English

 Shiffting domains

Aesthetic, semiotic and anthropological approaches to art

By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Contents

- Evanescenses. By Abdel Hernández San Juan

- invisible transparency: screen and images in earlier Hernandez ten. By Abdel Hernández San Juan

- The gaze resilience: a dual archaeology. By Abdel Hernandez St. John

- landscaping land art. By Abdel Hernández San Juan

- indexing subjectivity. By abdel Hernández San Juan

- A triadic reading. By abdel Hernández San Juan

- A new balance: he aperceptual objectivity of architectural photography. By abdel Hernández San juan

 letting speak the space. By Abdel Hernández San Juan

- vestiges of the city. By Abdel Hernández San Juan

- retroarchaeological readings. By Abdel Hernández San Juan

Evanescence’s of the Image: Surpik Angelini

©By Abdel Hernández San Juan

Houston, Texas, USA

  The Key Burnet Foundation art gallery, located in Kimas, a small town on the outskirts of the town on the coast, has presented, among its usual exhibitions of artists from Texas and other regions in the United States, a recent exhibition by Surpik Angelini, artist from Houston born in Caracas.
  Under the title “Evanescent Memories”, Angelini's paintings suggest a type of metaphysical surrealism, an inclination in his plastic work characterized by drawings and collages alluding to empty architectural spaces in which a world of silence and weightlessness is evoked, lines, allusions to plans and an aesthetic that evokes utopian works of architecture, preliminary projects recovered by the beauty of his drawings, but not realized, something that comes from his training as an architect.
  In his refined collages, Surpic recycles fragments of postcards that he collects on his travels, which he rearranges into a new composition. These postcards are some passages of painting in the history of art, Greek, Renaissance, Baroque, Medieval, Modern and other allusive art. to passages from Greek mythology, pyche, eros, etc., among other gods, demigods and characters from the ancient pantheon.
  The paintings shown in Key's space are, however, rather abstract in inclination, although they were made after extensive processes of stuccoing the surface, acquiring a dense porosity and consistency in white layers that contrast in their atmosphere with Surpik's three-dimensional works.
  Exposed as fabrics to stucco and the latter for the purposes of a textile paint used to dye fabrics, sheets, tablecloths and clothing, these are atmospheric paintings that suggest the rich ambivalence of combining an intentionally stylized brushstroke with the relatively random results to which that the fabric is exposed as a result of the stucco and dyes. The type of textile inks tends to dye the surface where the fabric is direct and to color it where the stucco material is concentrated. As the layers of stucco harden, the fabrics look like worn walls.
  There is a notable contrast between these abstract paintings and Surpic's previous work in drawings, collages and three dimensions while still perceiving the differences, also a style. Some of Surpik's three-dimensional works consist of very simple elements taken from everyday life such as small red bricks and pieces of wood, with which he creates pieces that are situated between installation and sculpture by the fact that they are arranged in space and form a volume.
  Due to the way Surpic combines the elements, its small three-dimensional dimensions allude to notions such as assembly while due to the contiguous relationship between materials of different quality, red brick, used wood, a piece of tree trunk, something that the artist paints on the brick, and The way they are arranged in space recalls the idea of ​​an altarpiece, with a ritual and intimate sense prevailing in them.
  Surpic's art could be understood as a modality of what I have defined as a liminal surrealism but characterized by allusions to certain installation phenomena in culture such as altarpieces, reliquaries, fragments in a workshop, an area in a garden, etc. Without referring to images that iconographically denote these references, due to the way it combines the assembly of various materials, some serialized and others directly in their natural form, and due to the way in which it distributes them in space, its three dimensions suggest the ambivalence of seeming both small installations and sculptures inspired by altarpieces, altars, reliquaries; something that we can find in a garden, etc.
  Some of his pieces are precarious both in their aesthetics and due to the fragility of the way they are made. Many of her works remain in her gardens as if they had been left there without being properly presented, others, preferred by her, are displayed as small ritual objects inside her house.
  The drawings and collages were presented by Surpik in a solo exhibition at the Muddy Gallery in las Mercedes, Caracas, in 1996, while the three-dimensional pieces have been shown less; An example in this regard was her installation presentation for a women's group exhibition at the Holocaust Museum Art Gallery in Houston, a few years ago.
  In Surpic we could talk about an interstitiality between surrealism and minimalism.
  The surreal tone comes from a type of minimalist look towards that based on materials. A reference in early surrealism could be de Chirico, while another in current neominimalism could be Mel Chin, a Texas artist of Asian origin well known in our Anglo scene in Texas art.
  With new works the exhibition continues the series previously exhibited at Sicardi Gallery
  There is something in Surpic's art that from high art in Texas is inspired, comments on or incorporates aesthetics in the so-called Texas vernacular expressions, resulting in a critical attitude as well as an exaltation of the aesthetic values ​​and beauty of these local cultural traditions.
  In 1989, in fact, it became obvious that Surpic's interest in Tejano culture went beyond a simple inclusivism in his visual art, leading to a collective curation of 69 Tejano artists titled Another Reality.
  These abstract fabrics move towards brown, sienna, reddish brown and different types of beige colors and develop blurring effects on their surfaces that give them a languid and sentimental atmosphere.
  This effect results from the last layer worked with an airbrush after dyeing and coating, a semi-transparent pigmentation that covers the whole like a faint glaze, a type of patina.
  Something that we can see in these fabrics has been recurring in Surpik's aesthetics and can be seen in his first architectural work carried out in his studio, workshop and library that he made in the garage and gardens of his house in Riveroaks, the combination between modern elements based on minimal geometric figures such as lines and triangles, and others that allude to traditional aspects in universal Greek, English, German architecture and various traditions of the Victorian house in Texas.
  The concept of evanescence focuses its exhibition in relation to the concept of memory.
  In the concept of evanescence we assume an image. You can fade the entire image or you can fade a moment, figure, passage or figures in the image. Evanescence can refer to a certain cloudy or blurred image that fades into the background, the image of a human figure can fade away by merging into the landscape or blurring among other forms. It can, however, also refer to images that have had a certain shape and that over time are erased.
  An evanescent memory can suggest the image of fog in a city when the roofs and walls of houses seem to vanish, or it can suggest the images that one has about certain cities or places in which one has been or lived, whose memories fade into recollection. , can suggest people that one has met, but whose memory becomes more active with respect to the emotions that were related to the experiences at the time they took place, when seeing this place, city or person years later, their image can become evanescent , what fades, however, fades more to the extent that along with that image in its new form, the memories that we relate to it fade. An example in this sense could be the photos that we collect about the trips and visits we made to certain countries and cities, either alone or with our loved ones.
  When we have just taken a trip and we look at the photographs that have remained referring to the experiences, in these the memories that move around those more immediate memories that the image in its direct form refers to remain as evanescent.
  It is interesting, however, that Surpik has titled “Evanescent Memories” a sample of paintings and not exactly photographs, with respect to which sometimes the concept of evanescence can be more illustrative.
  Given that they are abstract canvases, I could not affirm what, with respect to Surpic's emotional memories, are the passages and the referential or denotative universe that vanishes in recent paintings, but as an informed spectator and critic, I think that what vanishes in his canvases Recent are sensory experiences of the city, possibly of cities that have been significant in your travels in the United States, to Europe, or simply in Houston, the city in which you live; their own house.
  Vanescence can sometimes communicate feelings of nostalgia, as well as the emotions of slight sadness that accompany certain images, not sadness as a heartbreaking feeling, but a sublime sadness, full of emotions of beauty, constipated shock and contained passion for something that one loves, but before which a feeling of nostalgia is present.
  Although the languor of his canvases suggests these things, a rigid relationship could not be drawn between evanescence and the image of memory, or the effects of the image with such feelings since an evanescent image could also communicate a merely sensory and perceptual impression.
  To conclude, I would like to refer, regarding this new exhibition presented by Surpik at the Galveston Gallery in October 1998, some details referring to his individual exhibition Pyche's Ethnographic Reports that I presented a year and a half earlier at the Rice Art Gallery. Media Center at Rice University March 13, 1997 as part of a curatorship we did together, in Houston, Texas, USA.
