Abdel Hernandez San Juan

The Complimentary Text

Contents

I

The complementary text

The Complimentary Text:

Psyche Ethnography Reports

The Market from here: mise in scene and experimental ethnography

Installed Ethnography

Arguing with Betara Desa

The Museum display inside and outside of bounds

The Documentary out there

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

II

Geeting Displays

III

Sociology and anthropology in a curatorial practice

Sociology and anthropology in a curatorial practice

By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, transcription

Arguing with betara village, transcription

Dialogue, transcription

Psyche Ethnography report, transcription

Dialogue

The Market from Here: Mise in scene and experimental ethnography, transcription

Dialogue, transcription

IV

Horizonts of the critical ejercices of ready made

Horizonts of the critical ejercices of ready made

The travels collage

The exhibit of the exhibit

Art and recycling

The Museum of the market

Paroxisms of the text

The work technical card as work

Regaring the inmaterials

The Complimentary Text:

Visual Icons and Alphabetic text in Ethnographic Conceptualism

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Houston, Texas

      This essay is focused on discussing my concept of supplementary texts in the contemporary visual arts and on putting it into terms in an empirical interpretation, the concept refers eminently to texts understood in the alphabetical sense, that is, texts written through the use of the word, sentence or paragraph. Given that what follows is an analysis of contemporary visual art forms all developed within the tradition of so-called conceptualism in the visual arts, we must highlight the fact that in conceptualism we have moments in which the work consists only of a written word, an alphabetical text such as a sentence and even a paragraph or several paragraphs written without any recourse to icons or visual materials other than the sole visuality of the written text. On the other hand, we must analyze that although what paradigmatizes conceptualism as its main characteristic is the fact that the written alphabetic text comes to the foreground and the visual and iconographic becomes subordinate to it, the relationships of complementarity and supplementarity between the text and The visual can come in a wide variety of forms.

    The works and exhibitions that we will analyze, of which I am the curator, who decided the topic to be treated, I conceived and developed the curatorial project in 1994 in its first version, I later reduced it to fewer artists for its final implemented form, --the literal process of producing the samples--, I chose the artists, I directed the art and anthropology workshop in Caracas during the production of the samples and who, together with Surpic Angelini as co-curators, later in 1997 transported them to Houston, Texas and We exhibited and presented them at Rice University, they are peculiar forms of conceptual art in the sense that they explore suigeneris modalities of the relationships between the visual and the alphabetic textual, but despite this, because they are conceptual art in In them, the relationship between an alphabetical text and the purely visual, iconographic and non-alphabetic is at the center of attention and is as such what is prioritized and what makes up the main elements in the logic of the works.

      By supplementary or complementary texts in the visual arts we define above all the non-visual forms of alphabetic texts that surround or accompany an icon or a visual symbol although written alphabetic language is also otherwise something visual.

       Supplementary texts can also be studied in literature and anthropology. In the first, through the analysis of all the architextual and peritextual modes that surround or accompany the main text such as footnotes, subtitles, annotations, etc., which comment on the main text but which it can rarely do without, which Genette defined as transtextualities, and in the second, in the form of all textual and narratological references extracted from material on religion or culture not directly from the visual icon, but which are then used to decode or try to explain the latter Unlike this, in contemporary visual arts textual supplements play a much more preponderant and relevant place both in conceptual terms and in the sense of the infinite paradoxes that make up the interpretation of the universe of a visual work of contemporary art.

     The concept of supplementary text emphasizes the fact that a visual icon itself never or almost never includes non-visual texts and that all non-purely iconic text plays the function of helping to decode the purely visual.

     The main reference to understand that it is a supplementary text refers us to medievalist studies on the image when the exegetes of medieval painting, usually and most of the time entirely allegorical at a visual level with respect to theological narratives of religion, resorted to the latter. and to his eminently narrative manuscripts on passages of religion, to read and decode visual discourses that were certainly almost anecdotal and descriptive epitaphs of passages of that religion. When someone knows precisely the passages of religion to which the images make reference because they have read the manuscripts or books with the religious narratives themselves, they immediately decode which specific passage a painting that is allegorical and anecdotal about refers to. to those narratives, but when someone does not know the starting religious text, they cannot determine which characters are and which specific passages they are referring to.

     In the studies of medieval painting, the supplementary text then functioned as a redundancy of what was anecdotized in the painting and functioned together with that which was its illustration, to accompany the teaching of the gospel, that is, to explain, together with the images, the religious narratives that the apprentice had to learn and internalize.

    That redundant and anecdotal function of the supplementary text in medievalist studies on painting, saying in oral or written textual modes the passages of religion to which the painting refers, remains relatively similar with regard to how to relate a visual icon with a narrative substratum in the culture in the use and recurrence of textual supplements in anthropology, in the latter, especially when it comes to iconography and visual symbolism of ancient remote cultures such as Hindu, archaic oriental and Arab cultures or the visual art of the pre-Columbian culture, the recurrence of anthropology to textual supplements in the culture to explain the purely visual iconographic lies in resorting to knowledge external to that visuality collected on the passages in religion or culture found or known outside the purely visual and iconographic and used to decode the latter with the use of those non-visual texts

    As in medievalist studies, those who do not know or have material on the religion, myths, rituals and beliefs of the culture in question cannot understand what the images consist of purely iconographically and visually, which gods they represent or to which passages of such or such religious anecdotes they refer, unlike, therefore, an icon that has a reference in the culture known to the reader or viewer, the latter has to resort to textual material that is not found in the visual and that must be sought in other sources of culture not collected by the visual or ultimately not decodable in the purely visual without resorting to supplementary texts obtained outside of the visual there in culture.

    The same thing happens in a similar way with the anthropology of iconic and visual forms on primitive cultures of very diverse types in which when the visual icons do not necessarily refer to an ancient past, material obtained from field work in that culture through interviews is used, dives, collections or other forms of probing, to have non-visual textual and narrative supplements that help read or interpret the visual icons.

    As in medievalist studies, traditional anthropology resorts to textual forms that presuppose a pre-established order that things considered iconic and visual should have in culture according to which, in the same way that medieval altarpieces, frescoes and The murals of the vignettes and the medieval epitaphs can be identified as iconographic passages of the religious text, and thus the visual icons of other cultures can be read.

    However, unlike medievalist studies or the way in which textual supplementarity is worked on in traditional anthropology, in contemporary art the semantic levels and meanings that can be induced and inferred from the visual and iconographic cannot be searched for. in culture according to a pre-established form that these meanings can have in pre-established narratives found in some fixed and immutable text of culture that is one and the same all the time to which we resort to decode visual signs.

   The contemporary artist does not have visual signs and icons according to some fixed or pre-established place; certain images in culture have a single form and a pre-established meaning in some type of religious text; the works and their images are not didactic illustrations that anecdote. visually a representational organization chart of the visual with respect to passages of certain narratives that can be sought in culture in the way in which the epitaph of medieval painting illustrates biblical passages or the icons of archaic cultures illustrate their gods or tickets.

    Composing, deciding and combining visual and iconographic signs in contemporary visual art is not an activity that is super-edited or subordinated to an external text found in culture, rather, it is an enunciative and discursive activity that itself articulates relations of meaning that, as in the declarative propositions at the level of speaking, writing or communicating, themselves form an intentional discourse about something that that discourse proposes in its own horizon of meanings and that only it and in it are the clues to one or many possible interpretations. never referable to senses or meanings that the images have pre-established in an epitaph or a pre-established narrative in culture or religion.

     It is true that, as Umberto Eco maintains, ultimately, discursive modes also correspond to persuasive rhetoric and to that extent are subject to expository gestures that contain a certain redundancy with respect to the code and with respect to information, but these codes and these Information does not have, in contemporary culture, pre-established forms, but rather visual proposals are intentional activations of these codes with the purpose of articulating new relationships of meaning. On the other hand, ultimately, the redundancies of rhetoric do not They go from communicating codes that can only be deduced based on what I have called cultural understandings and therefore, they resort to a memory or a heritage that in some sense must be assumed in the culture of the spectators to whom they are directed. so that the relationship between redundancy and information is subject to the pair coding versus entropy,

      Since they are not meanings that the iconic has pre-established in culture in the form of the passages of the narratives of religion, the relations of meaning radiate prismatic rays of relations of meaning that can never be completely fixed at a point of meaning and that they are exposed to the same level of entropy of polysemy to which those redundancies of rhetoric are with respect to the heritage of readers or spectators, on the other hand, as Eco himself maintained, one of the main characteristics of the visual text in the avant-garde , lies precisely in not confirming these codes by articulating rhetoric whose redundancies confirm them, but rather in destructuring the previous relationships that have been established between rhetoric and ideologies to destabilize the latter, affecting the rhetorical expectations of the forms the contemporary visual artist thus affects. With this, the ideologies attached to those rhetorics through what Benjamín called shock.

    That is to say, far from confirming pre-established relationships in culture between rhetoric and redundancy around pre-given codes, the avant-garde tends precisely the opposite, to destabilize those relationships between rhetoric and culture to the extent that they contain stereotypes in the which certain ideologies and ways of seeing and meaning have become ossified so that, in short, not even through rhetoric is it possible to refer the iconographic visual in contemporary art to a preformed and fixed idea of ​​culture. Against the presupposition that culture is a fixed text around which senses, meanings and stereotypes can be fixed once and for all, contemporary languages ​​destabilize any possibility of fixing these relationships, also including, of course, the idea that they can be fixed. establish not only meanings and senses, but also assumptions or precepts about cultural identity.

    The immanentist and fetishist idea that cultures consist of ontic essences secured once and for all by some immanence that is given to them in parameters, for example, ethnicity or cultural identity, is in itself relativized and subject to a destabilizing criticism in avant-garde languages ​​which precisely usually seek to question and deconstruct those assumptions. For all of the above, not only can we not practice a critique of contemporary visual languages ​​that refers them to pre-given passages in culture, but we also cannot, despite the fact that visual rhetoric presupposes persuasiveness, refer those persuasions to the confirmation of preconceived presuppositions, if there is persuasion it is aimed at deconstructing and dismantling previous relationships that have been established in the culture, previous ideologies and previous precepts and not at confirming them. So ultimately it is a persuasion aimed at making the culture of the spectators stop seeing things in a certain way in which they have become ossified and open themselves to a rupture and a shock to their previous precepts.

    It is not our objective in this essay to discuss the problem of recourse to textual supplements either in medievalism or in anthropology, with respect to the latter we have planned to devote a theoretical essay exclusively dedicated to the topic, but rather to discuss and demonstrate the very different way how textual supplements function in contemporary visual arts, that is, the relationships between the written or spoken alphabetic text and the visual iconic.

      In fact, we have chosen the topic of textual supplementarity not only because it occurs in a very different way and far from that of medievalist studies and anthropology, but also and above all, because the differences between how the relationships between supplements work textual and visual iconographic in contemporary art, help to contrast against the background of those and also for the purposes of readers specialized in those, what contemporary visual art entails in the change of concepts about what is text, what is visual culture, what It is an image and it is an icon in the visual contemporaneity of the avant-garde, and above all, that concepts of culture and relationships between culture and text, culture and narratives, culture and visuality, are assumed in contemporary art.

    As an example of the impact of textual complements on the interpretation of the visual work, let's first imagine that I am at an exhibition opening, I am the art critic and we have a wine break so I am talking to the curator. of the exhibition after seeing it and perceiving the pieces in an entirely visual way without resorting to supplementary texts, but as soon as we are drinking the wine the curator asks me my impressions of the exhibition, for the moment I do not know anything additional to the purely visual. car is displayed within the gallery and therefore I have a number of first interpretations according to it. Before listening to the curator, for me the piece was related to a certain spatial transposition, I began to interpret it as an attitude of the author to assume the gallery space as if it were the automobile exhibition space, that is, a car fair in in a way as if the artist's intention had been a type of readymades but where instead of making a decontextualization only of an object he also made a game that exchanged the meaning of the spaces, a bottle opener is a readymade, but its A simple decontextualized exhibition in a gallery does not mean bringing to the gallery the entire universe of bottles and their openers but only the isolated object; exposing a car, on the other hand, seems not only to decontextualize an object but at the same time to bring with it the type of spatialities in which cars are usually staged to be shown or for sale at car fairs, this is my first interpretation of a purely visual type, the idea of ​​ready made spaces from another space within a new space which It refers to the industrial nature of the automobile, the fact that they are usually displayed in large buildings or storages as a discourse on the industrial, the urban and the commercial, and I am once answering your question by explaining my first impressions.

   But as soon as we have a few glasses of wine, the curator begins to tell me things that are textual supplements that were not purely iconographic and visual, he tells me that the artist used that car to travel from the city where he lives, crossing all the United States for more than a week, stopping in different towns and villages where he slept and met people on his way to the exhibition site and that the artist arrived on the opening day with the car with which he traveled and made his trip. parking his car inside the exhibition space like his work.

    The supplementary text that the curator tells me inevitably irreversibly impacts my previous interpretation and even presupposes almost its complete abandonment, and so I have to relate the elements again, see the work again and interpret it again. If it is the car with which he made the trip from his home in another city to the exhibition site at the other end of the country and stopped in countless towns, we begin to ask ourselves a series of questions that take our interpretation in an entirely different direction around of the same visual iconic object.

    There is of course a distinction to be made between textual supplementarity not included in the exhibition or visual work such as press releases, speech acts by the exhibition curator about propositions and or narratives related to processes, speech acts by the artist about his motivations and intentionalities, catalog texts and various forms of narratives about the objects and other textual supplements when these are included within the visual work in a way that is close to that visuality and even part of it without being iconic within it, such as titles and subtitles. or textual supplements included within the iconographic discourse such as exhibitions and works that, in addition to their title, include written alphabetical texts within them, that is, when these are part of the work in its visual and conceptual discourse.

      In this sense, within textual supplementarity in contemporary visual arts, we have three modalities.

1-external texts

(which accompany the iconographic visual discourse but are not part of it)

=

catalog words by the critic, informative releases prior to the exhibition, speech acts by the curator, speech acts by the artist about his motives and intentionality

2-Peritexts and Architexts

(which are part of the discourse of the work or exhibition but are not part of it from a physical point of view)

=

titles and subtitles, quotes or texts used outside the exhibition as well as logical ways in which visual discourses can form textual relationships of a peritextual or architextual type with other visual or spatial elements

3-Internal texts

=

written or sound alphabetic language that is included within the work or exhibition, that is, at the same level as the works and that form part of it,

     This modality can also include different forms of internal texts,

a-the total internal text: when the iconographic and visual work consists only and solely of an alphabetical text of which there are countless examples in contemporary visual arts,

b-the internal conceptual and dramatic text: when a written or sound alphabetic text is so deeply embedded within the composition of the visual work that the latter cannot be understood without the recurrence to that or where the recurrence to the internal text alphabetic is the decisive reference that connects and relates the other visual and iconic elements that make up the work, leading in many ways to the point that the visual is only a correlate of the alphabetic or literary textual, and finally

c-the internal accessory text: which is part of the iconographic work, but establishing an open relationship with the visual, that is, it does not entirely regulate the relationship between all the iconic elements, determining their relationships between them, but rather delimits, comments , accompanies, accentuates or modifies relationships of meaning in ways that play with the visual in an open way.

   As I said, in this essay I will discuss samples of which I am the curator, but of the seven I will discuss here only three and in one of them only one of the artists and where I am the one who this time mastered the supplements and textual complements, As we will see, however, the samples each explore a different modality of this relationship between the alphabetic and the iconographic from the point of view of the composition of each sample as an authorial, discursive and visual enunciative whole, despite this, the differences between their modalities, the set of samples can be grouped into two halves, one half of samples where the visual iconographic is preponderant and ruling while the textual alphabetic plays a secondary relational function although no less decisive, these are pyche Ethnography reports by Surpic Angelini, installed Ethnography the juan Carlos rodríguez and Arguing with betara desa by Juan José Olavarría

   After what has been said above, let us move on to the critique of the seven samples, focusing on the relationship between alphabetical text and iconographic visuality.

Psyche Ethnography Reports

   Assuming the viewer's path as they encounter the works in the exhibition one by one from the beginning to the end, we have at the beginning six rectangular wood and glass frames approximately 40 cm long by 20 cm wide and 2 cm deep displayed on the walls featuring six collages with images from Greek mythology and we have six poems by the artist handwritten on a light fabric that has been tea-dyed in a very light pink.

   When we read the artist's poems, they deal with her imaginary world, images related to her intimate subjectivity in which we can eventually read some name or word from Greek mythology. Up to this point we have visual images of paintings of semi-naked women and other icons that can be recognized by some viewers as relating to Greek antiquity, while for others the textual supplement or complement of telling them that they are images of Greek antiquity is required. Otherwise they might not recognize it as such or know what it is about, and at the same time we have a relationship between the visual of these images from Greek antiquity, and the texts consisting of contemporary and current poems that deal with issues of subjectivity and imagination.

    Now, for the purposes of the viewer, there is another distinction to be made here about textual complementarity, nowhere does it say that these poems were written by the artist who is the author of the exhibition so that some viewers could relate the textual and the visual, assuming that these poems can be taken from ancient literature and contain some type of interest or mystery to be found in the archives or libraries about Greek antiquity. Regarding the images, the information that they are poems written by the artist-author of the exhibition is therefore a supplement or textual complement that I, as curator, am offering to the reader of this essay, not to the viewer who visits the exhibition.

   If we take the path of my reader informed by curatorial textual complementarity we go in an interpretive direction in the way of relating what those poems say as well as the way in which they are written and presented with respect to the purely iconographic images of the collages, if we take the path of the viewer who did not have this textual complementarity and who could freely imagine his ways of relating the visual icons with the poems, we go in another interpretive direction, the first makes us notice the meaning, meaning or reason for being those images do not have. only for the reader but for the person who wrote those texts because for some reason he puts them next to those visual images, we master that the visual images and the texts are put that way by the author of the written texts for some reason that relates them from within and that must be found in the relationship between what the poems say and those images.

   If we take the path of the spectator in situ, the written texts could have been found at the same time as the images or at another time but related to them for indecipherable reasons in principle and to be imagined but ultimately related to them in a different way. necessarily through the subjective world or the expressive intentionality of the author of the work since the states and phenomena of imagination or subjectivity legible in the poems would not necessarily have to be related to those of the artist who made the work if it is not known that are yours.

  It is important here to highlight the difference that mastering or not mastering the curatorial textual complement makes, referring the matter to the interpretative differences that arise from whether an alphabetical text and an iconic image are related from a presupposition of interiority or are related by one of exteriority in terms of authorial consciousness and its discursive intentionality. In fact, it is a phenomenological issue because if the alphabetic text comes from an authorial consciousness that is the same authorial consciousness that has composed the sample, immediately what that text says is presented as internal states of that authorial subjectivity that in domain of the textual complement is the same and therefore internal relations of connection must be found between both things. On the other hand, if this textual complement is not mastered, a relationship of exteriority is presented between the alphabetic and the iconic, a moment from which the viewer It has to go out to find, search, find out, in what way and under what inferences, it puts a handwritten, calligraphic text, and a visual icon into associative relationships. Being in the sample they have been placed by their author which refers them to an authorial intention, but whether they are hers or not makes a big interpretive difference.

   We also have another distinction to make, the images of ancient Greek culture on display have not been directly painted by the artist, they are paintings by other artists of antiquity with respect to which the only additional thing that the artist has done is to make with them some collages to which we will have to return later since the collage in itself presupposes a specific semiotic analysis of its logic.

     On the other hand, we have a gallery that as a whole has been intervened with a dark brown or sienna fabric. With this fabric, which approximates the texture of chamoisine or velvet, we have a completely re-covered gallery, that is, whose white walls have been been upholstered or lined, covered or covered if you like by that fabric from the line that makes the limit between the floor and the wall to the line that makes the limit between the wall and the ceiling. We have that a part of that fabric at a precise moment is detached from the wall, forming a tablecloth on a table on top of which we have a white cup of coffee, unlike the rest of the relationship of that fabric to the wall that holds it. upholsters, covers or covers it.

   We have a chair placed facing a wall which has been entirely covered by human hair, that is, covered around the wood with hair, and we have at the eye level of someone who could be sitting in the chair sewn onto the brown cloth a cloth. with another poem with the same characteristics as the previous ones

    We have one hundred smaller wooden frames displayed on a wall, these are approximately fifteen centimeters by fifteen centimeters long and wide, that is, each square with approximately ten centimeters deep, mounted with glass, inside of which there are postcards with images of Greek mythology similar to those of the first set and some of fine arts as well as each one mounted with a mirror mat. The wood that makes these frames is in turn worked with wax

    We have on the floor approximately two meters long by 40 centimeters wide and ten deep, a wooden frame mounted on glass like a display case in which through the glass written in three-dimensional letters we have the phrase written in alphabetical language

pyche traveled to the underworld

    We have a mirror mask placed on a white pedestal

    We have a doll and a rag doll sewn to the canvas wall and we have a braid of hair sewn to the fabric wall next to those dolls

     We have some objects displayed on the wall, some strips of fabric delimiting the area where those objects are between the wall and the floor, and we have hundreds of postcards and wine glasses on the floor.

     Up to this point we have a description, this description says nothing about how to relate her icons, objects, images, symbols, signs, materials, from this description the reader would have to immediately move on to his deduction about what the artist has said, regarding to which, in order not to add anything, we would have to remain silent, stay on the plane of the descriptive, however, it is obvious that as soon as the viewer tries to deduce what the artist has said with all those icons, signs and images, he will have to inevitably begin to relate them, that is, try to manage to relate them and from the moment you begin to do so an interpretation will begin.

     We must, however, say that in our supposed description we have already introduced a notable amount of textual supplements not necessarily directly inferable from the iconographic; we have said, for example, that the fabric on which the poems are written is dyed with a conclusion to which we cannot the viewer would necessarily have to arrive, we have also said that the fabric that covers, lines or upholsters the gallery is velvet and suede, just as we have said that in the hundred frames the wood is worked with wax, we have also said that the poems are of the authorship of the same author of the sample, all of these are already additional textual supplements to the merely iconographic.

    This will then begin to relate the objects and images which means to induce, deduce, infer, start an interpretation, if your question is what the artist meant, you will begin to try to relate those elements and to be able to imagine what the artist meant he will have. to interpret.

    To facilitate your effort without even starting our own interpretation, let us offer our reader, since this is not the viewer who saw the samples, some more details on the descriptive level, let us offer him the information that the artist's exhibition as a whole, Although it has as a continuous element the brown suede fabric that covers all the walls as if upholstering them, the elements described form sets that could be understood as works, although they do not have titles and therefore could be seen as a single, continuous installation. That is to say, as a single exhibition-work, these descriptions, however, begin to offer interpretative deductions since nothing guarantees that our viewer of the exhibition has necessarily noticed it or that it has been significant in the way in which he made his interpretation. But in order to expand the description, the first set is relatively isolated in itself, making up a whole of six wooden frames that mount the postcards with images of Greek mythology and the artist's poems written on the pink silk,

     The second set is distant and isolated from the first, forming in itself a volume on the opposite wall, the part in which the fabric that covers the wall is detached here from one of its sides and becomes a tablecloth for a table with the cup of coffee. , a set that is the only thing on that wall also upholstered in sienna velvet or suede like the entire gallery,

    The third set is distant and spatially isolated from the second developed on the opposite wall as the only thing there, also upholstered in velvet, is the chair covered in hair placed facing the wall and at the height of a hypothetical spectator sitting on it, the poem written on a silk cloth which is in turn sewn to the wall cloth,

   The fourth set is distant and isolated in turn from the previous ones, they are the hundred frames with mirror mats that, like the first set, also contain Greek images, which make up an entire background wall also upholstered in sienna velvet in which only that is. .

   The fifth set is on the ground in the same area of ​​the hundred marks so that it could be seen as part of that same set is the glass display case with the text pyche traveled to the underworld,

   The sixth set is far away and isolated from the previous ones in a corner where two walls meet, both upholstered in the same way, is a white wooden pedestal with a mirror mask located on top,

    The seventh set is distant and isolated from the previous one on a wall itself upholstered in sienna velvet and dedicated only to it, they are the two rag dolls, doll and doll, and the braid of hair sewn to the cloth wall,

   The last set is on the wall opposite to the previous one and therefore distant and isolated, they are the objects on the wall with the strips of fabric delimiting the area and the cards and wine glasses on the floor that make up a single equally upholstered wall. .

    We have concluded a generous description for our reader who will be able to deduce from the description what the author has proposed.

    Let us initially be discreet, keeping our initial interpretation as close as possible to the description but already beginning to try to elucidate how these signs, icons, symbols, elements and materials could be related.

    In the first set we have images from Greek mythology, which refers us directly to visual imagery, to an imaginary and to a culture, Greek civilization, the images are related to Greek antiquity and its religious mythology, they are images of beautiful women, even We do not know that they are related to a specific goddess in that mythology unless we have the background that previously we, who knew about Greek mythology, were able to recognize in the exposed images in question, despite this, if we have read the title of the exhibition and we have noticed the name psyche, if we master in our heritage that Greek culture had a goddess called pyque, we will begin to relate the title with the images due to their coincidence in the theme and Greek visuality

    So we imagine a viewer who knows the images and another who does not, that is, one who knows whether they are goddesses or ordinary women, and another who does not know, the latter, however, recognizing the Greek visual imagery with its typical exaltation of beauty, he possibly thought that it was something referring to Greek religion and could begin his elucidations by referring to the knowledge that he himself has on what Greek mythology is and what types of discourses in the contemporary world he is concerned with paying attention to. In addition to that, television programs about the Greek past, as well as catalogs about Greek visual imagery, documentaries and films that recreate the Greek past from a contemporary perspective abound, these occupy a well-known place in contemporary culture usually related to how Modern man searches in his ancestors for clues that may be of value about himself or at most remain from a curiosity for a remote past largely disconnected from the present.

   But we need more elements, the previous ones are not enough for an intelligible elucidation, we then go through the entire sample with the sole purpose for the moment of returning to this first set to elucidate it, we ask ourselves that in the rest of the sample it refers again to mythology Greek and in what form.

   We find that three sets later, the hundred paintings are again, most of them allusive again to mythology and the visual imaginary of Greek culture, these are mounted with mirror mats, then the symbolism of the mirror appears in relation to Greek culture. which could be seen as the literal reflection in which the viewer sees himself or as a more complex symbolism of the mirror, we will return to it as it is followed by a mask of mirrors, we also find the phrase about the floor pyche traveled to the underworld which highlights something specific in attention to the Greek world and from the dramaturgical point of view reiterates an element that is in the title of the exhibition pyche, the Greek goddess

     Later in the last set the viewer finds these postcards again, now in the form of hundreds on the floor but with the addition that they have been turned upside down, that is, with the images facing the floor while what is seen from the front is that they are postcards of those that can be sent by mail or given to people on relevant dates as congratulations or in the form of a present, so that if in three sets there are postcards with images of women in Greek antiquity, in one of them on the ground references are made to the Greek goddess pyche and if the name of this Greek goddess is in the title of the exhibition, somehow the Greek theme or the allusion to it must have an interpretive relevance for the exhibition, it must be therefore an indication for reading the general set of the sample

    So, since we cannot deduce that our viewer takes the improbable route that we, knowing the set, have just taken to see if something in the rest of the exhibition clarifies for us or offers us elements to elucidate how to relate the images, symbols and texts from the first set, we have to assume that he leaves that set and moves on to the next without having fully elucidated or having made an interpretation of the first, leaving it open as a simple collection of impressions caused by the relationship between the beauty of the images, bodies of half-naked Greek women with eventual costumes, and the beauty and poetic intensity of their reading of imaginative and subjective poems full of images and possibly the sensoriality of the ceda.

   We also certainly have the poems that we can read written on the silk fabrics as well as the visual image of the calligraphy that they form since they have been written by hand, these, as I said, are very intimate referring to passages of imagination and subjectivity. , we say that they are intimate not because they show or make known passages from the artist's personal life as if something she experienced intruded on us, but rather intimate in the sense that her subjectivity around emotional and spiritual issues is in the naked poems. as personal searches of the artist in her symbolic and imaginary universe.

    Let us realize then that we have up to this point a considerable volume of alphabetical texts.

    On the one hand we have the word pyche that names this Greek goddess which has been written inside the display case on the floor in the fourth set and in the title of the exhibition and which due to this notable accentuation must have some Greek origin. significant relationship with the hundreds of postcards of images from Greek antiquity that can be seen in sets 1, 4 and 7 of the sample.

   We also have a high volume of alphabetical texts in the reading of the poems that are in set 1 and set 3

   An alphabetical text thus begins from the indexical, inferential and deductive point of view to come to the foreground in our senses about what to resort to to relate the elements and interpret them in themselves and as the overall discourse of a sample. At the alphabetical level, it involves the reading of eight poems that communicate symbolic and imaginative universes of subjectivity in significant ways.

     So pyche could be a key in modern etymologies in both English and Spanish since it is a word that stopped being a proper name, even if it was in the ancient past, of a goddess, and became one that describes or refers to an aspect of human psychology, each individual has his pyche, in fact the word psychology begins with that etymology,psycho-logy, but in that case we are interpretively moving away from the descriptive physical, nothing necessarily alludes to us having to relate the word pyche in references to the human psyche with the image of the Greek goddess since no icons or images have been included that necessarily refer to, indicate or accentuate modern psychology or the human psyche, we only have references to an ancient goddess and we have poems in which a certain psyche actually flows.

      This type of exhilarating poetry towards the depths of subjectivity, imagination and spirituality, provided with many images and symbolisms, could refer us at least, who have gone ahead to look for clues about the Greek theme in the rest of the exhibition. a flow of the psyche but given that the themes of the poems are not properly Greek, but refer to their own subjective symbolism, this could lead us to think about surrealism because the surrealists called psychic automatism the method or way in which The surrealist writers wrote letting what came to them flow, however, again, like the example of the word pyche but more than that, for this interpretation to be possible it is necessary to master the knowledge that the surrealists used the word psyche to name. its method of writing pychic automatism so that my interpretation is at once for the reader, as much as it would have been for the viewer, a curatorial textual complement or supplement at the same time that it is an interpretation, that is to say that we have to assume a spectator who does not have this acerb and who therefore would not have to interpret that the allusion to the Greek goddess is related to the theme of psychic automatism in the writing of surrealism,

    In fact, we wonder why relating the individual psyche that flows poetically in the writing and images of the goddess Pyche in the ancient past, if it were this relationship, the interpretation could lead us deductively towards an interest of the artist in underlining something more that a descent expressed in the etymology of us with respect to the ancients, could rather be a Jungian interest in the so-called archetypes, that is, a way through which the artist seeks to relate the deep symbolism expressed in subjectivity and the imagination of his poems, with an idea of ​​psyche in which the scriptural psychic flow of the poems as in the surreal psychic automatism of the poems is related to the goddess of ancient mythology in the manner of archetypes that would prevail in contemporary culture from ancient culture,

   The Jungian idea of ​​archetypes supposes that certain aspects in the past of culture, collected by religion and mythology, prevail in today's culture in forms of the collective unconscious that are nevertheless reflected in our relationships with subjectivity, imagination and the body, we would need to ask ourselves why a pink silk, silk is a fabric, refers to clothing, silk is a very soft and light fabric striking for its softness to the touch and lacking textures, essentially very smooth and especially used by women , that is, with a rather feminine generic inclination, it is located in front of the frames, meaning that to see the images you have to lift the screen and the first thing the viewer sees is the screen with the poems. Why do you have to lift the window to see the images?

    In the same way that we would have to interpret the relationship between the symbolism of the mirror and the images of Greek culture and women in the work of the hundred marks, here we would have to try to interpret the symbolism of the naked Greek women in relation to on one hand to the subjective and imaginary poems and on the other to the ceda and this fact that the viewer must lift it to see the images,

     It is assumed, in fact, that some viewers first read the poems without even lifting the lid on which they are written and then lift the lid and see the mounted images of Greek mythology; these are not a single image, but are collages. of several images, but we must also imagine our viewer who does not yet know that this specific goddess refers to pyche, but rather that it communicates a general idea about Greek mythology about which he may know a lot or little but at most have a certain visual memory accumulated on the visualities of antiquity, slender, winged bodies that accentuate feminine beauty, semi-naked

   So far, for the moment we have an exhibition - even without resorting to many supplementary texts - that according to the first set deals with a symbolic problem closely related to subjectivism and the poetic imagination of the artist as expressed in her poems and we have an exhibition that relates these personal dimensions of her inner world and her intimate symbolic universe with an idea of ​​the feminine or femininity expressed in the visual allusion to postcards as semi-naked female bodies in which the beauty and sensoriality of the body are exalted. in its social use in clothing and other media.

   We also have the Greek theme that refers to the ancient past of a culture given in the fact that the images of women and femininity that are presented to us come to us wrapped in this iconographic imagery of Greek culture and its mythology, we have a reference to psyche, the Greek goddess whose name implies this relationship to the psyche that we related etymologically, which presupposes some allusion to the psychic flow of her poems and could refer us to psychic automatism as a literary resource known in surrealism, this interpretative path presupposes mastering the heritage of psychic automatism of surrealism in which the word pyche was used, also means mastering that the texts are written by the same artist who is the author of the exhibition, otherwise, as we said, the subjectivity and imagination evoked by the poems could refer to the viewer, as well as the visuality from the calligraphy of those writings, to a completely different interpretation that relates those visual images of the ancient past with those writings, but claiming to dominate these collections as textual supplements, it is inferred that the artist would be in some way recalling from the individual aspect of her experience. symbolic expressed in the poems to an idea of ​​the pyche connected to the goddess psyche, to the feminine, to the body, etc., whose only known form so far is Jung's theory of archetypes.

    Just as our heritage on surrealism has influenced the way of a curatorial textual supplement or complement that our interpretation can take that direction and no other, our heritage on Jung has also influenced that our interpretation can take that direction and no other. , so for the moment, we will have to do both things at the same time, interpreting assuming a viewer who does not master that heritage and interpreting the same symbols based on the knowledge of that heritage in order to interpretively obtain a contrasted image between the interpretation of a spectator who does not master the surrealism heritage, Jung, artist, author of the exhibition-writer of the poems, and one who masters it.

    For the moment, however, to master the surrealism and Jung heritage, they are not yet supplementary texts included within the sample, but only obtained through the interpreter's heritage, in this case me, but we must analyze that the material coming from the heritage of the interpreter, in this case me, once it is externalized as objective textuality in the writing and taken to the scope of an interpretation that integrates it as an acerb to the interpretive direction, it supposes, for the purposes of a third party, the reader of that interpretation or the viewer. that sees and goes through the samples, a type of textuality that is being offered, for the purposes of its heritage that we do not know, it is therefore a textual complement, we will call this type of supplementary text not only external text but also a textual reservoir, for At the moment let's say that a supplementary text is alphabetic textual information that we obtain regarding signs, icons, symbols and objects, which is not included within the properly visual discourse and that we receive from a source external to the non-alphabetic visual.

    The textual reservoir is then a different type of supplementary text, which comes from the heritage of the interpreter who, by externalizing it in writing, creates a textual source that is not directly deducible from the purely iconographic and visual and not necessarily available directly by the heritage of readers and viewers.

   Both, however, textual supplements and textual reservoirs are different from subtexts, we call subtexts, narrative or narratological information that we derive directly from the visual information, that is, without resorting to additional written or oral alphabetic texts, but directly implicit in the level of the visual codes of that icon or visual sign.

    Now, returning to the beginning of my essay, let us notice the fact that the textual supplementarity to which we are resorting here is very different from that of the medieval epitaph, in medieval painting what we have visually before us we may not understand if we do not master the narratives of religious texts, not knowing which characters are nor knowing which passages of religion they refer to, but as soon as we resort to explanatory material that resorts to the narratives of that religion, when we return to the visual in painting we will see there painted before our eyes the exact scene that is described in the narrative of the religious text, the latter will tell us which character and which scene it is since the latter on the visual level is anecdotal with respect to the narrative.

   In the same way in anthropology, if we are faced with the iconography of a piece of antiquity in archaic Asia or in front of an iconography, Maori, Indo-American from the north or south, or from pre-Columbian codices and images, we will not know what they are either. the images, but as soon as we resort to a textual supplement external to the immediate visual found or collected in material, whether archaeological or from archives or directly in culture, we will immediately resort to returning to the images to decode the latter according to those narratives. external to the visual that will tell us what gods are and what specific passages the images refer to descriptively, allegorically or symbolically.

    Unlike medieval visuality, archaic icons may not be illustrative or representational anecdotes in a realistic sense, but they will ultimately be figures that will represent specific gods or specific images referable to a certain anecdote or narrative about culture.

    Unlike this, our textual supplements, once we have them, when we return to the purely visual and iconographic, cannot be described as visual illustrations of a pre-established narrative that has a pre-given and pre-established place in culture but ultimately as Returning to the visual, the purely iconographic continues to consist of indications that cannot be completed in a representation but interpreted based on inferences, deductions and indexicalities where the meaning or meanings that we can give to the visual in our interpretation will not cease to be a relative interpretation and in no way fixable in a pre-established way that establishes once and for all that this is the place that something has there in the culture of which the visual is its representation.

    Visual discourse establishes relationships of meaning that are not passive with respect to a pre-established culture but are themselves open interpretations.

    A light pink silk fabric dyed in tee can never be referred to a pre-given symbology in a belief, in a religion or in a culture, semi-naked women that refer to the Greek past, exhibited by a contemporary artist in collage mode, They will never be able to mean what those images meant to the Greeks, imaginative and subjective poems about or around things of a sensitivity in today's contemporary world will never be able to establish with a tea-dyed silk fabric, with calligraphy and with half-naked women. Greeks, a relationship neither closed nor pre-established, some inferences about what could relate the Greek goddess psyche with the human psyche and with psychic automatism in surrealism, do not tell us anything about the stable and pre-given meanings once and for all. for all that something outside of the visual may have as established in a precise way in culture.

    The relationships of meaning and meaning that we establish through inference, indications and deduction, themselves establish prismatic azes of open associations of meaning which in turn become elucidable sets that once again become indications of unclosed meanings on themselves, as prismatic radiations, must be in an open way and never closed on themselves, related to other subsequent icons to develop an interpretation whose suggestions will form, in front of the whole of an authorial sample, discursive relationships, discursive modes and authorial enunciatives which However, merely formed from relationships between the visual iconic and the alphabetic, they remain open to semantic indeterminacy.

   The aforementioned becomes even more evident if we take into consideration our viewer who does not necessarily have or resort to our textual supplements, in fact, we must assume a viewer who does not necessarily resort to or think about the psychic automatism of surrealism or the archetypes. of Jung, but merely relates his contemporary heritage about the Greek past with what the poems say and with other aspects of the objects and elements included in the exhibition.

   To the extent, in fact, that we follow the parameter of its possible interpretation, we adhere more closely to the mere physical description of the sample which, by the way, due to the open and indeterminate way in which the potential associations of meaning between Objects and symbols refer us to syntax, that is, to the mere surface form and aesthetics, which are precisely the effort to find the most profound articulations possible, in logical relationships between those elements facilitated by textual supplementarity. Now, so far, we have resorted to only a few additional textual complements to those provided by the same sample in the alphabetical language mode, its title and the poems, and in the face of this a question arises which, of course, is also an ethical question to which we will return later.

      But what we are clearly not yet integrating into our interpretation is all my collection related to the visual text that I am interpreting, nor all the textual supplements, we are recalling in my collection only that material that can be directly derived from the descriptive information in the visual level, remaining as neutral as possible in the sense of taking as potential spectator parameters of what has been literally exposed, the subtexts that we recall in the visual, the textual reservoirs of my interpretative heritage that we are recalling, are still maintained in The plane of inferential and deductive interpretations that are as close as possible to the descriptive level are therefore interpretations, not descriptions, but interpretations that do not even resort to many textual supplements but only to a few of the type that we have defined, textual reservoirs and subtexts.

    Jung's theory of archetypes, if these interpretive inferences were accurate, is a religious theory with meanings from which we would also have up to this point an exposition that relates the intimate personal aspects of subjectivity and the imagination of women since the artist is a woman. and the theme of women since the images are of women, the relationship between the psychic and the physical, since the women are half naked, with Greek mythology through a religious belief in the relationship between the ancient past and current culture. given that the theory of archetypes is religious.

   It could also be deduced, from what we have up to this point, a relationship between the psychic and the corporal as two polar aspects, the body, on the one hand, the immaterial, spiritual, psychic, etc., on the other, on the one hand the flow psychic of the essentially subjective and imaginary poems and going to pyche the Greek goddess according to a supposed archetype that in the cultural unconscious in the sense pointed out by Jung related an individual flow with a broader idea of ​​the woman or the feminine o of the body as the opposite of the pyche deduced from the fact that the images are mostly semi-naked female bodies, and o of the relationship between the pyche and the body,

    The use of silk fabric refers in a certain way to the body given the relationship of its materiality to clothing and other uses that surround the corporal areas and sensorialities of silk in women. These relationships explained above could lead us to interpret the fact of lifting To see the images, I give way to the idea of ​​the costume that is lifted to see the nakedness of the body, that is, as a symbol of semi-undressing, or it could be understood as the symbol of the woman's turban that must be lifted to be able to see his face in Arab culture, but given that it is not exactly a face that we see when we lift the screen, this is suggested on a sensory level that is diluted or disseminated in an interpretative polysemy, if it is not a face that we see, why relate raising the silk with the symbolism of the turban, additionally the poems are written on these silks and are supposedly read before going to see the images, although this cannot be foreseen, some spectators could at once go to see the images before read the texts.