  Surpik's proposal consisted of covering all the walls of the gallery with a dark sienna fabric. It was a fabric with a suede texture that covered the walls from the floor lines to the ceiling lines, leaving only the office doors uncovered. , the floor and the ceiling.
  Upon entering the spectators saw the gallery completely changed. Climbing the ladder on the first front wall, Surpik placed six collages of postcards about Greek scenes made by herself, mounted with mats on unvarnished wooden frames, from the extreme edges of each of these frames hung a dyed silk cloth in a light pink with tea on each of which he wrote his poems freehand in calligraphy.
  Continuing along the corridor, the spectators had on the right wall a part in which the sienna fabric that covered the entire wall was loosened along the floor and moved away from the wall to cover a small table that seemed like an irregular volume on top. of which he placed a white cup of coffee.
  On the left, in the same hallway, facing the wall covered by the fabric, Surpik placed a chair which she covered entirely with her hair collected throughout different stages in her personal life since she was a child.
  If the spectators sat on this hair chair or crouched around it, they could read poems written by Surpic on the wall at the eye level of a supposed spectator sitting on the chair.
  Continuing toward the back wall, the artist placed one hundred small square frames that were the same length, width, and depth. Through the glass, viewers could see one hundred collages made by Surpik with fragments of postcards collected on his travels through different cities, but while the wooden frame in which the collages were mounted suggested a niche or square box, each covered in wax. , the mats were mirrored.
  At the back of that room with the collages, Surpic placed a mirror mask on a pedestal and on the final wall he sewed on the sienna suede cloth wall a doll and a cloth doll that his grandparents gave him and a braid of his own hair. When i was a child.
  On the parallel wall she mounted several gifts that her Texan friends gave her. Delimiting the area, Surpik drew some lines on fabric to the floor and placed large quantities of postcards and wine glasses on the floor area.
  I consider this show an example of what I have defined as an autoethnographic aesthetic in which Surpik explored Greek images and narratives, images and narratives from the history of European modernist art, as well as narratives about her own cultural experience as an Anglo-Venezuelan migrant from Anglo-American mother and Armenian father, born in Venezuela and established in Texas.
  I consider relevant in this exhibition the way in which the relationships are seen between the process of creating the work of art understood as a type of autoethnography - revisions of identity narratives that correspond to it and then the elaboration and presentation of its sample as a way of return to those images and narratives.
  I define here the concept of self-ethnography in an aesthetic sense, a way of understanding this concept in a weak way, in the sense that Gianni Vatimo gives to this word.
  Unlike ethnography understood as the science of the observer, deconstruction of observation and even as one who studies other cultures, in this case ethnography refers to the life experience and heritage of the artist. It is a process through which the artist selects the “why” and “what for” of her work, the moment in which it is not simply a set of feelings, intuitions and ideas that an artist wishes to express directly with the materials or with space, but the very definition of the “what” of the work is constituted from the beginning in an autoethnographic search expressed in the work around images and literary and narrative elements about their own life processes and identity, the work is offered to the artist as an opportunity to take herself as a subject, as in life itself, she collects testimonies of her life in Europe, gathers personal letters, chooses objects that she considers intimate, mementos, memories, to through of them, achieving the definition of a work in which he makes his own introspection.
  In his exhibition “Ethnographic Reports of Pyque” Surpik explored this type of dynamic that goes from the creative process to the subsequent textualization in plastic language of that.
The creation process and the subjectivity of the artist become her focus of attention in these works. Sometimes these self-analytical reviews are directed towards aspects of her biography, passages from her own life, memories, moments in which the artist and the woman, the human being and the performance artist, see their art as visual presentations destined to be installed in the space their self-critical and self-analytical processes.
  They are works that emerge from modes of testimonial self-collection as a critical form of deconstruction of the authority of sexist or patriarchal power.
  While on the one hand the artist makes her works as visual editions of a previous self-narrative analysis—narratives that are related to the individual self—on the other hand, the previous work of self-revision of identity, self-ethnography, is related to each work in particular, each work poses a new problem, the artist makes public what she wants and how she wants.
  It is no longer a simple “theatricalization of time,” as Douglas Crimp called performance, but rather a performative one that she works on due to her interest in the relationship between images and narratives of both types taken from literary motifs and her own life. , what we could define as the narrative substrate of the images that she knows—the references to Greek passages, for example, specifically that of the relationship between Syche and eros.
  Once we are faced with her work, in its present, the critic sees herself situated before the work as such and no longer before the performative process that she experienced before and during the process in which she made it—although the way of presenting the exhibition obviously refers to something that has been typical of its previous experience, the critic sees itself placed in front of the closure, the performance has already concluded, only its document remains, the performance presents, shows a conclusion of the process, there is no return to what made it possible.
  It is seen in this sense that a posteriori textualization as a simple nationalization can create dissatisfaction in artists because, from the point of view of the ideation of the work, the experiential process and everything I have referred to is important.
  It must be taken into account that although in artists like Surpik Angelini art and life merge, at the moment of making her work or being invited to an exhibition the artist returns to herself as if for the second time, she searches there, she collects there, this time thinking about a work and that the process of editing itself is already, in the closing of the performance, a textualization that it makes as an aesthetic idea, a comment in which, like autoethnography, the individual narrative is returned as language in the plastic aesthetic of the work.
  This process of self-editing of the artist refers to an area where the processes of simultaneous temporality typical of performance, its experience and the ethical aspects related to her work are related to forms, a matter that generally involves individual-artist relationships. When I refer to a “self-ethnography” in this exhibition I am referring to a way in which it makes the creation process an objective in itself to which it dedicates a time of deep review of its identity processes, creates writings about it and selects objects and elements that allow it to communicate it in the plastic language of an installation exhibition.
  The artist proposed a work related to the testimonial-individual nature of her experience. He recombined his collages of collected postcards in the gallery looking for a way to organize them in space, creating an evocative effect alluding to his memories, criticism of narratives of cultural identity, how to translate the narrative into the spatial that is more fragmentary and synchronic, and that includes various dimensions in scale.
  The artist explored an idea that would allow her to rearticulate those personal stories in a way in which the work also functioned as an evocation of her memories, but as a critique of origin.
  The relationship between Pyque and eros in Greek literature accentuated by it, contrary to an anecdote, what is fascinating is how the exhibition questions the myth of origin and proposes the spatialization of its narratives at the level of indications, traces, almost like an idea of ​​an extended body , skin, tactility, physical contact.
  In a way, the artist erases the gallery by reconstructing all reference to the encompassing space that can distinguish between her work and the gallery space; she proposes a world without inside or outside, which exalts that which has no gravity, that which is temporal-timeless.
  To approximate this leap from the narrative and its linear temporalities typical of the creation process to the language of the exhibition in the gallery, it must be taken into account that Surpik since the sixties worked within a language close to surrealism, a type of work where elements were combined that refer to the fragmentary in John Cage, the idea of ​​relating pieces of information and leaving the meaning open---Surpik was in fact in several of Cage's performances during his years of study in California.
  Chiriko's is characterized by the creation of weightless spaces where objects, references to spaces and structures lose their gravity. This suspension in the weightless, in the incorporeal of the corporeal, is typical of the transition from the narrative to the spatial, but it is accentuated in Surpik's work to the extent that the surface covers everything and from the moment in which these things They are like metaphors.
  In a certain way, Surpik's exhibition should be seen as one in which he proposed the idea of ​​installing images for their narrative substrate, invoking the senses. In this sense, the exhibition functions as a reiteration that the performance makes of itself for its own sake, it illustrates this, because although in its exhibition there is no performance in the sense of an actor moving in space, the notion of performance refers to how the exhibition once again reiterates the performance that was present in the creative process.

Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Houston, Texas, United States,

References

Beyond the Intertextual. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Paper conference Lectured at the Fondren Library Lectures Auditorium, Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA, 1997

Surpic Angelini. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Lecture discussed at the Rice Media Center Auditorium, Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA, 1997

Is a Postmodern Prosemic Possible? By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, lecture given at the Faculty of Architecture of the Central University of Venezuela, Caracas, 1994

Theorizing Architecture. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, lecture given in the panel Art and Architecture: A Possible Dialogue, Fundación Consolidado, Caracas, 1991

 Invisible transparencies: Screen and the Imagery in earlier Hernández Dies

By Abdel Hernández San Juan

  The first time I saw a work by José Antonio Hernández in front of me, I had the impression of being in front of an artist who found a hitherto unexplored possibility of moving art beyond its usual cognitive and semiotic constraints.

  On the one hand, much of what was done then using geological materials or materials alluding to geography, speleology or natural or archaeological sites, or abandoned natural sites in favor of collecting materials from them to create volumes and installations of dimension telluric and cosmogonic in cemiclosed spaces, casts, moulds, ceramics, vessels, tectonic materials, or instead leaning towards the ephemeral precariousness of flimsy or poor materials in contrast to the persistence of durable materials destined to transcend via conservation over time of neoplasticist materials related to polyethylene and the serial and trivialized nature of industrial serializations.

  Unlike these propensual inclinations, Hernández ten appeared with a work that imagined the directions of land art on the one hand towards the media and more specifically towards the sensory, transparent and impresent universe of the screen, it was therefore an interstitial movement that On the one hand, it unmarked the well-known assumptions of land art by relating apparently incompatible things, live virgin land on the one hand, from which the specular projection screen was born, and also interstitial possibilities of unmarking the usual imagination that had then peculiarized the approach. of the screen in contemporary art.

  Just as land art left sites and locations to confine itself to modalities of arte povera or cosmogonic tellurias, the screen in art suffered from an endemic monitoring that consumed it in an artefactualized discourse about the television and the computer as electronic objects acquiring in his work an unexpected and surprising possibility, treating the screen as a mirror surface of impresent and weightless presence capable of psychoanalytically evoking the soul of Amerindian communities.

  In short, it was land on the floor from which the screen emerged almost imperceptibly, recognizable only by the effect of floating images that seemed projected in the air. In fact, the screen was almost invisible, the sensation of its presence was acquired through the visibility of the projected images.

  The universe of tactility and certainties of presence specific to the pre-media world that the earth evokes, acquired with cinematic mediation and rear projection, a new dimension in the imaginary, it even evoked the latter, and conversely the screen acquired a soul and was anthropologized, in this way the earth and its native communities ascend to heaven perhaps in life by becoming mediated or perhaps as spectralities of the soul volatilized, a new dimension specularized by the screen while the latter, conversely, was gifted in its senses of a soul that apparently with its usual homogenization had been lost at a time when by then we already knew more about these communities through the media than in person.

  Although it is true that the most philosophical minimalist sculpture developed around geometric and logarithmic principles had already been exploring high contrasts of this type, it usually did so as a discourse of mere materials or in the most typical way of the first Arte Povera when they were contrasted. lighting with precarious or poor materials.

  Then I began to get to know new works by Hernández ten, but the image of that one never left me and not so much because of its undoubted anthropological relevance-- but above all because never until today have I seen such a fine and sophisticated treatment of the screen on a visual level again. In terms of subjectivity, in that work where the screen as such was so intangible that it seemed invisible, acquiring the sense of its impresent presence through the volatile effect of the projected ascending images, the sophisticated thing was that the discourse on the screen seemed at its own time about the intangibility of an imaginary with respect to which the work, exchanging the parameters of the media and the autochthonous, elucidated and discovered more than what it itself confirmed in the known discourses, the imaginary, in fact, like the screen, is a concept intangible.