   In fact, placing an insulating surface that must be lifted to see what follows is also common in the museographic world of the conservation of papers, photographs, paintings and fabrics, but through inferences about the prevalence of the feminine theme, bodies of semi-naked women in Greek antiquity and the intimate content in imaginative terms and the subjectivity of the poems, the theme of the semi-nude or the nude between the intimate or personal could suggest but the dressing-wardrobe relationship, undressing-nude or the turban something of that relationship that both things imply with respect to identity, the turban is not a mask but a homogenization of female identity whose access must first pass through certain rituals, this reading however becomes imprecise from the moment in which prevalence is the theme Greek on a cultural level and not Arabic, so we leave it

    Returning to the theme of interpretively relating the psychic flow of the poems with pyche as a goddess in Greek antiquity and the religious problem in the Jungian sense that is supposed to believe that there is a religiously assured continuity in the archetypes among the contemporary woman of that psychic flow and the semi-naked ancient woman of the poems and represented in the goddess pyche, we know Levis Strauss's criticism of Jung's archetypes and we agree with this criticism to the point where he resorts to the arbitrariness of the sign in Saussure to dismantle immanentism pre-Saussurean that is implicit in the way Jung assigns to the image and the icon, in the same way that pre-linguistic language studies did to the relationships between words and moods, that is, we are According to Levis Strauss in his criticism of Jung, however, we do not agree with Levis Strauss in the fact that the relationship between diachrony and synchrony in the reading between melody and harmony in the musical staff explains the myth or myths, not in the meaning of those may or may not be understood or read according to the logic that is intended to be made explicit with the example of the pentagram, but in the sense that with the same logic of the pentagram an infinite number of phenomena could be explained in the culture in which relationships in a similar way between linearity and simultaneity work or in the end their simultaneous understanding must be understood considering that it is not something that specifically explains the myths.

   On the other hand, we consider that although Jung's theory suffers from the immanentism criticized by Levis Strauss in a Saussurean sense, at the same time Levis Strauss's theory on myth suffers from distinctions that separate from the semiotic point of view, that is, from semiotics of culture and the visual, imagery, on the one hand, and myths, on the other, since the latter imagery is material visual culture and in the sense most of the time or a large number of them the assumptions about temporality implicit in his theory of what a myth is fade, if visual imagery in visual material culture maintains a relationship with the cultural imaginary of that imagery in the contemporary whose spatiality and whose temporality is inscribed in the worlds of everyday life and common sense, covering meanings and meanings for people today, a moment from which Levi Strauss's theory of myth essentially based on a conception of myth as an oral story and, above all, understood as fragments split into oral memory, fades away.

      On the other hand, there is a connectivity that is discerned in the pure contemporary world, Greek culture, perse a and independently of referring to an ancient and remote past, as ancient visual imagery has acquired a place in contemporary culture massively codified that has a meaning in its symbolic distinction processes of itself as a cultural community relative to what that visual imagery means in its contemporaneity, having visual images of Greek culture or being in some way related to them, establishes symbolic distinctions between contemporaries, denotes in fact certain status and certain tastes, as well as preferences, customs and styles, it is therefore a visual imagery that has an expression in contemporary visual culture through cinema, theater, museums and literature that is expressed in the social world and This contemporary expression of the visual imagery of remote Greece has been susceptible to revisitations that no longer refer to that ancient past as it was in itself nor to its interpretation from the point of view of oral memory, but rather to refer to a visual imagery that in contemporary visual culture is distinguished from other visual imagery and given that visual imagery is material culture, we consider that the allusions we have here to the Greek past in the theme of the half-naked woman and in the theme of the relationship between the pychic automatism of surrealist writing and pyche in the Greek past have a basis more connected or related to the contemporary situation of women and as such relative to recent cultural processes which is made explicit in the non-negligible fact that It is collages of those images and to add more textual supplements that impact the interpretation, of images printed on postcards or congratulations collected in museums where they are donated or sold, which in turn have been collected by the artist during her work. trips, they are also displayed together with individual poems.

      On the other hand, applying to this the criticism that the myth can be read from front to back from back to front from left to right, from right to left, as in the example of the Levis Strauss plates, seems impertinent to me here.

     Although, as Levi Strauss says, all versions of the myth are part of the myth in which I agree, at the same time, this implies reference to an original or original version with respect to which all the others are versions, we consider rather that Beyond a theory of myth, culture itself is a continuous recreation and reinvention that derives from similar processes, thus considering that studies on mythology must correspond to the semiotics of culture since anthropology, no matter how much it risks recognizing The process according to which all versions are part of the myth presupposes a continuity in the versions and therefore an immanentist connectivity between the past and the present or at most an interpretation of that mere disconnection as a void that has to be filled with the myth, if disconnection exists, its lack of memory in contrast with oral memory and with an idea of ​​diachrony, does not have to correspond to the spaces covered by the myth in the form of disconnected fragments whose residues would be helped by the simultaneous logic of diachrony-synchrony. of the pentagram

     In our consideration, ruptures with the past are epistemic and therefore presuppose revisitations from the present that are no longer subsequent modes of an original form - or mere disconnection from the myth - but rather current interpretations that seek in the contemporary senses of the experience new meanings to ancient culture. This undoubtedly breaks with the evolutionary immanentism typical of the structuralism of Levi Strauss.

   On the other hand, although as we have highlighted, due to the presence of pyche in the title of the exhibition and three groups that refer to the visual imagery of ancient Greece, they must be relevant in the interpretation of the exhibition according to the parameters set by the exhibition. itself in the physical sense, this cannot be elucidated in isolation or separated from the rest of the sample since we have to assume in terms of common sense relevance, as well as what an authorial work is, that it is an enunciative set each of whose parts it counts to elucidate how to interpret that authorial ensemble.

   For this reason, although we have pyche and ancient Greece in three sets and in the title, we cannot avoid the fact that we have it within an author's sample that in its aesthetic and enunciative everything also includes three sets that do not refer to it like the rag dolls and the braid of hair, like the chair covered with hair in front of the poem, like the cup of coffee on the table, like the mirror frame, among other symbols that, without even resorting to more textual supplements, undoubtedly relate to more related issues. to the individual being of the artist with whom, by the way, we had already related before through reading the poems.

    And it is in this specific sense, that of elucidating the authorial ensemble of the sample whose elements must be parts of that discursive whole, that we consider that the other elements of the sample listed above require relating their general symbolisms taking as a parameter the neutral viewer not nourished by textual reservoirs and additional supplements, with supplements and textual complements that we have in the curatorship in order to continue our reconstructive interpretation by simultaneously two axes of reading that occur simultaneously, that of the average viewer and ours.

    For example, the female and male rag dolls sewn to the canvas wall in one of the sets, being generically defined, male and female, can refer to the pyche-eros relationship, they can suggest a certain artisanal tradition of making rag dolls. , they can also suggest childhood from the moment in which rag dolls are common in children, they can also suggest the pure generic expressed in the universality of language in the he and she mode, who can be boyfriends, a couple, or they can be brothers or friends, but this reading that offers one of the possible interpretations, that of a potential spectator, does not complete the affective indications of both objects given not only in their universality he and she, rag dolls, artisanal tradition, affective object of a boy or girl, male and female, but also the fact that they are not just any signs taken at random or arbitrarily among any objects in culture, but specifically rag dolls that have an emotional value for the artist since they have been preserved by her. throughout her life as a souvenir of her Armenian grandparents since they gave it to her, and this textual complement, which I have obtained directly from the artist related to affective memory, adds new interpretive levels, if it is about affective objects of the memory of Armenian grandparents, undoubtedly it is not only a question of a pyche eros relationship given in the generic university or of an affectivity in general referable to rag dolls in general, but of objects that are related to it itself.

     Continuing with textual supplements, it is necessary to highlight what we mentioned before, the fact that these are postcards collected by the artist on her travels to different museums around the world throughout her life.

   This textual supplement and the previous one, I consider the origin of the dolls of his Armenian grandparents, like that of the cart with which the artist crossed the entire country to the site of the exhibition, can considerably impact the interpretations gathered up to now as well as those of our reader and even more so if we add the textual supplement that they are all postcards, that is, they have an image on the front and on the back the sender-recipient delivery graphics through which a postcard is sent or given as a present . But we still have several textual complements as potential to impact interpretation as these previous ones.

    On the one hand, it is not just about pyche as is made explicit in the glass display case on the floor that says pyche traveled to the underworld, it is also that this passage is directly taken from the relationship between pyche and eros in the literature of ancient Greek textual supplement that we have also received from the artist, something to which, the relationship between pyque and eros the artist has dedicated her attention not only to this exhibition but in general to her life and that the exhibition puts to the foreground, in fact, the references to pyque that we alluded to at the beginning as well as the interest in Jung's archetypes are textual supplements not only implicit to our collections but also that we have received directly from the artist who expressed her interest in the theory of Jung of the archetypes in his way of understanding the pyche-eros relationship in Greek antiquity with respect to his present.

    In fact, the interpretative relationships that we have seen before between the body and the immaterial, the body and the spiritual or the spirit and more specifically as something that refers not so much to the body-spirit relationship, or body-soul but rather to the relationship between body versus pyche with the flow of pycheic automatism in a surreal sense and the images of semi-naked bodies attempts to put the theme in an interpretative relationship in the specific sense of the relationships between pyche and eros.

       Knowing that these are objects of emotional value in her memory has had a considerable impact on this and this has been confirmed by resorting to other textual supplements that cannot be avoided by the fact that the objects in the last set are gifts of emotional value made to the artist. by her Texan friends, the fact that the hair covering the chair is her own preserved hair. These are three elements that, when related to the strength and preponderance of the reading of the poems, come to have a relevance that impacts the interpretative elucidation of the entire exhibition. We have recently provided important curatorial textual complements to our reader that we know will impact the interpretation of the exhibition.

     But on the other hand it is obvious that if something becomes imposing and is at the foreground in this exhibition, it is the fact that the gallery or exhibition space that is usually in neutral white arranged as institutional codes of samples to exhibit works, has been in this transformed sample.

    The first thing that any viewer who has more or less mastered the textual supplements is that the gallery has been upholstered in dark sienna literally clothed and by a peculiar type of fabric that is the semi-glossy velvet usually used in women's changing rooms, on the other hand, this code covering walls is unusual, it is recognized in our contemporary heritage only in theaters and cinemas whose walls are usually covered with this type of velvety fabrics, they are the only ones usually covered in this way, at the same time it is true that the covering of the walls while he upholsters them could also refer to certain upholstered furniture, in which velvet is also used, but since there is no allusion to furniture or furnishings, the semantic clues for the interpretive inference here refer to women's clothing, the cinema , to the theater and to certain types of palaces or gala places of high society

    This resemantization of the space, however, not only has meanings in the direction referred to by the fabric and the covering of the walls, since it is the covering of an art gallery that is usually neutrally white to display the works and, to use the concepts as a curator that I put to the foreground in my initial curatorial text when I spoke of dedescribing the meanings of the museum's exhibition space to reinscribe it in a staging, here it is something that has undoubtedly been done with respect to the art gallery as a space with all intentionality.

   The reference to the gallery as a space and as a white cube has been a continuous recurrence of conceptual art since its beginnings where sometimes many exhibitions consisted of not exhibiting anything but only entering the empty space understood by conceptualism as the white cube that names everything art. what enters its spaces so that, contrary to the logic of the white cube, this resemantization of a sienna cube upholstered and covered with relationships of meaning that refer to other spaces that are not properly exhibitions shows in the space in which art is shown something that is defined. as ethnographic reports of psyche which must be relevant at least from the perspective of that symbolic fiction of elements.

   We continue further and find the part of the brown suede fabric that in the rest of the gallery covers the walls from floor to ceiling, this time loose below and spread in the form of a tablecloth on a table on which we find a white cup. of coffee, because a table, because a tablecloth with the same material that covers the walls of the entire gallery, because precisely on that table a cup of coffee.

    Remaining within the scope of an interpretation without reference to the supplementary texts, the cup of coffee underlines an everyday ritual related to domestic life or ritual occasions in society, the domestic component is given in the table and the tablecloth but at the same time it is the the only sign in the entire exhibition that does not say something at a semantic level about the meaning of the sienna fabric that covers the gallery, since with the exception of the fact that objects are shown on those covered walls as well as the detail that on two occasions they are sewn to that sienna fabric, this sign that the fabric here is detached from below and becomes without interruptions the tablecloth of a table on which there is a cup of coffee, is the only one in the entire sample that significantly indicates that fabric, that is, it draws attention to it and as such underlines with respect to it some relationships of meaning to which we will return.

    The next set, the chair, is an element for sitting, due to being located in front of the wall it could be interpreted as an invitation to the viewer to sit, or a metaphor for it, which would underline an invocation for the viewer of another type of relationship. with the exhibition different from the usual one of seeing the works walking standing or without relation to them, underlining the revocation of another type of more intimate or close attitude, if the viewer is invited to sit something unusual in the middle of a gallery, and to sit in front of some poems, it is supposed to be to read the poems, so we could interpret it as a claim for a closer relationship, but while the poems, as we said before, are personal, the subjective and imaginary world of the artist flows in them. The chair is in turn entirely covered with human hair so that it is impossible to sit on it, which creates both a relationship and a distance since the viewer cannot sit down, the hair underlines the human in general if we remain in a position. interpretation that does not include supplementary texts.

    But here an element enters again, even without resorting to supplementary texts, which, like the previous references to the use of the word psyche in the crucial method of the surrealists, psychic automatism, and like the reference to Jung's archetypes, which also comes from our heritage, in this case mine as a critic and that of any person visually informed in the history of art, the chair as a sign and as a symbol has become a prototypical icon in the visual arts due to its use in an emblematic work of conceptualism, the three and one chairs of Kossuth, Kossuth's chair, however, was the opposite of a chair covered with hair, it consisted only of the elucidation that the chair sign could have three different material forms with respect to the same referent, the real chair, the photograph of the chair and the concept of the written chair dictionary, so that in contrast to the analytical coldness of Kossuth's procedure, this chair covered with hair underlines another type of relationship with the sign or symbol chair, that we could understand as either affective, personal, intimate or eschatological.

     We will therefore have to return later to the interpretation of this symbolism, analyzing how to interpret what would be being alleged here regarding the sign and the symbol chair wrapped in hair in contrast to Kossuth's deliberations.

   By completely covering the chair with hair we could interpret it as a denial of that meaning of the chair to in turn recall the idea of ​​an ordinary and simple chair that revokes the sitting function in direct relation to the viewer reading the poems, the The hair that covers her could allude to something eschatological related to the body or something very personal and intimate, but if we notice the fact that several sets later there is a braid of hair given to the artist by her immigrant Armenian grandparents and that it is her own hair we could advance in the interpretation of this symbolism. But this path would renounce the allusion of Kossuth's chair in the history of art so that we will have to, as before, maintain as much as possible two interpretations running together, on the one hand, one that supposes the ordinary chair without relation to Kossuth, and on the other, one that tries to relate it.

   If there were an allusion to Kossuth's chair this could be interpreted as an allusion to art itself so that we would have to look to see if something else in the exhibition as a whole alludes to art itself, if so, we would have to accentuate the fact that The postcards that we have seen before could be read not only by the reference of their visual imagery to Greek culture, but also or before by the fact that they are postcards that refer to drawings and images that are artistic works of Greek painters and for the same reason be understood as an intra-artistic allusion to the fine arts, which could be confirmed in the work of the hundred marks because in it we not only have Greek postcards but also some from other periods of art, however, if it is an accentuation towards the relationships intratextual and intertextual of art, references of art to itself, we would find that for the moment the sets of the mirror mask, the doll and the rag doll, the hair braid and the last set of objects and the postcards and the wine on the floor do not offer well-defined codes that, referring to the most general acquiescence of any viewer, necessarily refer to the history of art.

    But certainly if we see it from the point of view of art history in which working with images of paintings made by other artists is understood as quotation, imitation and intertextuality, we would have to argue that at least the first set we saw of six pieces would be intertextual, as would the one hundred frames with collages, not without highlighting the fact that the artist transforms them through the collage technique, which semiotically supposes, as we will see later, a relativization of that intertextuality in favor of an imitation. and the formation with them of a new text, the one formed by the collage, which no longer pays attention to what its elements are in themselves before the juxtaposition that the collage creates, while in the last set this intertextuality would cease from the moment in which the same postcards are now being seen from their other side in which there are no images but the explanation that they are postcards to be sent by mail of those that are bought in the museum stores in which around the world the artist collected them from her own travels, we would therefore ultimately have a replacement for that intertextual allusion, instead of to Greek art, the serious allusion here to mail art, a trend within contemporary visual art. .

   We have in the sender-recipient postcards a more personal relationship, if you will, between the artist and her recipient because although the viewer is in the moment of the exhibition the immediate recipient, they are being shown something that in itself is usually used to be sent from which it is assumed that not only are these postcards part of a collection but in some way they are possibly occasionally used as shipments.

    Now, we would have to contrastively differentiate the two sets in which this occurs with the remaining sets in which we do not have intertextuality, although for the moment we have gone to this topic wondering whether to understand the chair in reference to its meaning in conceptualism or as a simple and ordinary object in the hair chair piece.

     In this sense we will have two types of textual supplements, the first refers directly to the artist's narratives and consists, as we said, in the fact that the hair that covers the chair is hair collected by the artist throughout her life.

   The second textual supplement within the first type of textual supplements, those related to the artist's narratives, is, as we said, that the dolls whose symbolism we interpret are belongings of her grandparents, that is, her ancestors, to which all the family textual supplements his grandfather and his grandmother on his father's side which were Armenian and these are objects that his grandparents kept from their childhood throughout their lives since they lived in Armenia before emigrating, the father of Surpic, son of both grandparents He was an Armenian who emigrated to Venezuela, and these objects were inherited and given to Surpic by her grandparents and she kept them as an emotional family memory throughout her life.

    The third textual supplement are the objects exhibited in the last set of the exhibition that we previously interpreted as simple icons without textual supplement, but which, as we said, are gifts that were given to Surpic over several decades by many of her Texan friends, friends of hers. Anglo-Saxon women from Texas, which she kept as emotional gifts with her cardiologist husband Paolo and her children with an Anglo-Saxon American mother and an Armenian father. These last two sets have great relevance in the exhibition, her Armenian grandparents, her community of life and her mother.

       But we have not yet integrated all the plans of our previous interpretation, nor have we developed a more complete interpretation of the symbolism of other elements of the exhibition such as the mirror frames in relation to the hundred postcards, nor the mirror mask, nor have we integrated the recent textual supplements related to her grandparents given in the emotional objects of the train and the dolls sewn to the wall covered with the gifts of her Texan friends in an interpretation that seeks to relate the previous interpretations on the frames with the half-naked Greek women, the cede, the poems, the table with the cup in allusion to a daily ritual, the chair wrapped in hair, the enclosure of the walls and the conceptual theme as well as the intertextual and other elements in an understanding of the Surpic Angelini exhibition as a propositional, discursive, aesthetic, visual and authorial set, we are waiting to allow potential interpretations to occur simultaneously from a viewer who does not dominate all this textual supplementarity and who, however, means possible or potential options in the interpretation of the sample

    In fact, looking at the exhibition as a whole, highlighting its most outstanding elements, we now have not only the velvet fabric that upholsters the gallery as the main visible syntax of the entire exhibition in which the exhibition space is almost erased and re-inscribed with others. semantic codes alluding in general at a syntactic level to a certain corporal sensoriality that we previously discussed in society and culture as well as at a meaning level alluding to a mostly domestic daily ritual, we also have that five of the sets that make up the sample are made up of elements affective aspects related to individual memory in the mode of conservation, collection, that is, that integrate personal forms of cultural collecting, this collecting, as expressed in the sample, does not refer to the collection of artifacts of the material and spiritual culture of cultures understood as all crystallized, but of an affective conservation that refers to the function of the object in memory and therefore to its collection, although we must not ignore that Surpic in itself has an interest in preserving objects also in that sense of collection of material and visual culture, in respect to which it is worth highlighting, another complementary curatorial textual supplement about the artist, her mixed collection of art from Texas, from Cuban emigrants to the United States, Venezuela and France, and her collection of tribal art from Oceania .

      We have found a new element not elucidated before, memory and specifically affective memory, which we consider as a whole acquires interpretive relevance. At the same time, there are two objectual discourses referring to affective memory that are at the same time gifts so that, as with respect to the symbolism of the mirror with respect to which we are waiting to interpret, we also have the symbolism of the gifts that is more intertwined with that sense of memory. affective.

     This exhibition therefore refers rather to the intimate conservation of personal objects, on the one hand, the collection of postcards from museums related to travel, visual imagery mostly from the ancient Greek world but also from the history of art in general gathered in its travels through Europe and the United States, these postcards collected in museums all have the character of having, on the one hand, an image of the history of art and, on the other, the lines through which people can send a Christmas message, congratulations on a date, having a present or attention with another person in the gift mode or in the mailing mode, all images used in collages both in the first set of the ceda and in the fourth of the hundred frames and in the last of the gifts, they are postcards of this type, on the other hand, the collection throughout his life of his own cut hair that wraps and upholsters the chair, the element of hair however refers us more to conservation than The collection, although it is a form of the latter, just as in another way, the cloth dolls and the hair braids of their Armenian grandparents are a form of conservation related to personal and individual memory, and in the last piece the objects that are gifts what her Texan friends have done to her throughout her life.

   In addition to these two generalities, gallery upholstered in velvet fabric, collection and conservation of travel and personal objects, we have the intertextuality of art with respect to the art implicit in the fact of making author's works that consist of images of works by other painters in the tradition. ancient greek and european fine arts

   What are we left with? And how do we then integrate the other elements into the interpretation of the whole?

    The discourse of the first set and the fourth refers us to pyche that we discussed before and to the relationship between psyche and eros in the two senses that we have discussed, relative to the ancient past in Greek religion, both gods, and relative to those two universal components of human experience, pyque and eros, the first set focuses on the bodies of half-naked Greek women and as the third involves the subjective symbolism and subjective imagination of the calligraphic writing of his poems, that is, they refer to their own world individual symbolic expressed in the poems, the fourth and the fifth in two different ways refer to the symbolism of the mirror, one in the mats that mount the postcards, the other in the symbolism of the mask, but groups three, five and six then refer to data very personal of the artist in her life, her hair collected around or around covering the chair in front of her poems woven on the wall, the rag dolls and the braid of hair of her Armenian grandparents woven to the wall and finally the personal gifts of her Texan friends in the last outfit.

      In fact, if we did not have in this exhibition the rag dolls and the braid in one of the pieces perse a and regardless of whether we follow the universal path he and she, male and female, artisanal tradition of rag dolls, braid as a ritual element of body, or let us follow the path of the additional textual supplement, which is about preserved emotional objects of his Armenian grandparents, if we did not have the hair that covers the chair with and without the textual supplement that they are his own and if we did not have the set final consisting of emotional objects with or without the textual supplement that they are gifts from Texan friends, perhaps we could move from the general theme of references to Greek antiquity and the problematic of pyche and eros, towards motifs such as collage and intertextuality leading us to an interpretation that would place emphasis on other issues related to these images in contemporary times, to the issue of visual imagery, to the issue of intertextuality in the history of art, to the issue of women in a generic universal sense. without necessarily paying attention to the artist, but it is clearly obvious that these groups form a decisive part of the exhibition as an authorial group and cannot be avoided in the way of making our inferences in the reading and interpretation of the relationships between the parts or elements and the discursive and visual whole.

      And from the moment they are unavoidable, they become decisive together with the personal content of the poems.

       It is true, as I said at the beginning, that for a viewer who does not know that the poems are written by the same author and who does not know that the objects are her grandparents' and friends', and that the hair is her own, but in any variant an interpretation such that it could not fail to be detonated by eminently syntactic elements, nor could it avoid the affective syntacsis of the semiotic codes that are assumed in the sensoriality of the entanglement of the walls, transforming the cold and distant space of the gallery into an inside or in an absolute interior governed by a syntacsis that refers to the body, to sensoriality, to the domestic and intimate space of the person, to semi-nudeness and femininity, to clothing in silk and velvet, to the body in hair, to the conservation of Objects that, according to the common sense parameter, have an affective meaning in themselves. But the poems are by the same author and refer to personal processes, as I said before, not in the sense that things about the person's life are revealed, but in the sense that symbolic subjectivity and the most personal imagination are present in them. The naked and the objects are not only conservations in general but they are also conservations of an individual memory, all of this added to the reference to the mirror completes the path in which my interpretation is integrated.

     The mirror in itself refers to our identity, in it we see ourselves, we see our own image alone with ourselves at the same time that we see ourselves alone but in an image of ourselves that we usually do not have, that is, similar to that that others perceive, is therefore a symbol of identity in the connection between the loneliness of the individual and that which completes his image from the outside as others would see it, here we have a sense of otherness that of seeing ourselves as we are in our identity but seeing ourselves alone from the exteriority in which others see us, is the symbolism of seeing alone that exteriorization that usually only others see, it is therefore, the very symbolism in which the self and the alter are united, the one self and the external image of others that turns our image into an object for others, is therefore directly related to the identity of the person, nothing is more a symbol of identity than the mirror.

   On the other hand, it is the only thing that is in the entire exhibition on a neat white pedestal, the mirror mask, precisely that code that when covering the walls appears erased in the rest of the exhibition appears here discovered in its white and neat display clarity. and what it shows is precisely a mask of mirrors, secondly the mirror appears again only in the mode of the mats, that is, of the external codes that cover the pieces of the collages, highlighting the inside and outside of the piece, that what she is, on the one hand, and what she presents to others.

   If the mat presents the work, it is not for anything else but because it highlights or accentuates that from a certain moment onwards the illusion of representation begins or that which is the fiction of the work, in this case collages of collected postcards, and that between the limit on which the piece closes, the edges of the format, and the rest of the exterior surfaces of that, the mat mediates the separation by accentuating it, as if saying from me inwards is the piece that I decorate and present and from me outwards. It is something else that is no longer the piece or work presented, that is no longer the representation in its fiction, but because in this exhibition precisely the codes of presentation such as the white walls of the gallery have been erased and resemantized, dewritten and reinscribed in a staging, the demarcation that the mat makes between the display and what is shown, between what is a piece and what is not, becomes relevant because it underlines these limits between the presentation and what is presented, between the display and what is shown, between what is representation and what is reality, which by covering all the white walls of the gallery is placed in the foreground.

     Thus, the issue of identity that we saw before in the symbolism of the mirror and the relationship between one facing oneself alone and one facing oneself as others see it, is also referred to the presentation-presented relationship, display-shown highlighted by the display as a whole with the entanglement and underlined on the white pedestal that shows the mirror mask.

    If what the works present, the walls, is with this exhibition erased and resemantized, replaced by other codes, the relationship shown, presentation-work, is also relativized, in fact, the sets that could be understood as works or as pieces not They have titles, and since the display wall is syntactically worked throughout the exhibition with a general enclosure, everything that has been placed inside appears as part of a single, large installation.

     Is it a single authorial installation that has incorporated architecture into its language or are there many pieces? Undoubtedly from the object point of view there are many pieces, some of which, especially collages, are at the same time rearticulations of the collage juxtapositions of pieces or paintings by ancient Greek painters and art history, but all These pieces have been rearticulated within an exhibition that is itself a single installation and which, moreover, incorporates architecture as a space to that installation, erasing the difference between the display and what is shown, between the presentation and what is presented, between the work and that which shows it, so that if the mat is a mirror it is also one in this sense not only of one's identity as a subject and above all that of the viewer, recipient of the sample, but also in the sense of the identity of what is a piece, of the relationship between the elements and the whole. .

   It becomes obvious that we have here a more complex semiotics of mirror symbolism, this not only refers to identity understood in the simple sense of the reflection of our image in the mirror as the externalization and reflected confirmation of our identity, and here by the way, not only our universal one, that of any of us but above all in the concrete in situ of the spatiality of the work, the identity of the spectator who, being the one who walks through the work and the one who, as recipient, is presupposed by it as an act of communication, It is the one who is expected to see himself in the mirror, but he does not see himself in any mirror but specifically in the mirror of the mats, which is that instituted code that emphasizes where the work begins and where what is not it begins, treating the mats as mirrors It refers here, then, in addition to the previously analyzed symbolism of identity and the mirror, also to something that with this exhibition is in the foreground from the beginning.

   As I said, just like the mat, the walls of the gallery are also presenters or displayers of what is presented and shown. With this exhibition they are erased or rewritten, reinscribed by new codes whose corporal and social sensory symbolisms we have discussed before, so here The mirror does not go through the symbolic in any way but rather it is required to return or return from the passepartout mirror to the presentational codes of the exhibition as a whole. There is therefore a relationship between the passepartout mirror and the exhibition as a whole, specifically the way in which In it the codes of presentation of what is the work have been worked on, the mirror then leads us directly to the gallery's enlightenment so that we have here a reflection on identity that passes through a reflection on the ways of presenting a work in the sense of discussing that the display, counter or presenter becomes symbolized or transformed into symbolism.

    If the mirror is precisely the symbol in which we verify the point at which the perception of ourselves or oneself in one's identity is communicated, with others, that is, with others, with society or the social internalized in the mode of alterity, one sees oneself and in the same seeing one's individual identity sees the externalization of that identity as a differentiated object from the perception that others have of one, a process in which, by the way, the identity is completed. We also have that here the Reflection on identity additionally refers to reflection on the identity of the symbolic of the work, that is, of what makes the work work.

     And this then seems to have three meanings, on the one hand, from the point of view of syntacsis it returns to the theme of identity, but on the other hand, from the point of view of the semiotic codes presentation-presented object, mat-piece , canvas walls together, also refers to identity in the sense of the instituted codes of what is art in the conceptual sense.

     In fact, we cannot avoid, as we said before, that collages, as in all collages, are not images made by the author herself, but are images made by artists from Greek antiquity in the history of art, but the fact that they are Postcards collected on their travels and especially postcards to keep present or be sent refer to various things, on the one hand that are purchased as objects and signs, on the other that they are preserved, covering a content in terms of the memory of experiences. lived, but on the other hand, they can also be sent or given with an idea of ​​the recipient in mind. The art object that is referred to in the images as being about other painters, is relativized in the very fact that it is about postcards through which that object is transformed into a utilitarian piece of furniture intended for other functions.

      We then have, as a closing to this first discussion of the Surpic sample, a broken down analytical table of the sample which will help us integrate these plans in a subsequent interpretation when we return to the sample after discussing the following in this first interpretive itinerary.

1- personal relative to your individual experience

Set 1

The poems written on the ceda deal with symbolism of subjectivity and individual imagination.

Set 3

The chair is covered with her own hair cut and preserved throughout her life.

The poems painted on the wall once again deal with symbolism of subjectivity and individual imagination.

Set 6

The objects attached to the wall: doll and rag doll, and hair braid are preserved from her Armenian grandparents related to her, her ego and her self through her family descent.

Set 7

The objects displayed on the wall are preserved gifts from her Texan friends

2- Contemporary women and the ancient Greek world

Set 1-

Half-naked ancient Greek women expressed in ancient paintings

Collage of those images

Poem written on light pink silk dyed with tea

Set 4

One hundred collages of images of these Greek women expressed in ancient paintings

Added to others in the history of art

Underlined the theme of the relationship between pyche and eros through the text on the glass display case on the floor

Referral to the recurrence to the image of pyche in the first and fourth sets

Sample set

Its title Ethnographic reports of pyche

Set 6

Armenian grandmother and grandfather, doll and rag doll

Set 7

Texan women

3-fabric, clothing, upholstery, entelamiento, cooked

Set 1

The poems written on tea-dyed silk that have to be lifted to see the images

General set-sample

The complete gallery as a space upholstered and covered in dark sienna suede velvet fabric

Set 3

The poems are written in manual calligraphy on a wall-fired cedar covered in dark sienna.

Set 6

The dolls of the Armenian grandparents are made of cloth, rags, and are next to the braid of hair sewn into the dark sienna entanglement on the wall.

4-references to art or intertextuality in art

General set-sample

The complete gallery as a space upholstered and covered in dark sienna suede velvet fabric refers to the white cube of the gallery to which only conceptualism has previously drawn attention.

Set 1

All images are by ancient Greek painters

Set 3

The chair, reference to the chair in conceptualism

Set 4

The hundred collages are of images by other painters

Sample set

The white cube transformed into a cloth sienna cube

5-conservation and collecting

Set 1

All images are from collected and preserved travel postcards

Set 3

All the hair that covers the chair is collected preservations

Set 6

Grandparents' objects are collected conservations

Set 7

The exhibits are preservations collected from gifts

The hundreds of postcards on the floor are the same ones collected on his travels

6-trips, correspondence, presents, gifts

Set 1

They are all postcards collected on trips and are postcards that are given as presents on congratulatory dates or sent by mail

Set 4

They are all postcards collected on trips and are postcards that are given as presents on congratulatory dates or sent by mail

Set 7

They are all postcards collected on trips and are postcards that are given as presents on congratulatory dates or sent by mail

7-Contemporaneity and culture

Set 1

Contemporary museums of fine arts or ancient arts where the type of postcards and images are sold

General set

The exhibition is an installation expression of language in contemporary art based on the distribution and placement of objects.

and transformation of a space

Set 3

The poems make allusions to the present contemporary world from subjectivity and imagination.

Set 4

Contemporary museums of fine arts or ancient arts where the type of postcards and images are sold

Set 7

The Texan women from whom the gifts come are contemporary

8-tradition and culture

Set 1

Greek tradition

Set 2

The domestic ritual of drinking coffee

Set 3

Cooking related to the feminine tradition inherited from sewing at home

Set 4

Greek tradition and ancient fine arts

Set 5

Armenian culture, the art of rag dolls

Emigrant family

Set 6

Tejano women, their new culture in which they live and the culture of their mother

9-Elements of affective referral

Set 1

The poems

Set 2

domestic scene

Set 3

Hair and poems

Set 5

The objects of the Armenian grandparents, rag dolls and hair braids

Set 7

Personal gifts

10-Ethnicity

Set 1

Greek ethnicity/ethnicity of the artist (Venezuelan emigrated to Texas)

Set 2 and 3

Ethnicity of the artist (Venezuelan who emigrated to Texas)

Set 4

Greek ethnicity

Set 6

Armenian ethnicity

Set 7

Anglo-American and Texan ethnicity, that of her friends, that of her mother, and that of the culture in which she lives

11-Preponderant symbolisms

Fabric, clothing, body, cooking, domestic space, subjectivity of the home, covering, upholstering

Silk fabric dyed with light pink tea

Set 1 and 3, for writing the poems in calligraphy

Dark brown velvet fabric

Sample set lining gallery/locker room-velvet wall lining

(cinema-theater-palaces, gala occasions)

Table with cup of coffee

Dyed in tea, domestic infusion

Subjectivity, imagination, the ego, the self, the woman, the semi-nude, the psyche-eros relationship

Sets 1, 3, 4, 6, 7

The poems, the hair, the half-naked Greek images, half-naked bodies, the chair

The face and the mask

set 1

Uncover or reveal the ceda

set 3

face reflection of the viewer's face

the mirror mats of the hundred paintings

set 5

the mask of mirrors-relationship with the viewer's face-mark of mirrors in which the face is seen

We can therefore, after this breakdown, proceed to integrate the different plans into a general interpretation of the sample.

We will return to Surpic, now let's discuss the exhibition by Juan José Olavarría

The Market from Here: Mise in Scene and Experimental Etnography

     We had talked about samples in which the iconic visual prevails over the alphabetic textual and vice versa. In the Surpic exhibition, despite the high volume of alphabetical texts such as the spectator's reading of eight poems in the room, the title of the exhibition and Pyche traveled to the underworld, these, although relevant in their elucidation and understanding, remain on a level of open associative relations that fail to regulate and govern the entire associative field of relations of meaning, remaining in a certain way, due to the polysemy and entropy of associative relationality, as subordinate to the relations of meaning created by the merely iconographic.

     Let's discuss below an exhibition in which the reverse occurs, where the alphabetical text regulates and governs all the dramaturgy and the concatenations of the iconic-visual, addressing my own exhibition The Market from Here: Mise in Scene and Experimental Ethnography.

     This work, as explained in its title, is about the markets, which becomes obvious and notable from a merely iconographic and visual point of view from the moment it is seen from the outside and especially from the moment one enters it, since from its very entrance Photographs of the popular urban markets in Venezuela can be seen on display and from the moment in which, from its first walkable pavilion throughout its entire spatial course, approximately 1000 photographs of the popular urban markets in Venezuela can be seen on display. Therefore, 1000 photographs about a specific social, urban, spatial, human and economic reality cannot be avoided. But photographic discourse, as we know, although it contains clear relationships of denotation and connotation, these relationships remain, especially in the documentary genre, subject to mere referentiality. Elements such as whether they are close-ups, that is, close-ups, medium or general shots, establish relationships of meaning with respect to how the photographic subject, that is, the eye of the camera, is involved in it, and how the relationship is made explicit. between this and the subject of the photograph, that which is visually rehearsed as its subject which in a certain way colors the elements of subjectivity and objectivity with respect to what is documented, as well as organizes certain generic aspects about the way of approaching it, but this does not It goes from remaining subordinate to the object language, that is, to denotation and reference.

    So, although we have a thousand photographs of popular urban markets which make explicit and bring to the foreground the theme of the work, we still do not know much more about the reason for these photographs and how to relate to them. In fact, the work explicitly states that from its beginning, both seen from the outside and from its entrance, much more than a photographic essay. Although this is relevant in it, from its very entrance the first room begins the work with a five-page essay printed on acetate and on its walls in reading which we see illustrating the first fifteen photographs of the popular urban markets that can be seen. in the work. This essay, which is read at the beginning, regulates the entire work both in the sense of its dramaturgy, that is, the relationships between introduction, development, knot and unraveling, entry, route, exit, as well as the indexical and deixtical relations of connection, that is, denotative towards the visual and iconographic within the work, since it is, on the one hand, its Introduction read in a single set, it is then, the museographic textual circuit or room textual guide that the viewer reads at the same time. time in which the iconographic is seen—as happens to the room guide texts in the museums of anthropology and ethnography, as well as the script text, that is, the libretto, which, written in advance, was used as that which would be staged in the sense that this expression and this relationship script/script-staging, has in cinema and theater.

   We cannot repeat that complete text here for our reader since the length of that essay would replace the objectives of the present one, but in broad strokes I will try to inform my reader about this text in general. As a summary, I have received the impression from several readers that this is an essay that is somewhat reminiscent of the type of writings of Jean Boudrillard on, for example, the consumer society, the world of advertising and commodities in capitalism due to the exacerbated and often exhilarating and sometimes ironic way in which Boudrillard tends to refer to it in texts such as the silent majorities or the profusion of simulacra. However, although I accept some aspects of this comment in general, the fact that it is a text that discusses the same phenomenon I consider that it is clearly an original essay that develops an entirely new reading of that world, first of all, Boudrillard usually refers to consumer society not as a phenomenological world or universe for the sense data that surrounds our own sensoriality in that world of consumption, secondly, Boudrillard takes mass society as a fact as our surrounding society. average in terms of majorities of a corroboration of majorities, but it does not immerse itself in developing a Phenomenology of that reality as a world understood phenomenologically for subjectivity, thirdly, it does not relate the empirical data of its experience with the theoretical abstractions of its symbolism. (Boudrillard Jean, Transestetica, anagram, Boudrillard Jean, The Profusion of Simulacra, Boudrillard Jean, the Silent Majorities)

    Once the consumer society is denoted as our surrounding world, it has not been the object of an immersion of subjectivity in it that, beyond only denoting it as the reality of the majority, abstracts it as a moving world, as does the text, between literal and empirical urban markets, that is, the universe of sellers and buyers, forklift drivers and merchandise distributors, and the experience in that world of the body, observation and point of view. Additionally, there is no alternation of point of view in his texts between the general theorization of a phenomenon and references to specific circumstances that the text brings to the foreground as an immersive situation in those markets for scriptural subjectivity, interspersing theoretical objectifications about their abstract symbolisms, with empirical phenomenological material on its bodily immersion and with reflections that move between the situation of experience and that of observation, finally, it does not go beyond referring to a present world, without moving between the different periods of the world of markets, consumption and Advertising, in short, is a text that is neither a political economy of the sign in the manner of some of his texts, nor an ironic essay on the subject, but rather an ethnography in which my point of view As a writer and theorist he moves between discussing markets and offering reflexivities between the theoretical abstract about their symbolism and the empirical about concrete urban markets in which I did field work, moving between the point of view as an ethnographer who reflects on the markets but also on me in them in the terms of a conclusive writing on observation in social sciences around my own research, and empirically very intricate and rich insights around markets, consumption and advertising not only or no longer for majorities that consume, but rather for concrete interactions of barter in urban circumstances of buying and selling and above all, for a Phenomenology on the market not only in the present but also in its previous forms in the colonial period, alternating material on its visualities both for foreign travelers such as Dutch and English as well as local customs among many other issues that refer to specific markets, the popular and urban ones of Venezuela in the neoliberal period, full of countless details about the specific markets, the text is also illustrated with them through of photographs taken during that field work.