   When Hernández ten made his work - in the late eighties - he did not imagine that thirty years later the screen would be transformed into a volatilized, almost imperceptible and intangible tactile universe through which, with the Internet and digital culture, everything would happen through her, but since then it evokes dimensions not very far from what the screen has become for us.

  Since then, his work has allegorized the best image that until today I have in my classes to discuss what the philosophical and symbolic dimension of the screen is for subjectivity today, just when studies on the screen have become a whole new area of ​​the theory of the screen. media and anthropology.

  These are the things that, in this regard, focused my inclusion of images of his art in my conference at Fondren Library, 1996, as well as later at the Rice Media Center, although on this last occasion not alone-- accompanied by the discussion of many others. artists in a parallel course to my curatorship with Surpik--, we included an interview film about their art, where in addition to their skateboards, erotic pleasure, images projected glands in cloude up at the moment of ejaculation, focused their attention.

  A work that I saw, however, only very recently on his Facebook has confirmed the well-founded and not merely interpretative basis of my hermeneutics. This one seemed to me for different reasons, but in the same sense, disconcertingly attractive, now it was a television screen in pure glass devoid of all its plastic monitor paraphernalia submerged in water but visible in an entirely transparent way inside a container cubic acrylic similar to a fish tank.

  Here the allogenous effect around the intangibility of the screen for subjectivity and the imaginary was not achieved through an exchange between the anthropological dimensions of culture and those of the media of the screen but through the emphasis on the semantic immateriality of its materiality. crystalline, like water, the screen is transparent and crystalline in its transparency, its materiality is undoubtedly solid unlike water, which is liquid, but with regard to the liquid or what liquidity evokes, it is not its matter but its phenomenal presence. volatile mode through which the image through it becomes intangible, it is an electrical impulse, sling, transmission, signal, it is present and it is not at the same time, live or deferred, it is in itself a specular mode of being as those crystalline species that live by folding and unfolding in the sea, suigeneris species of mollusks.

  Here, however, it was not a screen that was on but rather suspended without image, without vision and without audio other than because of the way in which the viewer reflects upon seeing it through the water as the ecological habitat appropriate as a linguistic trope to its stranger. way of being or housing beings.

  There is here an ecological, environmentalized and even sentimental reading of the media.

  Don't we become more affective as we become more interactive and playful? The media establishes a world of laxity, plasticity, adaptation, flexibility. If culture is mediated and remedied with it, then we become culture with the media.

  Isn't this ecological trope of the screen in water an invitation to rethink ourselves about the screen? What does it mean for our subjectivity as a crystalline surface that mediates between us and the world of our denoted objects? Aren't they vision, tactility and sound for our subjectivity, projections in our idealized interior of the world of others sifted by our subjectivity individuated inwards and then projected outwards that symbolized individuation?, don't we always meet with others in a kind of intermediate surface where Do our projections and yours meet?

 And what is the imaginary if not precisely the name we give to that intangible surface? Doesn't the screen externalize the surface that mediates the place that in itself corresponds to the imaginary? The world of dreams is of a similar dimension.

    The use of projected video continued sporadically, appearing in diverse ways in some of his installations, such as in a version of his pieces about skateboards showing the images of these decorations on repeated monitors, or the image projected on a wooden piece of furniture in his work. "Ceibo."

  The above contrasts with the preponderance that Hernandez himself has given to desacralizing the far-fetched, the extraordinary, the quoted or sweetened in favor of redeeming the mundane, apparently banalized, popular or vernacular, as some have pointed out with respect to some of his works, such as For example, his exhibition "Chiviados" where he minimalizes in a simple and repetitive way around wood ordinary broomsticks and bathroom dustpans, or in a similar vein his reference to complex thinkers like Kant through his images massified by consumption and culture. popular of which the latter has turned into an entire aesthetic that Cubans call 'poppis' or 'tacos' comfortable plastic sports brand shoes.

  It is also complex because on the other hand all these searches are related to sociological and anthropological truths, in contemporary advanced capitalism culture recreates consumption and reinvents itself through ideologies of yesteryear that contrasted the most media and the indigenous, they considered the codes of a sophisticated philosophical minimalism and the minimalism that, in the opposite sense, massive and industrialized, characterizes in itself the aesthetics of utilitarian industrial design, the most sophisticated thought and the most ordinary sense of comfort, the free market and consumption. They don't work anymore.

  The reculturalization of consumption forces an anthropology of neologisms and cultural reinventions through which Kant will no longer be that Kant hailed by an inaccessible and encrypted image but rather a Kant who goes in 'poppis' why not?, a Kant reinterpreted and reinvented as they said in an October issue "Kant after Duchamp", how can we not rethink the aprioris after Duchamp?, but in the same way that painting the Virgin Mary naked is a taboo for Orthodox Christians, it will also not stop It would be for encrypted culture to carry Kant in the mundane and ordinary brands of a pair of sports sneakers or to suggest another series of Hernández ten on clothing labels.

References

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, on how to be ecologicals in art, published at economy today newspaper, ojo pinta page, coordinated by Maria di made, Caracas, 1993

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Venezuelan art in computer, text of the catalogue of 100 Venezuelan artists working in computers focusing the water, crated by Maria Clara Fernandez and Ricardo benaim, viasa, Caracas, 1994

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, beyond the intertextual, lecture discussed at the fondren library lectures auditorium as a guest of the faculty of classical and Spanish studies, coordinated by Surpik Angelini and hector urrutibeity, rice university, Houston, Texas, USA, 1996

Hernandez San Juan Abdel and Angelini Surpik, Jose Antonio Hernandez dies, pp, including the presentation of the film a zombie in interface on Hernandez dies, a parallel multimedia course, rice media center, Houston, 1997

The Resilience of the gaze: a dual archeology

By Abdel Hernández San Juan

   Light is nature, this seems beyond a doubt, but light also participates in our sense of presence, something must thus make itself present before us only when the light is there, therefore, although light is nature, it also participates in our phenomenological certainty that makes us certain of ourselves, with our subjectivity involved in it.

   A river is a natural phenomenon outside of us but as soon as a river makes itself present to us through light according to our gaze we cannot so easily put aside our subjective impressions involved in our gaze of the derived nature of it.

    Remembering Barthes, the gaze and the soul are born together, the soul is born exactly when we can say that the gaze is formed in the baby, the gaze is not a passive perception of something predestined nor a simple objective reflection of nature.

   Just as it happens between our subjective sense of presence, which we cannot reduce only to how light makes presence possible for us, between our gaze and the objects provided to our perception in nature, we have the formation of something new.