    Once this illustrated text has been read in the first room of the work, as I said before, it continues then distributed by paragraphs, indexing and deixticalizing as a museum guide to the room, the course of the visual iconography in it at the same time that, because the text offers significant conclusions on how to deliberate between representation and evocation, an image of the markets and the dilemma in them of observation and point of view, is the text used in anticipation as a script for what was specifically its staging. visual, that is, the text that governed how to articulate the iconographic and compositional set of the work as a work about the markets and about my field work in them, in short, as a work that, like the essay itself, The topic would discourse between the alphabetical textual nature of the essay and a visual iconographic discourse. Returning then to the 1000 photographs all taken during field work, this is not a photographic essay as this genre is understood when it is only about the discourse of the pure visual photographic image, but rather a theoretical and literary essay photographically illustrated.

    Now, the work in question is not composed only of alphabetical language and photographs. It is conceived as a penetrable and traversable installation aimed not only at readers but also at spectators who are invited to enter and explore a world or universe created based on the empirical research that the essay discusses and that will be physically experienced in a tour. with entrance and exit, and in this installation language, in addition to photographs, spatial elements, environmental recreations of the market, sound, objects and visual iconography will intervene. Built as a three-dimensional penetrable with floor, walls and gable roof and made with materials that are used in real urban markets for its construction, such as the use of transparent plastic and bags to make the ceilings and walls, the work is composed of six areas, a circuit and its internal divisions specific to the construction system.

     These are the first area, the entrance or lobby to which we have made references before, consisting of a room closed on itself that, starting the work, consists only of the reading printed on the walls of the aforementioned essay and the fifteen photographs that illustrate it. The circuit is the route that the spectator will take with entry, route and exit, which is demarcated and continued by a single element, the museographic circuit of the same entry text distributed as a museum hall guide.

    The second area after the first vestibular and introductory room, is an installation and environmental recreation of the world of peddlers, which is what ephemeral sellers are called in Venezuela, that is, they sell outdoors without a roof, who set up with the merchandise on the floor, deploying a cloth to delimit the sales area and spending the entire day there, sometimes sleeping until the next day. These individuals usually sell basic necessities and the recreated installation environment places its emphasis more on their styles and their lifestyles, the way they sleep, their personal belongings, etc., rather than in the setting or scene of the sale.

    The third area is an installation and environmental recreation of the world of herbalists who sell medicinal herbs in the markets, plants for healing decoctions, infusions and home remedies both for the body, ointments, solutions, as well as for the soul and religiosity, iconic figures. religious, substances and bottles, stamps and different types of objects. The installation recreation of this area is focused, unlike the previous one, not on their lifestyles, but on their sales settings, that is, on the surrounding world that makes up the concrete scene in which barter and transactions take place. That is to say, where these herbalists display their merchandise, they receive their clients, expose them to visuality, prepare them, have their inventories and sell them.

   The fourth area installatively recreates the world of tinkerers, sellers of body items and jewelry, here they are sellers of bracelets, bracelets, necklaces, eyeglasses, earrings and different items both mass-produced in industrial production as merchandise and more manufactured. homemade or manual and includes music discs as an area. While the herbalists' previous area is full of aromatic herbs of very intricate types, raw wooden furniture for preparing ointments, cutting the herb or serving the merchandise, religious stamps, bottles and other things, this area is full of intense fluorescent colors , plastic and silver futinture, and all types of body jewelry where the merchandise is displayed, as well as the previous one, it is also focused on the scenic setting in which the moment of bartering and transactions occurs, that is, in that the buyer moves around looking until he chooses his purchase and in which the transaction is carried out between the seller and the buyer.

    The fifth area installatively recreates three months of my fieldwork in the urban popular markets of Venezuela. While my introductory and museographic essay is conclusive with respect to field work that I did alone for two years in popular urban markets, in this area we talk about three months of field work in which a guest set designer, Fernando Calzadilla, worked with me. I shared the work and this area recreates that three-month experience through, on the one hand, a display case in which photographs of both of us in the markets exchanging with the vendors, photographs of me writing, and two texts of mine about the concepts are displayed. of representation and evocation. It also includes the desk used during the field work as well as references to the construction of the work such as a model and finally a black wooden piece of furniture that is an inventory of optical objects that I define as the museum of the observer who in this work It is stenographic since one of the conclusions of my research on the markets is that the market is an ethnography of the observer, the area includes tubes from which one can look at different points in the work.

    The sixth area is the exit hall and is dedicated to an installation recreation of the world of street vendors, who do not sell in a fixed place but rather moving and who hawk their merchandise, including the recreation of the world of cart drivers, chicha sellers. and soup, as well as the festive and celebratory world of confetti and streamers.

    In addition to these six areas and the circuit with entrance, introduction, route and exit, the work includes relevant construction elements. Made in the same way that the covered markets that take place under the ceiling are made, it has a structure on which it is supported, it has internal divisions which are also at the same time places where merchandise is displayed such as shoes, clothing, toys and antique objects, it has a floor made of boards, a constant ambient sound recorded in the markets, an attic for storing merchandise and materials, and it also has a center or crossroads in which the paths of the circuit intersect and in which We placed plastics hanging from the ceiling where we printed two paragraphs by American anthropologist Stephen A Tyler on the concept of evocation quoted from his essay Postmodern Ethnography.

. 

Installed Ethnography

    Let us then move on, alternating to an exhibition in which, again like Surpic, the visual iconography governs over the textual alphabetical, the installed ethnography exhibition by Juan Carlos Rodríguez.

     The first difference is that this sample includes ambient sound in the room, a permanent recorded sound that refers to people washing clothes, the second difference is that in spatial terms this sound is related to what is seen visually since it consists of sheets. hanging wet, these hanging sheets that form a passable circuit of clotheslines have each one inscribed with names of people, on the floor covered in corrugated cardboard where the viewer walks, moving as if between bundles of hanging sheets, there are buckets with water and the clotheslines. from which the stretched sheets hang are assemblages of pieces of old wood that form posts to which small books of the Pentecostal Christian gospel are tied. Finally, on a cola machine located in space we see many pages written in manual calligraphy. These are briefly and in broad strokes the descriptive elements that make up Juan Carlos's exhibition so that we have to assume that our viewer enters this space, walks through it, sees, hears and feels what was described above and begins to make some type of interpretation and if we consider To carry out this interpretation without curatorial textual supplements, we must assume that, just as it happened with the generic aspects he and she with the rag dolls in the Surpic sample, they refer to the male-female relationship in the Surpic sample without even having textual supplements. additional to the iconic, that here the spectators somehow relate hearing the sounds of people washing clothes with wet sheets hanging out with a universal generic meaning, that is, referring to any people in any culture in the common sense action ordinary to all. culture of washing clothes and that for some reason, which we do not know at first, those sheets have names which must be assumed to refer in some way or evoke the people who are heard washing clothes but about whom we know nothing, at the same time At the same time, the books of the Pentecostal Christian gospel attached to the walls could allude to or refer to the human universality of that act as well as in terms of clues, perhaps suggesting that it is a Christian community in its values ​​or of people who believe in the gospel. Nothing, however, in the gospel readings makes references to washing clothes as a relevant passage in religious terms so that we do not induce the sound and visual referent as directly detached or anecdotal with respect to the content of the books.

    But as in the example of the car that begins our essay, my curatorial textual complements can irreversibly impact the interpretation of our reader by telling them that it is a poor popular neighborhood interned in the so-called favelas that are found in the poorest neighborhoods of Caracas around the mountainous strips, that the people whose sounds are heard washing are people who live in the neighborhood in the daily activity of washing and that the sheets belonging to them have been donated to Juan Carlos for his work, that the wood with which they are made The parales have all been collected in those neighborhoods and that it is a specific and real neighborhood in which Juan Carlos Rodríguez does his Pentecostal work since he is a Venezuelan artist who is simultaneously also a Pentecostal seminarian pastor who does his work at the same time religious and social assistance in this neighborhood as well as that the texts that are in the Coca Cola machine are the pages of a novel that a woman writes about her life in that neighborhood as well as that in previous works exhibited in Caracas Juan Carlos has developed joint installations, that is, co-authors, with this woman named Maira who already makes a living by collecting and selling waste in the city. Our supplementary texts therefore impact reading and what we previously saw as something generic universal now acquires an eminently local content.

   The artist and pastor has developed an exhibition about himself and the community and the relationship between the two which he has called installed ethnography. In previous exhibitions the emphasis of the installations was on the objects and things that Maira collects in the city, while for this exhibition she has focused on the neighborhood itself and its laundry activities. We therefore believe that this sample as our initial example of the automobile does not require further elucidation, either the curatorial textual complement is available or it is not available and in one sense or the other we have with it two different avenues of potential interpretations as unlike the two previous ones in which the allusions to anthropology remain at the level of symbolic fiction specific to the internal content of that fiction, the Surpic the supposed ethnographic reports of pyque in the ambiguity that they are reports of the pyche or reports of pyche the Greek goddess, Ernesto Leal and Juan José the interpretative deviation that highlights the Balinese deity of the villages and our inferences regarding the content of the pieces on the topic of inventions, in this sample the underlined character of allusive installed ethnography to the very genre of language that makes up the work, being a contemporary art installation oscillates between the evocation of the human activity of washing accentuated with names on the sheets and the gospel books that without complementary supplements would remain on the level of fiction and the real fact that it is an objective neighborhood in which Juan Carlos has developed work that is both social and Pentecostal. The installation itself emphasizes that Juan Carlos does more than just bring the gospel to the neighborhoods, he develops in them a somewhat therapeutic social work around the lives of his people whom he monitors and the fact of making shared contemporary art installations. with those people from the neighborhood adds a concrete, situated and real dimension to the sense of exploration. We will return to this exhibition later since in addition to the curatorial textual supplements there are even more intricate textual supplements in my knowledge as a curator that could help to interpret it, thereby distancing ourselves, of course, from the polysemy and interpretive entropy of viewers who do not have these supplements.

Arguing with Betara Desa

    Let us now turn to a similar critique of Juan José Olavarría's exhibition Arguments with Betara Desa. Let's start our critique from descriptive parameters, the visual icons that make up the sample and its different sets which, unlike Surpic, each have their own titles.

   The first piece that our viewer has without textual supplements is located in front of a column just upon entering the space, and is a wooden carrier of musical staves, composed of legs on which a table or stand is supported, it is those in which the musicians in an orchestra usually place their musical staves in which they read the scores of what they must do with their instrument. On this stave holder, however, we do not actually find a musical stave placed but rather a tourism magazine of the city of Houston in which, if we open it, we see images of the city of Houston arranged in the way in which they are usually He does it in a magazine for tourists.

    We therefore have a clear and precise iconographic and visual sign composed of the relationship between two elements, pentagram holder and tourism magazine.

   It is therefore, at a first level of reading, the relationship between two images usually not related to each other and in a certain way absurd or surreal in a first level of interpretation, this refers us to a metaphor when between two unrelated symbols, we have to induce a plane of meanings created by their metaphorical conjugation. This relationship to surrealism, however, as in our interpretation of the allusion to pyche in Surpic from the point of view of pycheic automatism as a self-proclaimed method by the surrealists, is, again, here too, a curatorial textual supplement to our own collection, Meanwhile, although it is a question of a certain universality of communication, of a relationship between two signs that form a third metaphorical meaning between them, it would not necessarily be necessary to resort to surrealism since there are metaphors in any form of language,

   At the same time, our inference also refers to a collection that is a textual reservoir or subtext, there are metaphors in any language, but metaphors created between objects of ordinary functional use, we only know them before or in surrealism as in the famous piece of the umbrella and the typewriter, or in Dadaism. On the other hand, in references to our previous allusion to the references that Levis Strauss made to the relationships between diachrony and synchrony, linearity and simultaneity, between melody and harmony in the reading of the Musical Pentagramal, for his analysis of the structure of myths, We also do not know if the artists read this essay by Levis Strauss, so, since we do not know, and ultimately, it is also, for the purposes of our neutral viewer, an additional curatorial textual complement to the merely visual, for the purposes We must once again make the three levels of reading run at the same time, the one that refers to a metaphor with its games of meaning in the surrealism or Dadaism of objects, the one that refers to the merely physical, pentagram holder and tourism magazine of the city of Houston for our neutral spectator, and that which could be deduced from an interpretation of the recurrence to the pentagram in the sense of Levi Strauss

    That the selection of a tourism magazine is not arbitrary and is subject to illations of meaning that go beyond a simple surrealist anachronism becomes obvious as soon as we move away from the specific piece and look at other pieces in the show, in fact, Several pieces in the exhibition are directly allusive to Houston, in order to simply summarize by doing, as we did before with Surpic, an advance tour looking for where other pieces in the show had allusions to the Greek theme in order to understand the first set, we have here from the following set that directly alludes to the capsules used as food by the cosmonauts, knowing that Houston is the city of NASA, complemented in allusion to the theme of a parachute that hangs from the semi-open ceiling, much as we have written on the wall the name of the most typical food in Texas, barbicue meat.

    We find the allusions to Houston again later but in different ways in a set of pieces titled The Allen Brothers Exploring the Border we have a direct allusion since the Allen brothers were the founders of Houston. We also find allusions to Houston in three additional ways. On the one hand, through iconographic signs that allude to the typicalities or customs of the region through the world of the small towns of the west, but in this case it is an allusion to Texan cultural identities more than to Houston as a city, the exhibition for example of a horse saddle on a white pedestal like a sculpture or the exhibition of a horse carriage to which we will return later.

   We will also find the cartographic map of Houston, although this is not alone but merged with the cartographic map of the city of Valencia in Venezuela, there are some letters that Juan José Olavarría exchanged with the faculty of architecture about the characteristics of the space in which the sample and let's also have at the end of the sample the word Houston but written as it sounds in Spanish Jiuston on a blackboard.

    Now, added to the fact that the ways of alluding to Houston and Texas are different from each other, we must not only elucidate what are those differences or specificities of the different ways in which the theme of Houston and Texas is directly or indirectly alluded to. , but also to elucidate the fact that not all of the groups in the exhibition and not all of its pieces are allusive to Houston or Texas, but to other themes, and to try to find interpretative relationships between these dissimilarities through which to interpret the group of works. shows it as a discursive and declarative authorial proposition.

    Let's first see what those modes are different from each other, which makes them specific and differentiated, then let's see what those other topics are. In the first piece of the exhibition we have already discussed it before, the allusion is direct through the exhibition of a literal tourism magazine from the city of Houston which can be opened and browsed by the viewer although it is not shown. on a magazine rack or place where magazines are displayed, but on a carrier of musical staves.

    The second allusion is also direct although more subtle, it is a table with a tablecloth on which there are many small plates on each of which are the capsules that the cosmonauts ingest in outer space, we say subtle and less direct because As in the previous magazine, we do not have direct images of Houston, and although we see the capsules, we could think that they are capsules of some other type, not necessarily cosmonautical, so here we have added a complement or curatorial textual supplement, we know that they are capsules of cosmonauts directly from the artists, the allusion to the fact that these are food and not capsules of any other type comes from the fact that they are placed inside the plates in the place where food is usually placed, as well as the fact that on On the wall, as part of that same group, the word Barbicue is written, alluding directly to Houston since a type of stewed meat is the typical food dish in the region.

   At the same time, this set has a semi-open parachute that hangs from the ceiling. The subsequent allusions are however more indirect, the immediately following assembly is an ordinary leather horse saddle mounted on a white pedestal of sculptures, the horse is undoubtedly a universal visual sign, but situated near or as part of a set of several pieces alluding to Houston, highlight the fact of the importance that the horse has in Texas. On the other hand, the horse carriage piece is not inside the gallery, but located next to a tree outside the gallery, in the green areas of the campus so that it can be seen from inside the gallery through one of its glass walls or it can be seen from outside by people passing through the campus.

    But the allusions in the following pieces are much more complex. We were talking about cartography, that is, the map of the city of Houston drawn in aerial view, that is, in plan, but on a tanned fabric which has been attached with springs to a metal structure with legs forming a three-dimensional volume in the space alluding to the trampolines used in the circus for jumping and to the same extent this map of Houston is merged with the map of the city of Valencia in Venezuela so that between both maps a new map of a non-existent or invented city is formed .

   We say that the allusions are more complex, first because from the iconographic and visual point of view at this point without the textual supplement that it is a map of the city of Houston and a map of the city of Valencia fused together, no viewer would have to conclude from the purely iconographic that this information or have reached that inference, nowhere does it say this is the map of the city of Houston and the city of Valencia merged, so that without textual supplements the viewer could think of any other thing, thinking that it is the map of a city that you don't know, or of a fictional city, as well as not knowing that the city of Valencia is the one where one of the two artists lives and the one where they physically made the pieces of the sample. The latter is strictly a curatorial complementary textual supplement in terms of interpretation which, of course, will notably differentiate the interpretive paths of the reader of this essay versus the in situ viewer of the spatial exhibition.

    Per se, we must not overlook that here again we have before us a metaphor formed by three elements whose relationship is in principle, as in every metaphor, an anachronistic conjugation of unrelated elements that seek to create some third or fourth meaning, the bed element. circus elastic, the only one visually explicit for our neutral viewer, and the other two accompanied and helped here by our curatorial textual supplement, the map of the city of Valencia and the map of the city of Houston merged. We have to assume here without the textual complement that the metaphor is even more open and entropic, not just anachronistic, a trampoline of circus jumping with cartographies of urban cities drawn on the canvas without knowing for certain what cartographies they are.

    The surreal game becomes more accentuated in the fiction that is created when, mastering the textual supplement, we fall into the fact that an inventive map of a non-existent or fictional city has been created with the real maps of two cities.

    In a way, once immersed in this piece we realize that with the exception of our textual supplement that is a map of Houston, the allusions to Houston are almost dissolved for the viewer's purposes; however, in another piece in the show we have a allusion not to Houston but to the relationship between the city of Valencia and the city of Houston given in the fact that it includes, as we said before, the exhibition of the letters that the artists exchanged with the faculty of architecture of the university of rice about the characteristics of the space in which the exhibition would be held, the Farish gallery, and the responses they received.

   We will return to this allusion to the in situ space of the exhibition, as well as to the fact that we have in it an allusion to the very process of production of the exhibition.

    But continuing our first careful journey to find out what the allusions to Houston are like, we note that the following one, although it refers directly to Houston in the title of the piece or group, The Allen Brothers Exploring the Border, the correlations of its iconographic images are also metaphorically, in fact, this set titled like this is composed of three elements, two of them are objects located on top of two high stools, one of these objects is a shield, it is perceived that it is a shield because it uses recurring visualities in any shield , but this shield is made of goosebumps and at the same time it is an invented shield, that is, non-existent, illusory, fictional, the shield of a non-existent, new, fictional inventive city or country.

    The second element is a television on which a permanent image consisting of a breathing human torso is projected and the third element is a large cloth displayed on the wall on which the image of a printing press is drawn.

   What relates a printing press, with a torso that breathes through a television monitor and a coat of arms of a non-existent or invented country or city made of goosebumps? Undoubtedly we have again a metaphor that is even more anachronistic than the previous ones, but we will return to it later hermeneutically, let's just say for the moment that the Allen brothers who title the group are the founders of Houston which, by the way, does not cease to be a complementary curatorial text because undoubtedly, with the exception of those of us who are Houstonians, it is a very local fact that not everyone needs to know. Concluding our first inferential journey around the theme Houston, we have, as we said at the end of the exhibition, the word jiuston written on a blackboard.

    Let's now go through the pieces in the exhibition that are not allusive to Houston or Texas and then try to elucidate what can be related to pieces related to Houston and pieces related to other things in a work as a whole.

    Although in the circus trampoline the allusion is already very diluted, just as it is in the mere sense of the specific gallery as a site and space in the piece with the letters, and although we cannot avoid that those at the beginning of the exhibition without They are directly allusive, Houston tourism magazine, cosmonaut food, typical Houston meat el barbicue, as well as in the title the Allen brothers exploring the border, in other pieces the allusion is non-existent.

    We have no allusion to Houston or Texas, for example in the work Altar a Betara Desa composed of votive offerings, that is, objects that collect the religious requests that many people in the city of Valencia make to a god or goddess in the form of god, grant me this or that for me or for my son, God please make me able to get this or that, it is a piece of infinite objects made in the form of votive offerings such as those that are placed on altars or in the epitaphs exposed on the walls under the title Altar to Betara Desa. We have here the curatorial textual supplement that these votive offerings and phrases of people asking God for something were made by people who live in the city of Valencia where one of the artists lives and where they made the exhibition, something which is not an inferential element for the neutral spectator who sees those votive offerings and does not know who asked for them, that is, they could be votive offerings from any person, but we also have the acrachronism that these people do not know such a goddess called Betara Desa and that for the same reason they can be asking the Virgin Mary or any other god of their creed or conversely the relationship between votive offerings from any people and the goddess Betara desa, but we have at the same time that the neutral spectator without supplementary texts resorting merely to the visual does not have to think either. that Betara Desa is a goddess, one might think that she is a person, although the altars with votive offerings that make religious requests are generally made to gods and we additionally have the complementary curatorial text that informs our reader that Betara Desa is a found name Juan José in a book by Gregory Bateson called Naven in which Betara Desa appears as the goddess of the Balinese villages.

   But Juan José has placed the votive offerings as if they were requested from Betara Desa under an altar to this name. We will return to this anachronism because we already have in the exhibition as a whole three pieces that allude to invented universes or worlds, that is, fictional or non-existent, but made with fragments of real things, the two maps of Houston and Valencia creating a new, inventive, non-existent or fictional city but with fragments of real cities, the inventive shield with goosebumps of The Allen Brothers exploring the frontier and this inventive or fictional altar to Betara Desa made however with real requests to the gods by real people, as well as a goddess who is not the goddess of the people of Valencia, nor of the people of Houston, but of the Balinese.

   If we read it from the point of view of a neutral spectator who does not have complementary texts, we have a certain iconographic universality in terms of codes to which common sense resorts to elucidate in its collections that votive offerings asking for things are made to the gods. and that since it is not explicit which people make the requests, they could be generic people from any culture who ask a god or goddess from any culture based on unknown or science fiction principles, while if we resort to textual complementarity we have to, without recurrence to the textual complement about those who make the requests and in recurrence to the textual complement that Betara Desa is a Balinese goddess of the villages, it could be an altar of people in Bali asking their goddess, but since Juan José, in curatorial knowledge, does not has gone to Bali and the complement about the origin of the goddess is bookish, that is, extracted from reading a book, the question immediately arises as to why or with what discursive objectives to fictionalize a fictional or unreal altar based on assumptions votive offerings requested from Betara Desa. People in Bali request things from their village goddess, in the same way that Christians or Afro-Christians request things from the Virgin Mary or other Catholic saints or other syncretic saints venerated within the Catholic saints, in the form of making votive offerings for them. ?.

     There is a generic question in terms of discourse genres here to be elucidated. In the votive offerings that are usually made to the gods in the Christian religion, what we can consider as properly requests to the gods is usually done orally, that is, kneeling and praying in front of an altar or an image of the god and requesting it with the spoken word or, as happens on very few occasions, writing what they ask for on a piece of paper and placing it at the base of the altar, but hardly, if not almost never or never, these requests to the gods become properly ready-made and highly elaborated from the artisanal point of view where the written order is carved and made to last as an inscription on an object form, this type of votive offerings in itself when they are permanently inscribed are made on tombs such as on the slabs of cemeteries. and in such cases they hardly make a request to the gods but rather in terms of genres they say goodbye to loved ones so that we also have here a creative inventiveness given in the intentional fusion of genres, not only do we have the fusion between the genre of requesting something from the gods, asking them for something in exchange for a sacrifice or giving them, with the genre of the ex-voto that is inscribed to last in which the oral and the written are combined, but we also have the making of an independent object which does not consist of a marble slab but rather something made with ordinary materials from the world of objects, which refers to the idea of ​​a request to the god transformed into an inscribed votive offering which is displayed on the altar in the manner of an offering since it only In offerings to the gods, objects are given or made to be given or left to them.

   Meanwhile, if we resort to the textual complement that the texts inscribed in the votive offerings are written by people from the city of Valencia, we would have an even more pronounced science fiction, people from a cultural and social reality asking a Balinese goddess or a any goddess if we do not have as our neutral spectator compared to the purely visual references to who Betara Desa is.

    Now, we must also assume that although we must not forget that this group Altar to Betara Desa is the one that titles the exhibition called Arguments with Betara Desa, we must imagine a viewer who has no idea who Betara Desa is and who therefore In the same way in science fiction films he reads and sees things that he accepts within the fiction about inhabitants of worlds created by the imagination but non-existent, he sees and reads here some objects that are votive offerings written and made in the way of requesting things to the gods but requested to a goddess or god that Betara Desa does not know.

    The following pieces that do not refer to Houston are one the exhibition of a bullfighting cloth made with several fabrics by the same artists, the other is a row of small plastic bags with soil inside placed on the floor in front of each one of them. which there is a cushion on which spectators who so wish could presumably sit and look at the earth or the plants that grow on it. The name of some European intellectual is embroidered on each of these cushions. On the other hand, one of the pieces in the exhibition shows the rear legs of a horse made on top of which a book with his drawings on mechanisms is presented, as well as finally a three-paragraph quote from Gregory Bateson in his book Naven Written on the glass wall.

   Finally, the piece with the letters, although it includes the Houston element due to the fact that they are letters exchanged with the architecture faculty about the Farish gallery exhibition space, its other elements do not make references to Houston such as the fact that they are letters written from Valencia. and received in Valencia, the fact of including a group of coffee Telmos as well as a small border with decorative motifs of colonial architecture that appears on the wall after digging that area.

    Before proceeding to interpret the symbolism of how to relate the pieces allusive to Houston and the non-allusive pieces in ways of making an interpretation that elucidates the discourse or the visual enunciation of the entire exhibition as an authorial ensemble, we believe it is pertinent to group the pieces of this shows in types of pieces with their differences.

     On the one hand, we have four sets of pieces that are more nested in the horizon of their possible meanings and meanings, and we have another six pieces whose horizons of meaning and meaning are more ambiguous, entropic and indeterminate.

    In fact, so far from the inferential point of view and interpretation based on indexicalities we have four highly referential pieces or, to use a more semiotic expression, in which what the iconic and visual sign indicates on the horizon of its referent is not ambiguous but rather precise and delimited, the tourism magazine refers directly to Houston as a city without ambiguities despite the fact that at some point we must interpret it according to the pentagram holder in which it is shown in relation to which it becomes a metaphor, the table with the capsules inside the dishes, although it requires the curatorial textual supplement that they are the capsules of the food used by the cosmonauts, it is quite precise and unambiguous with respect to its references without taking into consideration that in front of it is the live text barbicue the typical Texas meat and the parachute hanging from the ceiling, both things close to the Houston tourism magazine and the horse saddle. This first set that begins the exhibition, made up of four pieces, a pentagram holder-tourist magazine/table with capsules on plates and the text barbicue, a semi-open parachute and a horse saddle, thus seems the clearest and clearest in the exhibition.

    Three other sets seem, although less than this first one, also less ambiguous in their horizons of meaning and significance, these are the exhibition of the letters sent and received about the space itself in which the exhibition would be, although not without being accompanied by elements that make it more complex. its reading such as the row of coffee Telmos and the border on the wall, the piece of the row of black plastic bags with soil and cushions, because although it is still ambiguous how to interpret that the cushions have names of European intellectuals woven into them , at least the positional relationship with respect to the body of the cushions is for sitting and that the earth is land in which plants grow which can be contemplated from the cushions prevails over that ambiguity. Finally, the carriage on the outskirts of the gallery exchanges defined horizons with the first set around the Texan theme.

    The most ambiguous pieces in the exhibition in terms of the entropy and indeterminacy of their horizons of meaning and interpretative significance are then in turn the most metaphorical, some of them suggesting either a world or universe of science fiction in the literal sense that this expression they have in terms of genres both in cinema and literature as well as in visual art in general, or they suggest inventive worlds of the imagination in which the surreal or dreamlike conjugations of the elements tend to dominate, because although in the text The Allen brothers exploring the border we have an equally direct allusion to Houston, the piece in visual terms is entirely metaphorical, a torso breathing on a television monitor, a shield of an invented country made with chicken skin and a drawing of a press to print. Within this more ambiguous or surreal set we have the circus trampoline piece with the fused maps of Houston and Valencia, in a new fictional, inventive or imagined city, the Altar to Betara Desa, the hind legs of the horse with a book of drawings of mechanisms and bullfighting fabric.

   In my previous essays on Juan José (a convinced avant-garde, published in economics today) and another on this exhibition of his) I have previously made, as its curator, the theoretical effort of integrating the different planes to recur to the relationship between the visual and the textual offer a reading that is as congruent as possible despite the ambiguities that prevail in many of its pieces. In those efforts I focused on discussing how, both from the point of view of art and from the point of view of anthropology, The exhibition of the letters sent to the faculty of architecture about the space in situ and received, can be a sign of primacy for the understanding of a good part of its discursive and enunciative set, when understanding the sample from the point of view of a self-reference to the very process of its production, including the letters, the entire set referring to Houston and Texas appears interpretively collected by this side as alluding to the fact of the same situation in which the artists found themselves, of being conceiving an exhibition to present in another city and country. , Houston, Texas in the United States, very far from Valencia, Venezuela where it was carried out, in the sense of extending the questions to where we will exhibit the exhibition, requesting information about the physical space to the faculty of architecture and in that same sense search and research of information about the city in which the exhibition would be held, the city of Houston, in this same interpretative sense, I proposed as curator the interpretation that the exhibition can be understood as related to the conjugation of two things, being situated as an artist before the fact of doing an exhibition in a space, a specific site of the faculty of architecture and the city of Houston and being situated as an artist in front of my thematic choice and call to do an exhibition that would deal with the relationship between art and anthropology.

    From this perspective, undoubtedly very influenced by my curatorial textual complements, the exhibition appears interpreted as a whole as an exhibition of the exhibition where we have on one side the cards in the sense of physical space and on the other the transforming questions about what Houston is. and that it is Texas as a culture as a way of asking that same physical question, the question through which to explore the anthropological theme, as I said in that text, the sample would be interpreted based on the exploration of two relationships with the unknown or not yet known. the tourist and the cosmonaut, which in itself characterized them as artists compared to Houston, but which in itself always characterizes the anthropologist who goes to distant lands to discover unknown cultures, in a certain way it was about situating that the transformation the sample itself as the object of his attention and the situation in which he found himself through two figures of that lack of knowledge or journey to the unknown, the tourist and the cosmonaut, creating pieces that in a certain way suggest that by generating symbolic constructions about what unknown based on the known, any version or way of representing cultures is an invention.

   On the one hand, the exhibition would underline that objective knowledge of a culture is impossible whenever it is generated from a position of ignorance like the one in which he was in front of Houston, like the one in which the tourist and the cosmonauts are, and taking himself as an example with the sample in the conceptual sense of illustrating an idea, and resorting to the tourist and the cosmonaut as symbolism of that situation, it would be a sample from which it is inferable to interpret that the readings or representations given by the anthropology of a culture when that culture is not that of the author, they are always inventions of this type and that the works in the exhibition in the form of a coupure, to refer to this concept of Mc Evilley, would enlighten the Houstonian and the viewer with things that The type of symbolic results of impressions and effects that, for the purposes of the natives of a culture, the constructions of anthropology on cultures usually mean, affect their own experience of seeing themselves read by an artist from Valencia. In short, the surreal effect that can have on Houstonians or Texans of seeing something about their reality that combines icons and symbols in such a way and that produces such a relationship between the limitations of its author, the symbols of their cultures, those of Houston , and the fictional inventions that result would be more or less homologous to what any native whose culture has been represented by anthropology with respect to their own culture could have, split fragments that coincide conjugated with anachronistic inventions in no way related to reality.

  Now, this denial of the objectivity of anthropology, that is, this denial that any knowledge about cultures is possible through anthropology, leads us not to Levi Strauss's discussion of myth but to the discussion of the myths that Anthropology creates something that, by the way, is not entirely there except in the last part when Levi Strauss refers to how anthropology's interpretations of myths are versions of the myth itself. However, it is not precisely about this, since it is not This is the case of anthropologists who interpret myths from cultures where what is at stake is whether the interpretation is more or less faithful to the myth in question, rather here it is emphasized that there is no distance between the anthropological text and the myth as something different from his own, but in some way it is implicit to maintain that anthropological knowledge itself is an invention of mythical fiction itself about cultures, that is, not at all related to the reality of cultures and to the same extent a myth itself.

    Now, this could lead us to what Lotman called neomythological works when he said, “That is why a very frequent distinctive feature of neomythological works is irony. However, the multitude of points of view typical of neomythological texts only in the beginning of that orientation embodies the idea of ​​relativism and the unknowability of the world, when it becomes an artistic language, it acquires the possibility of also representing other ideas about reality, for example, the idea of ​​the multivocal world, whose meanings arise from a complex sum of the different voices and the correlations between them.

     It is true that the pieces about Houston and Texas could be read and interpreted in a purely local sense as pieces about Texan cultural identity and as a Houstonian, after settling for years in Houston, personally I am convinced of this, but in reality even if that is the desire and it would be attractive, it should not be overlooked that this was done at a distance and from Valencia, very far from those for whom years later Texas became a culturally important experience in terms of identity, as has been my own experience and as surely It was before for Surpic, established in Houston since the sixties.

    The works in this sample actually refer to the vast majority of inventive constructions that result in the production of supposed knowledge based on ignorance and how the world is always a consequence of similar inventions, in both senses, as a denial of the knowability of cultures in the way in which anthropology proposes it, on the one hand, and in the way of assuming that cultures themselves, conceived or understood per se of knowledge about them, can be something other than themselves that are also inventions of this guy. And it is in this last sense that the anachronistic symbolisms of the exhibition could be read as ironies halfway between parables about the aporetic ellipses of knowledge, on the one hand, and as symbolic constructions about the type of mechanisms through which cultures are themselves. same inventions, in this sense, especially this last meaning, could be interesting for an interpretation of the exhibition in folkloric terms, that is, far from reading and interpreting it in the sense of anthropology, since it becomes obvious that the artist has not focused to anthropology despite the allusion to Betara Desa in the title and my request as curator that if I take the title Betara Desa from Naven I would cite Bateson in the exhibition, but rather because of what I could say regarding the processes themselves of culture, such as, for example, the altar to Betara Desa as an example of the type of logic on which the processes of creolization and syncretism are usually based.

   Although one could interpretively reflect on the cultural identity of Texas around this set of pieces, it is no less true that it would be a way of moving far away from the perspective from which the artists did it at that time, situated in front of what was unknown to them.

    In a certain way we have in this exhibition a very predominant place that is given to the imagination, imagining that the maps of two real cities could be the map of a new invented city is also in a certain way a dreamlike way of dreaming of an ideal world like that one. that one has in dreams where suddenly all geographical and cultural distances disappear in favor of the trampoline of the circus that alludes to acrobatics, a figure that is capable of jumping any obstacle doing acrobatics that move beyond objective divisions uniting two cities in the imagination although this is also a metaphor that the two cities were already united in the subjective experience that they were living and that the exhibition itself signified. On the other hand, this construct of imagination can be understood as examples of the inventions that we make in culture when we construct knowledge about other cultures based on our limited knowledge of them or the limits that our own knowledge imposes on us, it could be understood also as a way of underlining the fact that ultimately what we say about cultures are always inventions and even the question of to what extent a culture is not always an invention of this type.

   According to this reading, a part of the sample, especially those of the most ambiguous pieces, could be interpretively integrated like this, the altar to Betara Desa as an example of the syncretisms and cultural creolizations that are behind any belief, including religious beliefs in culture, In fact, although people from Valencia asking a Balinese goddess for things is something absurd in principle, it is not so far from illustrating with an example the type of inventions that usually occur in cultures around their beliefs and religions. , what would be at issue here would be the question of to what extent, in the same way that for the viewer it can be the same thing as a science fiction altar to an extraterrestrial deity, as it is about an altar made under the same parameters in which its works operate. own religions, Texan viewers who read it from their own reality when they offer things to their gods and ask them for favors in return now positioned as requests to a Balinese goddess, or as aliens who ask things from unknown deities in a world of science fiction, or Valencians who ask the Virgin Mary whose votive offerings are decontextualized and placed on an altar to a Balinese goddess, are not after all inventions so different from those that, illustrated as paradoxes by the work, constitute in themselves the type of inventions that They are generated in cultures as consequences of knowledge of one another as well as as a consequence of the fact that these inventions ultimately result from syncretisms and creolizations of previously unrelated elements.

   It is true that this perspective is very far from the implicit assumption of the fact that what is syncretized or creolized is not after all so arbitrary but rather corresponds to endogenous cultural processes in which identity elements come into relationship that therefore have a certain substantiality in culture, but we do see it precisely from the point of view of the musical staff that Levi Strauss used to analyze how to relate the diachronic and the synchronic, the melody and the harmony in the relationship between the now and here of the synchrony of the myths versus the oral nature of these related to a diachronic memory, and above all, if we see it in the sense that we pointed out before Levi Strauss's criticism of Jung's immanentism, his objective was to emphasize the arbitrary rather than the necessary, It would not be entirely unreasonable to imagine the processes that can combine the maps of one city with another in the imagination or to fictionalize at least in the way of exemplifying how these much more arbitrary processes of cultural inventiveness occur, as or in what ways the religions that that we know exist, that of the Texans, that of the Valencians or that of the Balinese are all exposed to similar principles of inventiveness that have at their base more arbitrariness than we are usually led to accept.

   The real fusion of the two maps as we know is impossible, but if we see it from the point of view of the ontology of a sample made by an artist who makes it in Valencia to be exhibited in Houston, we would have to consider that it also has some reality. For example, in their subjectivity, his, both cities will always be united in his sample, just as they will be in his experience of where he produced it and where he later exhibited it, it will thus remain in his memories as two united cities and in a certain way any reference to the sample, for example in this essay about it, presupposes this conjugation of cities, so that, as almost always happens with surrealism, the most dreamlike metaphors that contain a high dose of imaginative freedom tend to coincide with complex symbolic processes, here that the acrobatics of a union that is objectively impossible from a physical point of view, is nevertheless, ironically and paradoxically, a perpetual symbolic reality for subjectivity, experience and reference to it, to a certain extent the image of that exhibition as actually done in Houston, is eternalized in the memory of those two cities in the exhibition itself and that at least in that exhibition and the arbitrary myth that is generated around it, as around anything, both cities will be together to always in an acrobatics that will be perpetual.

    It is also possible to interpret that the allusion to Bali through Betara desa in the title is not so much intended to be the theme of the exhibition, which in reality is not, but rather its interpretative deviation, if the high points of the exhibition are the city of Valencia. and themselves producing the exhibition in Valencia to exhibit it in Houston and the reality of Houston that he imagined and decided to make inclusive of the theme and content of the exhibition from Valencia, exposing the letters of the production process on the physical space and thematizing Houston in the sample according to its images – an idea that is in a certain way an extension beyond the initial letter wanting to know about the characteristics of the space – as well as thematizing Houston and Valencia together – as becomes obvious in the greater number of the pieces that make up the exhibition, going to bali and Betara desa functions in the exhibition as a detour towards a reality that is neither that of valencia nor that of Houston and which can serve both valencians—in the first instance the same—and houstonians, the culture of the spectators and the presentation of the exhibition, as a reference to another reality external to those two around which, ironically with the references to anthropology, Valencians and Houstonians could see some aspects related to the paradoxes illustrated or discussed. that the exhibition symbolizes, so far from discussing forms of the Christian religion that govern both in Valencia and in Houston, the processes of invention, creolization and inventive syncretisms of culture are illustrated by turning to the religiosity of a different culture. in itself and yet previously thematized by anthropology, since if Betara Desa is the village goddess, perhaps the invention resulting from having imagined Houston from ignorance and having created symbolic constructs of that Valencia-Houston conjugation, for example in the shield invented with skin chicken in allusion to the time invented in memory of the founding of the city by the Allen brothers, or the trampoline for acrobatics--, it would not be far off, in terms of neomythological unknowability, as Lotman alludes, to name a fictional village or village invented the image that the exhibition suggests, of being able to be a construction like those that the Balinese make with their village deity, partly the reality of Texas, partly that of Juan Jose in Valencia, partly the conjugation of both things, partly a global village fiction.

    We have therefore resorted here to countless curatorial textual complements; on the one hand, we have developed a reading that places at its center the piece that exposes the letters sent and received from the faculty of architecture due to its self-referentiality to the exhibition space as a situ and We have therefore been induced to read the entire exhibition as modalities of that self-referentiality, but by carrying out our reading and that of the neutral spectator together, the exhibition of the cards is within a group that includes Telmos and that includes a border and nothing in it with exception of the letters makes a return to the exhibition as a whole more than the specificity of it being in the piece, therefore we have to assume an interpretation that does not elucidate the whole of the exhibition as a whole propositional in that way, which would mean in terms interpretations that the self-referentiality of that piece would not necessarily help to elucidate the whole of the exhibition from the perspective of a self-referentiality as an inference to interpret the rest of the pieces and the whole as self-referentiality, nothing in the piece makes direct or indirect allusions to the set of shows it in such a way that it, as something purely visual iconic, could be interpreted by establishing other paradigmatic relationships. We have also made interpretations of the circus bed and the aforementioned metaphor of acrobatics in the circus, introducing our analyzes on subjectivity and experience of the artist in terms that the pure visuality of the piece in all its metaphorical expression does not make explicit even in its title. nor in its visual elements.