   However, that something new cannot be accessed in itself by externalizing our perception of the objects of that perception as we receive it in a merely physical or optical sense, only through the repetition that a sign implies for us, through the formation of a language we externalize our gaze and see it as a sign of the gaze in front of us, only then are we ready to perceive to what extent something new takes shape between us and what we see.

  Seeing is not the same as seeing by seeing, we can see, of course, another person, for example, far away from us seeing, a river for example, but in that way we cannot access their gaze, we cannot simply see their eye. In our body, its gaze will always belong to the eye of another body, to access its gaze, even to access our own gaze beyond a mere distinction between the eye and its objects, we need to externalize this in a language, we need to see the seeing. or see what seeing sees, but not from the outside like an eye body, but by accessing the interiority of that gaze that sees.

   This leads us to language as an internal state of the subject, to his or our gaze; nothing should then be considered more internal to subjectivity than the gaze.

   Seeing the look externalized in a language in which the look is a sign of the look, we perceive that seeing a river, looking at it, is not the same as seeing the sign of a look seeing it, which a few minutes before was external, Seeing another seeing a river became internal in accordance with an externalization that turns the gaze into a sign in language.

   For me one of the most interesting results of Cristina Jadick's installations and photographs must be truly linked to the way in which she has managed to provide the images around this subject in an original and rich way.

   What I find curious about her most recent exhibition “Ïnto resiliense” is precisely that her exposition eludes her own more usual way of exploring the paradoxes evoked before, here she helps us to distinguish in a more defined way what she usually mixes in her previous exhibitions, perception and the object of perception, why is she doing it? An exhibition of photographs from which perception and its objects are not exactly the same?

   Should we maintain a natural resilience between perception and its objects?

   Is this exhibition dedicated to showing us and exploring the natural principle of a certain mixture between perception and its objects?

   More on the same, the relationship between perception and the objects of perception has been, from my point of view, usually neglected in all its possibilities by contemporary art criticism referred to a mere ocular and optical matter.

   For me, one of the most interesting results of Cristina's mixed media installations, photographic installations and photographs must be linked to the attention she has given to them.

   Her idea of ​​resilience suggests in fact a certain natural argument since recognized through the various photographs and landscapes that make up the exhibition, resilience can be found and found in nature itself, something that she explores and accentuates by interposing all the time. the resilience of the river's natural elements.

  In “into resilience”, more than in any other of his previous exhibitions, the elements at play, perception on the one hand and his objects, on the other, seem to be put aside more than usually in his art, so, in addition , not necessarily as a way of renouncing or leaving its usual semantic conjugation of both things on the surfaces of language and its senses, relationships between sensitivity and senses in which perception and its objects have usually been treated by Cristina Jadick as one and the same. same thing.

  I have argued before about Cristina Jadick's samples of her exploration of a type of filigree between light and textures creating something similar to what I have called liminality. Better yet, she invites us to accentuate this time the distinction between perception and object to the extent that this helps us clarify how the elements at play, here above all the elements of earth art in her work, must be understood as originally linked.

   In fact, usually the mixture of installation, arte povera and land art creates a profusion of elements through which the aspects of land art usually linked with spatiality and more precisely with natural spatialities, tend to be lost, from this perspective I I consider “into resilience” as an exhibition through which, by recalling the distinction between perception and object, we can also have a sense of the need for spatiality in land art and its importance with respect to the theme in question of this exhibition, the river. bayou.

   What we have here with this exhibition “Into resilience” must then be recognized as an archeology of the relationship between land art, natural spatialities and landscape usually neglected, but not so much to keep perception and object separated, but to distinguish them from each other, both things, the perception and spatiality of nature on the one hand, and the gaze and its landscapes on the other, exploring how this original connection between land art and landscape spatialities should be extended and enriched in its possibilities semantically to investigate relationships between subjectivity , nature and culture.

     This allows us to know how land art should be considered a main element in his art, not so much this time lost under the elements of arte povera and installation, but revoked, recalled and explored from the mixed techniques of landscape, photogravure and Photography.

   In fact, as much as we have this time pieces that allow us to distinguish the gaze and the landscapes of the river, as well as at the same time we also have paths through which the matter found in the river is collected, transforming the fabric or the two-dimensionality of the surfaces. of the work in metonyms of the river surfaces. The material from the river, found objects, etc., enters the fabric or the two-dimensional surface of the collected work, weaving over it.

   At the same time, this is paradoxically also a metonymy of the very kind of showcase in which the work becomes as signs of its gaze, that semiological inventory of a “I was there” in the river from which all this collected material comes, all this inventory. of elements collected on the surface of the painting now seen in reverse, that is, not only like the resilience of the river weaving the fabric, but also the resilience of the gaze weaving the river into subjectivity.

    The ambiguity of choosing and or accentuating one thing over the other seems, if we look at the exhibition as a whole, intentional, more or less considered as a metonymy of the river surfaces or instead of the work of art vitrinizing the motifs of the river inventoried, the sample in both variants refers us to a simultaneous archeology, to a duplicity.

  The sample is at the same time both things, on the one hand it is a denial of the external observer understood as a mere collector of inventoried archaeological evidence, to instead recode the conventions of the framework with the trope of resilience arriving from the natural tissues of the river towards the blurring of perception and its objects, and at the same time, the exhibition is also a denial of the object as something externalized or denoted, as something simply predestined to instead let the trope of resilience work but this time in reverse, that is , arriving from the gaze and its soul and providing our image of the river with a sense of it through the subjectivity and sensoriality of our body for which the river makes sense.

   The accent on spatiality is far from being something absent or new in Cristina Jadick's art, on the one hand, even though we speak here of spatiality in reference to the river, the sites of reality that are objects of our perception evoked by her landscapes. , spatiality as a matter of language semantically defines the main ways in which Cristina has always explored the installation, but on the other hand, considered as something external beyond the spatialities of the installation, she has in recent years been included in exhibitions focused on it, such as “places” for example, and she is usually attentive to the topic, as can also be seen on her Facebook regarding the “on sites” exhibition.

   Now, in addition to the richness that “into resilience” specifies, we must add comparative comments on its nature since as soon as we compare this sample with others by Cristina, it appears as rarely accentuated around the distinction between the eye and the objects of his perception, however, even in this exhibition, this is disseminated even as is usual in his works.

   In short, even in this exhibition, an exhibition defined by asking to what extent the mixture between perception and its objects can truly be found in nature? --the relationship between the gaze, perception, and what is given to it --, this is still mixed, blurred and disseminated, that is, explored according to its resonances in subjectivity and sensitivity rather than approached as something external or objective foreign to the internal feeling of sensitivity and multisensory.

   So, therefore, what we must really point out here as main must be this, that as soon as we know that perception and its objects are separate, distinct things, as soon as at the same time we ask ourselves why we instead do we integrate? Because we usually endow objects and have a sense of grasping them as if they were integrated into perception as the same dimension. And the answer to this paradoxical question is not easy to resolve, but on the side of senses and meanings, we integrate perception and its objects because the latter are significant for us, they make sense to us.

    In this way, although the river as a landscape can be externalized as something given to us in nature, we cannot so easily be observers when we feel the river in our sensitivity and when the latter makes sense to us in our subjectivity, enveloping the sense of ourselves. and our city. This for me is what Cristina Jadick's exhibition is telling us. Our sensitivity, our soul and our gaze are woven into a resilience that, coming from the very nature of the river, explains at the same time the principle of the resilience of our gaze.

   Reality itself in fact phenomenologically crystallizes for our senses in a very similar way.

   We know that something is present before us in forms, we know that we have a palpable external impression of it in our sensoriality, like a data from our senses, but we instead tend to integrate what we know is separate, perception and its objects. , since these objects are significant to us, since they make sense to us, we cannot so easily put them aside as something separate from our perceptions, we cannot treat them merely as something optical or ocular, we cannot separate the optical from the sensitive, if the gaze and the soul are born together from childhood, something grows, extends and transforms, disseminates our perceptions in our sensitivity.

  Liminality explains this

  Recovering the spatiality of both things, land art and objects, we must point out again that it is the way in which Cristina Jadick usually approaches natural elements, for example the sea and beaches in her previous exhibitions or simply her constant allusion and inclusion of materials. natural materials such as tree trunks, earth, etc., materials and objects found in nature in several of her exhibitions, the path through which Cristina has approached the bayou river in this exhibition is therefore a continuation of her usual environmental research on environmental issues. which conceptually are about subjectivity and culture.

  Certainly, with this exhibition we have more than before some pieces that can even be referred to as landscapes in which the river is out there represented, but we also know that it is an exploration of the river in subjectivity according to how it can be considered. culturally by our sensitivity and our soul.

  For those of us who know the importance of this river, in fact I lived for several years just a few meters from it, the river means much more than just a natural landscape for a passive gaze, it is also linked to our soul of the city and this subjectively woven into it, its exhibition cannot then be accessed and understood without this dimension of the river for subjectivity, it in fact remembers the human adaptation to natural disasters that occurred long ago so that through close photographs of the water, the sky and trees or of furniture and domestic utensils fragmented or juxtaposed as intimate memories the exhibition combines a constant allusion to a relationship between resilience that can be found as something that is born and caused by nature in a resilience through which we We adapt or mix, merge or adhere perception and its objects, it is the gaze with its soul beyond a mere optical device in order to be adaptive to the challenges that nature usually poses to us.

  In fact, Cristina, through a series of exhibitions that I had the opportunity to experience in person since she conceived them in her studio, can be defined as the artist who, in a more usual and original way, is developing works around this.

   Considering it from three of her previous exhibitions she has explored a type of blurring of the borders between perception and its objects, testing and achieving a semantic density of memory of matter through which usually the distinction between perception and what is perceived is relativized. towards a surface of sensoriality and sensitivity that semantically unites perception and its objects as if they were unified in each other.

  There is something in Cristina's art that is as if the objects were attached to the surface of perception or scattered on it, this idea of ​​a surface of perception must however be discussed in order to achieve an elucidation around the sign of the look in his work.

  Revisiting some of his previous exhibitions again, we saw the use of found objects, textures and light together with photography, such as in his exhibition “the sound of silence” and this leads us to think that with this exhibition he has explored a movement that goes from the liminality characteristic in that exhibition and others of hers towards resilience, now perception and its objects are more visible, but in many of her installations we can recognize how she usually collects the signs of gaze and perception through given inferences by the conjunction between sensoriality and sensitivity, the sound and visual effects of the waves, the texture of the bags that filter the light, the layers of light through the texture of materials found or that denote the natural, the sand, etc., all of this woven in a way in which semantically perception and object are united as in a surface of semantic memory, the integration of both things usual in its installations is related to what was said before, we integrate perception and its objects because these allow us They make sense and become part of our sensitivity, the sensory and the sensible, the gaze and the soul are united, the world of nature thus appears according to subjectivity and is understood culturally.

  Liminality enters here to explain why perception moves beyond the perceptual optical and disseminates in the sensible something that must be truly understood as an extension as soon as the sensible and the sublime participate through the senses and what It is significant to us.

  This exhibition explores the natural dimension of this, showing it in the resilience of nature itself, the resilience of the elements of the river and the resilience of the gaze.

   Many of Cristina Jadick's impressive installations, her mixed techniques, collages and juxtapositions become unique and original precisely because of the way this central issue is explored in them, I would even say that we could not fully understand her art without understanding this issue, a dense surface of matter accumulated like a semantic memory characterizes his works and must be referred to here as crucial, something regarding which “into resilience” brings us renewed light.