     We have also resorted to the curatorial supplement of making references to the example of the musical staff that Levi Strauss uses in his criticism of the myth to read the visual metaphor of the stave holder where the tourism magazine is displayed but nothing in the piece, neither in its title nor In some other part of the exhibition he makes allusions to the fact that the pentagram should be interpreted based on this acerb or curatorial interpretative subtext in anthropology in order to elucidate interpretations on the rest of the exhibition based on a supposed allusion to the neomythologism discussed by Lotman. in the arts related to the unknowability of the world and relativism also consisting of a collection and interpretative subtext of mine as curator, nothing in the pieces or in the exhibition as a whole indicates or induces that the interpretation of the symbolic and metaphorical groups made up of The pieces must be interpreted as relative to or as addressing a question specifically about the knowability or unknowability of the world, we infer this from the fact that the referential horizon of the exhibition presupposes direct iconographic allusions to Houston and Texas in several of its pieces but nothing in The sample says that this must be considered from the point of view of those who are in a situation of knowledge or ignorance in the face of a reality that is the object of the question about its knowability and not even its representation or mere referential intentionality.

  We generally assume that the referent, of course, in every discourse, is part of the common sense of what is being talked about, but as we said at the beginning, not all the pieces in the exhibition allude to Houston or Texas, as is made explicit in the piece altar to betara desa that titles the exhibition. In fact, if we choose the supremacy that the exhibition should be titled arguments with Betara Desa and this piece is titled altar to betara Desa, we would have to assume reading the entire exhibition in relation to this piece. Regarding it, we have also offered curatorial textual supplements that move beyond its mere visuality, such as the analysis of the generic modes in it fused between slab inscriptions and votive offerings, the fact that requests to gods are not made in the mode of inscriptions. lasting but orally or in the form of ephemeral writings, moving from this towards an analysis of general principles of creolization and syncretism as they occur in the symbolic logic of religions.

   From all of the above it could be inferred that to the same extent that the Surpic sample seems to immerse itself in individual dimensions that would require us to move beyond the meaning of symbols for public culture in the sense of these for the individual self and the experience of the person , it is in its difference that it would seem to lead according to the neutral viewer in a direction of obscurantism, understanding here a possible esoteric interpretation of the sample which would confirm this more esoteric reading, especially with the pieces of the horse's hind legs and the piece of the row of plastic bags that wrap dirt and cushions with names of European intellectuals baked on them. Both pieces are those in which we most directly have allusions to art itself.

   The first exhibits a book of drawings by the artist which are somewhat reminiscent of Dadaism and Surrealism due to the importance that imaginative recreation and a certain mystery or interest in the enigmas of mechanisms had in those trends, being in fact drawings of mechanisms. of mechanical parts as Duchamp used to do in his drawings almost all relating to mechanisms. In the large glass, in fact, especially in the green box, all the drawings were of mechanisms and in a certain way the large glass was conceived to be read or deciphered as if it were a mechanism but where instead of mentioning parts geared according to mechanical logic In their place were the visual symbols whose meanings should be deduced as mechanisms, which translated into the symbolic interpretation of the large glass led to an interpretation of mythologies such as the theme of the virginity of the bride or the theme of uniforms or freedoms. alluding to single or married men, among other topics, this piece incidentally includes a drawing of Michael Foucault's face.

    While the piece with the row of plastic bags with soil refers directly to earth art and land art, that is, to ecology or ecological art, these two elements, added to the detail of exposing the letters whose self-referentiality of the sample in The exhibition is more a gesture typical of conceptual art, as well as other aspects specific to the type of materials such as the use of steel, the tanning of the surface of the trampoline, the way of making the objects of the votive offerings, among other details. They refer to the way in which materials are usually understood in art, something in which the Surpic exhibition also reflects the three elements in art that we have discussed in relation to it: surrealism, conceptualism in relation to the white cube, expressionism in the poems, mail art in postcards and intertextualism in the use of images from the history of Greek art, is also deducible in the use of materials that also refer to arte povera, despite this the Surpic sample leans more towards a therapeutic use of materials that perseveres this subtle hint to the povera inclines them more towards how they are understood in body art, process art and performance, however, there is no actual image of the body in Surpic's exhibition, which is why which references to the performance cannot be deduced directly from the visual exposed but from the relationships between narratives and experience.

     Both samples coincide in the recurrence to surrealism, the use of visual symbolic metaphors, both are samples developed within the genre of installation in contemporary art, one of Surpic, discusses a theme of psyche and eros that relates to women and femininity from an individual perspective referred to emotional objects or a memory of personal conservation that includes travel, correspondence or sending of presents, conservation of emotional objects and the symbolism of individual identity if we see it without reference to the given culture in the use of the mirror or the identity between the individual and the social, if we see it through the symbolism of seeing oneself and seeing oneself in being seen by others that completes the image as an object perceived in the relationship between the alter, seeing oneself seeing the self. and seeing the alter of how others see us, and that could be interpreted from the point of view of a more culturalist theorization if we added the personal content of the Armenianness of the immigrant grandparents via affective objects and the Texan women of the gifts, their referral to Texas.

   The second discusses a less personal or individual topic and more related to a city or culture, the city of Houston and the culture of Texas, the city of Valencia in which and the preparation of the latter according to my curatorial point of view, in In both samples the religious theme is predominant although from different perspectives, the first through the Greek theme the relationship between the pyque and the goddess pyque and the theme of the archetypes, the second through this altar to the Balinese goddess of the villages that, as I said It can be interpreted as a deviation from science fiction both for the purposes of Valencians and Houstonians who, led to discern or elucidate some image about their cities and cultures, are faced with a sample that does not offer them a conclusive image regarding it, that is, in which They do not conclude something about the city of Houston and the culture of Texas about which they rather ask on the board: What is the city of Houston like? nor about the city of Valencia, but rather symbolic constructs of the imagination, a sample that seems to be an allusive reference from its horizon in which there is neither in one culture nor in the other a conclusion of the sample as a whole but rather an image that shifts attention to both cultures to place it on a third that is neither of the two and that refers to its own culture to anthropological literature in this case Bali in a way according to which both the culture of Valencia in Venezuela, an almost entirely industrial city Christian and the city of Houston, equally largely Christian and Victorian, without excluding the phenomenon of Afro-Christianity, which in metaphorical and allusive ways has been discussed in the exhibition, would be collected, as in the images of anthropology and the myths of the unknown. created by it, collected as a whole by the image of the deity of the Balinese villages.

    In both, the anthropological theme regarding my requirement as a curator to propose exhibitions around the theme of the relationship between art and anthropology is discussed from the point of view of the symbolic fiction internal to the relationships of sense and meaning of the same pieces, that is That is to say, it corresponds to the imaginary or fictional plane of what the samples deal with in surpic in the manner of an allusion to the relationships between pyque and pyche, the Greek goddess, and between pyche and eros given that it is assumed This symbolic fiction of the exhibition is titled as Pyche's ethnographic reports, in the other the anthropological theme or the relationship between art and anthropology is also approached from the point of view of the fiction internal to the symbolism of the elements, if we see it Without curatorial textual complements the theme would be focused in a surreal and science fiction sense through while if we see it from the point of view of the curatorial textual complements we have offered an interpretation in this regard Betara Desa is ultimately the Balinese goddess or deity of the villages, and the title of the exhibition metaphorizes the image of the village deity in an exhibition that in different ways refers, although metaphorically, to two cities or cultures that could be seen as villages, that of Valencia and that of Houston, with respect to which as Bali For anthropology, the exhibition does nothing other than produce or illustrate the type of inventive myths that any effort to know from ignorance derives from, always projecting the parameters of some cultures onto others and generating the invention of a new culture. which is never one culture or the other.

    The latter certainly refers us to something that I have argued in some of my theoretical essays before when I argued that in the same way that Indiana Johns and the Temple of Perdition in the world of film creates a superposition between the culture of the actor traveler to unknown lands and the image of the latter that ends up creating the palimpsest of an invented culture created by the film more than a reference to a culture itself, whether that of the actor or that visited by him, the images that one has of the cultures in questions given by anthropology, for example in Levi Strauss, about South America and North America, are so far removed from the reality to which they refer that they result more in palimpsests of cultures invented by anthropology than in images of what those cultures really are. However, all of the above, including the latter, is largely a curatorial construction based on my own textual complements and supplements.

   Nothing in the exhibition, in fact, neither in the titles of the pieces, nor in the title of the exhibition nor in the content of the works, suggests that it is interpreted or that its own discursive propositionality supposes the theme of the knowledge-unknowing relationship, none of the pieces not only does not include references to the very idea of ​​knowing or not knowing but also does not even include elements that suggest it, such an interpretation has been a curatorial construction based on interpretations that relate the iconographic visual with the supplementary texts, for example, based on elucidating the congruence that could be implicit in the common sense that a piece includes the letters exchanged with the architecture faculty about the specific space and the fact that several pieces from the beginning They are then about the city of Houston, as well as resorting to common sense and relevance riddles about what it is like to speak about the city of Houston and the culture of Texas for an artist who is faced with the situation of exhibiting in Houston an exhibition made in Valencia, but no piece in the exhibition emphasizes either in its title or in its form or even in its content that it necessarily has to be interpreted in this way. In this sense, we hope that my interpretation as curator is not completely far-fetched and that it has elucidating proportions, as well We believe it from the moment that, unlike our reader and viewers, I master as a curator a greater number of textual complements to elucidate the merely iconic.

   We will return to both samples several times later and immediately move on to our interpretations and analysis of the Juan Carlos Rodríguez sample Installed Ethnography exhibited in the spaces of the rice media center. We will try with Juan Carlos a form of reading similar to those previously explored, trying to make my interpretation as a curator flow together by providing additional textual supplements to the purely iconographic and that of the average viewer. However, we have important differences from the beginning, although we must say that these differences also come from curatorial textual supplements and complements.

The Museum Display/Inside and outside of bound

     I would like to discuss here in broad strokes certain specific aspects of what I have called the museum as a laboratory and that in this specific place I would like to analyze in terms of what we could define as the museum displays inside and outside, focusing on aspects and characteristics of this curatorial practice considering that it was possible from the point of view of the objective conditions of its production and implementation in time and under economic conditions of neoliberal capitalism, that is, when Venezuela, and specifically the city of Caracas, was one of the most active centers. of the world bank and the international monetary fund, with hundreds of thousands of transnational corporations and an unparalleled proliferation of private companies throughout the planetary world.

  These economic conditions that made it possible begin with my own individual economic circumstances. At that time I was running a private individual business that allowed me as a freelance professional in capitalism to cover my basic conditions while thriving and being able to dedicate my time to a practice like this. On the other hand, at the same time, these conditions that made the practice possible were reflected at the same time in the modality of its objective production, which to a large extent was possible by decentralizing the spatialities of the museum or, to be more precise, of the museums. in which I was at that time working either as a lecturer or as a curator.

    In fact, when I began to conceive and implement this practice, I had just concluded several seminars on museum axiology at the Mario Abreu Museum of Contemporary Art, a conference on curatorship at the first meeting of curators in Puerto Vallarta, my performance as a jury for the national biennial. of drawing and I began as a curator of Venezuelan art on the topic of the market at the Alejandro Otero Museum of Visual Arts. At the same time, I had just concluded an interdisciplinary seminar on art and anthropology at the Petare Museum. However, none of these relationships were equally addressed in economic terms to neoliberal capitalist economic circumstances, would have by themselves fostered a practice that required even freer conditions from the economic and spatial point of view to be implemented, it was thus that in conjunction with my analyzes on the economic circumstances that could make it possible and analysis of spatial issues that included focusing on the concepts of city, urban markets and freelance production that made it possible.

    Due to the aforementioned, I will concentrate on discussing only the exhibitions that arise from the contemporary Venezuelan art scene in relation to this practice, that is, without referring on this occasion to some Cubans who, due to the interest of my co-curator in the subject of exile and on the subject of Cuban art, were later included

    The Theme in question leads to paying attention to two main axiological questions to understand, understand and analyze the specific exhibitions that I will discuss which I presented at Rice University on the campus in the spring of 1997 Surpik Angelini, on the one hand, the understanding of the museum display understood as outside the spatialities of the museum, that is, as I was working with several museums, it is a practice that, in my own person, presupposed reference to the museum, but as it was a economically possible practice in freelance and independent terms, was objectively producible outside the museum displays, this fact, which found its expression in the objective reality that made it possible, at the same time was central to the research that as theorist and curator I was developing and from which the specific practice was born, that is, while on the one hand, the museum relationship outside the museum display, defined from the spatial point of view the way in which in freelance and independent terms, the cultural production of the practice became possible, to which I will return later, on the other hand, the theoretical and empirical research that I was developing also had the characteristic of being focused on that decentralization of the museum display, I am referring to a research that acquired three areas or related but differentiated aspects, the first consisted of investigating the spatialities of the urban markets in the city in the form of field work that I carried out for two years of immersion in them, on the other hand, I developed an investigation into the relationship between the museum and the markets which led me to develop a theorization about the museum according to the markets that gave rise to new results on the visualities of urban markets in the visual tradition and yet, never before objectified, of the museum, study of the visualities of the market in drawing, vignettes and artistic and non-artistic visual iconography in the colonial, modern and contemporary postmodern periods, as well as a theorization of markets according to the museum, finally a research that led me to do an investigation of the city ​​of Caracas, that is, of Caracas as a city equally in those three periods, colonial, modern and postmodern.

     From the above, four main aspects emerge that define the curatorial practice in question: on the one hand, the preponderance and prevalence in it of three specific urban spaces, the popular urban markets, which indirectly located in the city, also include this lastly, the popular neighborhoods that are specific enclaves within the city, the cities as such and finally the museum.

   Thus, while from the point of view of both economic and spatial production, the practice itself between myself as its curator and its spatial and economic form of production is the expression of an axiology that involves criticism of the museum displays outside the museum or ultimately, between its insides and its outsides in new ways that do not suppose the museum itself as the place in which the samples are produced and exhibited, on the other hand, from the point of view of my research as a curator and my work as a curator. field they suppose the approach of these same paradoxes, the popular urban markets in the city one, my own work The Market from Here: Mise in Scene and Experimental Etnography, the popular neighborhoods another, Installed Etnography by Juan Carlos Rodríguez, the cities as other cities, the exhibition Arguing with Betara desa by Juan José Olavarría and finally or, to be more exact, first, the museum focused as a room guide route and museographic instance of staging in The Market from Here and focused from the point of view of travel and postcards in another, the sample pyche ethnography reports by Surpic Angelini.

   At the same time, this criticism of the museum displays outside the museum and in its place a mode of production that involves the city and the markets—contemplating around a thousand photographs of them, preparation of the samples in private spaces, visits with the camera of film to the poor popular neighborhoods, my development of a photographic survey of the city of Caracas from Galipán with the collaboration of Angel Sánchez, compilation of visual and iconographic material on the city of Caracas from the 15th century to the present and the markets from the 15th century to the present, research into collections, photography archives, newspaper archives and video libraries, also involves research that seeks to relate in an endogenous way art and sociology in the first place, and art and anthropology in the second. .

    When we say art and sociology, we refer to the fact that the curatorial research implemented is first and before sociological in the sense of the synchronic understanding of the now and here of a Contemporary society in its spatialities, it is second and then sociological in the sense of a phenomenological sociology of the life world in its spatialities and of the world of common sense in the sense of Shutz as I had been working on it individually, at the same time as ethnomethodology in the sense pointed out by Mead that focuses on the relationship between the self and the social, both understood as Shutz understood it in terms of citizens of the city, and when we say anthropological we refer to the fact that we make this sociological research inclusive of questions about visual culture, visual imaginaries, urban imaginaries and visual heritage that represent culture and their theorization and that to the same extent require anthropological analysis added to or subordinated to sociological analysis.

   This interweaving with sociology and anthropology expresses, on the one hand, the very modality of production that made the practice possible in its spatialities and, on the other, the specific way in which each of the exhibitions explored that relationship according to its themes, its accents and their problems.

   On the other hand, the problem of the museum displays outside the museum not only reflects and expresses my own relationship in Caracas between my seminars and lecture series in various museums, or my position as a curator of Venezuelan art at that time in Mavao, and the spatial settings outside the museum where we did the exhibitions but is also reflected again later in the spatial relations between the foundation with which we did the internship in Houston, the transarte foundation of Houston, a museum that has its spaces in the Alabama Street near the Menil Museum, and the Rice University where we exhibited the samples approximately kilometers away in different spatialities.

   That is to say, that the display relationship of the museum, spatiality of the samples that we had in Caracas during my conception of the curatorship and during its production implementation, we have again, although with new characteristics, between the transart foundation, at that time a house, currently a museum, with which we produce the samples, and the rice university in whose spatialities they were presented

   Finally, there is one more aspect of significant consideration regarding the museum displays, in my matrix curatorial text, the first that I conceived from which the main ideas emerged that later derived in this practice in the form of a smaller modality, fewer artists and realized outside the museum, as well as in general during the production processes of the samples that we define in Caracas as an experimental workshop of art and anthropology, my idea of ​​deinscribing the museum or dedescribing it, that is, objectifying its usual inscriptions for the purposes of the auditoriums and audiences, to reinscribe it as spatiality in the sense of conceiving museography as a staging of this reinscription, continued to be central to the theoretical issues discussed during the art and anthropology workshop and was expressed in the samples in various ways that are of of great interest for its understanding, first, as I said, the market from Here: mise in scene and experimental ethnography is composed as the visual staging of a text that was at the same time the script of the work and its museum room guide, that is, its textual circuit with respect to the visual as a correlate of the literary, in this same sense, the viewer goes through that kind of anthropological museum of the market which paradoxically is made with the same materials and in the same way in which the markets, the Surpic Angelini exhibition Psyche Ethnography reports is based largely on the exploration of postcards purchased in museums in the United States and Europe as well as collected, these postcards are, on the one hand, reproductions of images from the history of the art in the museum, that is, from its collections, especially ancient Greek art, but they are, on the other hand, cards that are used to send by mail or to give as presents on significant dates to other people such as congratulations .

   The problem of deinscribing the exhibition spaces by depriving them of their usual inscriptions that I referred to before, which in my work on the market is presented in the terms of an anthropological museum of the market but carried out in an ephemeral way, that is, with the materials, means and constructive resources of the market, is explored in the Surpic exhibition, erasing, if you will, all the walls of the gallery with a dark brown or sepia velvet fabric, while in the exhibition by Juan José Olavarría these reinscriptions occur in the way of basing the same sample in the mail communications with the institution anticipating questions about the exhibition spatialities, this principle, addressed in the way of exposing the letters sent and received, then serves to understand why the sample can be read or interpreted as an extension of that basic logic but beyond space, towards the same cities where, on the one hand, the exhibition would be exhibited and where, on the other, it was produced.

   Finally, the exhibition by Juan Carlos Rodríguez, although it refers less to the museum display, is part of a series focused on exhibiting collections of objects from the neighborhood

   To understand more exhaustively what was discussed above, it is necessary to resort to certain comparisons that offer points of reference to our readers and audiences, in order to facilitate the intelligibility of the fact made more complex by the variety and heterogeneity of spaces, we begin the other way around, that is, Instead of moving in a linear way space by space from the first to the later, we will do like the rewind of a film or a rewing, moving from the most recent to the previous.

   Let's start by comparing the spatialities of transart foundation as a museum according to its most recent building.

   Currently a museum, this architectural masterpiece based on the structure of a book defines the current spaces of the transart foundation.

    Located on Alabama Street just four or five blocks from the museum and the menil collection and just a block and a half from Montrouse Street where the buildings of the Jung Museum, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Glassel School and the museum are located. of contemporary art, the building completes and complexes the network of the city's main museums.

    Conceived according to Surpic not as an institution, but as a house in which she deploys her library-studio, although specially designed from the point of view of its spaces for the inauguration of public art exhibitions, the space is nevertheless understood as a cultural space. and not literally as a physical space, it defines itself in terms that if we stick to its website, paradoxically it seems to want to preserve or conserve something of what the foundation was between 1998 and 2002, a research center that we conducted between both of us, that is, focused on the work of two researchers, in the form of our post-curatorial investigations, a space at that time defined by settings for the writing of essays and books in which we essentially discussed our own essays, and other theoretical questions, we printed, bound, circulated our materials and we had a video library and a newspaper library that collected our textual and visual material, and I would even say take it further in that same sense of what that research center was.

    The research center, however, with the new architectural design, is outside the display of the current museum, that is, in the same way that our small curatorship was defined as a modality of the museum displays outside the museum, Now the research center is outside its physical spaces as the latter focus on recovering what in reality, with certainty and fairness, defined the initial reason for being of the foundation created to make possible a public art experience which We will discuss here.

   In fact, the new space has in its spatial and physical expression much of the impetus of that small public art curatorship.

    However, whether we take the new museum building as a parameter or take the old house as a parameter in either of the two variants, in any case we continue to refer to the same phenomenon that, although currently the transart exhibitions are held in the same space, back then and in what will continue regarding the relationship of transart with the curatorship that gave birth to it, it will continue to be referred to what is now happening with the research center, the requirement to work in relation to the museum but outside of its physical displays, since As we said, the samples were exhibited several kilometers away in other spaces, a private university institution and not concentrated in the same space unlike what happens with rice university art gallery but scattered in space and time among a variety of spaces, the gallery of the rice media center, a small gallery without a front wall, a kind of mezzanine that connects the film post-production rooms with the offices of the media center, the lobby or intermediate social space of the rice media center where they usually coincide or meet. Its workers meet during snack time around the Coca-Cola machine, redesigned at that time through panels to function as an exhibition space.

   The gallery of the faculty of architecture and the outdoor patio spaces where the sculptures of the sculpture department of the faculty of art are displayed behind the sewall hall, faculty of social sciences.

   Each of these spatialities undoubtedly poses specific questions specific to the vicissitudes of the campus to each of the samples, vicissitudes with which, both in intersubjective, intergestural, proxemic and kinesic terms, they make the hermeneutic intricacies quite complex and largely situated. of exhibitions that, having their audiences in these located spaces, nevertheless have their museum or the institution that produced them and made them possible three or four kilometers very far from the university on Alabama Street within the perimeter of the art museums.

    But the asymmetries and complexities that heterogenize and peculiarize this singular small curatorship become infinitely more complex if after analyzing it in Houston's parameters we fly the rewing backwards and go to Caracas where they were produced.

   While the museums in which I worked at that time as a curator and lecturer each assumed different spatialities, the Mario Abreu art museum located in the state of Aragua three hours from the main metropolis in the center of the city of Maracay, the petare museum, a small museum located in petare, an abandoned colonial urbanization that was, like la pastora, an urban center in the colony, with its colonial parks and typical architecture, has however been relegated as a new periphery by the large modern city and poor neighborhoods have fallen on its surroundings that create a cord of depressed urban culture around it, highlighting against that background as the only and main cultural institution, it plays an important investigative sense in culture and the urban environment because it is a museum, although of visual arts with a broader profile that focuses not on high arts or fine arts but on arts that maintain an endogenous relationship with live culture and are an expression of it, the so-called popular art, which extends its reach beyond of art towards phenomena of visual culture in general as well as the ways in which this visual culture resemantizes and reinvents the visual culture of both folklore and mass culture through the mass media, its conducive nature for the interdisciplinary study of culture between art, sociology and anthropology.

     Finally, the Alejandro Otero Museum, removed to the outskirts of the city via modern highways, is a colorful, elegant and very modern museum of refined avant-garde architecture in leafy glass, which is paradoxically due to being areas far from the metropolis but related to the entrance to it from the rest of the country, on the one hand the most important wholesale market of inputs and merchandise in the country that supplies the city of Caracas from the rest of the provinces and through the racecourse on the other hand, a splendid display of the high society and its gaming customs around horse racing, a museum that houses and produces the main Venezuelan drawing biennial of which I was a judge.

     Between these three spatialities my movements as a curator then unfolded, lectures in the three museums, appointments with Venezuelan artists at the Alejandro Otero Museum, etc., while, however, the practice in question that I later took to Rice University meant then my displacements among other new spatialities, independent and related to my work as a freelance in terms of production.

     On the one hand, the urban spatialities of the market, as I said before, that I visited weekly as part of my fieldwork immersion, on the other, my research trips into the visuality of the market in collecting led me to the vaults and collections of the main museums in the country, while the actual production of the curatorship involved other additional trips, meeting as co-curators Surpic and I initially at the Eurobuilding hotel and at his parents' house, a country house designed by Fruvivas, the establishment of a production office for our curatorship in the Maracay loom buildings established in a central area of ​​the old city required us to move from wealthy areas to that old center where we had the offices, at the same time, the market from Here, as a work physical, we developed it at the other end of the city, in the fifth fountain ovejuna where the Sello foundation had its headquarters and the house of the theater producer Elaiza Irrizary in whose car park or side garage we built it and since I spent part of my week There we established during those months an alternative or conjugate office, attached if you will, to my office in Maracay looms, within the same fifth sheep fountain located at the thousand level under Mount Ávila.

    Added to the above are two main displacements that the curatorship entailed at a spatial level during its cultural production, on the one hand, my development of a photographic essay of the city of Caracas attached to the photographic work on the urban markets that I developed from a space established with Ángel Sánchez in Galipán, a town in the heights of Ávila that we call the station, as well as continuous weekly trips with the camera to the poor neighborhood where Juan Carlos Rodríguez developed his work with Maira and the people of the neighborhood, and from where he prepared his exhibition.

   In addition to this, the production of the exhibition by Juan José Olavarría meant traveling to the city of Valencia, two hours from Caracas, an industrial city to which I traveled with our contributor Domingo de Lucia, director of Atenea, Pinturas de Arte y de la Arquimia Foundation, thanks to whom and with whose support the exhibition was developed in terms of material production in the house of Juan José with his then partner Adriana, among all these locations described above, all very far from the spatial locations of the museum displays, it meant traveling then the museum outside the museum thus involving urban markets, collections and museum vaults, mountain village, offices in a central area of ​​the old city, hotel and house in the wealthiest areas of the city, trips to the poor neighborhoods and highways interprovincial trips to the industrial city of Valencia, all with our film and photographic cameras, our tape recorders and our means of cultural production.

   We cannot help but add to this that Surpic's exhibition, with the exception of the previous ones produced in Caracas, was not produced in Caracas but rather was produced between her and me in Houston between her studio, her apartment and her house in Riveroaks where I was living at that time

    We therefore have with this curatorial practice independent in its spatialities, as well as independent in the self-managed nature of its economy, made and financed with the private economic resources of its two curators, a clear and clear example not only of the so-called private and independent curatorships, but also a clear and clear modality of cultural production that supposes, both in Caracas and later in Houston, the decentralization of the museum as a space or an ideal or reflective mode, theoretical if you will, through which the museum displays move outside their spatialities. towards multiple places that involve closed spaces and open spaces, country houses, side patios, modern hotels, mountain towns, highways, urban markets, poor neighborhoods and three modern metropolises, one of services in the capital Caracas, the other business and industrial Valencia and the other modern Houston, which represented two freelance economies, mine and Surpic's, self-managed, an anniversary campus and which, as I said before, continues to represent today, when it is 23 years since the inauguration and closing of the exhibitions, already very far from that curatorship and immersion, each of us in our research and our subsequent works, now individual, the same decentred relationship between the spatialities of the museum, the current foundation building, and the museum displays outside the museum in the new modality of the center of research that I conduct on the outskirts of that space and a theoretical, scriptural, empirical and post-curatorial fieldwork practice focused on new themes
  Recalling in this sense expressions still largely valid by Levis Strauss about the museum of anthropology, I quote it in selected fragments

      For a long time, anthropology museums have been conceived in the image and likeness of other establishments of the same type, that is, as a set of galleries where inert and in some way fossilized objects, things, documents are preserved behind display cases, completely disconnected from the societies that have produced them. The only link between these and those has been constituted by the intermittent missions sent to carry out work in the field, to gather collections that are mute testimonies of ways of life that are both strange and inaccessible to the visitor.

      As anthropology deepens its reflection on its object and as it refines its methods, it feels progressively going back home, as the Anglo-Saxons would say. In France and India, community studies carried out with the support of UNESCO have been conducted respectively by the Museum of Man in Paris and the Anthropological Museum of Calcutta.

  The museum of popular arts and traditions has been flanked by a laboratory of French ethnography and it is in the museum of man where the laboratory of social ethnography operates, dedicated, despite its title and its address, not to Melanesian or African sociology, but to the sociology of the Paris region

  On the other hand, the expansion of Western civilization, the development of the media and the frequency of travel that characterizes the modern world has put the human species on the move. Nowadays there are practically no isolated cultures, to study any of them, it is not necessary to travel half the globe and play explorer. A large city like New York, London, Paris, Calcutta or Melbourne has representatives of the most varied cultures in its population.

  Before, anthropology museums sent men who traveled in one direction, to look for objects, who traveled in the opposite direction. But today men travel in all directions and as this multiplication of contacts produces a homogenization of material culture. Anthropology museums must pay attention to this immense transformation...how many communities from Southeast Asia, black and white Africa, the Near East, etc., have been represented in Paris by individuals in transit or by residents, families and even small communities

Claude Levis Strauss

Anthropology museums

Place of anthropology, structural anthropology

The Documentary out-there

   The documentation of my small curatorship focused here only on the exponents of the samples previously discussed and mentioned was developed in two types of settings with Fran Rodríguez, film director, directing a camera focused on that purpose and Surpic Angelini with his camera, while I directed as research curator, a model in which the camera enters the production process first from the beginning,

 . While I held theoretical and critical dialogues that we recorded on the recorder, dialogues developed in Surpic's mother's house, a house whose architecture is by Fruto Vivas, in Lamark in Houston during my trip in 1996 and back in Caracas at the Eurobuilding hotel and later in riveroaks, I do not include our correspondence as part of the documentation, the moment in which we began to produce the samples in Caracas really defines the entry of the camera.

  We distribute the latter in the following way. Surpic with his film camera carried out a natural and spontaneous documentation of everyday life occupied in the processes of simple life, recording everything, not only dialogues, but also life experiences in Caracas and later in Houston, while Fran Rodríguez carried a larger camera. focused on the production of the exhibitions and my dialogues with the artists.

   Surpic's Camera was present all the time as a continuum of life while Fran's camera, contributed by Surpic through transart for the experience, focused on the curation, the exhibitions and the artists.

  When I talk about two cameras I am not only referring to two cameras physically in the literal sense, although also, but to the simultaneity of two ways of participating in the camera, one, that of Surpic, present all the time, daily life, also including its presence and filming of what we did with the other camera, while the other camera did not film all the processes of experience and life, but rather settings specifically arranged around encounters in specific places intended to film dynamics directly related to the curatorship, the exhibitions and the artists.

 This simultaneity of the cameras allowed us to simultaneously capture the details of the samples and artists, and the more general view that Surpic also documented.

  Surpic's continuous filming turned the camera and Surpic into an inseparable part of the experience we lived, becoming part of its nature, while Fran's punctual camera focused on the curatorship, the artists and the exhibitions was occupied with more conceptual issues. and content of the experience focusing on crucial issues and participating from a more inclusive point of view related to curatorship

  The agenda of this chamber had two main settings, to meet in an intermediate space for me as curator to theorize and dialogue with the artists on the topic of curatorship, the relationship between art and sociology, art and anthropology, the evolution of the whole. of the samples during their production, which translated into a general location to meet us around the general development of the samples and the locations where each artist prepared theirs.

  We held the general meetings in a Surpic family house that we were able to have for that purpose, there we met to have discussions about the general development of the samples which were filmed by the camera with Fran, these settings were more focused on the conceptual. and the theoretical and empirical contents of the curatorship, were in turn filmed including Fran with the camera by Surpic's camera more related to the process which also filmed mundane things of life outside the scope of the curatorship, while the camera with Fran had to move from that general setting to the setting in which each artist prepared his exhibition, which meant moving from Juan Carlos Rodríguez's house and the La Bandera neighborhood where he prepared his exhibition, to the fifth sheep fountain in Caracas where I I was preparing my sample with Fernando Calzadilla and Elaiza, to the city of Valencia, three hours by highway, where Juan José Olavarría was preparing his.

  The objective of this camera was not only to film the process in which each artist made his exhibition in counterpoint with the ones we had on the set in Surpic's house, but also to advance with each artist about their previous works and their sense of art aimed at edit a short film for each artist

   in which a counterpoint was offered that addressed the process that the artist brought with the exhibition and how this was related to the set of his previous works, therefore including three types of filming, filming of the artist's previous works, filming of the process that The artist had the exhibition in preparation and filmed an interview conducted by me as curator in which the artist spoke about his work.

  Surpic in Houston in turn continued its camera in everyday life with which it documented the assembly process of each of the exhibitions before the inauguration, that is, the assembly and museography process which in itself formed a workshop, In the exhibitions, for example, of Juan José, I participated as a curator in the museographic decisions, making proposals that were consulted of course and discussed. He wanted, for example, to place a horse carriage that could be seen through a glass, which in order to be seen had to open a curtain. which sometimes remained closed, he wanted that carriage to be seen by the viewer, relating it to a piece that was at the beginning which was a horse saddle on a pedestal, and I told him that this glass had a lot of visual importance in the gallery and we should to put in something more than just the carriage being seen through it, while at the same time further accentuating the relationship between the title of the exhibition taken from the name of a goddess, the village goddess according to Bateson's Naven, suggesting that she write a quote on the glass to a book by Gregory Bateson, two paragraphs extracted from Naven, this led us to a dialogue between museography and artist

  The museography process of Juan Carlos's exhibition was also a workshop between me as curator and Juan Carlos as artist. The floor, for example, was an issue because it could get very wet with the water that ran off the sheets, where placing the books of the Christian religion, adding a film monitor including films that we had made in the neighborhood and the performance of Juan Carlos dressed as a hummingbird, where to place the pages of Maira's novel, whether to write or not and how the names of the people who gave him the sheets, all those things I had to discuss with the artist at a museographic level.

  In the same way, I discussed the Surpic exhibition with her since I was doing it in Riveroaks, I participated in the preparation of the wax boxes and the museographic process in the space resulted from my dialogue theorizing as a curator with Surpic at that time museography with Surpic about spatial solutions, that museographic workshop centered theoretical issues of what I call self-ethnography and could be considered a clear example of interdisciplinary dialogue between anthropology and theory of art performance but translated on a visual and spatial level technical issues of museography of my side and authorial decisions with his exhibition on the Surpic side, covering the gallery with sepia chamoisine for example arose from that dialogue as well as other solutions in the space that characterized the Surpic exhibition, while these types of museographic solutions were suggested to me and Fernando in our work the market from here by Elaiza Irizarry.

  Abdel and Surpic were at the Juan Carlos Rodríguez exhibition with the presence of Juan Carlos Rodríguez, his proposals and decisions, an exhibition that we exhibited in the spaces on the ground floor of the rice media center, the assembly process of the Surpic exhibition that we conducted Abdel and Surpic with Surpic's proposals and decisions, which we exhibited in the rice media center gallery including the performance of their guest Gabriela Villegas, the assembly process of the Juan José Olavarría exhibition at Farish Gallery that we developed in a similar way and the assembly process of my exhibition Abdel Hernandez and Fernando Calzadilla that we developed in the sculpture court the sculpture patio.

  Surpic in turn filmed the days of openings of each exhibition as well as to a large extent the fifteen days in some cases and a month in another that lasted from the opening of each one until its closing, including visits from the public and sudden conversations with people from the public. .

  Surpic also maintained with the same criteria the documentation not only of the assembly and the samples, but of the dynamics of the daily life that we lived those three months around our daily life in the city, regardless of the specific services that we require for the specialized photography of slides and postcard of each sample, part of which was made by Surpic herself and another part of which we requested from photographers in the city.

  We could talk then about a camera that participated in the curatorial process, a conceptual and content camera focused on the artists' processes and on my relationship as a curator with them directed by Fran, from which Fran's films as a film director resulted. my co-direction as curator with Surpic Angelini's translation of the exponents discussed here.

Epilogue

 This small curatorship that I conceived as a curator in Caracas in 1994, produced in Caracas in 1996 was born in the contemporary Venezuelan plastic arts arena as an expression of global, cosmopolitan and modern Venezuelan art in the city of Caracas in the nineties, not of Cuban art.

  It is the expression and consummation of countless processes internal to Venezuelan culture and Venezuelan art in the 1990s and what this decade in Caracas processes, assimilates, incorporates and at the same time denies of the 1980s. Venezuelan art, art from the capital of Caracas, and from the entire country.

  Its first forms from the point of view of how and when I conceived, designed and composed it conceptually in the global field of modern and contemporary Venezuelan art, were born in texts, conferences and publications on Venezuelan art that I was then developing in the arena in Caracas as well as in countless meetings over more than a year that I held monthly at the museum with a number of no less than one hundred Venezuelan artists each month to a full auditorium and meetings with Venezuelan artists in their studios.

  Barely a year before, I had been a juror of the national drawing biennial of Caracas in that same museum with Ariel Jiménez and Eliseo Sierra, published its catalog and during those same months, after years of continuous publishing on Venezuelan art, I gave lectures about young Venezuelan art in the museum, MAVAO, about the production of Venezuelan art in the city, Fundayacucho and about multiculturalism in Venezuelan culture in the face of the globalization process, fundayacucho, and the curator as creator in the national meeting of curators held in Puerto Ivarta by the national directorate of the CONAC museum, El Universal, 1994, immediately after which I was chosen by Tahia Rivero, Venezuelan curator, president of the Alejandro Otero museum as curator there.

  As can be seen, once the reader enjoys the general theoretical and explanatory texts gathered here about the exhibitions, from an initial list of almost eighteen Venezuelan artists that I chose for it, for reasons of budget precariousness, I had to reduce my list to a minimum, as well as, additionally, look for ways to make it possible outside the museum through other freelance resources, mechanisms and avenues. This new experience began when Surpik and I met at the museum when in 1995 we decided to share the curatorship of a smaller version.

  This edition is dedicated to Venezuelan art and the arena of Venezuelan contemporary art to which it is curated, being mine as curator - and Surpik Angelini, as co-curators - it truly belongs.

  For reasons of shortages and economic precariousness to carry out the planned exhibition, I had to reduce this list to fewer artists, of the initial artists I kept two Juan Carlos Rodríguez and Juan José Olavarría, the research I had done on the market I decided to specify it in one author's work for which I then invited two other Venezuelans from the world of theater to work on the scenographic aspect of this work: Fernando Calzadilla and Elaiza Irisarri, whom I had previously planned for the museography, as well as later the inclusion of Surpic, also a Venezuelan with whom shared both the cultural production of the exhibitions in Caracas, their curation and their presentation in Houston as co-curators and comuseographers.

Acknowledgements

  The exhibits discussed both during the process of creating and producing it in Caracas I directed as curator and during the process of transportation, montage, openings and closure on campus, were possible objetibly and materially first and overall by the private, individual and personal payments me and of Surpic Angelini

  Additionally to it, the contributors and sponsors contributions consisted mainly about providing facilities such as facilities for space and transportation without having to pay for it, but not cash to pay things and services the exhibits needed. 

  Special Thanks in the senses of that additional contributions to each artist participant for providing to both Abdel and Surpic the works and exhibits I asked them to be done to this curatorial serie. To Surpic Angelini and Paolo Angelini, to Tahia Rivero o and Vazco Zinetar, and special thanks of both curators Abdel and Surpic Angelini to the Eurobuilding Hotel Marcos and Zare Zarikian for their infrastructure facilities of space. To Naviera Pacifico de Venezuela for helping us with the transportation of the exhibits, to Elaiza Irrizary for her generous support at sello foundation to the production of my individual exhibit the market from here and to Domingo de Lucia for his contribution from artquimia foundation of atenea in Valencia. To Key Burnet for her support with transportation during the montage process at Rice. 

  To bert long at the sculpture court back yard for his help from the sculpture room of the faculty of art and art history for the facilities to exhibit the market at the back yard, to the persons Stephen Fox and Richard Ingelson at the school of architecture who helped with getting the Farish gallery. My special personal thanks to Stephen A Tyler by his support in all the process before, during and after the spring at rice. 

  To the persons at the rice media center who helped to obtain the gallery space and exhibiting space. 

  To the Houstonian people in the city of Houston who helped we both with the releases we did and circulated to each exhibit opening as well as to those who respectfully and generously published such as Patricia Johnson, Houston chronicle, Donald Caledare, artlies, the Houston press and to the united states embassy in Venezuela for the facilities to my travel, Surpic travel and the artists. To Tina melo during the creation and foundation of transart foundation, to Terrell James in the city of Houston and to Cristiana Jadic, Mike Jadick, Mike jadick, Diana and Carlos Gland and her family.

  This letlee serie of exhibits was made at rice university during the spring of 1997 by Abdel Hernandez San Juan and Surpic Angelini through a letlee private nonprofit foundation we both created to make it possible, transart foundation and as explained before was fully payed with the private money of each one of both to the art event we made with the nonprofit facilitator, including both the production in Caracas, the montage at the exhibit spaces, the releases and the openings 

Grades

For examples of recourse to complementary and supplementary texts in the interpretation of the medieval art of Byzantium see

references

Angelini Surpic and Berg Long, Another Reality, catalogue, Houston, Texas, usa, 1989

Barthes, Roland The Responsibility of Forms, Essays on Music, Art and Representation, The University of California press

Benoist Jean, Julia Kristeva, Michael Serres and others, Identity: meeting with Claude Levis Strass, Petrel

Bourdieu Pierre, The Artistic and Literary Field

Bourdieu Pierre, The Rules of Art

Bourdieu Pierre, things said, Gedisa

Catherine David and Benjamin Buclock, Documenta X, book-catalogue, Germany

Danto Arthur, Philosophizing Art, The University of California Press, 1999

Eagleton Terry, Phenomenology, Hermeneutic and reception Theory, Pp, literary theory, an introduction Univ of Minnesota Press; 3 edition (April 2, 2008)

Eco Umberto, the absent structure, Lumen

Eco Umberto, Rhetoric and Ideology, Pp, 176-179, in The Persuasive Message: Rhetoric, Pp 166-179, The Absent Structure, Lumen

Hernandez san Juan Abdel, The Comprehension of Art in Posavantgard, book

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, An Expedition to the threshold, Houston, Texas, USA, 1997, Book

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Surpik Angelini, Lecture discussed at the rice media center, rice university, Houston, Texas, USA, 1997

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Theorizing architecture, lecture discussed at the panel art and architecture: A possible dialogue, Consolidado Foundation, Caracas, 1991

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Juan Carlos Rodríguez, lecture discussed at the rice media center, rice university, Houston, Texas, USA, 1997

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Venezuelan Contemporary Art: Juan Carlos Rodriguez, Antonieta Sosa, Algeria Bravo, Dulce Gomez, Luis Poleo, Alexandro Balteo, Cipriano Martinez, Susana Amundarain, Alfred Venemozer, Maria Cristina Carbonel, Molina, Lecture offered in the lecture hall of the museum, promotional print of my lectures by the museum design office, Alejandro Otero Visual Arts Museum, Caracas, Venezuela, 1994

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Juan Carlos Rodríguez, Conference offered at the Mendoza Foundation, Caracas, Venezuela, 1995

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, The Production of Venezuelan Art in the City: A Neglected or Repressed Reality, Presentation on the panel of the Ayacucho Foundation, Ateneo de Caracas, 1995

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Valuing Venezuelan Art, Catalog text as jury of the Venezuelan national drawings biennial, texts from the jury Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Eliseo Sierra and Ariel Jiménez, MAVAO, Caracas, Venezuela

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Juan Jose Olavarria, Lecture discussed at the Rice Media Center, Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA,

Hernandez san Juan Abdel, The Market from Here: Mise in Scene and Experimental Etnography, lecture discussed at the rice media center, rice university, Houston, Texas, usa, 1997

Hernandez san Juan Abdel, The Market from Here: Mise in Scene and Experimental Etnography, lecture discussed at the bag lectures main room, anthropology faculty, rice university, Houston, Texas, usa, 1997

Hernandez san Juan Abdel, The Market from Here: Mise in Scene and Experimental Etnography, lecture discussed at the panel of LASA Congress, with lectures by Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Quetzil Eugenio and Lisa Breglia, LASA, Florida, USA, 2000

Hernandez San Juan Abdel and Rodríguez Fran, Homo Convivalis, Rice Media Center Lecture auditorium, Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA, 1997 

Strauss Claude Levis, The Structure of myths, Pp, 186-210, Structural Anthropology, Barcelona, ​​Paidos, 1987 first published as the structural study of myths, in myth, a symposium, jnl, amer, floklore, vol 78, n 270 Oct-Dec 1955, pp 428-444

Strauss Claude Levis, Levis Strauss, The Unfolding of Representation in the art of Asia and America, 221-242, structural anthropology, Barcelona, ​​Paidos, 1987 first published at Renaisence, a magazine published by the free school of higher studies of New York, vol 2 and 3, 1944-45, pp 168-188

Mc Evilley Thomas, Lecture to the Film: The Exhibits on Campus, Rice Media Center, Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA, 1997

Mc Evilley Thomas, Artists in trance: Various Artists, Art in America, new york, 1998

Thomas Mc Evilley, Sculpture in the Age of Doubt (1999)

Todorov Tzvetan, Symbolism and Interpretation, Cornell University Press, Feb 18, 1986

Todorov Tzvetan , Genres in Discourse, Cambridge University Press, Published August 31st 1990 by (first published 1978) 

Todorov Tzvetan, Symbolism and interpretation Todorov, monte avila editors, available monte books

Todorov. Tzvetan "The genres of discourse" (Waldhuter editors, 2012)

Todorov Tzvetan. Theories of the symbol, monteavila editors

Todorov Tzvetan. Criticism of Criticism, Editorial Paidós

Tyler Stephen A, on the markets in India, A POINT OF ORDER, Pp 133-135, Rice University studies, 1973-1974, USA 

Tyler Stephen A, Posmodern Etnography, Pp, The Unspeakable: Discourse, rhetoric and dialogue in the posmodern work, Wisconsin university press

Tyler Stephen A, Evocation: The Unwriteable/a response to Abdel Hernandez San Juan, sep 9, rice university, Houston, Texas, usa, 1997

Getting Displays

©By Abdel Hernandez

Art and Anthropology

Written and composed in English 

by Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Meetings with Celia

A Phone Call

Celia: Express to be interested in anthropology, mentions George Marcus at Schneider and Crist and The Traffic in Culture, Refiguring Art and Anthropology

Abdel: 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.

Celia: George did Writing Culture?

Abdel: Again, by the same reasons, 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?

Celia: I read the Reynoso Introduction

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

Celia: But there one can see very distinct positions in between them nor homogeneous

Abdel: 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.

Celia: I am interested in experiences you did in anthropology and art in the eighties as pilon if possible to speak on that too.

Abdel: 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), well let just defines a meeting

Celia: Friday at 9:00 am is ok?

Abdul: Ok

Friday Meeting

Abdel: I can see your attention on two themes to be afforded, first anthropology from your mention of George Marcus and second you seems to be motivated to afford also art and anthropology at my late eighties projects in Havana (Hacer, urban) and Pilon (Rural), we can then divides the meeting in this two parts, lets begging with anthropology and then after we can speak on Hacer and Pilon.

  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. 

   Celia: I am interested about how anthropology is being traditionally seen from art and biseversa art from anthropology because I feel myself I need to relates it in new forms and there is nor to many things done in a new sense.

   Abdel: It needs to be theorized and discussed in new ways, I in fact did two lectures preceselly on how art was seen from anthropology and anthropology from art previously in terms of stereotypes assumptions nor well informed and nor well communicated on each field in between, Anthropology from the arts and Arts from Anthropology discussed at the rice media center, Houston, Texas, spring, 1997

  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.

  Celia: How was your process as curator with each one of the artists?

  Abdel: I provided them my theoretical attention, statement and approach on this issue of art and anthropology, I also provided them as we are both doing here general 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.

  Celia: Who are the artists and exhibits?

  Abdel: 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. I also selected and invited Lazaro Saavedra and Surpic and I exhibit his show with him at the same gallery she did.

  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, and Ernesto Leal, both who works before together as duo to an exhibit they did at the Center of Development of Visual Art in Havana, 1994.

   There was also at the sculpture court back yard sewall hall an exhibit of my authorship as single author I bring, montage and exhibited, The Market from Here 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.

  Celia: I mentioned I seen something by Schneider and Crist, Art and Anthropology and something by George Marcus.

  Abdel: Let me tell you 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 your mention of 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.

Sociology and anthropology in a curatorial practice. 

©By Abdel Hernández san Juan

dialogue with just kind and Ángel león brave

Preamble

    The text material that follows has an interesting story, after promoting my private school of advance hard science studies, department of sociology, I decided to start a business of private conferences that resumed my private conferences in Houston in ninety-eight as well as before in Caracas in San Bernardino, announce the topics of the conference subjects, philosophy of sciences: epistemology, phenomenology and hermeneutics, contemporary sociology, semiotics and language sciences, philosophical and cultural anthropology, English, art theory and criticism, methodology of research, field work, visual languages, of this promotion I started some conferences for a group that chose art theory and criticism, but during their development the motivation arose to discuss concrete experiences of art, this is how the dialogues emerged that they continue,

    I explained in a relatively descriptive way—although as I have said in my book the correlation of the world, description is impossible without interpretation—seven exhibitions resulting from a curatorial project of Venezuelan art that I conceived in Venezuela in ninety-four and present later during the spring of 1997 in co-curatorship with Surpik Angelini at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and once the general explanation was concluded we began to dialogue.

    The participants in the dialogue are two artists whose peculiarity and relevance is that they are surrealist artists while at the same time they have the exclusivity of developing their works in realistic genres, something unusual in contemporary art, but as the dialogues themselves make explicit, something that in some way I had foreseen in Houston, nothing like the sensitivity of a surrealist to understand the samples that will be discussed and dialogued in the text. Rarely have I heard a more lucid, accurate, pertinent and elucidating approach to these samples that are still so rich, complex and difficult to interpret, than in the voice of these two young exponents of contemporary surrealism, just kindly garrote, a visual artist who He has also worked in art pedagogy and Angel Leon Valiant, an artist who was a student of Justo who currently lives in Spain.

    We had the occasional occasional visit during the dialogues, but only the main content is collected. The text that follows are literal transcriptions and covers only the content that was discussed, which refers exclusively to three of the samples since although the remaining ones were discussed, those sessions were not recorded, I will try in the near future to create some type of recorded dialogue around the four samples not included here, I hope that the reader can enjoy this unusual but attractive material

General introduction

     Abdel Hernández San Juan: Well, in response to the request to start a series of sessions more focused on concrete experiences of art, I will speak today and we will discuss an experience of which I was the curator consisting of seven exhibitions

     The peculiar thing about this curatorship is that in the field of art it is inserted in a modality that we could call thematic, although it has something of a call, let's say thematic art salons, for example the landscape salon, there is a kind of pattern that is established from the thematic and generic point of view regarding what the work is going to be done about, this is done in some way for that curatorship that has these characteristics, that is, it is not an experience like in most curators where you expose things of the artists that the artists have already made, but you give the artists a theme and they have to make works exclusively aimed at that curatorship, they are going to do something that they did not necessarily do before in their work, what they are going to do in order to to the call, which generates things that I think are very interesting to discuss because once we have the text of what happens when something like this is done completely called, the result is an intense proposition.

   We say there is a problem here, let's make works for this, and since they are made exclusively for that, a great propositionality is generated, from the point of view of the event that is generated, what ultimately results with such thematic and propositional exhibitions is that effects of art institutions and the institutionality of culture in general, specialists, museographers, museologists, we are faced with something very exclusive, something that hardly happened before, and if it ever happened we must look for it with tweezers, when any Has something with these characteristics ever been called?, and then once it is like this in front of cultural institutions, it is something so exclusive that the question arises, what is the relationship to have with it? With something with unique, unusual characteristics, how do you do it? Do we archive it? How do we process it? How do we memorize it? How do we document it? What is the relationship that must be had with it?

   But it happens that the topic of this call was not a topic like, let's say, "man", "woman", "ecological", but rather it was a methodological topic, the problem that was posed here to the invited artists is that each one would ask themselves the question about the relationship of art with the social sciences, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and with special emphasis, if possible with even more focus, the relationship of art with anthropology, it could be sociology, but more emphasis on anthropology.

    You tell artists, do something that has to do with the relationship between art and anthropology, and they may have stereotypes, what would it be to make an exhibition about this relationship? So you can't take the artist and say, do this to me. , you can induce up to a point but you can't say do this or that, it's a curatorship that I did with a Venezuelan in Texas, we met in Caracas, I was a curator of Venezuelan contemporary art at the Alejandro Otero Museum of Visual Arts, she came, they put us in contact, we became friends, we liked each other, we read our texts, and we decided to do something together, we chose the artists, and we called, we did it in Caracas, we prepared the production conditions, what we did, the most we could induce was to put them on the spot. As much as possible about the problems of contemporary social sciences, not much either, we are working with people who do not want to be sociologists or anthropologists, but let's say when dealing with the topic as curators our responsibility was to make them aware of the contemporary situation in the social sciences. , a bit like we updated them, we gave them references of authors, some titles, etc.

Fair kind stick: How many artists were there?

Abdel Hernández San Juan: Seven exhibitions, six artists, we talk to you a little about the characteristics of these trends, what are their differences from the previous ones, what are the types of questions, the things that motivate these new trends, what I wanted to read I could also read, although it was not mandatory, the curatorial process was very interesting because not only were Surpik and I as curators talking to the artists, we also had a camera through a film director Fran rodríguez and that's how we began to record all the dialogues that we had as curators with the artists both at the beginning when we explained the problems of curatorship and talked to them about social sciences and later while they were preparing the samples, following them up, they were making the exhibitions, we arrived with the camera and filmed

   How is the exhibition going?, suddenly it occurred to one of us to introduce a video into the exhibition, we went with the camera and made that video, the camera was as documentation filming the dialogue, then filming the work processes and when a The artist in his work needed video, in this sense it was a very peculiar curatorship due to the way in which the camera came to participate within the curatorship modality, curatorships today are like cultural productions, how it is produced, what is the way to produce it?

     It was an experience that we did with our own resources, it is as if we here now wanted to do something together and we collected each other's money to make it possible.

  On the one hand, I put in the money from the sales of thirteen of my drawings in Texas, about thirty-five thousand dollars, and Surpik must have put in something like double that.

  It wasn't enough, but we could start with it.

   The camera itself had costs of millions of film, developing, editing. But then we started looking for sponsors so in reality most of the things we got were donations. An Italian, Domingo de Lucia, owner of a company that produces paints for art, Atenea and who has a foundation, Fundación Artquimia, with whom I had worked before, a great friend, he provided a free box of paint for each sample, he made donations to us. of materials needed for the samples.

  Born in Venezuela through some friends of Surpik or his family, he gave us the containers and ships to transport them.

  A foundation in Texas by Key and Warren provided a car that I used to transport myself and we carried many things back and forth to campus in the production process.

   Since before, Surpik in Houston went to the university and coordinated to obtain the spaces for the exhibitions, in the office of international scholars of rice university and the school of social sciences, faculty of anthropology, they put the letters of invitation to me as curator—along with another from the transarte foundation that Surpik and I created and founded in Houston—which helped with the consular procedures for my trip as a curator—a one-year j visa as a guest professor as well as for fifteen days for each artist.

Justo: But is there anything like this before in Venezuela?

Abdel: Yes, this has a previous origin. Since ninety-two in the Venezuelan art arena, I have been publishing texts as an art critic for a variety of catalogs on contemporary Venezuelan art in museums and galleries, also in the economic press where I had a weekly page in an Italian newspaper, He had been giving lectures on contemporary Venezuelan art in panels and as a moderator, he had been a juror of the national biennial of Venezuelan drawing at the Alejandro Otero Museum of Visual Arts, he was very active as a critic and curator of current Venezuelan art, regarding this process between chosen as curator of contemporary Venezuelan art at the Alejandro Otero Museum of Visual Arts, and when I entered the museum as a curator, the first project they gave me to develop was to make an exhibition of contemporary Venezuelan art on the topic of a bit of the spatial location of the museum with respect to the community specifically with respect to a wholesale market that is in its vicinity.

   This is a very modern museum but it is a little on the outskirts of the city, you have to take a highway that leaves the city, it is about thirty minutes away, it is not completely outside, but a little on the outskirts, right where There is the museum, there is a horse racing racetrack where many people come from the city, but the museum is located in a location that coincides with a wholesale market of warehouses for products and merchandise that come from other provinces and are stored there a little before enter the big city, the capital, Caracas, food, vegetables, food products, each wholesale seller owns a warehouse, this market has hundreds of these warehouses, on the one hand the trucks that come from the rest of the country arrive at it bringing The merchandise goes to Caracas and is deposited in these warehouses, but on the other hand, smaller trucks come from Caracas that buy the merchandise from wholesalers and take it to Caracas, distributing it to the points of sale or are the stores or markets themselves that come to buy it. to sell in Caracas.

  But this market is not only wholesale storage and retail distribution, when large trucks come from the rest of the country because they make very long trips, as well as when small trucks come that take the merchandise to Caracas, there in The spaces in that same market generate sales, triple sales, the wholesalers who store the product sell directly to those who come there to buy, the large trucks are deployed to sell and the small ones too, this generates great traffic and settlement. sales

   Well, this large market is next to the ultra-modern and contemporary museum

   Well, I was curating Venezuelan contemporary art with countless artists on this topic. I had defined and written a curatorial project with a museography defined in advance and a design of rooms. Since that project, I had already considered the modalities, artists who They would take their samples and circulate them in the market spaces, artists who would conceive their works there in the market spaces, artists who would bring the market to the museum, artists who would make thematic works about the market in the more general relationship between the market and the market. art and non-artistic market, merchandise, icons, products, and within this project I had already defined that the relationship with sociology and social sciences in general would be at the forefront of the project from the methodological point of view, one of the rooms planned In my curatorial project I anticipated focusing on it exclusively, especially those artists who considered the study and investigation of the markets there in their spaces and then the museum-market relationship with that sense.

  Surpik read this project and really liked it. He expressed to me in person and in letters, that sample of contemporary Venezuelan art, although with several artists I managed to define what they would do and I met with them every week when they came to see me at the museum or I called them to meet or in their studios, it is an exhibition that could not be carried out, it was not the first time that it could not be carried out, for many years before, almost since the museum was founded, this project was planned due to the proximity of the museum and the market, but it could never be done for one reason or another, almost always reasons of lack of budgets.

    When Surpik and I decided to do something together, a curatorship, I made a summary of the theoretical and research results of that project and the research that I had done for it was like the basis that would nourish and define what we would do, which would not be and that project first because it would not be done inside the museum since the museum considered that the project could not be carried out due to lack of resources, but it had done the research, it was then about reducing it to something much less ambitious, something that would be with a minimum of artists, which would be done with resources from two independent curators and critics outside the museum, as an independent production, but something that in some way was nourished by that project that I as curator conceived, designed and wrote

Justo: Who were the artists?

Abdel: If it was then that the chosen artists were four Venezuelans, two of whom were in my project in the mavao and had been working for me as its curator, Surpik, who was very interested in participating as an artist in my project, would be the other, and finally a Venezuelan artist who was not foreseen in the project in the mavao but who had worked before with a Cuban artist, here the point is that Surpik was interested in Cuban art from which I had distanced myself a lot and was completely dedicated by many years to Venezuelan art, even when Surpik and I met, I had been working on the possibility of expanding my project of curating the theme museum market to artists from South America with a greater number of course of Venezuelans since it is something that was born from the scene of the contemporary Venezuelan art, but Surpik told me about his interest in Cuban art, about the Cuban exile, I was very far from it then, I had emigrated to Venezuela, I had distanced myself a lot from the Cuban theme, the first thing that came to mind was this Venezuelan artist Juan José Olavarría for the fact of having worked with a Cuban, Ernesto Leal, the second was Alejandro López, who had lived in Venezuela for several years, Fran Rodríguez also lived like me in Venezuela, the film director who worked with me on the camera, and we added Lázaro Saavedra. Lázaro and Leal lived in Cuba, but we managed to bring them to Venezuela to produce their samples and some films.

Fair: That's great, do you have images of the samples?

Abdel Hernández San Juan: Yes, we are going to start with Juan José Olavarría and Ernesto Leal, he had already worked with Ernesto Leal, they had done an exhibition together at the center for the development of visual arts, so in this case we chose the duo.

Fair: The project was several exhibitions? One was made after the other, did they have nothing to do with each other?

Abdel: One was inaugurated, it was closed, and immediately the next one was inaugurated, it was the same university campus, the university city, there are two artists who coincided in the same space at two different times, but all the others in other spaces in the university city .

Justo: But weren't they public spaces of the art institution?

Abdel: That was an interesting component, three were in a space called rice media center, the university has its faculties, engineering, social sciences, art, but it has nothing for video, film or photography, because there is no a faculty dedicated to it, the art faculty is oriented towards fine arts.

Just: The theory?.

Abdel: no, the fine arts.

Fair: but with easels and that?

Abdel: Yes, practice, making sculptures there, etc., then throughout the history of the university the initiative arose to have something for it, it is related to the art faculty, it is a center for the media, it is like a kind of optional, other faculties want some film or video and they have the media center, but it has peculiar characteristics, there are exhibitions of student photographs, but there is also a theater where there is a film program and in that same space lectures are given , certain professors, for example Mc Evilley who comes from New York, gives a lecture a week, it is a center like a laboratory, three of the exhibitions were in that center, it is a more modern, secluded construction, Rice University, the architecture is English type old, half Victorian, rice media is modern and is in the gardens near the exit of the campus but still inside, two of them were in the gallery of the media center, and the other is like an intermediate place, a kind of room common.

Just: Like a waiting place?

Abdel: Like a lobby but where there are coke machines, where you have a snack, it has so much space that you can put some panels there, usually it is not used for it, but it can, the conditions were created and it was done there, another was At the Faculty of Architecture, there is a gallery called Farish Gallery, also an academic gallery where models and architectural projects are usually exhibited. It has a mezzanine, Alejandro's was made in a kind of theater that is not in the media center but a largest theater that is a construction in itself called hamman hall and the other was mine that I did with a set designer that I had invited for my museography project in my market project, I anticipated a museography that incorporated elements of scenography for that exhibition, then it was exhibited in the area where the works of the sculpture faculty are exhibited, it is like a kind of open-air terrace but it is below the normal floor level, where the sculpture classroom ends, The sculptures are usually exhibited there, it is between the Sewall Hall which is the faculty of social sciences and the faculty of art, but the sculpture classroom ends on that terrace.

Arguments against betara desa

Abdel: Juan José Olavarría and Ernesto Leal, the exhibition was called Arguments to Betara Desa, Betara Desa is a goddess of Balinese culture and has been studied by several anthropologists.

Just: Bali?

Abdel: Yes, Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead worked there, Betara Desa is a goddess of the village, the viewer enters and the first work is a wooden musical staff on the left, but where the music score goes they put a tourist magazine from the city of Houston, oriented towards tourism, the second work was a table with a white tablecloth and some plates with some capsules, it was like the cosmonauts' food.

Angel: How did you know it was cosmonaut food?

Abdel: That is a good question, I think it would not be known, as a curator I know but I did not know before, I had not even thought about it, what do cosmonauts eat?

Fair: they could be medicines, and being on a plate associates medicines with food

Abdel: If you are absolutely right, it is a point, the viewer can see it as something else, those are the things that we have to discuss, and then it also has a text like saying in Cuba okra, which is a typical Texas dish, a type of meat, the text said barbique

  There is another piece very close to these two that is like a kind of parachute hanging from the ceiling and it is half open, it is as if someone had arrived there on a parachute and the parachute had gotten tangled in the ceiling and had been left half open from the ceiling, it see from below looking up

  Then there is a pedestal with a horse saddle

   On one of the walls of the gallery there is a curtain that can be closed and opened, although it is almost always open, but what I mean is that you can see from here to here and from here to there because that wall is made of glass, one of the works that they decided to place outside, people who come walking through the campus come across a work that is in the open on the outside of the exhibition site, but since that wall is made of glass they see that inside there is an exhibition and perhaps some relate that this is located there in front of a tree because it is an area of ​​gardens and trees, because it is related to what is inside, others will not see the relationship, but what they put there is a horse carriage, one of those carriages So you know, old, traditional but without a horse, lying down, the horse saddle already made a direct allusion to horses, horse riding, now the carriage, notice that up to this point all the themes are Texan with the exception of the parachute, this exhibition was demanding of produce, we had to get everything, carriage, saddle, cosmonaut food, tourism magazine, etc.

   The next work, have you seen those trampolines they use in the circus? They grabbed and put up a trampoline. If you want, you can jump there, but you can't do it because the fabrics you could jump on were like cartographies. They grabbed a map of the city of Valencia, which is the city in which they produced the exhibition.

Fair: A city in the countryside?

Abdel: It is an industrial city about two hours from Caracas, and they took a map of the city of Houston where the exhibition would be shown and they superimposed both maps, it is as if they took two acetates with the two maps one above the other and crossed it mixing them.

Fair: Painted?

Abdel: Yes, when they were in Valencia doing the exhibition, they sent letters to the architecture faculty in Rice, it was already decided that it would be held there, asking for certain details about the exhibition space, and that exchange of letters then they They took those letters, those sent and those received, and made a work based on those letters. They exhibited the letters mounted in frames and exposed all the thermoses that they used to drink coffee, little jugs, where they drank tea or coffee, or containers where they kept food, both of them. as those who helped them, and exposed all of this

  There is like a small place on the wall that they scratched and in that space they painted like a lattice with some arabesques as if it were something found in restoration on a previous architecture. Like from another time

   The other work is a long row with black plastic bags of those that are used as pots in growing places and they placed them inland in each one, a row on the floor along the gallery, and a plant was born in each One, in front of each of those flower pots they put cushions and on those cushions they wrote stenciled names, names of European intellectuals.

  Another work is called the Allen brothers exploring the border, the Allen brothers were the founders of Houston, they are in the story of how the city was founded, there are two shelves like high tables, one with an invented shield, instead of taking the shield real Houston, they made one invented by them, as if it were the shield that was made for the first time in the city, in the other they put a television monitor with the image of each one of them breathing and on the back on the wall they put a drawing in large dimensions on fabric from a printing press

  I'm missing a detail, on the glass wall they put a quote from Gregory Bateson, which is a paragraph where Bateson mentions Betara Desa, he says other things about culture, it's a quote that talks about play in culture.

  This is how the gallery on the first floor ends, but this gallery has a staircase and as a kind of mesanina they put a piece called the altar to betara desa in that mesanina, they manually made a series of ex-votos, ex-votos is what you do when you are going to make a wish but it can also be on a tomb what is written on the marble to say goodbye to a family member, it can be a prayer, it can be like asking something to a god, please grant me this or that, they summoned a series of people in the city of Valencia and told them to make a wish in writing, then they made each person their votive offering, and they distributed those votive offerings on an entire wall, which is what actually makes up the altar to Betara desa. or its main part, but the altar included other elements, a large blackboard that has a head of a buffalo like those of the hunters that they put on the deer wall, but without skin, it was the skeleton and they put it with chalk on the blackboard the question, what is the city of jouston like?, Houston written with j instead of h, which is how it sounds in Spanish, on the wall they placed two blankets of those that bullfighters use to fight bulls, made with scraps of fabric by themselves

Justo: This exhibition has many rich things to discuss

Abdel: I see many anachronistic elements, like an anachronism, surreal elements, although there are some that I don't like that whole part of Texas, for example, that has more congruent, coherent things, at times even common sense, certain stereotypes, certain cycles, customs, the typical food of Texas, the food of the cosmonauts, the horse saddle, the tourism magazine, up to that point I see it without anachronisms, although it is still curious two artists from another culture, one Venezuelan, the other Cuban, who deal the theme of us in Texas, but that's a percent, but then more anachronistic elements begin, for example the trampoline

Justo: The trampoline with the two maps seems very interesting to me

Abdel: I have written about it, but it seems to me to be a complex exposition that is not easy to interpret.

Fair: I would like to see the images before I say what I think, we can talk now or better see the images

Abdel: You are going to like it much more, visually it is more attractive, I like it more

Viewing images

Fair: Laughter

Returning from viewing the sample on the computer

Fair: Let's talk about something that matters to us

Abdel: From the viewer's point of view, how would you define it? As a hermetic exhibition? As a very open or varied exhibition that would have no control over what the viewer interprets? Or as an exhibition with certain contents and meanings? very clear?, an interpretation without ambivalence or ambiguity?, what do you think about that aspect of the exhibition?

Fair: I think it is hermetic but I agree with the first and last thing you said, it is hermetic but it has an organized discourse, I believe, without falling specifically into a fragmentation of languages, that is, seen from above in its generality, I see it as a position that questions the relationships between ancient cultures and modernity and the disconnects that exist in that, that is like the great reading that I see, the meta-reading that I see of the exhibition, which has as a unity, a unity In that, he is talking about the inconsistencies between the past of the culture and the trace of what is left when modernity is imposed, in that fissure, between what was the primitive culture of Bali, the moments in which Bali emerges. , and all the anthropological interest in Bali, and the fissure that exists with what is happening in modernity in Houston, with what is happening today, is that magnetic attraction, I don't know if I should call it tourist, I think it would complicate things a lot for me because of that. path, but that past vision between what was and what we have remained, the need to unite them, but the need also to say how disunited they are, it seems to me that it is like the metatext of the exhibition

Angel. The disputes and interests of anthropology. How culture ceases to be authentic as it modernizes

Fair: It is like an ambivalence of journey, but the critical position does not close, there is no position, the position of the sample is open

Angel: It's like saying that a thousand years from now with the cosmonauts and the future, all of this today will have the same anthropological value as Bali. I now remember a criticism that a professor once gave us about Kasho's work, he told us that what will be remembered about Kasho's work is the story of the rafters, the emigration, not the way they see it in the present, but how it will be seen in the future, the work has validity for that reason, so you say in Houston the symbol is the pot, the food, what remains is that vision that the future will have of what the present was.

Abdel: Barbique food is like saying kimbombo in Cuba, it is very typical, idiosyncratic customs unique to the region

Fair: The one who is seeing will never get to the essence, for example the parachute, but he is talking about that, a person from another contemporary culture, falls into a system that is unprotected that is arbitrary, I love the car part. idea of ​​it being outside, the public space, but it seems to me to be brought against the grain, I don't see it inserted, I don't know if it has to do with the trip.

  One is the archaeological object and the other is the anthropologist's gaze, and those two things are not going to meet, because they are arbitrary, as if there were no continuity between those two things, as if there were no identity between the anthropological object. and the gaze of the anthropologist, in that discontinuity, is what I see in general, between the gaze of the anthropologist and the object to be analyzed, it is shown as I see it, how the sample has the touch of distance of incomprehension, I am the anthropologist, I am going to analyze that but I am a stranger to that culture, because I am not from there, I am going to do a reading but that reading is not going to coincide, because I am not from there, I am going to do a reading but neither I I did not breathe nor was I born there and what I am doing is taking all my cultural ancestry to another place and it is not going to happen because you are reading with your tools, it is like not if you made your house by hand and I come with a tool box, I am not going to understand you the way you did, that is, an understanding that is not simply, you are what you are doing but the reality is different.

  What I like about the exhibition is that it seems to distance the anthropologist from the object, as if he were never going to be able to unravel it, some cushions, for example, what is that piece called, the cushions have the names of important European figures, it seems to me even as if ridiculing the fact, a cushion on which you sit with the name of a European where you sit and look at a little piece of land that is an allusion to the anthropological object, to culture, there is nothing further than a European from a culture, it seems to me that one of the spikes and Achilles heels of anthropology is the instrument that analyzes how far it is from the object analyzed, and even believes that it has arguments in the intelligence that questions it and can make it universal, What he is doing is banishing it and turning it into an object for himself, who knows how those Indians felt about their life, you have to live it, not analyze it.

   It's like we live in Texas and we go to Cuba to understand how people live in Cuba, you will never understand, you have to live there for ten years, have children, sign up in your notebook, run errands, cross those streets at all costs. Now, ten years to be able to understand those people, like you are going to come with a little book there, I don't understand anthropology many times, but it is valid, but there is a fissure, and the exhibition tells me so in almost all the works, laughter, laughter, seen from there I can make an analysis of each work, tell me now how do you see it?

Abdel: I don't see that way of reading the exhibition, as I say, I don't see it as clear, but I understand that it is a possible reading, and you are not the first to see it that way, you are pointing out more attractive things that others have not seen, but there have been people who have seen it that way in a general sense, perhaps with other emphases with other elements, and that speaks in favor of it being a possible interpretation of the exhibition, but for me personally that reading seems very rugged, I don't see it, I see that the works are very hermetic, that they do not produce a precise meaning, that they are not works that produce from the point of view of the senses something that we can say that their meaning is this, they are very hermetic and at the same time very entropic but not therefore illegible, if the reading that you have done already coincides with the fact that several people see it that way there is something in the sample that leads in that direction

  I am going to tell you two of the readings that I have done of the exhibition, I have read it in two ways, one emphasizes that it is an exhibition of the exhibition

I see in this exhibition how it is very recurrent that it resorts to the media in which it could be made as an exhibition, turning that into its own theme. I think it is a predominant element, it is one of my readings.

Fair: Each work speaks of itself, art speaks of art, the exhibition of the exhibition, but what happens is that the title is very strong, the name of the exhibition is a tribute, that is why I am going in that direction

Abdel: It is called arguments with betara desa, in the reading that I do I call the title differently in my interpretation, the piece of the letters directly uses the elements that were used alluding to the production process of the exhibition, that of the bed elastic to the two cities involved in making the exhibition in which they were made in Valencia and exhibited in Houston, the problem of Houston I think is local to the exhibition, in the sense that if it had not been made in Houston they would not have treated the Houston theme, I don't think it is the Houston theme treated universally as someone who claims to treat a theme, as if it were an exhibition in Paris about Houston, but rather it deals with the theme because it is going to be done in Texas

Justo: And the anthropologist? The text cited by the anthropologist?

Abdel: Because the exhibition is going to be held in Texas, then the Allen brothers exploring the frontier, founders of Houston, then the theme of the west, idiosyncratic, the food of Houston, the horses and carriage, the food of the cosmonauts in Houston There is NASA, that is one of my readings, a reading that is an exhibition that exposes the very process of making the exhibition as something both physical and conceptual.

   The other reading of mine goes more in the direction of what you called a transculturation, it is as if it were an attempt to illustrate with experimental examples how the processes of cultural syncretization occur but instead of doing it with elements of real culture such as , take cultural syncretism as it occurred in a given culture, for example in Cuba, how the Afro-Cuban religion was syncretized with the Christian religion in the rule of ocha, the African side and the Christian side with the Virgin of Charity of Copper or the saints that have emerged and how the Catholic religion has been adapting to how this process of religious creolization has been taking place within it, but instead of doing it with a real religion in which this has occurred or with a real ethnic mix taking a fragment of a culture in which a true process of syncretism has occurred, instead of working with the elements of a culture in which a true process of syncretism has occurred, we are resorting to a laboratory model, we could say it like this , but not a laboratory in the sense of a laboratory that is located in a real culture in which there is a phenomenon of syncretism and that illustrates the problems with the elements that have been syncretized in that culture but of a laboratory that is showing as with any element of a culture, regardless of whether it is even hypothetical, there is the conjunction of elements that produce cultural inventions

   The idea is that a real and organic process of transculturation between cultures or in a culture, we must see it outside of the elements that participated in that syncretization to isolate and understand what conditions must occur with any elements for something like a syncretization to occur. in a culture, therefore we are going to imagine that instead of working with two or more elements that were really syncretized, let's imagine that elements that have not been syncretized could be syncretized and what that syncretization would be like, showing how it would be is showing the mechanism of invention through which to perceive how cultures invent themselves

    As it is not with elements that really occurred, it is done more nakedly than in reality behind a syncretism what there is is an invention, because there is no necessary relationship between the elements, for example an African god, obattala, an obatala has sixteen different forms from each other, in one it is an old woman, in another it is something else opposite, and it is androgenic, it can be a woman and it can be a man, that will never happen in the Christian religion, in this the sexes are very well defined second. no image is sixteen times, Christ is only one, the saints are each one only one, there are not fifteen virgin Marys, but only one always the same identical to herself, there is no virgin Mary on the path such where she is a maja with pen and on the path in which she is a jumping rabbit, the Virgin Mary is a single Virgin Mary, a single Christ, however an African deity as important as Obbatala who is in the creation of the world between heaven and earth is sixteen forms of being, the Western monadic principle of the one and indivisible identical to itself as a one versus the multiple that governs Christianity and our Western culture is completely denied by African logic, a deity that can have sixteen forms of being. being and representing themselves different from each other and that can be a man or a woman

   That idea that what one is cannot be repeated because it is a unity with oneself typical of the West and Christianity is denied by the African deities who do not respond to the Leibnizian principle of the monad to the unity and identity of the Western monad, elegua For example, it has seven different ways of being, it is represented in fifteen different ways, in one it is a doll with two heads, in another with the head in the sex, in another the most common is the stone with couris behind the door, and so on. in different ways according to their paths with echu, they are phenomenologically different principles and incompatible with Christianity and yet they say that they have been syncretized in the rule of ocha with Christianity specifically with Catholicism, and in general as a syncretism of religions, as you can Imagine that something with these characteristics can syncretize with something that is its opposite?

    the unity, the trinity, mother, father and son, not because they are superior to each other, let us not enter into a discussion of superiority, because the Hindu religion, for example, has shown to be extremely rich and complex, sophisticated and is completely different from the Christian religion. Look at everything that yoga and other systems have given to this Hindu way of organizing the cosmological world, ordered according to other cosmological principles, and yet the Hindus have among their deities contrary phenomena, a deity that is half monkey half human being, another half elephant half human being, another kali with eight arms and an eye in the middle of the forehead

   The point is that they are different systems.

   Transculturation actually means something new, a new culture

    It is then a matter of showing the arbitrariness that is behind the idea of ​​identity or the essences of cultures, of showing that they have been formed from inventions.

    I am not going to enter here into the discussion of whether there really is syncretization or not and to what extent, in the case of religion transculturation is more difficult, but I do think that transculturation occurs at other levels of imagery, imagination cultural and cultural ethos I do believe a lot in the importance of transculturation, but it does not always occur properly through religion, although I also see a little in the sample the illustration made with elements that have not intervened in a process of true transculturation, of a fictitious process of transculturation in order to show how it occurs, what the arbitrariness is behind it, it is like saying behind every cultural process there is an arbitrariness, the elements that are related could have been other and Those who are should not have been those, the relationship between the elements is not necessary, it is arbitrary, but of course once the phenomenon occurs, a certain mythology arises resulting from that transculturation and this makes it real and organic, but here it is about to show or say that cultures are inventions that we are always inventing, that is what the exhibition says to me, everything we have been until now is an invention and what we could be will be an invention

  And of course anthropology that believes it studies cultures as if they were something in itself does not escape this, what it is actually studying believing that it studies something that is something in itself, are nothing more than inventions, not only does anthropology not coincide with its object as you say, but rather it has a mythologized idea of ​​its object, the object itself is arbitrary, it is a fiction, it is an invention that anthropology comes to study as if it consisted of something, but in reality it does not consist of something that is in itself but what it is in itself is an invention, it is not only that anthropology is a fiction, but that its object is an invention, although anthropology is also an absolute fiction, which is why you said that it never It's going to match and I agree with it.

   To get to know El Fanguito, for example, this neighborhood that we have a few blocks away, there is no way in which someone arriving from Australia, France or Holland, which is already the maximum extrapolation, can get to know it without living there, but even coming from the same city of another part of the reserve you cannot visit the fanguito unless you go to live there, I call it without emigrating, I say that anthropology cannot be objective if the anthropologist does not emigrate, it is not spending ten years but always being from that culture from which you come, but you have to emigrate and leave your cultural parameters, transforming yourself with the new parameters

    Fair: With results that go back to the anthropologist's culture, his objective is not to insert himself into the new culture but to obtain information to return it to a culture from which he is supposed to be, the object that is being analyzed also comes historically moving changing but it is studied as if it were static, diachrony, that is changing

Abdel: Exactly, and that culture is not something in itself to be studied, even if you emigrate to it and change your cultural parameters, in any case that culture will continue to be arbitrary, it is an invention that is constantly changing that is constantly being invented. , the anthropologist with an exogenous methodology foreign to this tries to study what that is in itself, but it is not something in itself, it is not an onto

Just: laughter laughter, laughter

Abdel, laughter, laughter

Angel: laughter, laughter

Justo: What he believes is in itself was a victim of another anthropology from there back

laughter, laughter

Right: you don't know if it comes from Chichimu, or if it came from a lagoon to interpret something that was there and brought it and imposed it on that medium that is already extrapolated and another comes to follow it.

Abdel: Not only does culture invent itself without anthropology, but it also invents itself in the face of anthropology and in the face of anthropology.

   I see the exhibition as a kind of I don't even put the emphasis on what you have called what I find fascinating. You have called it a fissure, I don't see the exhibition as clear in that sense with the exception of the quote to Bateson.

Fair: But it's the topic

Abdel: Yes, but let's see you're not the only one, several people have seen that reading that way, Mc Evilley, for example he said that the exhibition was a parody of the anthropological way of knowing, that he parodied it, I see it differently, The quote that they include from Bateson does not talk about those things that we have talked about, what you have interpreted, and my interpretation is due to my heritage and yours, to my knowledge and yours, but the quote to Bateson does not refer Neither what I say nor what you say refers to the game in culture, as an idea of ​​what the game is in the Western sense reaches that most archaic, primitive culture, but sees that the game has an importance that everything that is being done there is not serious, that there is also play in that archaic culture, analyzing the importance of play in the culture

Justo: But the artists are also playing, the exhibition in the exhibition, as you say, there is a game in it

Abdel: It's true, but it doesn't talk about anthropology and objects, nor does it talk about inventions or transculturation.