A scriptural reading: Luis Alberto

©By/by Abdel Hernández San Juan

Cultural anthropologist and art critic

  On a micro level, that of signs, symbols and graphic organization, the plastic and visual work of Luis Alberto Hernandez is an exploration around the idea of ​​a visual grammar where the inscriptural and scriptura as an aspect of writing that refers us to His memory comes to the foreground over the content of what was said.
It is not, however, that there is no saying in his works; this is frequently constellated in a more synchronic way by the relationship between the visuality of writing as graphic gestures and the universe of symbols, signs and images in which it is expressed. those scripturalities orbit with the titles and capable of legibility in that usually by fragments certain calligraphies become alphabetically intelligible such as for example their titles in "Timeless" or "Nomades" in relation to the images, or when, although unusual, what is inscribed can be read in some of his small format books such as "Sortilegios" or his golden books.
  These are not, however, erased writings as if the ruling logic were diachronic, as is usual with writing in its always linear form - from left to right - then erased, but rather a writing of which only its scripturality remains, That is to say, its relation to that according to which it preserves the gesture, retains the ephemeral transience of the instantaneous gestural, preserving it as a mere retention of its evanescence in a memory that is no longer the memory of what was said, but that of the gesture itself. breath of life that is brought to the gesture over a synchronic time irreducible to any linearity.
  Thus, the museum of scripturalities is not, as when we fix our gaze on the inscription, one relative to that which is inscribed, such as, for example, we would say that writing, like transcription, inscribes oral and spoken saying, but rather a memory. of the synchronic that, because it is irreducible to its infallible linearity, can only be reserved as palimpsestuality and as constellative meanings that radiate evocative connections that overflow its very nature of writing.
  The scriptural and the inscriptural are thus different, the first reestablishes the relationship of writing with the fleetingness of the gesture that makes it, referring to calligraphy as a gesturalized visuality, the second to what is inscribed with that scripture, the scriptural thus refers us to a capable accumulation in which by governing the gesture the form exceeds the content and what is said or the message, the code or what is inscribed is erased not in the intentional way as someone who erases what is written but in the architextual way in which some things remain hidden by others, removed from their presence, overabundant by others that decenter them, that take them to the margin or overlap one another.
  The scriptural thus refers to an economy of the text that cannot be present here and now at the same time all the time and accumulates by strata, scripturality takes us to the palimpsest, inscripturality instead to the inventory, the catalog or the archive, which that is inscribed is fixed and retained by conserving, what is scriptura is palimpsestualized, the palimpsest is a thresholdization of architextualities, scriptures, gestures retained from writing retain in a superposition of textualities that move one another because the gesture in them continues to refer writing to incessant time and that incessant time is increasingly synchronic, irreducible to inscriptural linearity.
  It is not, then, inventoried writings or things collected or collected through the mediation of an inscriptural economy but rather a procedural temporality irreducible to writing with respect to which only its perennial gestures remain and as such palimpsestualized accumulations, thresholds of architexts. displaced.
  It is like in geology that some formations erase others and new organic groups remain in whose stone we can only read superimposed temporalities, fragments of civilizations hidden in each other or of geological eras or more usual in Luis Alberto of evocations of past fragments, timeless temporalities retained in the stone of time after which we must archaeologize adhesions that are already invisible or inveterate by others.
I had not previously noticed the relationship of scriptura to time and gesture, among other things because the concept of scriptura refers to a scriptural economy, but when I saw the paintings of Luis Alberto, I became aware of this crucial distinction between scriptura and inscripturality, what is inscribed is a mark, fixes in a trace a memory that retains and preserves, that collects as an inventory, or that records as a marked inscription, the ink on the paper, the burin on the wood, the trace on the wood, the recording of voice, video or photography, is writing as a deposit of retentions, scriptura, on the other hand, which was once referred only to its writing, to the formalism of its stylization, to calligraphy, for example, has been too reduced to the text and its economy, it is true that scripture gives a visual image of the text, but if it is pure text it is inscription, to be scripturality it must form as a whole not a whole equal to its memorized but inscribed object, but something new because scriptura It is not the economy of the memory of the text, but rather the temporality and spatiality of the gesture/text, if it is form and style, writing, it is the calligraphic or visible gesture in any way, a scriptural conjunction is not a addition or multiplication of parts or elements, but a superposition of temporalities and spatialities that cannot coexist at the same time in presence and move one another.
  The idea of ​​an economy does not refer here to something always within reach, the scriptural planes, as becomes obvious in the paintings of Luis Alberto, form images of a synchrony irreducible to scriptural and inscriptural linearity, they first form capable of being They differentiate into strata where some things are visible to us and others remain behind, suggested or hidden, thus the scriptural image par excellence refers to the palimpsest, this is made explicit above all in the paintings of Luis Alberto and less in his assemblages, in the first, at times infinite calligraphic capabilities in different fonts that are superimposed on each other suggest a sedimentary time of multiple dimensions in which the sign or symbol is formed, the latter, in fact, sometimes the cross, emanates as the last form of all the strata of writings erased by time.
  This refers to the archeology of something that is becoming indecipherable where the iconographic and visual image begins to replace the writing of which only a memory remains, thus emerging a meaning beyond the alphabetic over the grammatical.
  It is as if Luis Alberto in his paintings retraced the journey that civilization took to reach the hieroglyph, as if his works consisted of finding out how a hieroglyph or petroglyph that we have as the remains of an ancient civilization should be deciphered to find out its origin or origin. to read and interpret it, but rather as if the artist were in search of how that signifying and symbolic phenomenon that we have in front of us could have come to be and be shaped in that way.
  He investigates not how to decipher the symbols interpretively but rather what kinds of paradoxes produce them to acquire the form they have, it is as if his paintings once again told us the story of how symbols are formed, in their pictorial logic, writing. It does not become or arise from the image, but rather the other way around, the image arises from writing, this second is what becomes a palimpsest from which the symbol, the non-alphabetic sign, then emanates with a surprising crystalline clarity.
In his work, Luis Alberto actually proposes a kind of trip in reverse, far from moving from the analogical image towards writing as its most differentiated form invites us to notice a certain mysterious archaism of writing, something in it, visible in its scripturality. , refers it to the palimpsest and hides it behind memory capacity that, like in geology, is erased until forming a whole of synchronic temporalities irreducible to alphabetical linearity in whose center visual signs and icons then emanate.
  The writing is not always diluted, as I said, there are pieces in which the writing is legible, or graphically codifiable, but in light of his work understood as a whole, it is notable that these pieces are almost always based on circles, crosses and other symbolisms, they transform writing into an architextual dimension but not in the way in which the footnote is architext and peritext of the body of the text because in that case both things, footnotes and texts are ultimately alphabet, but in the way of an architextuality where scripturalized peritextuality, scriptura, surrounds its margins and makes the margins of the iconic and visual image.
  There is in this, in reverse of the discourse of semiotics, a call that the prismatic analogy and the iconic immediacy of the visual sign is more appropriate to the temporality of the process, and to the states that are proper to being than the linearity of writing or In any case, since ultimately calligraphy and writing have a relevant place in his art, it is as if he were telling us that unlike what we have usually thought, no matter how differentiated writing is, it is necessarily less archaic than the image.