Fair: But he is an anthropologist who was not born there in Bali, he does not have to say it, he is an anthropologist, it is implicit, even if he does not say it, we abstract it

Angel: For example, the trampoline, how does the viewer know that those maps are those of Valencia and Houston?

Abdel: It doesn't say it anywhere, they are right.

Fair: It is like Duchamp's green box with respect to the large glass, you see the large glass that is the work but the green box has the explanations of what cannot be seen in the glass, it is a book about what the viewer cannot see or know.

   As you turn the function of two legs, of a parachute, into a game, each work talks about the work, but it is not talking about how the spectator finds all the codes of the work, but if he is an advanced spectator he realizes

Abdel: At the altar to Betara Desa, the viewer does not know that those requests were made by real people in Valencia, they see those altars, what they are asking from Betara Desa, they are asking a god who is not the god they believe in. , betara desa is a goddess of the Balinese, not of the Valencians, there we have illustrated what I explained before the principle of arbitrariness that is behind cultural inventions that are actually syncretisms and transculturations, thank you for granting me this betara desa, But they are contemporary people from today in Valencia, the viewer does not know where they are from but it is seen that they are contemporaries from Bali. They are not, they are people who do not believe in Betara Desa. What are they doing by asking Betara Desa? It is the arbitrariness of the principle of transculturation. what I was referring to before, revealing how these syncretisms occur

Fair: it is clear that they are not from there, we are talking about the same thing, the fissure between the object and the tourist's reading of the anthropological situation

Abdel: That is another emphasis that I emphasize, that many of these things are not treated through the idea of ​​the anthropologist but rather through certain ideas in the culture in which similar principles occur, figures that experience similar situations in the culture regarding knowledge. For example, the tourist facing the unknown, the astronaut facing the unknown, a bit like what happens with the anthropologist, in the manner of the anthropologist, similar problems, but not referring to the anthropologist, such as knowledge of the new, the unknown.

Right: it's the first piece

Abdel: Thomas McEvilley saw it as similar to you, he didn't say it was ridiculing but he did say that it was a parody of anthropological knowledge,

Fair: But was that real, or were they invented?

Abdel: the artists asked them to ask, maybe they really asked but believing in the artists but a goddess that they don't know maybe they believed in the artists, something that is brought to the United States that will be known further afield, and believing in This was done through believing in the artists, as it were, an exceptional opportunity, and they asked thinking about the gods that they believe are Christian gods, but in the work their votive offerings appear as if they were asking Betara for a Balinese goddess from the village that they They don't know, it is a way of illustrating the arbitrary principles of the inventions that are the cultures in religion with the altar, but you have it in everything, with the Allen brothers and the invention that is Houston, with the letters and the invention that is the exhibition, and so each piece, each one illustrates the same issue in different ways, is one of my interpretations, in the other, as I said, it is the typical conceptualist tautology of the exhibition about the exhibition.

Angel: It's like yoga, for example, people who practice it and are not Hindus, and they do the mantras and repeat them as they are, and they believe that it can really have an effect on them.

Abdel: Interesting.

Fair: You may not know what the mantra means but you repeat omommmmmmmmmmm it works it numbs you when you are in the action in the play you are doing what everyone does, what I know is that the repetition of the same stimulus always over a long period comes a moment in which you no longer feel, you leave it there for an hour and you fall asleep and you achieve relaxation even though you do not know the origin of that and above all you forget everything you had before thinking and you no longer want to be anything, you stopped thinking, you concentrate in you and it inspires you ommmmmmmmmmmmmmm, all the equipment you bring takes away from you

  In reference to the topic you discussed at the beginning about the relationship between the museum and the market of your curatorial project as curator at the Venezuelan art museum, there is an exhibition that my son did on some aspects of that topic in recent years.

  It was an exhibition in the gallery with objects from the winery and an exhibition in the winery with objects from the gallery, I would have to tell you about some works, almost all of them alluded to each other, he has a work that is called in allusion to Rubén's with My enemy under the same roof was a double socket with a yellow light bulb and another cold light written on the wall with my enemy under the same roof, the other one is like this, she put many cartons of eggs that together added up to the cubic space of the kitchen. his house,

Another that was allusive to one and three kossuth chairs, was a bag with a person's errands, a photo of the java and a text written in coffee about what the java from the basic basket cellar means, he then made Other things, there are several pieces, there is one called the dream world, those two pieces were related, they were the same products that were in the warehouse, the oil knob, the rice, those products on a shelf that were unreachable and then underneath there were a fish tank that had water and the bottom was made of chicharon and there were some cans of sardines inside the fish tank. There is one that was called standardized products, it was simply a platform with the classic products of the winery, with some chains decorating it, as if sublimating the aesthetics of the winemaker, and it was a contrast with the previous one that was made of shopping products and contrasted one thing. with the other one

  There is another one called a two three trying what he did was draw that same phrase on four plates, it was a drawing with soy yogurt on acetate plates, the corrosive erosion of the yogurt on the acetate plate, the yogurt ate the emulsion of the plate and I show the drawing of the text one two three testing

cuc the cuc products and next to the winery beans, soap, on the wall like in the wineries some display cases there is another called contraband the plates with soy yogurt another piece called under pressure consisting of introducing a white pullover into a pot of pressure with black beans, it was dyeing the pullover, it was a pullover purchased from the clothes that come as a donation

There was one that was called poyo by population, which was a poyo modeled with laundry soap, there was another that was called eleven ounces per person, which consisted of a pomito with eleven ounces of peas, which was what each person got, and on top of that there was a throw pea

a kind of action that were lines with whitewash on the street so that people would understand that there was also something in the warehouse that was on the corner was like a trail, they were discontinuous lines from the gallery to the warehouse and in the warehouse what was there It was an exhibition of abstractionism

Angel, it has to do with the wholesale market that Abdel was talking about.

Fair: that's why I mention it because your project gives many possibilities of unifying one thing with the other, museum and market, this is like an example that makes bridges,

Angel: we should talk a little about that, I have a friend from Isa who made a work of contemporary expressionism and he told me that it was based on the contents of Mc Evilley's work of art, I would like to read it to incorporate it, the thirteen contents of the work of art, I would like to discuss it

Abdel: but we didn't have it, we would have to get it

Fair: each content related to the form

pyche ethnographic reports

Abdel Hernández San Juan: We come from very abundant theoretical reflections prior to our beginning to talk about the exhibitions, in the previous conferences when I spoke about the philosophy of language, Peirce, the indication, and other concepts such as interpretants, ground, representatement, the referent and the way in which the independence of the meanings is created with respect to the object with the interpretants, he spoke about the problems that are posed to the visual, the indirect relationships of meaning, metonymies, synecdoche, for example when he analyzed the pieces de angel, spoke of the problems of those two forms that Barthes calls the obtuseness of a message when the information approaches zero and the possibility of encoding what that means is minimal due to the high level of entropy, when the content of something that one is seeing visually is so entropic that the possibility one has of decoding a meaning as something more or less measurable is almost zero, and I posed as a challenge for these next conferences in which we have gone from the previous theoretical ones to talking about practical forms of art, keep my presentation as minimally interpretive as possible, offer a kind of description without involving my theorizing and interpretation to ask you and discuss together then what you think if you believe that these are hermetic samples or on the contrary entropic so as not to condition the interpretation and let what you really interpret come out

    That is to say, we have on one side the word from the dictionary that you are looking for and it has a precise meaning, we ask ourselves semantically what the meaning means when you cannot grasp it visually, unlike the words in the dictionary because they are created those ellipses in which the indirect relationships of meaning never close the meaning as the word table closes around the referent table, he said that in the visual, in the iconic it becomes more complex and difficult, in the alphabetical articulation you create bundles of relationships of meaning that begin to radiate links of meaning that can be metaphorical or metonymic

   Then Just the other day he made a quite precise use of the word metonymy in a new context, these translations of meaning evoke but do not mean, in the field of the visual when the alphabetical text that generally helps the visual image does not intervene. dichotomy of the entropic degree of the zero degree of not being able to decode become greater, and on the opposite side to the entropic I placed the hermetic which is very closed, one is that it is interpreted in such an open way that it can be interpreted in so many ways that you no longer know What the meaning is becomes entropic, the opposite is the hermetic, where it is no longer that many interpretations can be sustained and it is nullified by multiple possibilities, but it is nullified because there is no access, it is like a closed vault, there is no entrance, the same exposition that we discussed in the last meeting, my question was, do you think it is a hermetic exposition? And certainly, despite being hermetic, we saw that it is interpretable, but we saw that it was fascinating, but we had to work hard to reach a certain elucidation. , I am very interested in this topic, when the relationships of meaning are hermetic and there is no access to the code, how to interpret.

   Today we are going to talk about another exhibition, perhaps less hermetic than the previous one, but in this case I think that the meaning is not that it is inaccessible as in a vault for which you do not have the code, where the code is as in the language of the deaf. dumb one needs the code to decode but in this case there is code but the code is stratified in many layers, let's discuss it

The exhibition is called ethnographic reports of pyche, pyche of the human pyche, and also of the Greek goddess, there is a Greek goddess called pyche

Let us remember that we are facing exhibitions that were commissioned under a thematic guideline, a call as if we decided now to work on a theme, let's make a cultural production and a set of exhibitions to work on that theme, and here the theme was the relationship between art and social sciences. and with more emphasis the relationship between art and anthropology

She is a female artist, born in Venezuela, she emigrated to the United States when she was twenty, her father is Armenian, her mother is American, she is married to an Italian cardiologist.

Fair: Has a complex identity

laughter, laughter, laughter

Justo: This is the thing about the pyche with that identity

laughter, laughter

Abdel: A very relevant element of the exhibition is that the entire gallery from the floor level to the ceiling level is lined with a kind of velvet or velvety suede of a dark mahogany color, you know what fabric I am referring to, which shines through. On the one hand, she covered everything with it, I believe that it has components of psychoanalysis, then we are going to analyze it, she annulled the gallery, she annulled the code of the white walls that are there preconceived by conventions to present a work of art, and she covered that in a way that could perhaps metonymically suggest theater walls, that fabric is used in theaters, in cinemas, in palaces.

Angel: Like an animal

Abdel: It is used in certain types of colonial furniture and in certain types of social parties, etc. She lined the gallery with that fabric and all of her works are articulated in the exhibition space around this fabric, but in different and different ways. specific each one, when the viewer enters and goes up the stairs, the first work is six wooden frames with a mat in each of which she put in each one a collage that she made with postcards, the kind that are used to send a letter or Christmas or for a birthday, which on the one hand have an artistic image and on the other a sender or recipient, are postcards that she has been buying in different museums throughout her travels, the images all have to do with the ancient Greek culture, she took several postcards and made a collage, they are ancient Greek paintings but cut out and rearticulated like a collage, there what seem to be naked women's bodies, to each of these little frames she put a silk cloth that she dyed with tea, semi-transparent, it looks like a light pink, on that card she wrote a poem in calligraphy with her own hands for each square, her poems are very subjective, very symbolist, a little surreal, but above all related to subjectivity , you go up the stairs and the first work is mounted on the fabric that upholsters

   The gallery is like this, -explanation with the hands of the shape of the gallery--, when you go to the back of the first hallway on the right, she took off the fabric from underneath and put a little table on it as if it were a tablecloth with a cup of coffee

  The next one is a chair placed facing the wall against the wall, facing the wall, close, but she covered it, throughout her life every time she has cut her hair she has kept it and grabbed all that collected hair and he covered the chair with that hair, then on the wall at the height of a spectator he sewed a cloth and there he wrote another poem about it.

  Moving through that hallway in the back hallway, she put there one hundred frames with the same width and the same depth, that is, each one is square, inside it has a mat, it is a frame with glass and mat, on only one side you can see the work. , has a depth, and the piece is seen from one side

Fair: Like a wooden box?

Angel: Is the painting in the background?

Abdel: No, the painting is close to the glass, she cut the mat with mirrors, the mat is the margin that she made here with mirrors

Fair: The diaphragm

Abdel: She made that space between the wooden frame and the beginning of the edges of the work with mirrors and inside they are again like in the first colleges that she made of travel postcards from Greek mythology, so she has a hundred waxed paintings by out

Angel: And what is it that pricks inside?

Abdel: Inside are Greek postcards, and here there are no poems, here what there is is a display case on the floor, they are different from each other, of course each collage is different, the display case is one of those in a museum where the documents and documentary material are displayed, In a glass display case, the only thing there is is a text written in large, three-dimensional letters and it says Psyche traveled to the underworld.

   You keep walking and you have the next piece in the corner where he put a pedestal of those white ones for sculptures and put a mirror mask on top

   On the next wall she grabbed some rag dolls from her Armenian grandmother that represented her relationship with her husband, her mother and father. They are rag dolls made in the Armenian tradition, she pinned them to the wall as a couple. held hands, put a braid of grandmother's hair

   The last wall that we have left she grabbed and pulled some kind of colored ribbons at both ends as diagonals delimiting the area. On the wall she placed a series of objects that are gifts that have been given to her throughout her life. women friends of hers from Texas, and on the floor she threw thousands of travel postcards but in this case they were piled up lying on the floor with some glasses of wine

Angel: What wine?

Abdel: Cabernet I guess.

Laughter, laughter, laughter

Just: Hermeticism

Laughter, laughter

Just: The identity

Angel: Identity and memory, there is something affective and nostalgic, the poems, there is something poetic too, the collages, the postcards, the chair covered with hair, there is something affective in it, the human condition

Fair: The affective, the affection

Abdel: Affect, affectivity, identity, memory, affection

Fair: Lining the gallery, galleries are almost always the spaces of the institution, sometimes a space between works always works for the work, but it is impersonal, a space that no one pays attention to in the traditional gallery, but here it makes a I completely unmark it, erase everything, here in this sample there is no space where you are not connecting with sensitivity, in relation to the texture and that sensation, here the entire space is me, that is what the sample says, there is no nothing that is not me in front of you, and that superlativizes the idea of ​​his sensitivity, it is a sensitive claim, his being, it is a sensational, intimate portrait.

Angel: Intimate and from the soul, sincere. A confession of his story.

Abdel: But in relation to identity and memory, and that identity and that memory would you see it as something exclusively of your individual personal biographical identity or would you see a sense of cultural identity in it?

Angel: The cultural identity too, the Armenian doll, Armenian, has part of her culture there, but she is an emigrant.

Abdel: Armenia, and his family is also an immigrant

Fair: Where is she from?

Abdel: She was born in Venezuela, her father and Armenian grandparents emigrated to Venezuela, she to the United States

Angel: And the titles of the works?

Abdel: They don't have a title.

Justo: The title of the exhibition

Abdel: Ethnographic reports from pyche

Justo: I see it, I don't see it with the cultural slingshot but rather towards it, towards the individual person.

Abdel: His biography?

    I think that the Greek component cannot be avoided, it is in the postcards that there are hundreds with two works dedicated to it and it is in the title, there is the question, let's say, of how to think about the relevance of the ancient Greek world in the contemporary world, for that matter. Yes, the great Greek thinkers have been preserved in contemporary thought, but it remains a curiosity of the past, but it is difficult to say in what way Greek culture is alive within the contemporary one, for example Christianity, if it is notable that it is current in almost all the structures that the contemporary family has around what is forbidden, what is not right, the sense of what is sinful, what purity and goodness, or evil, are, our sense of these things has a structure completely Christian, even in our own parents, even when they are communists, beyond the ideology, the structure is at what time do you let the female daughter go out? What is a transgression for you? The meaning of sacrifice, for example, totally Christian, all these things are valid in today's society, our parents are crossed by parameters that Christianity established

Fair: Morality

Abdel: Morality is completely Christian, in our morality there is almost nothing in it that is not Christian, it has changed as a result of the secularization process, but the basis of our morality and our ethics is Christian, but Christianity is the replacement of ancient world, it comes from cultures that were slaves that came from below from the offspring, and it was the religion that ended up imposing itself, Greek Christians, it is also called Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman Catholicism, the conception of Christian Catholicism has many Roman elements, there would be We have to study it in the anthropology of religion, but there is a follower of Freud, a little speculative, but he works on the idea that Greek culture continues in our culture through archetypes, Jung, has worked a lot on Greek mythology, in a way peculiar, unlike the historians of antiquity, has examined how certain Greek logical parameters are present in contemporary culture, then for example the same structure of eros, eros and civilization, eros is a decisive component in contemporary culture through of archetypes, the Greeks had the god eros, of eroticism, and Marcuse says that eros and civilization are the same thing, you have the eros of the girl even in the field, eros was a Greek god, eroticism, they had gods for everything the Greeks, the god of love, Greek painting in itself is very allegorical to Greek mythology, almost all Greek painters are allegorical. Then there is a sense of the feminine in your sample

Fair: Yes, I also see that the exhibition always focuses on women, but obviously the discourse is the femininity of the discourse, it is self-referential about her, I see it that way because there are her poems, which would be interesting what those poems say.

Abdel: they are very subjective

Angel: Cold

Abdel: Did you have a relationship with Fridda? It would be memory, identity, effectiveness focused from the biographical, autobiographical intimacy.

Justo: Since there are not so many women in art, one thinks of fridda, but it is the feminine, the woman in general, I see the possibility of a reading that goes from everything that is institutional to the intimate personal, through the transformation of space that turns it into her self, deconstructing the space as an institution, making it so tactile, so personal, it speaks to me a lot about how she wants to know herself as a being, she is attracting towards her interiority, the attraction is to her sensitivity, to an introspection.

Abdel: And how do we connect that with the theme?

Fair: She has an identity problem that is drawing attention to it, as she can be multiple.

Abdel: Her introspection, the search for personal identity and individual, non-collective memory, but through individual experience, reflects on cultural identity.

Fair: I see it more towards her than towards culture, or society, this type of language is as hermetic as a human being is hermetic is intimacy.

Abdel: I call what you are saying self-ethnography. When we were in the process of producing and making the exhibition, since the topic was the relationship between art and social sciences, with an emphasis on anthropology, I thought about the idea of ​​a self-ethnography, which clearly passes through a psychology in the sense of the micro-individual, would be through the individual of psychology, but a self is not a self, it is not in the sense of an autoethnography, because the idea of ​​self passes through Self-awareness and self-awareness is very representational, it presupposes a separation between the plane of consciousness that reflects, consciousness of consciousness, and the reflected plane, the self is finer and more interior to the being.

Just: I see myself see

Abdel: Exactly, a form of return to the self or self-view that is less representational than self-consciousness, which is more representational. The latter assumes that it is separated from the world because it is a material world and in that sense it reflects more representationally what is implicit in it. repetition, on the other hand, the ideal of the self achieves more of what we are talking about

   The self is a very important word in English as much as the self is or the ego is, the self is the certainty of being oneself, the idea that one coincides with oneself and that one is something towards oneself, what Leibnis called the monad, which is that unity from which we look at the world from that interiority coinciding with itself and always interior to our subjectivity, the one in front of the multiple, the self-absorbed inside of something that is one in front of the multiple, and Faced with the external, the self overshadows that coincidence, no matter how much you change in life, but you are you, the self is the most invariable thing in the personality of the individual, the ego is self-esteem, it is the confirmation in others of ourselves. and to comfort one can overestimate or have self-esteem problems, and the self that does not exist in Spanish, Hegel said that there are words that do not exist in German, is another well-defined area of ​​our interiority and subjectivity.

  It is like the funnel or the sieve, it is what makes the light pass from one side to the other, it filters something, it is something that we have that makes us translate the external to the internal and vice versa, we have internal things but they are external like language, the language is yours, you express only from yourself what you want to say, but at the same time you learned it and it was already formed culturally, and it coincides with what others speak, so in some way it is something that is a way in which the external component of culture is present in you but at the same time from you it is something internal and individual in which you express yourself, you express what you want to say about your being, but at the same time you learned it, it is a component external culture

Another boy: The language is completely collective

Abdel: But you can give it your own form in the sense

   But there are other ways of this relationship, we internalize the social world, the world of others and we externalize the internal world outwards, the first is to internalize and individuate, the second is to socialize, the process of translating from the inside to the outside and vice versa, the extrinsic becomes intrinsic, and the internal becomes external, that translation is done by the self and that is what our self consists of, it is not only composed of that funnel but also of an accumulation in which these processes are stored as if in a memory. They archive and that archive makes up the experience and the heritage, the experience and the heritage are nothing other than our self, they form one and the same thing with our self, if we did not have a self, what is extrinsic to the experience could not happen to us. to be one with our individual interiority, the things that we have been experiencing outside become inside, that is our self, on the other hand we do not have that experience before us all the time, it is not at the same time all the time in front of us , it is like saved, we go to it because some we go to it because some activates in us to call it or visit it as an aspect of the experience, this is done in us by our self, neither our ego nor our ego does it, it is done by our self. .

Boy: The papers that are stuck on the furniture to cover them are capable, there are machines that are programmed in the computer as different capable, the history of a culture in memory is capable, culture is transmitted capable and goes away valuing as you see how capable

Abdel: You have a different accumulated experience than mine, and that experience is a heritage, what is the difference between experience and heritage? The heritage is more selective than the experience, it is more like a hidden treasure, the heritage is active when you have to make friends with others, you have the heritage of the city of Havana, you meet a person who does not know Havana, and that person does not have the heritage that you have, and so it happens with everything, if you like it music or books are experiences that you have accumulated, but it is not compatible with your mother who has another profession and does not have your heritage.

  The self is made up of individuating the external and socializing the internal and from the accumulation that results from this, that accumulation is one with the self, the external of the experience becomes internal in the self, that world of internalized ideality. It makes up the identity, if now all the elements of my experience were activated it could not be relevant to the situation, there is a relevance here, specific to the situation between us, the relevance of that situation encodes the way of visiting the experience and the heritage, I am not going to talk here now about a house on the beach

   One side is passive and the other active, a passive memory that we don't go to all the time and another active, it is linked to the memory by the memory.

  Unlike the self, which is the same, the self is that which changes in us, although it is our own identity but it is not the self, it is the part of our identity that is permeated with things all the time, it reflects our variations, the our permeability with things with the external world that permeates us and transforms us and becomes identity

  The similarity to self-awareness is that in the self we also return to ourselves, we go through self-awareness to reach the self, but it is not necessary to travel the entire path of self-awareness, the self is absolutely singular and is linked to personal identity, that is a decisive and autonomous component of subjectivity

   So I called it self ethnography, which has very novel implications for anthropology because this had never been raised before, seeing the problems of cultural analysis and reflection or on culture through the self is something truly original, but all this is a theorization. Mine, we are going beyond what we are seeing, what Bretch said that a work is always what it is and what it wants to be, with theory one goes further

Boy: Elio said that the work did not convey anything. Don't beat your head, the work doesn't convey anything.

Abdel: the exhibition does not solve this problem or even thematize it

Fair: does she mutilate the figures?

Abdel: he doesn't mutilate them, he cuts them out and pastes them, it's the Jungian question

It cannot be avoided because it is in the title and it is in the visual images, there is something like an asymmetry in the sample: fifty percent is dominated by the Greek theme and fifty percent by the personal theme. We cannot forget that the postcards are from travel. They are postcards sent by mail,

Just: you have to read the poems

Abdel: They are very feminine, very personal, symbolic and subjective, I consider that the exhibition has an important surrealist component, that is why I tell you that the components of surrealism well geared can be very stronger than conceptualism. Surrealism is very powerful, although the question of intervening in the gallery is very conceptual, it does it in a way that seems surreal, but the idea of ​​working the gallery as a code is very typical of conceptualism although conceptualism did it at the same time by emptying the gallery, leaving it empty

Right: Here there is a void, the gallery content is emptied to make it intimate

Abdel: Conceptualism leaves the gallery at zero, it is the conceptual paradigm, the idea of ​​the white cube as a concept, is like the idea of ​​the margin, that the passe-partout is the code, in a book the margins and notes are as important as the content

Boy: Angel made an exhibition with nothing and a text that said there is nothing due to lack of idea

Abdel: Studies have been done on those types of dimensions that seem neutral that create the internal guidelines of the discourse, it is emphasized that they are not simply additions but that they have great importance as margins in the meaning, architexts, peritexts, when surrounding a text of an archipelago of external elements, halls, prologue, the margins participate in the unity, it is like what made silence is the opposite of sound, which is non-sound

   You draw attention to the sound, it is sound because it is not silence, and conversely it is silence because it is not sound but that is how they need each other, silence needs sound to be silence and conversely, they are opposites but they need each other, a father is a father because there is a son but if you remove the son he is no longer a father, it is the opposite but he participates in the identity of what he is otherwise it cannot be identity

   And in that sense the margin that apparently is the non-text leads us to think that there is no identity of what the text is without its margins.

Fair: It is not an anthropology about an external fact, but rather it is a filter that has passed through its vital elements, in different vital references that it filters and that is like its own meaning thinking about the anthropological meaning.

Abdel: Exactly, through her

Justo: She takes herself as a filter for anthropological study

Abdel: Exactly, architexts, peritexts, enter this exhibition to participate in the meaning, unlike conceptualism where the work with that neutral element is generally loaded with conceptual meaning, here she has that recoding of the gallery space to dismantle it and make with that something in which she can speak another discourse, as if the viewer had to enter directly into her interiority and her culture.

Angel: Does the coffee cup have coffee?

Abdel: I think so, that is the only part where the upholstery fabric is removed and turned into a tablecloth, and there he put the tax.

Angel: for me it is the soul

Abdel: If you believe that the soul is also in it, that is interesting, do you see existential components in it?

Angel: It's very sincere, it's like something raw

Abdel: Her friends from Texas, there is a lot with the idea of ​​memory and collecting things.

Fair: There is something to bring up, what you said about selective memory is a bit egotistical as well.

Abdel: She gave it a certain relevance in the dialogues that she had with me during the process of creating the exhibition to eros, she spoke of psyche and eros as an inseparable relationship.

Just: Raise the window, read the poem, this is eros

Abdel: She said that pyche and eros were like a couple, that they had a relationship like a couple, I agree that the element of eros is not very visible in the exhibition, but the ideas are naked

Justo: It is always like naked

Abdel: In Jung's sense, she was very Jungian, she was interested in archetypes, she believed in it, Greek eros, our eros, Greek pyche our ysuche, not me, I was Lacanian and post-Lacanian from then on, not Jungian, but I listened to her.

Angel: In this type of exhibition one could also go the other way, interpret it in different ways justifying completely different topics from what we have talked about.

Abdel: The mirror for example, we could go towards the mirror and its symbolism, it is in the mirror mask, it is in the diaphragms or mats, it is a complex exhibition, as I said at the beginning, the Greek thing is very stratified, it has the mirrors for the other side

Boy: You can't avoid plastic, it's always plastic in your work.

Justo: Every work speaks of the discourse of itself and of art, anthropology, culture is what we focus on here, but there is also art, Greek art, elements of the art institution, the lined gallery, the chair, but I would love to know What would the winemaker on the corner think listening to all this?

The Market from here: mise in scene and experimental ethnography

Visualization of images in field work

Abdel: I would like to follow more or less the same criteria as with the other exhibitions so that we can have a bit of the perspective that a hypothetical viewer would have in the sense of the way of discussing the exhibition, that is, a way that is neutral enough for him to that we are going to put into discussion is in some way similar in its bases to what would universally be what any viewer would confront, since when we were seeing the images of the field work it was giving you some previous elements that give you information that in reality If we follow the criteria of the other exhibitions we would have to see it from within the work as a space because that is something that happened before and outside in those images, how it is inside the work is what interests us now.

Fair: it is a work of social sciences.

Abdel: I really came to consider it as a work of social sciences, as a work of anthropology although it is done in media and with formal, material and language resources that are not typical of anthropology but rather of the art of installation or installationism in art, in that sense of the media and visual, aesthetic, material resources, we could say that it is hybrid not in the sense that Canclini uses the term hybrids to refer to cultural identity problems but in the sense of what They are called mixtures of techniques, on the one hand I conceived it, designed it and composed it as a museography, displayed for the purposes of whoever sees it in the same way that one goes through a museography in an anthropology museum that is showing you something as it can. be a culture, a society or a people, where you have a text that gives you elements and you see images that are being museographed, in anthropology museums about a specific culture.

   So you have display cases, texts explaining about that culture, photos of the culture, it is there from its entrance to its exit, I designed it like an anthropology museum in terms of the way the text is related to the image and the way the The viewer understands why he is seeing all that and what the didactic guide is that refers him to that culture, a museography of anthropology.

    But on the other hand, it is not exactly an anthropology museum because in these we say that the elements that are used to display written and visual texts about cultures and peoples generally resort to neutral resources in the same way that we talk about Surpik, for example. For example, the wall as a neutral code where what is required of it is the necessary condition as a neutral code to show something.

  In the case of these museums, they use display cases, certain lighting that is manipulated, point light, diffused light, a certain staging is created with certain aesthetic elements as well, the typography, the size of the display cases, whether they are suspended or whether they are lying display cases. , as the point light on the objects is defined, that is, there is also an aesthetic staging work in these anthropology museums.

   But the elements used are minimal, they are only light, way of placing objects, way of placing objects, size, way of placing light, setting a point, use of shelves, use of pedestals, ways of placing the text .

  A small text located below the visual image is not the same museographically as a large text that covers the entire wall, but in this case let's say that the resources, although they retain the text-image relationship parameters typical of how it is shown in a museum of anthropology in some way this neutrality is also transgressed because the possibilities offered by the language of the installation are used to make the mise-en-scène richer and obtain from the viewer something more than simply the presentation to him of an exogenous reality with which he does not It is not going to come into contact in any way, as something that is going to be presented to it in a cold, distant way with which it has no connection.

   This case requires from the viewer a way of getting involved with what is being shown that can even go so far as to summon their sensoriality, because this type of market on which this work is based, its theme and its problem are in themselves very multisensory.

   There is, for example, a very typical scene in these markets in which you have a pacillo, Venezuelan markets, they are urban markets, contemporary urban markets of Venezuelan popular culture, you have a pacillo, let's say through which you begin to travel, then you have goods to the left and merchandise on the right, but the places where the merchandise is shown to you are like types of niches, each seller has a niche in which he has his merchandise inside but also has display outside the niche or more precisely around his entrance.

   At the entrance to each niche outwards there is a display of merchandise through ways that we study such as hooking or hanging from, cooking, they use the element of air a lot, suspending something in the air, and looking for ways that suspension in the air can generate ways to present things, to generate languages ​​of display, and so there are backpacks, things that hang, toys, and then there is also a language on surfaces such as presentation-type tables.

  In this one, which I tell you, is very multisensory, there is no actual merchandise on a canvas directly on the floor, here the merchandise is on little tables, but specifically you are walking through a hallway, you have niches on the left and right, you have an arch above that It makes the roof and it is completely covered in merchandise from the floor to the ceiling and it covers you completely.

   This is a completely multi-sensory market, you turn here and you have toys, you turn there and you have colors, and sound.

  In general, the popular markets are very loud, first because music is sold in them, and then because the criers are constantly ringing, and the shouting is a sound typical of the market chichhhhhhhaaaaaaaaa, I have chicchhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaa one that is close another that is far away depending on what are selling, they proclaim it as if with a song at the end.

   Then you also have the sound of the animals huuuuu triiiiiii, because when there are food markets there are animals, you feel the noises of the animals.

  In addition to the fact that in these markets there are many dialogues, that is, people talk, there is a constant murmur, each seller is talking to the buyers with whom he is interacting at that moment and there are thousands of them at the same time, and dialogic situations are generated around of the logic of barter.

   There are two scenes that are central in the market, one is walking and looking, the buyer is like deciding what he is going to buy and where he is going to go, which is followed by the seller who is trying to catch the buyer. , it is a scene of mutual seduction, but then there is the moment of engagement, which is the moment where everything that comes towards the barter takes place when the transaction of the purchase of the product and the price is going to be reached.

   There is a situation there with time, a timing, a competition, the person who is selling is going to buy something here but they would buy it from others so it is always on the verge of being bought but it can change, so they generate dialogues sometimes about the merchandise but sometimes about other things, some who come here to buy come talking about something and when they arrive the seller enters the dialogue and talks about things that have nothing to do with the merchandise, All this generates a sound.

   So this work, unlike a traditional anthropology museum, includes a professional sound studio from the markets, very well-made recordings, I mean we immersed ourselves in depth and did a sound survey, which was very interesting because it elaiza, and that's why I wanted work with a theater team and I invited them to participate in my work, she is a film and theater producer and is used to that kind of thing.

   In plays or movies, when they have to fictionalize a little square, for example, the little squares of the housewives of the 15th century, they have to look for all the exact little sounds, bring the exact utensils that were used.

   It was a fascinating experience because she actually got with me to see how all the little sounds could be found, and we started a splendid recording, and she had great experience in it, specific sounds, general sounds and with that we made an editing mix, a sound Constantly within the work in the work you feel criers, animals, murmurs, people talking, the passage behind the buses puuuuuuuuuu, you feel the forklift drivers from behind putting boxes, or sacks.

  Then from the aromatic point of view the work transgresses all the principles of a museum, it has a general conception of smell within the work.

   That first thing that you saw from the outside that you asked me what that is, what happens is the following, the example that I gave you of the type of market is a market adhered to an architecture that the sellers have rearranged, refunctionalized, resemantized but in reality The largest number of markets, which make up the urban grammar of these markets, are self-built, they are not reuses or refunctionalizations, but rather they are completely self-built, and they are generally deployed on the street, not in the architecture.

   In those that are about architecture, what I explained before about the pacillo, the arch, the niches happens, but that was not the one I focused on.

     There are several types of markets that I have studied well, there is one, for example the small town market that you arrive at, they are some portals where the merchandise is displayed, but suddenly it coincides that here is the merchandise and here is the car that is parked and it includes the pedestrian who passes between them and through the doorways, it includes the one who parks the car and gets out for a moment to see what is there.

   But of all the type of market that governs is the one that I tell you where the seller does everything, assembles the tube system, builds the structure, ties himself to it, conceives how to tie it and manages to make something that is resistant to rain, wind, any weather challenge, something that has to withstand a month outdoors, is something that has to have strength and in this sense, very inventive construction systems have been generated, where the predominant material is nylon, not nylon that is used to sell loose fast food or bags, but a strong double-traction nylon that is still transparent, but not completely, which has a thickness, canvas and vinyl are used a lot, but nylon more because it is a more wholesale material, more in bulk, it is more economical, it comes in coils, and it is cheaper, and it is also very good for rain because it is synthetic, it is polyethylene and it completely avoids rain.

    So we decided after a series of analyzes about how to do the work that we should do it in nylon, as if it were a construction.

  The work has that ambiguity, it is made as if it were a market with the same materials, structures and ways of obtaining that a market manages to establish itself in a place, resist and co-invest in a walkable, roofed, rain-resistant interior, with a crossroads. , with roads, powerful so that those who are there can live there and settle there, but at the same time it is a museum, a museography, so the work has that duality we could say, on the one hand it is made like a market and on the other side is designed as an anthropological museum of the markets.

   I told you that it measures nine meters by nine meters, it is made based on the principle of a crossroads, meeting of paths, people can turn in one direction or another at crossroads, the idea of ​​a crossroads, turn right or left. , meeting of paths, we designed it that way, we articulated it on tubes, a system of tubes with clamps, those tubes once we put the structure to support the plastic, we put wood tied with wires to the iron tubes that make the structure.

    So I folded that wood, prepackaged all the plastic, and then we conceived a floor of old wood, a floor to which you climb, a floor about fifty cm away, a floor of reused old wood, then I go to the work, I'm going to position myself. in the viewer's perspective.

   You enter the work by lifting a piece of plastic, the first room is made with the same plastic, it is a room closed on itself from there you still do not have access to the rest of the spaces, the route is a small room that is like the introduction of the work, what is here is a display of black and white photographs mounted on plastic, plastic is the material used in the work is walls and is support

Fair: it is the support

Abdel: it is the support like saying the fabric

Fair: not in this case it would be the gallery wall, the plastic is the replacement for the gallery wall

Abdel: It is both, it is a gallery wall and it is a fabric.

Just: and it's the picture

Abdel: Both things, sometimes it is a wall, sometimes it is a support, and everything happens in it, and through it you can see everything because since it is semi-transparent, so we dyed it, we gave it an asphalt dye as a way of exploring a kind of sepia, no. like something thick that covers, but rather it follows the transparency but we wanted to remove that raw transparency, something like that didn't seem completely transparent to us, we gave it a kind of tone that goes to sepia so in this first room what you have is a display of photographs taken in the markets, shocking, dramatic, strong, very focused on the human being, on two things, on the human being and also on the polyphony in the multivocality, in the heteroglottic plurality of the market, that is, what you I was talking before, the market is not a single perspective, the market is never a single point of view, the market is a constant succession of points of view, the idea is created that a single point of view cancels itself out, they are like many Sometimes, that thing as heteroglottic that means many voices, this, but now on a visual level, to some images that are taken as well as from above where you first see how to say Peter Brueguel with hundreds of thousands of people, they are realistic photos of the real market It's not like in the Middle Ages in Brueguel, but you see things as tingling because of the amount of people that move, the mobility that exists in these markets, the density of movements, there are like two or three of that type, where You see where the markets are, you see the construction systems in large numbers of human beings on the move, you see the forklift drivers passing by, they are like generals, then there are other more detailed ones about certain things, for example guys, a platform arrives of pullovers with graphic things lying on the platform and the sellers standing on top of the merchandise hawking them, selling them, I mean there are a series of photos from very general to very close, there are very close images of the forklift drivers as if you are here and suddenly some forklift drivers come at you and They pass you very close and surprise you with the camera, a photo in front of the forklift driver at that moment when he almost touches you, and there is an introductory text that is the one that opens the work, it is a philosophical and anthropological text of mine about the markets on What I was telling you, in that text I talk about heteroglossia, the polyphony of the market, the cancellation of the point of view and I reflect a little on my dilemmas as an observer within the market, that is, I am an observer who is within the markets, moving within them. but at the same time he came to the paradoxical conclusion that the market is the very negation of omniscient observation, of the observation that the idea that I am an authorized observer or equipped with a neutral objectivity who can really grasp the totality of the market is denied by the market so I play with that a bit from the point of view of subjectivity, that is, on the one hand I relativize my own situation of being a participant observer and say that I am rather an observed observer and that in that situation of being an observer observed I cannot have that distance so I do a kind of reflective and at the same time empirical revisiting of the different moments of the market there I talk about the market of the Sunday square of the 15th century the perspectives of the English and Dutch foreigners who represent the Sunday square the meeting in the market as a place of concurrence in the 15th century and the difference between the perspective of traveling strangers and local customs, I make a reconstruction and move from the medieval market here, to the classical market, to the modern one to the current one. , advertising, the stoppage of images, that very modern contemporary capitalist neoliberal market, the text covers all of this, but it is a bit like a kind of anthropology ethnography descended into my bodily experience in the markets.

You leave that room with what I call stagings, which are exactly, they are stagings. What I was going to stage was a museography in the sense of an anthropology museum, but I knew that that museography could not be a museography. usual had to be another concept of museography and the idea that occurred to me was the concept of staging.

  In the theater you stage a text, a script, a pre-established script, you bring it to the stage, you place the environments, you define the period, you put the appropriate furniture, you distribute the characters, the concept of staging is also used in anthropology but in a different way it is used to say the staging of field work, that is, you did field work but you are no longer in the field work, that was an experience that you had but then you have a third party, an audience or audience to which you are going to talk about the experience and you are going to stage what the field work was, in the anthropology museum what is done is to stage an empirical work with a museography about a culture, but In this case, what is going to happen with the deployment of the cultural image is going to alter the usual parameters of what a cultural reality is, starting with the fact that what is going to be presented is a market, which is the opposite of what is going to be representation, you are going to represent a market but the market is the same, the denial of representation, I mean what I am doing is going to happen to us as subjects that we are going to represent, that is focused from the beginning but then it is what will govern the entire work, the criticism of the representation, and in the end it is a criticism of ourselves as apparent representatives

 So what begins from here is a circuit in which you will find yourself supposedly on stage, the first staging is relative to the universe of vendors who live on the street, people who sleep where they sell, people who itinera, they are given a piece of territory, and they throw a tarp on the floor and there they put the merchandise, at the entrance to the subways on the boulevards, sometimes they are given an area, but then they stay to live there, then They have to have utensils, things for their life, to wash their mouth, to sleep, so we staged this, there they call him a peddler in Venezuela, he is what here would be called a merolico, but the merolico here since this is socialism does not reach to live in the street, the peddler does live on the street there, the peddler is like a merolico but he lives in the street, he lives there, that's what he feeds on and lives,

Justo: The market is your home

Abdel: a recreation of the universe of the sellers who live in the market, the following staging is inspired, based, recreates and is a background investigation into the world of the sellers of medicinal plants, the herbalists who sell knowledge for both healing physical as well as spiritual, here the religious elements are united with the physiological ones, here the herb marjoram is united that helps you or for such a thing on the skin, here the ointments and lotions are united with the little bottles of essences with the medicinal plants and with the images of religion, here is the vignette of images of the Christian religion, the Virgin Mary, Saint Francis, the different saints of the Christian religion on stamps made with a certain visual invoice that are for sale, here is the plaster figurine of Christ the plaster figurine of the Virgin Mary, the stamps have a certain serial character seriality a more serial character more pop not because they are pop they are from the church but in the sense that they are already industrially pre-made, the plaster works too They are serialized, they are figures that are already molded in plaster that are sold as molds, and they are sold as for example Christ and the Virgin Mary to hybrid saints typical of Venezuelan culture such as for example black first the doctor the doctor of the poor a white doctor who was a doctor and was sanctified recognized by the church José Gregorio Hernández, María Teresa de calcultra characters from popular culture who have been sanctified and recognized by the church, in this same room what governs is Christianity because it is what governs In these popular markets and in general in contemporary Venezuela, but Venezuelan culture has a strong Amerindian component, there are several important indigenous Amerindian tribes, that is, indigenous people who speak different languages, the Yanomami, the Wayues, the Añis, the Baris. The Yuxpas, who are tribes that have their communities, some more isolated and others more integrated, for example the Wayues live on the border with Colombia, have become quite acclimatized to the modern economy but they still have their languages, their languages, their fabrics and they continue to wear makeup. Since they put on makeup, then these markets are not properly Amerindian markets, we did not do this work based on Amerindian markets, but certain elements of Amerindian culture come to these markets, which are distributed in them, so there were things like certain ointments, In the herbs there are many indigenous things, cachicamo carapace, elements of Amerindian culture, casabe, corn, and then there is also, although less strong because Venezuela is in no way a black country like Brazil or Cuba can be, but although less fortunate There are some black things especially on the northern coast of the Caribbean, not much but there is and there are Elegua and Obatala

Fair: A syncretism

Abdel: But not as strong, much weaker and scarce, incomparable with black countries like Brazil or Cuba, but if they have something, they have the Caribbean, we put some necklaces with the image of Ogun with his cauldron, something about Elegua, a necklace, something to obbatala, a necklace

The Virgin Mary is six times large and small on stamps, she is about a thousand times and there are about twenty Christs in the work.

A lo Africano solo le dedicamos dos altarcitos

Fair: They bought all those elements

Abdel: We bought many things, others were given to us by sellers, others through Elaiza, the theater production company.

Fair: and this piece of yours had no sales function

Abdel: no, but it's full of fifty percent discount signs.

Fair: No but I say the action itself sell and buy there really

Abdel: no, but it is continuously represented, that action is represented, we even made the calligraphy of the sellers, we made them as if the sellers were speaking there, the way

the way they set the prices, the lists they make, the way they make their inventories, offers, here everything is on sale, the work is full of calligraphy on materials similar to those used by them, but at the same time it has all the typography museographic

The third staging is the world of the body, jewelry, hardware, earrings, necklaces, bracelets, the fluorescent, the kitsch, the course, the buckles, clothing which is where the music speeches are, we did a staging with everyone This elements

The next staging was that of the vendors who move, they do not have a stall or a place, you do not go to him but he comes to you, he is traveling, he leaves the spatial market frames he moves All the time, the chicha sellers, the soup sellers, here are the sales of party things, the chicha is like rice pudding, it is similar but it is more ancestral, it is served with a ladle, this part has confetti, streamers, and we include the forklift drivers because although they don't go far, they move all the time

So the work also has a self-referential room where, in the same way as the introduction in the lobby discusses the theme, it has a self-referential room, it is in it where the photograph dramatizes the market and the text, but in this Yes, in this one there are some showcases where I wrote a text about the concept of representation and another about the concept of evocation, and in the showcases we displayed photographs of us in the markets, a little like the ones you saw at the beginning about us in the work of field but many more of what you see, photographs of the process of making the work, there is a model of the work, there is a kind of inventory of optical objects because as we play all the time with the concept of the impossible observer of the observed observer of multivocality and polyphony we made as a kind of museum at the same time instead of museography the culture that is observed, museography the observing culture an inventory of the observer trapped by the market, here you can see indications to the viewer of points at which he can look

And I'm missing some details, the work has some general elements, there is like a ceiling mesh and we put things in there as if stored and from that ceiling we hung with general things of interest, it as a work has a gable roof but this ceiling allows us to store and It allows us to hang things that belong to the general texture of the work, the bag, the weave of the market bag, the work plays a lot with light, it has an internal lighting system like a house, but then the light of the natural atmosphere It enters sifted through the dyed plastic. The photograph is exposed in front, but then throughout the entire work behind the plastic we put photographs that are not presented in the way we see this photo, not placed to be seen, but interspersed, like behind of, as if evoking, here is a staging of the salesman who lives on the street, behind the plastic in that part photographs of it although they are not presented at the same time from behind in a more subtle way, this happens with each scene, but only in the first room and in this self-referential room, they have the live photograph, presented to be seen

Toys, things that hang clothes, to make compartment divisions we throw like large bags, they are things that are part of the general warp of the work, but they are made in a way that works for their functionality, which helps in the division, and now

Right: it's like a big piece of machinery, it's super, what provokes me the most

Abdel: The market here is called staging and experimental ethnography

Fair: that anthropological attitude of museography of a market that basically means museography almost always deals with things that have happened in another historical moment surpassed or already extinct that becomes museographic due to the importance it had but are already disappeared, but I think that the most What is interesting about the work is that it is a museography of the opposite of something that is alive today, you are doing an anthropology of something that is alive now, that you go to the corner and it is there alive, that is what captures me the most and is most interesting of my work, it is ignoring what anthropology museography usually proposes, regarding certain things, the work of something that passes through a historicity is museological due to the temporal values ​​it has, it also happens in art, something already past is museologized, as something that is there, alive, that is not disappeared, suddenly I caught myself thinking that this would be like a question, like a thing that is there that has not disappeared, that is not the much culture that There are no longer objects, what you have left, very little, which are very valuable and must be guarded, but rather it is something that is alive and what you are doing is representing it and representing yourself as you have represented it, that attitude is what seems very very curious

Abdel: what you say coincides, it is similar to what Patricia Johnson said, she is a critic in Houston and she said that the work gave people the feeling that this human being and what they saw was not like an otherness different from them. but it eliminated that sense of otherness and what they were seeing was one with themselves, that they were not others, but that other was themselves, but he also said that markets are civic and that in them there is always the idea that a culture looks at the other, it is not the same as what you are saying but it coincides

Exactly: this idea of ​​making the ordinary extra-ordinary would be for you like the label and the attitude to make this type of work, you would even have to raise the idea that is used a lot in contemporary art, the idea that I am talking about like a re-functionalization, the work has stopped being a gallery work, the gallery is no longer an exhibition space, and you are making a gallery in the same market space where you are self-representing what you want to do all of it. the life of the market and the whole idea of ​​being and having, demand and supply as patterns of behavior of contemporary people but at the same time there is an attitude that has to do with the recovery of those anthropological actions that are like two middle vertienens contradictory but you want to make the work reality, however the work is not a market, how do I make a work that wants to get closer to reality, but I defunctionalize it, I mean I still sell things in it, rather I sell it to it than also represents another market

Abdel: It is that aspect that gives it more the character of a museum, because that feeling that the market can be real, it seems that you are in a market in which you are living, but everything is a museography. It is actually a market museum

Fair: the idea of ​​making a work in which I get closer to reality is contradictory when I am removing the basics of the idea of ​​the market to sell and buy or that enters into other types of markets.

Fair: the work was sold

Abdel: no, but I am interested in what you are saying that there is no gallery here, which is something different, that is attractive.

Fair: I am very interested in the collage that a work that left the museum that is meters away or blocks that were supposed to be in the museum but comes here to the market with museum patterns museum labels exhibition patterns

Abdel: that theme is central, the relationship between the museum and the market is central to the work, if not the main thing in it

Exactly: that's why I ask you, look at how you take the work out of the museum to insert yourself into that utopia that is inserting art into life, how to insert yourself there yet still maintaining the standards of a work that does not interact with its reality, the reality that ter presents not interacting with the public and its reality but rather remains in its representation

Abdel: they are paradoxes, in the project that I had in the museum it was interesting what was happening, there were people who wanted to do things there in the market, walk a path through the market, make the work mobile, there were others who wanted to do them in the museum, there was no one who agreed with anyone, everyone proposed something different. I liked it because it was seeing as many different possible perspectives as possible, some that were not carried out, others that have been carried out.

But what I did is unique, it is a completely specific way of solving the dilemma and approaching it, if the problem of the relationship between the museum and the market had not been at the center, it would not have been conceived nor would it have even been born as a work.

Fair: It's as if you museologize the market with everything in it, the polarization of commerce, commerce is paralyzed, the commerce to which she refers is paralyzed, everything that contrasts the letter of the markets and the letter of the museum, very much a market very museum-like

Abdel; It is like a market museum but at the same time it is a market, it is mainly a market museum but not in the traditional museum way because otherwise we would have done it inside an anthropology museum.

Fair: what's the difference, because you made it on the market

Abdel: all the props, I worked with a set designer and a theater production company, although there is no theater in it, but the staging is how props are made in the theater, fifty percent of the work is brought directly from the markets

Justo: I believe that the work paralyzes the function of the market and hegemonizes the function of the museum, that is, the museum goes to the market and establishes itself in the market, it paralyzes the market, I see it as a contradiction, the work of art is supposed to leaving its narrow cultural frame of reference and entering into life but when it reaches life it paralyzes it and in that contradiction where I feel that the analysis must be focused.

Abdel: There are two things I want to tell you: one, what you call life here is urban, here you are in contact with an urban reality, because we did not do it in neutral walls with showcases, with languages ​​of a museum, first because there is a criticism of representation in the work, the main theoretical and conceptual problem of the work is the criticism of representation, abolishing omniscient discourse, omniscient is when the one who represents is in control of everything, through the production of a fiction by means of controlling the special effects of the representation that is going to tell you this reality consists of this and my representation is the objective and authorized perspective, here that principle is reversed there is a denial that it is possible to represent the market and this enters into a discussion within ethnography that is the side of the work that is speaking towards anthropology, that is, the side of the work that is speaking towards anthropology is speaking towards anthropology in the negative, it is saying, we must review the representation, we must discuss what it is. represent a culture, given that we are considering the market, the market is the opposite of representation and therefore concepts on which the anthropological authority of the observer has been based have to come into discussion, the observer is not an omniscient observer, as In a novel the author arranges his characters, and distributes the worlds and says what is going to happen between the characters, this is called omniscience, when the author says this world is going to consist of this and I say, I say, there is no omniscience but heteroglossia, which is the denial of omniscience, of representation, what there is is multivocality, polyphony, but not in the sense that the author's voice is disseminated or fractured because this work has an author, but in the sense of that polyphony is the market itself as culture, it is not the polyphony of the characters in a novel, it is not the polyphony of Ba1tin, which is called that because there is a dialogicity of the characters who dialogue in the work according to what is said, Bakhtin analyzed Dortoyeski and said that his novel was polyphony because there is so much dialogue between the characters that the novel is then dialogized as a genre and a situation tends to occur in which the author's controlling position is affected by those dialogues, which causes the idea of ​​a unity, it could be said that there is a relationship with what Bakhtin calls dialogicity but in this case not around a fictional world created at the whim of a mimetic representation of reality divided in this case in an anthropological and urban way. through the direct relationship with a concrete social reality that is the markets, it is not the polyphony of the characters of a work, but the polyphony of a real urban cultural reality, then the reason for not placing ourselves in the museum is the reason to question representation and explore a more polyphonic possibility, it is a museum of the market but it also evokes that deconstruction of the representation of the market, it relativizes that authority, and then also because there is a criticism here also of the way in which the museum generally conceives the empirical part both the art museum as the anthropology museum, if we see them from the point of view of the art museum, it is the dilemma that you said, the market is a question that the art museum asks about the market, but in art there is a market and the work of art is part of that market

  And if we see it from the point of view of the anthropology museum, it is that the anthropology museum does not go to field work, it does not inscribe itself in the experience in culture, but it presents itself as something separate,

Fair: and that is your attitude in the work

Abdel: that is denied in the work and what is being said here is the museum should not be outside the field work but in the field work inscribed in the field work inserted in the field work it should be a staging of field work affected by experience,

Fair: inserted in the field work with its speech but inserted in the field work, it is not you take it out of your environment and put it in a display case

Abdel: but you come with the museum

Fair: you come with the museum and museumize reality is like museologizing reality,

Abdel: It is bringing the museum to field work, I put it for example in a discussion

Justo: Now I understood the key point of the matter, for me that is the main question but it had not been said

Abdel: if that is the key point, there is a discussion that I have with Malinowski because he went to live with the Trobriandese for ten years, the paradigm of the anthropologist who did do field work, but if he spent the ten years as an observer apparently neutral describing how they build the canoe, how they cut the tree, the rituals, then when they put it in the center of the village, then when they take it to the shore, then the trips to the high seas, but he is always a stranger in the situation

Fair: if I am here and the culture there, I also live with the economy of my culture

Abdel: He opens his book saying that taking the canoe to the anthropology museum is removing the canoe from its ethnographic reality, my counterpart, what I am proposing with this work, although it is true as you say that it is not a culture. that is in extinction, disappeared

Just: it is the anthropology of the here and now

Abdel or a past form of culture but rather our own contemporary urban culture would be the difference with Malinowski, but the coincidence is that what Malinowki was studying when he analyzed the manufacture of the canoe was or the trade as the Trobrianders traded the canoe was essential in that trade and thus discovered the kula, which is a ritual system of primitive economy, how the system of exchange, gifts, purchases and sales is formed within the primitive Trobriand society. Here we also have a study of trade and the market, but from our own living contemporary markets as you say and what is posed here in reversion to Malinowski is the question that he did not ask himself because he thought that bringing the canoe to the museum was removing it from its ethnographic reality, because he did not think the opposite, bringing the eye of the museum to the field work, it would not have been necessary to take the canoe to the museum and present it to a split spectator but rather it would have brought the metonymic paradoxes that it involves, in the sense in which you used in Lacan terms, that it involves the way of evoking the idea of ​​a cultural whole through a fragment of that culture, for example, a canoe exhibited in a museum is a metonymy of a culture as an absent whole, but evoked museographically so that the viewer knows about that culture metonymically, the The reading that we can obtain from culture through museum metonymies that evoke a whole is extremely attractive, except that in the museum it does not work because this split emptying of the relationship with culture, however, in field work, this metonymy can work, which can to be the eye of the museum, that is, to look at cultural reality with the eye of the museum in the field work, in situ, among the canoes, among the people, if he had noticed this he would not have conceived of himself as an observer and would have It would have occurred to him to do something with those canoes

Justo: Because he is not an installationist either.

Laughter

Abdel: It's true.

Fair: he would have to put on an installation artist costume

Another little thing that I was waiting to tell you has to do with the gaze of objects, because to see the gaze that goes to the museum to see the objects when you take them out of there and it goes to the museum, you are also making an artistic object but it is still the gaze of the scrutinizer who is observing a real phenomenon about art, is not taking into account the gaze of the same seller of that same market who, when seeing all that same phenomenon paralyzed, is not going to have a hedonistic or aesthetic perspective to enjoy those objects, he will You will feel identified, I am trying to translate the seller's look, which is assumed since you go there should be the most legitimized look, the one that one is supposed to want to be incorporated.

Abdel: The one who wants to redeem herself

Fair: this was done for the museographic view, it is a museographic view, which is supposed to incorporate your view into the view of culture, and if it includes it, we would have to see how it is.

Abdel: Yes, I did intend to include it in some way, if there was like that utopia in the work that the privileged perspective was that of the sellers,

Just: that she was seeing herself represented

Abdel: there was the idea that somehow the perspective of it is the most important, but I don't know if it will be achieved

Fair: Giving birth to the space, legitimizing its space, putting an object there but what happens is that the nature of that object does not circulate in its interests, I tell you as if I were a cart driver I see that there I see it as something strange that does not belong to me system

Abdel: But this is the same thing that has been proposed to art

Fair: the desire to insert it into life is like a click, one more aesthetic form, it is like a label that does not really consider inserting itself into the mechanism, not using the mechanism to make another work from this other cultural side, this create a little problem

Abdel: but there is a point where the dilemmas of art and anthropology coincide, because it is a dilemma for both, in the case of art we already know it has always been present and has taken various forms, there are some that have been gone in the Bretchian direction of doing a type of practice in the communities that works directly with what the people of the communities have and where they themselves are the actors, Brechtian theater, Bretch's community theater

Theater

Eugenio Barba who reaches places

Abdel: What Eugenio Barba arrives at is an interaction of surfaces, that is, there is no true immersion in the culture because the Barba actors do go to the towns and these communities, where they learn bodily things, bodily expressions, dance movements, and then they They go to the theater training setting, they elaborate those things they learned and make a play with it and then they return

Fair: it remains external

Abdel; They always remain external, it is an interaction of surfaces, more like a kind of what in English is called a deal, which is like a barter.

Just: I take and give you

Abdel: you give to me and I give to you, but we are always external. The experiences that have been most involved in cultural reality have started from a more Bretchian vision in the sense that the actors themselves are from the community, you direct a play but the actors are from the community, not here in this play this does not happen at all photography in the sense that it is a play full of photographs of the markets, but there are some things in which they gave us suggestions, in those who participated in some things

Fair: that they are not inserted into the real mechanism of culture

Abdel: no, it doesn't happen in that sense, because it should have been done there, from the moment we decided to take it out of there we were already moving away from it,

Fair: no but it was on the market

Abdel: no but I say there in the spatialities of the market, those photos that you see the beginning of us with them in the markets, we should have done the work there with them, instead of showing the photos which is what we did, we we take something from there

Fair: the piece was not made on the market

Abdel: no, it was made in Elaiza's house, in the garage of her house, then we dismantled it and took it to rice university

Fair: I always thought they had made it in the market

Abdel: no, I did field work there in the spatialities of the market, I spent years touring them and immersing myself, then with Elaiza and Fernando, but the work we did was done outside of those spatialities.

Let's look at the images again

Horizons of the critical exercises of ready made

©By Abdel Hernández San Juan

Entrance/Taking Distance

That modern and contemporary high art in its media, techniques and languages ​​developed and evolved in the tradition of European arts such as these are acquired in fine arts academies governed by classical ballet, learning the techniques of the great masters from the Greeks, including Renaissance and classical painting, to its revivals and ruptures in the arsenal of the avant-garde at the beginning of the century, cubism, abstractionism, dadaism, etc., and its post-avant-garde developments, abstract informalism, conceptualism, minimalism, can maintain a distance towards culture, making it the object of their attention in different ways, is not something new.

According to Mario de Micheli, an analysis that we share, Dadaism was already, with ready-made, photomontage and other plastic techniques, the first form of cultural criticism and the very idea of ​​an autonomy of languages ​​proper to the arts, well in its modes. of abstracting towards pure forms, abstraction, with everything to which we owe the development of our modern technologies, the fact that geometric figures could become cities, either in their ways of becoming an attitude towards it, the searches themselves in style and visual rhetoric as ways of commenting on social and cultural forms, assumed this distance.

The distance of the avant-garde towards culture, however, was still a first, although culture was estranged to become the object of either de-routinizing defamiliarizations, or of disruptive shocks towards preponderant rhetoric, or simply an object of visual attention according to various thematizations. , this did not yet become the object of an explicit awareness of the mediating function, on the one hand, and superordinate function of art in relation to culture, on the other, which did come to the fore later with conceptualism and the self-awareness of art.

   Although the process of decontextualization and re-contextualization of objects, signs and elements found in areas of daily life or society, implicit in the ready-made in its ostensible passion for demonstrating the relativism of the interpretations of these, implied, in itself, an Overordination , it is only with conceptualism that this relationship between naming and visual objects or forms becomes a field of continuous experimentation.

Naming art not only an object not understood in its ordinary form, but fragments of reality, five centimeters of earth or its simple sale on the stock market, packaging a bridge or the art museum itself, any given delimitation in the nature, or even the simple designation of a fragment of reality or nature, or of the empty exhibition gallery as a white cube, becomes the object of continuous exploration, the designative, nominalist and denotative relationship between the readymade and naming becomes a permanent critical exercise.

  The Overordination, already implicit in the read made, thus comes to the foreground, art not only contextualizes and decontextualizes, also, in its relationship with the art institution, from which it comes and which, moreover, is in the artists themselves and the works, goes and designates, goes out into nature or the city chooses, selects, names and returns, travels between a map and territories, goes in search of objects to be found or found, experiments and explores, not infrequently returning the result of these experiments to the discussion of that art institution itself.

The distance of avant-garde art from culture, of course, although it makes explicit the fine arts' own questions about the importance of educational work related to the evolution of sensitivity and spirit, which fine arts play in modernity. aesthetics towards the public, the spectators and the consumers of visual forms, does not imply a type of distance towards culture so extreme that it exempts its vitality, in avant-garde art we have our own more sensitive and humanitarian, ethical and evolved ways. of, taking distance from culture, highlighting or discussing, exalting or criticizing, mediating or bracketing, addressing, quoting or revoking, certain aspects of culture, even going so far as to redeem them.

On the relationships between art as a phenomenon of individual expression and creativity and the relationships since early modernity between art towards its interior and society and culture towards its exterior, and the different modes that the ideologies of this relationship have acquired, I have referred before in countless texts, as much as in countless texts I had referred since the eighties to the need to experience interdisciplinary relationships through art through collaboration between professional acerbs, which would return as well as artistic experimentations if they had been communicated in concrete works, with other forms of secularization, but what I had not decided to do was show how avant-garde and post-avant-garde art can, by itself, also offer various models or exemplary alternatives on how to develop and resolve this imperative of inevitable distance, on how to approach, interpret, assume or treat culture in a humanistic and sensitive way, objectified if, according to these different ways.

Although in the post-cage experimentalist impetus of our avant-garde languages, the character of a certain testing hypothesis or utopia of the possibles proper to the uniqueness of the work of art with its, until now, individual authorial world closed on itself and its factual motherhood of physical work, which characterizes the conceptual artistic laboratory, these various models or modalities offer at least alternatives for a critical exercise of the possible ones, a critical exercise that may include, as one of its professional hypothesis testing moments, the critical exercise of the relationship between the naming, which can be designating, denoting, placing quotation marks, opening questions, arranging hermeneutic horizons, and the readymade, widely developed in various forms in experimental art.

   I define the modalities that I will analyze here based on a main element, the exploration in different modes with the readymade as the predominant plastic technique, these are innovative conceptual art modalities towards the tradition of conceptual art itself of which they are part and the which they renew in terms of language and not for cultural reasons, since culture becomes in them precisely, and for what makes them exemplary, an object of attention in some, of objectification, in others, of interpretation in others.

Although in all of them it is present at the level of artistic materials, objects and elements, readymade as the main plastic technique in some, such as in the example discussed in my chapter onThe Immaterials of Lyotard at the Pompidue, different modalities of decontextualization-recontextualization are developed that range from that classic conceptual tradition of the ready made in its relationship to questions and searches from, about and with regard to the art institution, on the one hand, towards its relationship to relativism. of broader cultural criticism, that is, in its exploratory outing through the interdisciplinary conceptual art laboratory, here towards three modes of distancing towards culture, leaving open in the critical exercise of the ready-made, naming here given in the presentationality of that insite ephemeral with its coming and going to and from the art institution, the avant-garde work of art and anthropology,

On the other hand, the range of alternatives in which the few artistic forays developed outdoors move are quite narrow. On the one hand, the first and most extensive tradition in our collections is that of Land Art, specifically in its developments on natural sites selectively chosen by the artist, the references here range from the extensive fabric curtains crossing Christo's natural landscape, passing from the kilometers of lines over large areas of land developed by Walter de María or the spirals of Robert Smithson, to the tree trunks of Joseph Beuys in Kassell's Documenta.

   In this tradition of Land Art, some incursions move from entirely natural locations, towards locations in which these created artistic forms are related to elements of architecture and civil engineering, such as Christo's bridges and canvas museums, the incursions with found materials and photographs in site specifics such as those by Gordon Matta Clark in interior-exterior spaces such as staircases and patios, while others more focused on the form of the artistic element itself, derive in minimalist forms such as the metal plates of Donald Hudd or the geometric shapes by Richard Long, or those other sui generés by Sol le Wit, to name a few examples.

    Given the significance that the relationships between the work of art defined as the element that is inserted and the natural environment or natural or architectural space in which that element is defined acquires in this tradition, within Land Art the most focused incursions into a closed form on itself that, far from unfolding or disseminating, focuses on a self-defined volume, the three-dimensionality and traversability of this as contemplative forms, we have accepted more easily than others, within our technical meanings of sculpture.

    In this way, Land Art, whose emergence as an art that moved towards the outdoors did not respond in its beginnings so much to questions about sculpture, as to questions about the intense relationship between conceptualism and nominalism, dialogues and communicates with this tradition that In some of its ways it accepts or which, according to certain requirements, it accepts, which comes from traditional sculpture to the outdoors.
    Sculpture as a traditional technique in fine arts moved towards the outdoors in precise forms.

    Or it is a sculptural work that, due to its metal or stone materials, for example, is resistant to rain, oxidation and other effects of potential deterioration, which, conceived under the same parameters as a sculpture for interior spaces, can be displayed in outdoor spaces, or, on its reverse side, it consists of a sculptural form that responds to the self-sufficient technical parameters of the sculpture which adapts to environmental requirements to be exhibited in a temporary or permanent way in these.

   The relationship between the artistic form and the place in which it is located is thus considered as the relationship between two things different from each other, on the one hand the place or location where the sculpture will be exhibited, on the other the sculpture that in it it will be exposed. The latter, in fact, contemplates more or less in its own way the characteristics of the place, will understand that site as the place where the work of art, understood as the sculptural piece, will be shown.

   In Land Art the relationship between the work of art as the novel or exterior element and the location is different, even where the work of Land Art consists of a materially autotelic form, closed on itself and traversable, its relationship to the locations natural or architectural, it will not simply be that of a relationship between the work of art, here, on one side, and the place in which it is exhibited, there, on the other side, either to show the work on that, or simply to set the site.

    Rather, the natural or architectural space itself becomes part of the work of Land Art as an element, both in its formal, aesthetic and visual aspects and, above all, in its conceptual aspects.

    A work of Land Art, in fact, consists of this dialogue between what defines the author's work as a visual, material, aesthetic and conceptual whole in itself, and what defines a natural or architectural location in itself, it is In short, to obtain a form of dialogue in which the work and the place are related to each other for the occasion.
    Although the above could make us think of traditional pictorial and sculptural art modalities conceived from the beginning to be placed in architecture, Land Art also offers different answers in this regard.

    On the one hand, in the work of Land Art, it is important that the work assimilates something related to the character of the materials and spaces in that location, hence, on the one hand, the preponderance that materials such as earth or others from or related to it that provide the work of Land Art in most of its modalities with an essentially ephemeral character, that is, defined by the intangibility and transitory imperdurability of a relationship and by the relationship itself, rather than by its imperishable character.

    The ephemeral nature of the work of Land Art, moreover, not only refers to the fact that the work is not lasting, but above all to the philosophy itself that is assumed in the way in which the dialogue we were referring to acquires. place. If it is a work of Land Art, in this case what makes up its aesthetic, visual and conceptual totality will be directly related to the way in which the author has offered a response to the very dilemma of the visual, aesthetic and ethical relationship between an inevitably external element. , whether it is inserted and added, or whether it is, as in many forms of Land Art, found, extracted and found in the same forms that that nature or that location provides and offers. Ephemerality, therefore, designates an aesthetic and ethical philosophy at the center of which is the original relationship between conceptualism and nominalism.

    Nominalism, however, which consists of the relationship between words and things, language and its designation of reality, between naming and that which is named, between the map and the territory, is not an invention of conceptualism, It actually comes, in the field of art, from Ready Made, which is an invention of Dadaism, which is later taken to greater elaboration in conceptualism.

   Land Art, in short, arises from the most nominalist side of conceptualism, becoming independent and autonomous given the relevance that the experimental and exploratory output of these questions acquires towards that pre-signified world of natural and architectural sites, towards the earth. and towards places and sites, including, of course, in many forms of Land Art also the knowledge resulting from this exploration of the new, caving, archaeology, the search or research that this entails.

     Arte Povera is thus one of the forms that Land Art takes.

     In the context of the aforementioned preamble I will discuss the seven samples of my curatorship

The Travels Collage

A modality that is different from the previous two is that of travel and our relationship to it, explained by Surpik Angelini. It is an exhibition almost entirely based on travel postcards collected by the artist throughout the years. his travels through the USA and Europe, mostly postcards acquired in fine arts museums, many of them related to Greek art, inventoried, collected, reworked and exhibited in the gallery space in different ways. We climb the stairs to the Rice Media Center Art Gallery to find the first set of travel postcards worked in the form of collages, these are mounted in raw wood frames with mats from which a canvas hangs from each of the six of silk dyed in a pink color on each of which in manual calligraphy the artist has written her chosen poems.

From the view of this first entry we can perceive that the second group of travel postcards is displayed on the extensive background wall, this time it is one hundred square frames approximately 18 centimeters wide, high and deep each one like small boxes of wood covered in wax and dyed in sienna, each one with its glass, a collage of collected travel postcards and mirror mats, the hundred irregularly displayed, while the last set of travel postcards can be found in the penultimate session of the gallery scattered on the wooden floor of the exhibition interposed by wine glasses on the same floor forming a width and length delimited by strips of fabric that come from the wall to the floor and on the walls a collection of gifts made to the artist by several of her Texan friends in different periods of their lives.

There remain, however, despite the topic of travel and the postcards of these collected and saved being at the foreground of his sample, several significant elements to be made explicit in his sample. The first of these elements is the relationship that her exhibition establishes with the gallery space as a whole, the fact that the artist covers all the walls of the gallery with a chamoisine fabric, from the limits of the wall that adjoin the floor to those that make it to the ceiling, sienna color, the second of these elements, are four pieces in which it does not include travel postcards or explicit allusions to them. The first of these is perceived from the very entrance, it consists of a part of the fabric continuously adhered to the wall, which for a moment detaches from it, becoming the mat of a small table that covers which the artist has placed a small cup. white porcelain to drink coffee.

The second of these pieces is perceived from the same view but this time on the left, it consists of a chair placed facing the wall entirely covered by the artist's hair collected throughout her life after cutting it and, above all, the height of a possible spectator who is sitting in the chair, sewn to the general fabric that covers the wall, several rectangles of small fabrics, on which poems written by the artist are read in calligraphy. The third of these pieces is a mirror mask that the artist has placed on a pedestal, the fourth of these pieces are a doll and a rag doll belonging to her grandparents, which the artist has sewn both to the fabric of the wall accompanied by braids. of his grandmother's hair.

   The last of these pieces is not, however, one by Angelini, but rather a performance by the Mexican-American artist Gabriela Villegas whom Surpik invited on the day of its inauguration, but for whom it has arranged a cubilo in black wood closed on itself. Opening small holes through which spectators can look, on the day of the inauguration, a pregnant Villegas, with a flashlight, illuminated her face and belly.

The Exhibit of the Exhibit

Far from paying attention to the art market itself or to the relations between that art market and a broader market as a form of distanced culture, sometimes our attention can also pay attention to the very situation in which an artist finds himself. is invited to exhibit an exhibition in another country and city hundreds of thousands of kilometers away.

   What becomes distanced here is then the very situation of doing something from a given city, geographical and social reality, to be taken and exhibited in another city, geographical and social reality, in principle unknown to that artist. The issue to which we pay attention and which is distanced can then define in itself something that always happens when an artist is invited to propose a work to be exhibited in different places, we could say, in fact that always in any case, an artist is exposed to this circumstance with the only exclusion of that occasion in which the artist exhibits in the same city in which he lives and with the sole exception that here the artists have made this phenomenon the object of their attention and distancing.

Being something so routine and frequent in the experience of any artist, it is, however, something that is strangely noticed, something that is practically never distanced to be seen and understood as a topic to be treated or a situation to be objectified.

Accepted, then, given its routine nature as a tacit and undisputed reality for the artist, it is true that it constitutes in itself that aspect of culture that most defines our conditions of possibility, our dispositions and our limits with regard to different realities, two Examples are brought to the fore in the exhibition Arguing with Betara Desa by Juan José Olavarria and Ernesto Leal that we exhibited at the Farish Gallery of the Rice University School of Architecture in the spring of 1997.
Here it is about the very situation faced by the artist brought to the foreground in two modes, the first of these modes is that of the tourist and the tourist relationship with a place that is new for us, provided with some novelty. or with respect to which, if we know it, our relationship to it, since it is tourist, is modified, being from that moment in a peculiar way, to draw more our attention to what that place is like, to open our senses to recreation or enjoyment of what that place offers as its peculiarity or distinctive character, ways in which we typically do not perceive it, this is the relationship between a way of life and culture that is inserted into another way of life or culture to enjoy it, spread in it or know her.

The second of them is the relationship that we experience with respect to the unknown, also implicit in the same situation in which the artist is proposing a work that he creates in one context and takes it to be exhibited in another, here it is the figure of the cosmonaut, who leaves from living conditions in which he feeds and inhabits his body in one way, towards other living conditions, here the expedition to the stratosphere or to a distant planet understood as a letter of exploration, knowledge of the unknown, search of news, relationship with the unexpected.

We are in fact entering the El Farish Gallery at the Rice University School of Architecture and as we leave behind our reading on the exterior walls of the title of the exhibition, the details of the artists and various acknowledgments that we have placed to our contributors, we see that other spectators do the same, preparing to enter. From here, with respect to the entire exhibition, we perceive two different ways in which Juan José Olavarría, a Venezuelan artist, and Ernesto Leal, a Cuban artist, have decided to develop and recreate the two examples referred to above. As a whole, the beautiful gallery is offered to us on two levels, ground floor and mezzanine.

We perceive that on the ground floor the two examples have been first explained, entering on the left the first two sets of works are dedicated to them, a ready-made of a musical staff in wood where in the place of the scores, we can open and go through a tourist magazine about the city of Houston, begins the exhibition, while it is followed by an extensive dining table dressed in a white tablecloth with two rows of plates on which the artists have distributed the capsules with which the cosmonauts feed themselves in outer space. , an immense parachute falls half open here hanging from the ceiling and on the back wall, made of sawdust and cement, we read compactly the text Barbicue, which is the typical food of Texas.

  This allusion to Texan typicalities is recreated with a few additional elements related to a carriage and horse saddle. The two examples thus begin the exhibition as we perceive that what follows are developments from different angles of the same two questions that with respect to the artist's own situation that we referred to at the beginning, the two examples make explicit. One of these angles is the cartographic one, here it is about the relationship between two cartographies, that of the city of Valencia, in which the artists made the exhibition, and that other, of the city of Houston, worked on a single cartography. inventive made on a tanned fabric which in turn is the fabric of a trampoline, in which it is displayed, on it the map of both cities is displayed.

The second of these angles is that related to the physical production of the exhibition, including its preparation in Valencia and its assembly in Houston, which the artists have addressed by exposing their letters and documents sent and received to and from the Rice University school of architecture. in which it would be exhibited, related to the anticipation and assembly requirements, and a series of plastic telmos on the wall exposed, poeticizing those used by workers both those who helped them in Valencia and those who were related to the assembly of the exhibition in Farish Gallery , there is also a piece made of sawdust that consists of the hind legs of a horse worked in the middle as if it were a stool or a place where a book made by both artists can be placed as a collection of pages with their drawings.

The third of these angles is the one in which the artists have worked by deploying on the floor a row of plants growing in the ground inside black plastic bags followed by a row in a similar arrangement with for each plant a cushion on which the spectators can sit. About each of which they have named names of European intellectuals from the end of the century, a notebook with their drawings in the process of making the exhibition and a few brief paragraphs quoting Bateson.

The fourth of these angles is the media angle, defined by the arrangement of two televisions on whose screens the image is continuously seen, in one the breathing of one of the artists, in the other, the breathing of the other, both as the image of Breathing is expressed over the immediate area below the chest, above the belly.

   The fifth and last of these angles, the one developed at the messianine level, is defined by the same situation that defined at the beginning the artists bring to the foreground with the exhibition and that the two examples of the tourist and the cosmonaut make explicit, the very question that centers the whole of the exhibition, How is the City of Houston, written with J Jiuston?, written on a blackboard, a phrase accompanied by some elements such as votive offerings made by artists in the city of Valencia in which certain people ask for things, which ones are Ask the Virgin Mary for a bull's head bone and a bullfighting cloth. The exhibition is titled discussion or arguments, in English Arguing with Betara Desa.

Art and Recycling

Another modality is that which we define as social, closer to the questions of an art that asks and explores how to expand its social reach by moving towards spaces to which art hardly reaches or from which it is difficult for people to go to art museums. their living conditions.

   In short, it is a large installation developed by the Venezuelan artist Juan Carlos Rodríguez inspired by and in homage to a scrap metal dealer, collector and recycler of cans and waste material in the city, with whom Juan Carlos had previously exhibited two exhibitions in Caracas in the art gallery of the Mendoza foundation and in the Mario Abreu Museum of Contemporary Art.
  This time, as in the previous ones, it is not about samples that Juan Carlos makes with the participation of Maira, but rather an installation by Juan Carlos alone, developed with large quantities of sheets collected in the neighborhood with the names of those to whom they belong. minutely written on them and hung by the artist on a system of clotheslines deployed in the exhibition spaces of the Rice Media Center on an area delimited on the floor by reams of corrugated cardboard and suspended on columns of wood taken from the neighborhood, recycled and reworked as assemblies. , the setting of the space includes a general sound of people in the neighborhood while they wash clothes, plastic buckets filled with water at different levels, a video of Juan Carlos with Maira in the Neighborhood and the documentation of a brief performance about it exhibited by Juan Carlos on the day of its inauguration, pages of a novel by Maira about life in the neighborhood are displayed on the Coca-Cola machine in this part of the Rice Media Center, while small Bibles and little books of the Christian religion are attached to wooden assemblies.

The Market from here

“The Market from Here, an installation by Venezuelan artists Abdel Hernandez San Juan and Fernando Calzadilla, is among the most significant contemporary Works to come our way in many years. It is poised at the crossroads of art and anthropology. The two disciplines, powerful tules for the analysis of culture, are the source as well as the subject of this work, which reproduces and interprets a Caracas marketplace. Walking into the enclosed, cruciform sculpture is not unlike stepping into a diorama, those old fashioned “stages” western Museums once used to add context to artifacts of past lives. But this one is about people here and now. Abdel Hernandez San Juan, art critic, curator and conceptual artist in Caracas and Calzadilla Venezuelan Scenographer devoted more than three years to the planning research and execution of The Market (…).

(…) Unlike most art installations, which maintain and even insist on dividing the observer from that which is observed, The Market envelops the viewer to erase those boundaries. Set in the sunken sculpture court behind Rice University’s Sewall Hall, The Market has boundaries defined by a plastic skin, painted like parchment and discolored by additional markings and weather. The thin permeable material serves as both container and carrier of meaning. (…) Ways to perceive and understand the enclosed world become apparent the minute the threshold is crossed and the visitor is encased in its plastic wrap.
Markets are places where things are bought and sold (…). Historically they’ve also functioned as communal spaces, where social and civic nourishment could be had. And markets serve as metaphors for the way one culture looks at another. The installation aims to soften, if not entirely dissolve that sense of “otherness”. Entering this space consecrated by the artists the visitor bridges that abyss and becomes one with the “other” represented here. (…)”. 

[The Market from Here: An Installation by Abdel Hernandez San Juan and Fernando Calzadilla, Where, Sculpture Court at Sewall Hall, Rice University, entrance 1 off main street, When-, 5-8:30 p.m. Mondays-Saturdays. Through April, 1997, Reprinted from: The Houston Chronicle, Section 5 D, April 5, 1997, Art 

The work in question focuses on the theme of markets as its object and subject. We conceived and composed it, on the one hand, as a work that closes on itself, both in terms of its aesthetic and stylistic totality, as well as its physical being. an outdoor work that can also be seen from a distance and from a height,

Secondly, as a closed volume, traversable and contemplable from its exteriors and from above, it is a piece that can be penetrated and traversed by its interiors, centered on the viewer who, in addition to contemplating it from the inside, can also contemplate from it outwards and vice versa. outside inwards, perceiving from different points the semi-transparent images and silhouettes of other spectators along their journey, thus allowing the spectators to take part as images and concepts in the visuality of the work, related as a whole to the natural ambient and artificial light. whose lighting, in contrast to the transparency of its surface, varies throughout the day between morning and night.

We include, on the one hand, Sienna paint on asphalt with water thinner and watermelon applied on the transparent plastic, on the other, the composition of the whole aesthetic and visual is an atmospheric language based on color and tones and the language of the textures of the materials.

The readymade is a notion that is still significant to understand its entirety this time in terms of its theme, that is, the fact of being a work about the markets that is exhibited outside of them, including images and materials, some of these. purchased and recycled from them, the same plastic as the chosen support is predominant in those to protect themselves from the rain.

The readymades in their interior, however, are recontextualizations of objects, materials and forms brought to the work from other contexts, thus being as a whole a work based on dispositional languages ​​where the contiguity of elements such as shelves, display cases and other media presentational and typical of the installation as a genre, are in the foreground also including texts and photographs of both the process of its physical creation, as well as the process prior to my studies for several years of the visuality of the markets both in painting from the 15th century, museum collections of fine art as in their commercial contemporaneity,

When we walk around the faculties of art, on the one hand, and of humanities and social sciences, on the other, located in the sculpture court at Rice University in the back yard of the Sewall Hall Building, we only have to advance a little between trees and nature, the occasional squirrel that passes around us, on the sidewalk of the main street, inside the campus, can be seen extending a wide area under the sky defined by approximately fifty meters long and thirty meters wide, on the that different colleagues on campus stop at different times of the day, it is a cool area, perfect for taking a break and relaxing, enjoying nature or looking from a kind of balcony or terrace from which you can see, down, about seven meters below the ground, the patio in which the medium and large-scale sculptures resulting from the sculpture workshops are regularly exhibited, whose doors open precisely to that patio, are the adjacent patios into which the studio of the Anglo-African and African-American sculptor the Texan ends. Berg Long.

We have descended the ladder. We have several possibilities. If we stand from Berg Long's studio we can see it from its entrance, we have it just a few meters at the same height as us, we can leave from here and stay exploring it from its outskirts. We can also, when we wish, go back up the stairs to perceive it from above, returning to the terrace from which colleagues on campus take their break.

 At first impression it is a large-scale three-dimensional shape 9 meters long by 9 meters wide and 6 meters long, which we have made in a hard plastic painted in mahogany, dark sienna. If we approach it from its height, we perceive that the color that we have seen on the external surface, that dark mahogany, does not prevent the transparency of the plastic on which it is painted from being perceived through it and sifted through, elucidating from the same the forms that are found inside this three-dimensional form to which we can clearly perceive, from this same surroundings, its gabled roof, its floor made of old worn boards raised to fifty centimeters, and its extensive plastic surface that offers the walls to that coated form.

Located from the terrace at the height where the open air becomes more obvious and explicit, we can perceive in plan that its general shape of a house or three-dimensional architectural gable, describes a cruciform shape that suggests the routes of paths through the markets.

We are ready to enter, arriving from the Berg Long studio while we notice that some spectators have lifted the plastic from its front side and have also decided to climb up and enter.

We have just entered and we perceive ourselves to be located in a kind of lobby, small room or cubicle measuring one and a half meters by one and a half meters closed on itself which we have conceived, composed and made following the criterion of giving continuity to the same material, mahogany plastic. that arriving from the exteriors that cover it, it turns around and enters now folded to define as if it were a part of itself or of its outside that folds forming this first inside, this kind of vestibule, anteroom, prologue, introduction or preface that conceptually, plastically and visually it is its beginning.

In this room I can read on the mahogany walls and printed on transparent acetate a brief and fluid essay of about five pages, of my own authorship and composition, on the representation of markets since the 15th century in painting, from the English and Dutch who They were able to draw him, even the images of the Sunday square given in picturesque expressions of manners.

While I read my own essay, spectators next to me do the same and I can perceive that while they read they enjoy the images with which I have illustrated consisting of photographs of the markets as well as photographs inside the same empty work that in minutes they will have to walk through. full.

The writing advances in developments about the point of view in the markets during the classical, modern and postmodern worlds, and as the viewer leaves the premises the impressions of the floor on which they walk are immediate.

Already from the hall, this floor worn in old corrugated wood laid on old boards in whose wood we can perceive the layers of its former paintings and the superimposition of its subsequent layers, these are laid and mounted on a structure that we have decided to cover with slats of wood on which we have decided to staple the hundreds of plastic coils that we painted in sepia, thus wrapping and completely covering that structure, thus creating its walls and ceiling.

Around these wooden slats on which we adhere the plastic, sealing it, we wrap inside and out that modular, mountable and removable structure that acts as scaffolding. Leaving the vestibule, the first plastic, visual and conceptual element of its structure, we perceive the entire work as we have composed it. A variety rich in nuances of plastic bags that we have found in the markets have allowed us throughout the work to experiment with the visuality of the weft, the warp and other forms of the texere that offers the relationship between gestures and the color of these materials in their relationship with light by deploying it on top of the transparent plastic. Advancing between these intertwined spaces we perceive that the path of the spectators, oneself, anyone, the spectator at one's side, or anyone else who from a point in the work can be seen semi-transparent or in silhouette also travels through it, could well be that same type of tour that defines the inside-outside relationship, between the buyer and the seller, like when we walk through the markets.

We also perceive the way in which natural light enters filtered through the asepiated or caobized transparency of the plastic that covers it, sometimes glimpsed as it passes through the texture or weave of a variety of plastic bags, jute, or found materials, offering the work its atmospheres while at the same time perceiving through it the nature whose greenness participates, offering the inventories of objects, the ledges, the rooms and the environments their visual background.

It is the way in which I have experienced in the work the possibilities offered by the relationship between light, weave and texture of a rich variety of elements collected in the markets and the atmosphere, environment and range in tones, values ​​and colors that define the disconcerting beauty of this work.

I have painted these mahogany gable walls and ceiling on the floor on large plastic coils.

I have also treated the photograph in a sifted way throughout the work, placing it in several of its parts behind the clean plastic so as to be perceived in translucent forms, as if behind the material.

We have also conceived an extension to this game with the mixed visual effects of the sifted sensitive perception typical of semi-transparency in its relationship with natural light, material texturalities and the photographs from behind with which we poetically evoke the visuality of the markets. of the lobby from whose walls the same plastic continues becoming a surface that is freed inside the work from any functionality, or from that to which it was previously subordinated, the making of walls and ceiling, becoming here a disseminated element in which This moment of seeing photographs behind the material plastic is released as something to be contemplated in itself.

The conceptualist experimentation with the viewer as a concept and image was in the foreground of attention, determining the compositional and authorial decisions regarding the aesthetic, formal, visual and conceptual whole of the work as a whole.

We have defined this as a whole as a route or circuit with entry and exit which is characterized by, in the same way as in markets, spaces and passages through which one passes observing the merchandise, which are inside for the buyers. , --palaces through which they walk, here circuit, itinerary, path of the spectators--, and outskirts for the sellers, that is, spaces in which merchandise and products are displayed, presented and advertised, here objects that the spectators They see along their journey which in turn evoke and recreate both objects or elements and merchandise, the products as they are seen and perceived in the markets.

  Thus, the viewer is in turn walking inside something that as a whole is a great work that evokes the markets that it thematizes and recreates, its theme, object of study and inspiration.

  This time we decided to leave such an overall view of the work with its entrance and exit to look at it inside and understand the visuality of its parts.

  The impressions of sound and music, however, we cannot avoid them, they are still immediate from the lobby, these are sounds that we have decided to choose recorded in the markets, as experimental-sound fragments, from bells to the distant voices of the criers offering their wares, which are heard among delicious incense and exquisitely scented smells of green plants that aromatize the whole, aromatic riches typical of the world of herbs and extracts of natural aromas and sounds that offer the environment of the work its continuous harmony .

  It is not only, we understand then, a circuit with entrance and exit that, like in the markets that are here entrance and exit to the work penetrable by the viewer, but also that circuit consists of a large environment made up of rooms that can be perceived one from the other, but which can be entered and each of which, although harmonized in color, tones and lighting by the sifted plastic assembly that surrounds them, are distinguished from each other by the type of materials, colors, environments and visualities.

  In the same way that with the transparent sepia plastic with its way of environmentally intersecting the natural light into its interior spaces we have given the work that sifted and translucent effect of generality, we have worked on the traversable spaces in it by sifting the perception through transparent plastics and a variety of elements that hang in the space as inventories of old and everyday small found objects with which we have accentuated the composition.

From the entrance of the work looking towards the back we can perceive that the transparent sepia walls in the background form a room which we conceived, composed and made by placing transparent display cases which we also made in plastic and in which you can read my texts in the proportion of very short paragraphs on the concepts of evocation and representation, a sample of photographs that we have interspersed including photographs of the markets, photographs of myself writing inside the work during the process in which I made it and photographs of me there in the developed markets alone or exchanging with sellers.

It is a photography laboratory that includes a clothesline on which several of these same photographs are drying, a desk and a model of the work as a whole, a black wooden shelf that we made on which we have decided to place tubes of cardboard from which viewers can look again at different points as accents in the work and an inventory of optical objects such as glasses, spectacles, lenses, magnifying glasses, magnifying glasses.
Up to this point we have understood what the work is like as a whole,

1-tour of an art viewer that takes place as if it were a tour of the markets, (the seller with his inside and the buyer with his tour that is for him his inside and for the seller his outside),

2- a spectator who sees objects within a work as if he were seeing goods in a market, grammaticality governed by dispositional principles of distributionality and presentationality, contiguity, inventory and displayability, in a kind of as if it were or was for sale, which goods.

3- a spectator who walks through an environment which envelops him as a whole and contemplates it as an image, (continuous participation of the visual image of other semi-transparent and mutually observable spectators from different points of view in the work).

We have understood that the work has a vestibule made with and of the same materiality that covers it, material that folds or folds forming this first inside of the outside or outside of the inside, this small first room that is still neither inside nor outside of the work but that the vestibule offers its interlude, its interim, its anteroom, its beginning before the beginning which is already a beginning of the circuit with my illustrated philosophical essay.

We have also understood that looking from the entrance towards the back, the work has a self-referential room in which all the elements refer to itself as a work, a tautological-conceptual-self-referential room in which the work looks towards itself, deals with it. same, conceptual tautology towards the whole of a work, each of whose smallest elements, as we have just seen, is in turn conceptual tautological, a place of self-conceptuality and self-consciousness.

Let's return for a moment again to the terrace to complete the understanding of its whole. After doing an interim with our friend Berg Long we went up the stairs and decided to see it again from above where the colleagues take their break during the day, but this time at night. When perceiving it from above and outside at night, the work is entirely illuminated from within and we perceive how all the inventories of elements and objects that are inside, shine through on its semi-transparent and material plastic surface, forming situations in contrast with the light.

Now the work unfolds as an intervention in relation to the climax and nature, that plastic that covers and surrounds the structure has begun to be bathed by rain during the month of exhibition, participating as if it were happening in the disconcerting beauty of its ensemble, it is that cuttlefish that has begun to drip and fade, diluted by water, on the plastic as if it were tanned by the rainy effects of natural weather, or as if they were the eyeliners of an attractive and beautiful woman that fade at the end of the day, (for Using two references that help to understand, it also seems like one of those lamps that one uses to read books in the bedroom at night, something that is simply turned on and turned on, one of those whose lights and shadows They are projected on its walls.

Four places remain to be understood, two of them are small rooms, the one at the entrance and the one at the exit, the other two are rooms, in these last two we evoke the body. Thus, in addition to entrance and exit, in one of the rooms it is a vegetarian body, that of herbs, ointments, creams, ointments, spreadable lotions, visual and aromatic extracts, home remedies and the environments specific to its sellers, in the other, we are faced with an urban, plastic body, of disposable objects that are replaced, defined by gangarreas, ornaments, things that accompany its attractiveness and way of looking, handles, eyeglasses, as entry and exit, evoke, the first, a body that lives, that could very well live where it sells, that of merolics or peddlers, the other, a mobile and partying body, confetti, joy, celebration, the body of a seller that moves, wheelbarrow drivers, chicha sellers, those who go where the people are.

In this way, while as a whole, given the preponderance of plastic as a material to shelter from the rain in the markets, the work evokes markets that come and go but can remain in relation to the climax, the rain and the environment for a long time in a place, at its exit the work evokes a salesman who suggests the dissemination of markets, it is the one that you can hear through the window of your own house, he approaches selling anything.

Looking at it from the lobby, transparent plastic bags of recycled clothing are spread out in the work, an attic of unused materials forms a ceiling from whose form mobile developments hang as a general environment that, along their length, like strings forming lines separated from each other, these seem curtains of found objects and transparent plastics that blur perception all the time in the work.

Throughout this environment, as in the textual guides of museum museums, a circuit of impeccable white-on-black texts in computerized typography develops, this is the same one read in the lobby then fragmented into many short texts, distributed these in its relation to the visual image at different points We also decided regarding its thematic horizon, to accentuate some points with a criterion of dramatization of light small sets, those in which the visual and sensory allusion to worlds of daily life in the markets is more Explicitly, it is an interdisciplinary work of anthropology and ethnography with art.

This interdisciplinary relationship takes on three main forms in the piece.

First, the work opened with a catalog whose text is mine, which is a theoretical essay of philosophical ethnography From Modern to Postmodern Markets: The Market from Here/Mise in Scene and Experimental Ethnography. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, published in print at rice university, this text, based on my individual field work alone in the popular markets of Venezuela for two years, is then repeated printed in the lobby of the work illustrated with photographs of the markets , also then the same text is distributed as a museographic circuit throughout the entire work inside, that is, like the texts that are a room guide in museums of anthropology and ethnography, the text runs through the entire work inside from entry to exit room by room. This text of philosophical ethnography about urban markets and accompanied by images of the markets is not only the catalog text of the work, but also its spatial introduction, and then its museum-museographic circuit, but it is also the text that, written before of making the work and based on my field work alone, it was used as the script or textual script that would be put on the visual stage, experiencing a conjugation between the conceptualist text in the visual works, the critical and museographic text, and the text as It is understood in cinema and theater is considered as a script or libretto of what will be staged, for which I invited two people from the world of theater to work with me in order to combine the conceptualist installation with the scenography in the theater, Elaiza Irrizary and Fernando Calzadilla

On the one hand, it is worth highlighting that this text that is read in the lobby and along the route because of what it relates to me and my work of art here, in the materiality of my author's piece, in relation to the markets there, in which I was and am no longer, which I evoke more than I denote, refer to or represent, in which, however, paradoxically, one never ceases to be, a paradox that in the work I bring to the foreground as one of my own. to the relationship between the market here, this one, the art market, and the market there, that one, are there two? Are there several markets? or is it one and the same market?, thus opening the philosophical question about the point of view in the markets and defining this relationship, which is a continuous research, also like field work.

On the other hand, it is worth highlighting how in this essay that viewers can read in the lobby, I have experimented and literary explored the relationship between an ethnographic philosophizing about the point of view in the markets, conceptually playing with the deixticals Here and there inspired by the use literary of these deixticals first by Levi Strauss (go to the detail in which essay) and then by Clifford Geertz, which although not said in the text itself is to be assumed for readers in the field of anthropology, then this text later fragmented as textual development along its circuit with entry and exit. (For an exhaustive reading of this text, it is still available in print reproduced at the transart foundation, Houston)

The inclusion of photographs that include me in writing and the markets must also be considered, which has led me in the work to accentuate the performativity of experimenting with alternatives to representation based on real field work research that I did in the markets. evoked in the relationship Here, the work, and there, the markets a hundred kilometers away, a philosophically poeticized here and there relationship.

anthropology and ethnography developed in the visual display, it is necessary to say that the self-referential room of the work in which photographs of me and Fernando in the field work in the markets appear in the showcase, as well as photographs of me writing, also includes extensive paragraphs theorists written by me on the concepts of evocation and representation, meanwhile, while, as I said before, the indirect allusions to Levi Strauss and Geertz are not mentioned either in the text or in the work, I did include in the work a direct and explicit quote to Stephen A Tyler, specifically two paragraphs of his on the concept of evocation that I chose in his essay Postmodern Ethnography published by Carlos Reynoso in his compendium The Advent of Postmodern Anthropology, published in Gedisa

Entitled The Market from Here: Mise in scene and experimental Ethnography, the experimental references from my position with this work for the contextualization-decontextualization game that ventures into Houston is Lyotard, read my essay on Purpose of the Immaterials: Lyotard in the Pompidue, while the references in anthropology are the words of Stephen A Tyler that I cited to whom I referred before, including within the work two paragraphs of his that I chose from his essay and text published at the advent of postmodern anthropology edited by Carlos Reynoso, Gedisa

And so
Hundreds of meters of transparent plastic coil
Five pages of fluid philosophical and poetic essay
One hundred fragments of this essay
Books
A Desk
a model
Ten photographs of myself
Fifty little boards to place the fragmented essay
Fifty white-on-black computer prints of these fragments
Ten computer prints on transparent acetate
Five hundred plastic and jute bags with various weaves
Fifty kilos of wooden slats
Three hundred reams of clear plastic
Five kilos of diluted asphalt
One hundred and fifty pounds of recycled used clothing
One hundred and fifty old worn boards
plastic toys
Seven recycled wood shelves
One hundred tiny found objects
Five tape recorders of recorded, chosen and reissued sounds
Five thousand ribbons to wrap the scaffolding with the artistic structure
Thirty pieces of corrugated cardboard boxes
One hundred types of aromatic herbs
An electrical lighting system
Fifty optical objects
One hundred photographs of the markets
Ten photographs of the assembled work
Ten photographs of the dismantled work
Ten photographs of the work in the process of creation and assembly
One hundred and fifty pecatillos to hang
One hundred small rusty objects
One hundred glass vials
fifty bottles
ten light bulbs
Fifty molds of white figures pre-cast then colored
One hundred plastic objects for the body
Confetti
Dies Telmos
Three or four tambuches
Jesus Christ
The Virgin Mary
The Virgin of Coromoto
Maria Teresa of Calcutta
Black first
One hundred stamps
a wheelbarrow
A wood carving
A cachicamo shell
A little Chimo, tobacco extract
Un Catre viejo
A recycled old car
One hundred little wire hooks to hang things
Fifty plastic shopping bags in the market
Blumers
Fifty painted fakes
A Guira
Colorful necklaces.
A living Gaius
a scaffold

To emphasize everyday life in its spontaneous passage and rituals, I have also created a visual grammaticality that creates vocabulary throughout the work, a series of elements or objects that could be where we perceive them as if some person in the market had left them. I have been in this place for a short time and I am about to pick it up like little tied plastic ropes or hooks from which I can hang you with any object you need to hold. Experimental and environmental installation of high contemporary art does not fail to produce the impression of being an inhabited place, a museum of anthropology or ethnography, an antique shop or a place where relics are collected or arranged, a church chapel, well what it is, a current work of art and modern about the market, one of those markets that unfold in the open air, its true theme.

Paroxyms of the text

Finally, we could not fail to mention the two performances or multimedia performances that we present by Alejandro López centered or developed around the theme of the text, both in the Hamman Hall theater. The peculiar thing about both performances is that in a certain way they exacerbate, ironize and parody certain conceptions or usual or predominant forms of relationship to the texts, in some cases showing their mannerisms and their hackneyed character and their fictitious paraphernalia, as in his usual performances, Alejandro appeared on stage disguised with an outlandish or extravagant outfit, dressed in flowers with a builder's helmet and oversized glasses, in the first work, he is located within a set that suggested a walled castle as a symbol of the idea of ​​a text or of the text, the symbol of the text as a wall or as a fortress, and while from that fortress he read a text, in turn on a projection screen that had the phrase The Text: Indestructible Unit written in large fonts, images of sounds from factories and airplanes were projected, in the second work Alejandro appears uploaded in a large chair from where he read fragments of a book by Talcon Parson

The Work Technical Card as Work

Another modality is Curriculum Vitae, the exhibition developed by the Cuban artist Lázaro Saavedra who, in the place that corresponded to works in his exhibition, exhibited a countless number of files in writing and text on medium-sized cardboard in which he makes a meticulous inventory of previous samples of yours, specifying in each one the title of the sample, date of presentation, materials used in the works, their technical characteristics, breakdown of articles and press publications published about them.

 What is involved here is the self-referential modality, the fact that it is intentionally an exhibition of the artist whose works consist precisely of drawing attention, intratextually, to what defines an art exhibition space and in this to a work of art, author, title, the breakdowns referred to, and, above all, to reinvent previous occasions as a way of looking at art towards itself and the institution in which it is defined and redefined.

   It is significant in the Lázaro exhibition, given the material displayed in these works files, the attention given in them to a typologization of the types of audiences and to different reactions of these on the different occasions of their exhibitions, is also significant. , the way in which Lázaro draws attention to the fact that generally a file includes too little in relation to everything about the work about which the artist would want to inform, the file or card, a small card in which As soon as the title, the author and the technique of the work are put, here it is redeemed and brought to the foreground, treated in itself as a work at the same time that by becoming the work this allows it to unfold, becoming the file itself in everything. a means to develop the relationship between the work and its audiences.

Regarding the Inmaterials, Lyotard at Pompidou

  When in the mid-nineties I received the catalog-box of the exhibition developed by Jean Francois Lyotard at the Pompidue art museum, I could not believe how far the experimentation with the Duchampian principle of the ready-made and its subsequent conceptualist forms had come. of wrapping the allocative conventions of the art institution in the very concept of what we understand as art, the gallery as a white cube, the empty space, the sale of five square meters of land on the stock market, all of this in the artistic institutions of postwar, it was just an incipient and timid glimpse of what I had in front of me.

  It is true that in the readymades, according to the tradition started by Duchamp, the spectators are faced with elements, objects or signs taken from universes of daily life in which these are not understood as art, it is also true that from the side of these artistic institutions, such objects had not previously been contemplated as arsenals of the technical and visual acquis of fine arts, at least, however, the sensibility that chose them was an artistic one undertaken by a plastic artist who brought them from city spaces and social towards the artistic institution.

The same could be said about playing with the principles instituting conventions about what is or is not art in the kind of things that the orthodox conceptualists did. In Lyotard's exhibition what one has in front of one is literally a box of art with all the peculiarities, minutiae and exquisiteness typical of a work of art that is presented to the reader and spectator in that way, the same way in which they had to be Duchamp and others do it.

  It was not, however, as in The Castle of Purity or The Naked Appearance of Octavio Paz, the book of an art critic who comments or discusses, including his book in the box, the work of a plastic artist, Duchamp, but before well in a modality in which Lyotard himself as Duchamp is the one who makes the work, developing the box that corresponds to his exhibition, only this time it is the same creator, Lyotard, who includes his philosophical texts.

   But while the reader and viewer of art do not hesitate to assure that this is a practice corresponding to and belonging to the world of art, things are not as simple as they seem at first glance.

   We know that the museographic display on the art museum scene is carried out by a philosopher, not an artist, and not so much in the sense of not having been trained in fine arts institutes, but because it is someone who before and after this exhibition has not done anything other than the type of things that philosophers do and not those that characterize visual artists or art curators.

   Not so much, either, however, because your sample will cease to be aesthetic as long as one has to stick to that era in reality, as perceived in the box, the inventory, the sample book and the catalogue, explicitly beautiful and original, but because the type of things to which he paid attention, the way of collecting them and the way of inventorying them, especially of relating the elements in it, the fragments or parts and the aesthetic, stylistic and visual whole, were those of someone who developed a way of doing philosophy in a new media using the artistic readymade.

   While Lyotard echoed an extreme relativization of some essence or immanence that could be attributed to philosophy as its own, something that Derrida also did in another way, --Margins of Philosophy and Gillez Deleuze, What is Philosophy?, the museum of fine arts also played to explain the inverse of art by showing how, on the one hand, just like art with respect to itself, philosophy also denies itself in its essences or immanences, on the other hand, beauty and artistic acceptability of a philosophical museography - aesthetic and beautiful, as well as the possibility that the exhibition of a philosopher could be valued from parameters of fine arts, according to how it resorted to a resource such as the ready-made and others such as museography. room, cash register and inventory.

So what exactly was Lyotard doing? Was it perhaps, as is made explicit in his philosophy books, the practical exercise of a form of that which in his own philosophy books he would have developed as a form of the economy of the text? Rather, it was an aesthetic economy translated into its textual correlates, elements, modes, visuality of the fragments, etc., anticipating as much as possible the expectations of its two types of prospectus auditorium, that of philosophers and that of plastic artists, curators. of art and museographers.

   Lyotard thus exchanged domains, here those of the philosopher and those of the plastic artist, those of him the philosopher and the museographer, domains that contemplated the inversion of basic principles of convention such as those related to the instituting act that assigns belonging to symbolic practices. That a philosophy is not made with ready-mades of objects, museographic installation displays, shelves, box catalogues, and visual arts designs is obvious, but that it is not made in a fine arts museum is even more so.

   How would other philosophers in their guild then understand Lyotard's exposition? This is a good question. Probably for some of the most enterprising, Lyotard resorted to a mode of experimental philosophizing in which philosophy, without losing its specificities, borrowed its means from art; these would remain on the side of the instrumentalized disposition of an exogenous medium, to others, more impressed by the level of permeability with which Lyotard, always unmistakable to them, a philosopher, comes to them imbued and accepted by the museum of fine arts. Lyotard has simply moved towards art from whose field he now returns to them as a philosopher in its media, For others who were more conservative with respect to the samenesses inherent to their specialties and professional acrimonies, the relationships between specificities and conventions, immanences and means, essences and vehicles, it was a way of inseminating simulacra close to a transvestism of essences. Artifact?, mere seduction?, game with visibility in the economy of correspondence effects?.

From art, for some, accepted in its own spaces, the question is reduced to whether the exhibition, the catalog and the Lyotard box are good or not. And the answer in my opinion is that it is very good, artistically and aesthetically speaking. For the aforementioned reasons, however, neither Lyotard, nor his exhibition, nor his box will be included in the history of art, even if they are recognized as good.

   What is it ultimately about then? We cannot help but argue that probably others who are not sensitive, those more attached to the history of art, callously dismiss Lyotard's talent, creativity, inventiveness and innovation as a creator in favor of the distinction and accumulation of the centralized capital of authority, those who would probably say, “what art historians and fine arts professionals see in Lyotard's exhibition and the reason why it should be of interest to the guild is because in it they can see their own methods.”

   Would certain insensitive artists also notice, perhaps, that what artists should see in Lyotard's exhibition are their own methods? Duchamp's ready-made, fine arts museography, the visual arts catalog and the inventory box, for example ? Or would they concentrate more sensibly on admiring the creativity and talent, the inventiveness and the daring with which Lyotard has developed a visual artist or not, with these, admissible or not in the history of art, his own work and his own creation? And it is true that only insensitive mediocre people would notice such things.

It is necessary to say, however, that the principle of immaterialization in the ways of philosophizing is closely related to the relativization of the relations between essence, immanence and substance, the giving of the essence of one thing for another, or the giving of impressions. of substance of some types of things correlated in their dematerialized phenomenal, by other types of things, something that Julia Kriteva defines in Sensible Time as Transubstantiations notable in the ways in which philosophy in the 20th century, Adorno in Aesthetic Theory is a A clear example here, it generated more than it diagnosed, alleging lost evidence in the referential horizon, art in this case, which in reality corresponded to the immaterialization, continuing Hegel, of the very modes of philosophizing. According to others who are even more conservative or, failing that, simply skeptical and nihilistic, Lyotard simply played at an economy of the aesthetics of the beautiful at the dawn of both anti-philosophy and anxiety.

According to the European avant-garde of the beginning of the 20th century, it is about the dissolution of everything in everything else, dematerialization and immaterialization of art and philosophy in a broader spirituality, the soul or simply life as The Stil defined it in abstractionism, “art that is diluted in the reality of spirit and life”, something that later finds its correlation with the dissolution of art also in technology to its current forms in cybernetics, the internet and communicative fractality. Ultimately, these are elusive elusions to what I have defined as the dilemmas of ontology in the 20th century, something that Boudrillard has defined as Symbolic Exchange with Death, a phenomenon that involves either our predilections for the spiritual recovery of technological modernization. and successful economy that always, in abstracted formal-logic, was abstract versus representational, computers, modern cities, financial markets, customer service, but that suffers the imperatives of a representationalist, spiritually discarded modernism.

Or on its reverse, the retraction from all dissolution and the return to a well-contoured definition resistant to the spread or dissolution of the one into the multiple, art here, philosophy there, media here, technology there, the spirit here, the being on the other side, the specialties and the professions, in short, to their seculities. Something similar, however, could be asked from our host guild, here, in the plastic arts, criticism, theorizing, philosophizing and museography of these. For my part, I must admit that I received Lyotard's box with immediate sympathy. My reaction was, in fact, to welcome his philosophical experimentation in artistic media from the museum of fine arts, on that occasion the modern and contemporary museum of visual arts, while recommending its viewing and reading to everyone who could.
However, my vision assumed an abstract philosophical and empirical background knowledge about the generic transgressions and the games of domain exchanges that this entailed, as well as even a knowledge about what Lyotard himself probably anticipated, the fact that one could simply accept a relationship of belonging, a relationship which in no case would exclude that as coming from the guild of philosophers, Lyotard from that moment would have to deal with a continuous editing of himself according to dissimilar contexts and auditoriums that were in reality very rarely reconcilable both in terms of questions, both of priorities, of technicalities and of acerbs. And this is something that Cubans, when things get uncomfortable, call pumpkin, which means, the game is over, everyone goes home.

Notes

-The philosophical-ethnographic essay in the catalog of The Market from Here, from its first room and distributed as its museographic circuit, can be read since thousands of copies were printed at the Transart Foundation of Houston, Houston, Texas, USA, 1997

-The paragraphs that I chose and included within the work in the form of quotes are from Stephen A Tyler, Postmodern Ethnography, Pp, Carlos Reynoso Ed, The Advent of postmodern anthropology, Gedisa

This small curatorship of seven samples had a second stage

This second stage included a lecture I gave of a summary of my essay The Postmodern Work in the Fondren Library auditorium at Rice University on a trip I made to Houston in 1996.

I gave the conference at Fondren Library thanks to an invitation from the department of classical and Hispanic studies, Héctor Urrutibeity, sponsored by the Venezuelan artist established in Houston Surpic Angelini, who traveled to Caracas to meet me at the museum thanks to and as a meeting facilitated by Tahia Rivero and Vasco Zinetar president and vice president of the museum.

During my preparations for the exhibitions in Caracas, Surpic Angelini began to participate by traveling to Caracas, progressively incorporating himself into the process until fully entering as an artist into the creative process with his exhibition, additionally, to make the exhibitions at Rice University possible, transportation After the works and the assembly in Houston, Surpik and I Abdel had to create a foundation, which we called, taken from my book Edges and Overflows of Art: Possibility of Transarte, Transarte Foundation.

  Given Surpik's participation as an artist and then her facilitating work in coordinating the spaces for the exhibitions and their implementation together on campus, Surpik became from then on co-curator with me of the seven exhibitions that we exhibited together in The Campus

- On the curatorial topic see my lecture Abdel Hernández San Juan, The Curator as Creator, given at the first meeting of art curators held in Puerto Vallarta coordinated by the sectoral directorate of the CONAC museum, Vicky, references in the newspaper el universal, First National Meeting of Curators Concludes Today, El Universal Newspaper. During the event, Abdel Hernández raised controversy with his opinions on the social figure of the curator in the context of contemporary art. Abdel Hernández spoke about the new art of intermediaries. The Economic Dimension of Contemporaneity entered fully into the discussions of the second day of the First National Meeting of art curators with the intervention of the young Cuban theorist Abdel Hernández San Juan on the new art of intermediaries, Diario El Universal, Caracas, December 16 April, ninety-four, 1994

- Also regarding the topic of curatorship, museography, formation and reproduction of the value of the work of art, room texts, catalogue, restoration, conservation and the axiologies in this regard, see my lectures The Art of Intermediaries and New Ways to the Genealogy of Art, series of three-month lectures to discuss at the Mario Abreu Museum of Contemporary Art, References with photographs in the Diario El Siglo, Maracay, 1993

- About my co-curator Surpik Angelini, she is a Venezuelan or Anglo-Venezuelan artist, born in Venezuela where she grew up until her twenties in Caracas to an Anglo-American mother and Armenian father. She settled in Houston with her Italian cardiologist husband Paolo Angelini (and their two children Alex and Giorgio), and developed his life and career, specializing in architecture between Houston and Caracas, in 1996 he exhibited an exhibition at Muddy Gallery in Las Mercedes and participated in group exhibitions in Houston at the Holocaust Museum, as well as individual exhibitions at Sicardi Gallery and key burnet gallery, develops his own studio as an architectural work, works on the theme of the relationship between art and water in his art experiences in Matamoros and ventures in 1989 into a Texas art curatorship bringing together 69 Texan artists Another Reality in co-curated with African-American artist Berg Long, with text by Mc Evilley.

-see my 1993 essay On How to Be Ecological in Art regarding the exhibition of contemporary Venezuelan artists on this topic developed as a modality of art on computers, later extending this topic and other new ones to For more information on Surpic Angelini and Abdel and Surpic partnership visitwww.transartfoundation.org

-Read my book The Subject in Creativity; Six Philosophical Essays. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, an authorial literary work that I conceived, wrote and composed in 2004, a philosophical issue that I had previously dealt with in a series of lectures that I offered at Fundacreatividad at the University of Valencia in 1992, attention Miriam y Señora Dibora, Houston, Texas, USA, 1997

- About the Exchange of Domains defined as one of the main and decisive characteristics of the Postmodern Work, the latter defined by me, as in another way The Open Work in ECO, in accordance with the configurational Paradigms and the ideal types of configuration of works and relationship with its readers or viewers, read my essay The Postmodern Work, 1995

- I conceived this small curatorship during my stay as curator at the Alejandro Otero Museum of Visual Arts. It had two stages. In my initial conception it was a room of several contemporary Venezuelan artists which I titled Artists in Trance and would be part of a larger exhibition about the topic of the markets that I was preparing in the museum. (Communication Abdel Hernández San Juan/Antonieta Sosa 1994). At the beginning, that exhibition on the theme of the Market would be collective, that is, inviting several contemporary artists to deal with the market theme, at first considering only Venezuelan artists, Communication Abdel Hernández San Juan/Antonieta Sosa, 94-96 then thinking that it could include artists from North, South and Central America.

 (communication Abdel Hernandez San Juan/Luis Camnitzer, Caracas, 1994)

Later adapting to the objective conditions that could make it possible, I separated the elements that made it up. I addressed the market issue alone with an individual author's work, while a collective exhibition on the subject was not feasible at that time (project which I still wish to carry out by inviting others), but the sociological questions that I had put to the foreground to conceive the Artists in Trance room, which opened consisted of works in which the artists have to relate the relationship between art and the institution of art, on the one hand, and the relationship between art, communities, art audiences, markets and social sciences, on the other, then treat it as a possibility in itself. See in this sense High Art Museums and Markets, a selective summary currently revised for publication of my writings on the subject at that time, communication Abdel Hernández San Juan/Jorge Rodríguez, (Abdel Hernandez San Juan, High Art Museums and Markets, Revised paper on the issue of markets as curator at the Alejandro Otero Museum of Visual Art, current attention regarding the final form of the letlee paper, Jorge Rodríguez, Dean of the faculty of Plastic Art, ISA, University of the Arts, Museo de Artes Visuales Alejandro Otero , Caracas, Venezuela, 1994

Based on this, I proposed The Market from Here as my work and then chose the other artists who would integrate it through a conjunction of Venezuelan artists and artists who I had previously invited to individual experiences prior to joining with proposals. See in reference to those experiences my two lectures in Unearte, Abdel Hernández San Juan/Antonieta Sosa, HACER, Unearte, IUESAPAR, summoning them in Caracas 1996 to deal with the matter each in their own way, highlighting which aspects of their works interested me and informing them of the questions to the foreground that it posed.
This small curation of seven samples had a second stage which arose around the question of how to contextualize the seven samples that would make it up. This second stage included a lecture that I gave as a summary of my essay The Postmodern Work in the Fondren Library auditorium at Rice University on a trip I made to Houston in 1996. The lecture at Fondren Library was given thanks to a invitation from the classical and Hispanic study department, Hector Urrutibeity, facilitated by the Venezuelan artist established in Houston Surpic Angelini, who traveled to Caracas to meet me at the museum thanks to and as a meeting facilitated by Tahia Rivero and Vazco Zinetar, president and vice president of the museum.
It is a summary of this contextualizing lecture The Postmodern Work that I gave as a lecture at Fondren Library in '96, which made up the small illustrated publication that Gerardo Mosquera read and commented on in his text Artists who left the plate.

That contextualizing intention later materialized in a spring course that I was invited to offer in the spring of 1997 at the Rice Media Center while in the course we would offer contextualization, in the campus galleries we would exhibit the seven exhibitions. During my preparations for the exhibitions in Caracas, Surpic Angelini began to participate by traveling to Caracas, progressively incorporating himself into the process until fully entering as an artist into the creative process with his exhibition, additionally, to make the exhibitions at Rice University possible, transportation After the works and the assembly in Houston, Surpik and I Abdel had to create a foundation, which we called, taken from my book Edges and Overflows of Art: Possibility of Transarte, Transarte Foundation. Given Surpik's participation as an artist and then his facilitating work in the coordination of the spaces for the exhibitions and their implementation together on campus, we decided that we should develop the contextualization together in ways of contemplating its different aspects, Surpic becoming from then on. co-curator with me of the seven exhibitions on campus and their contextualization.

See my lectures The Market from Here. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, lecture discussed at the panels Fitocriticism, Beyond Critique and Counter Critique, Paradigms, Theorizing Performativity, Bag Lecture Main Room, 12:00 am at the Faculty of Anthropology at Rice University, 1998, National Congress of Anthropology, Chicago , USA, 1999, Siete Días LASA Congress, with discussed talks by Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Stephen A Tyler, Michael Taussig and Quetzil Eugenio, University of Florida, Florida, USA, 2000

Ver mis lectures The Museum and the Public at the Age of High Media Technologies, Massive Medias Consumering and Entertainment y Alternatives to Representation: Experimental Figures of Language, Metonyms, Sinegdoques, Collage, Montages, Evocations, Heterotopias como los temas que trate en la series of Interventions at the Meeting with Catherine David as Harpert Montgomery guest, with lectures interventions by Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Catherine David, Harper Montgomery, Jorge Judice and Mari Carmen Ramirez, The University of Texas at Austin College of Fine Art, The Blanton Museum, Austin, Texas, 1998
6- On the curatorial topic see my lecture Abdel Hernández San Juan, The Curator as Creator, First National Meeting of Curators Concludes Today, Diario El Universal. During the event, Abdel Hernández raised controversy with his opinions on the social figure of the curator in the context of contemporary art. Abdel Hernández spoke about the new art of intermediaries. The Economic Dimension of Contemporaneity entered fully into the discussions of the second day of the First National Meeting of art curators with the intervention of the young Cuban theorist Abdel Hernández San Juan on the new art of intermediaries, Diario El Universal, Caracas, December 16 April, ninety-four, 1994

Ver mis lectures The Market from Here as Individual Exhibit, Lecture discussed on my Individual Exhibit at ISA, University of the Arts, Room 2, May, 2004 y at Torre de Letras, The Cuban Institute of the Book Roff, March, City of Havana, 2007 y Artists in Trans: Seven Exhibits at Rice University, lecture discussed at ISA, University of the Arts, City of Havana, May 2004

Bibliography References

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

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, The Posmodern Work, paper, Transart Foundation, Houston, Texas, USA

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Beyond the Intertextual, paper, conference lectured by Abdel Hernandez San Juan at the Fondren Library lectures auditorium as guest of the faculty of classical and Hispanic studies at rice university, coordinada por Surpic Angelini and Hector Urrutibeity, rice university, Houston, Texas, USA, 1996

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, The Subject in Creativity, Book

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, The Market from Here: Mise in Scene and Experimental Ethnography, conference lectured at the bag lectures main room of the faculty of anthropology at rice university 97, the rice media center lectures auditorium 97, and at panels such as fictocriticism at the faculty of anthropology at rice university 98 and the panel at LASA Congress in Florida 2000, between others, discussed lectures by Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Quetzil Eugenio, Lisa Breglia, USA, 97-2000

Abdel Hernandez San Juan and Surpic Angelini, Seven Exhibits on Campus at Rice University, lecture discussed by Abdel and Surpic at the Maracaibo museum of contemporary art as guests of the museum director Manuel Espinosa, Caracas, Venezuela, 1998

Arthur Danto, The Original Creative Principle, Philosophizing Art, The University of California Press, 1999
Arthur Danto, Illustrating a Philosophical Text, Philosophizing Art, The University of California Press, 1999
Alfred Shurtz, Knowledge in the Worlds of Everyday Life
George Gadamer, Aesthetics and Interpretation
Gilles Deleuze and Guatary, What is Philosophy?, Anagram
Jacques Derrida, Ousia and Gramme, Margins of Philosophy, The University of Chicago Press

Jean François Lyotard, The Inmaterial, Pompidou Museum of Art, Paris
Jean Boudrillard, Transestetica, Anagrama, Colección Argumentos
Julia Kristeva, Sensitive Time, French Alliance
Max Weber, Sociology of Religion, www.elaleph.com
Mario de Micheli, Dadaist Negation, The Artistic Avant-garde of the 20th Century
Michael de Certaud, The Practice of Every Day Life, The University of California Press, USA, 99
Octavio Paz, The Naked Appearance or the Castle of Purity, Marcel Duchamp
Pierre Bourdieu, Structure and Practice: Saussure, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Trans, Richard Nice, Cambridge University Press
Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms, Critical Essays on Art, Music and Representation, The University of California Press
Stephen A Tyler, Postmodern Ethnography, Carlos Reynoso Ed, The Advent of Postmodern Anthropology, Gedisa

Surpik Angelini and Berg Long, Another Reality, Catalogue of the curatorial practice of 69 Texan artists, Houston, Texas, Usa, 1989

Thomas Mc Evilley, artists in trance, various artists, art in America, new York, 1998

Thomas Mc Evilley, lecture to the film after visiting the exhibits, film recorded, transart foundation of Houston and rice media center, march, 19997

Thomas Mc Evilley, Sculpture in the Age of Doubt (1999)
Theodoro Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Orbis