  Luis Alberto in a certain way tells us that writing is also atavistic, that something in it refers to a strange mechanism that goes towards the spells of palimpsest memories, it is as if writing could not escape the effects of synchronic time and ended up itself also submerged. in the primal spells of visual logic.
  This could also refer them to the place that writing had in religion, for example in Byzantium during the Middle Ages when it was an epitaph, like the iconic image, referred to intuitive figures such as the prism or other signs of the irreducible, in his work the The image of writing moves away and blurs as it tends rather to surround the iconic image that is always highlighted in the center or within circles. It in turn then emerges from these palimpsestualities to return to us complex visual neologisms formed from capable and capable of submerged scripturalities, some hidden behind the strata of the others and ultimately resulting in all symbolic ones not very different due to their analogical prismatism to the purely visual icon.
  It is as if Luis Alberto invited us to think that writing, through the mediation of a strange atavistic mechanism that prevents it from surviving the temporalized simultaneity of the process and the gesture, belongs to the same species of visual icons and forms, together with this return, itself a palimpsest, mysterious chrysanthemums.
  Our concept of grammar is so related to alphabetic language and its logic that the possibility that iconographic-visual codes can be grammatical is far from us, but if we abstract as it does, the concept of grammar gives rise to everything we need to think. grammatically it is a vocabulary, whether that vocabulary is made of vowels and consonants or in their difference of golden eyes, calligraphic gestures, crosses, circles and ways of relating graphic elements after which the writing mostly leaves only the memory of its gesture. , it doesn't make much difference.
  However, when we move away from the microlevel trying to find out the meanings of that vocabulary, we realize that it is at the same time a neological and inventive grammaticality, which responds less to a pre-established language and more to one that is being reinvented.
And isn't the palimpsest itself already a certain form of oblivion?, a certain way in which the spatialities and temporalities of reinvention begin? There is an interesting relationship between the palimpsest and the withdrawal of the code, where the palimpsest begins the code becomes progressively more and more indecipherable, the palimpsest is certainly not yet the closed and inaccessible vault to which we do not have access, there is still code in the palimpsest, but like that image that evoked an echo about the abbeys to which only certain priests had access to, shrouded in a mystery of indecipherability, they referred to jealously guarded knowledge but of which only a few had the code while others did not, the palimpsest on the other hand does not refer to something hidden for hidden sake, but to something regarding which time and space can no longer be fully elucidated, as in geological formations, centuries of organic sedimentations erase from our access to presence certain things behind which, with respect to the previous ones, only fragments remain, but given That it is about culture here, not nature, that is the neologism, the point from which culture begins to reinvent itself since it can no longer completely reconstruct its codes.
  It is as if the origin were irreconcilable and it was only possible to invent ourselves with its fragments.
  In this sense, Luis Alberto's paintings and assemblages, like the idiolects of slang, are inventions of a language in their visual case, but like slang with respect to the language established indecipherable by the codes of the latter, and this then sends us back to speech, well, only the memory established by speech can generate a language within another language.
  But speech is preserved here more of its relationship to the gesture, to its synchronic temporality and less to its saying or its voice.
  On the one hand there is in his work a reference to calligraphy as a gesture that evokes writing but sometimes also a certain original relationship between calligraphy and gesture that seems to want to have a certain ideography of the scriptural calligraphic gesture, it is as if it were sought from writing. its basic gesture preserving its scriptural memory but stripping it of its literacy back to the ideogram as occurs in the East. Although, as I said, not always, there are works in which we still see alphabetical writing.
  However, although his gestural calligraphic signs evoke something of the ideogram, they are not exactly so, as at the same time they contain certain indications that refer, on the one hand, to Christianity, such as the predominant gold leaf in his works or simply the reference to the contemporary cross. , and on the other to certain features of African writings which are eminently oral and sound, referring us back to oral speech and phonetics.
  It is true that there is also something retro in his work that refers to a kind of nostalgic search for the extinct, the universe of parchments, of the past times in which communication was confidential, what Barthes called the spirit of the letter that was sent to him. sends to a single person, some of his works in fact remember what Surpik Angelini defined as messages for survivors, remembering not only the message that is sent in the bottle but also the confidential message that only the recipient, the person to whom it is send the letter has read
  What differentiates a visual grammar, iconography and a morphological syntax is given in the fact that with the elements in play we articulate a vocabulary no matter how closed in a hermetic nonsense of inaccessible codes that this results in, as Kristeva said, as a morphological level, syntacsis in terms Language refers to being and identity, grammar on the other hand refers to logic and difference.
  No matter how hermetic certain works by Luis Alberto may be at a given moment, they are deliberate in terms of vocabulary plus a discourse on the order of the universe, on the coexistence of opposites, on pairs and symmetry, on the whole and the part. , about the element and the whole, about writing and speaking, about calligraphy and message, about the individual intimacy and the collective cultural, about the faith of the person and the sacred order of the cosmos, than about the being and its identity expressed in its imprint
  However, this last one deviates from what was said before because if there is a single intimate sender then the being is important and this according to Kristeva returns us to the syntax, the form -- the syntax -- is the most immediate thing in it, it is the vehicle but not as an instrument that we have as a tool but as the medium in which we are, everything that is present before us in a language does so in the form, it is the phenomenon, our being is in the forms and only makes presence before ourselves through forms, when we see visually externalized languages, being makes presence before ourselves in its syntacsis, thus in the syntacsis that is morphology, being does not have time but only to be, grammar on the other hand supposes the entry of the logic that takes being to where logic wants.
  And it is here that looking closely at his fabrics and assemblages it becomes noticeable that it is not about that immediate being, Luis Alberto is neither an expressionist nor an abstract informalist.
  What would Luis Alberto be then in terms of style in art? The single question returns us to the neologism. I will return to it later.
  There are works by Luis Alberto that seem like dialogues between him and his girlfriend, for example, where only he and she know what they are talking about, and hence the impression that the viewer sometimes has of being in front of something whose codes are inaccessible to him. The truth is, well, The reason for a neologization of faith, either for that of a dialectal neologism in a sociolinguistic sense or for the latter of the confidentiality of a message, his works tend to be intricate to read in terms of their codes.
  On the one hand, confidentiality refers to being and syntax, but on the other, the way in which he organizes his works moves away from that infront of form and seems more related to a neological search as we analyzed before.
  What is this neological search? On the one hand, refounding the sacred in the individual order with the establishment of faith that this implies.
  There is a series of words and symbols around which, both in cinema and in literature and visual culture in general, the image of a certain inaccessibility has been created, of a hermetic universe, closed on itself whose codes we cannot access and in search of which we must go through journeys, expeditions, trips, the holy grail, the chrysanthemum or simply complicated games that require beyond the puzzle to accept the non-coincidence between its parts, the kaleidoscope, the prism, among other curious inventions that seem irreducible.
  His art refers to and seems to exalt these irreducible dimensions that in one of his books he calls "spells."
  According to Derrida we must still read ourselves, or more precisely, what we must do is read ourselves which means that we are still legible, but the economy of scriptura refers us to the palimpsest and according to this we are no longer as legible as before, it is not a question of that we are illegible, but that by reading ourselves we invent ourselves.
  The palimpsest is itself the beginning of that neologism.
  If writing becomes scripturally palimpsestualized, the margin, peritext and architext of the pictographic, rising even with the hypothesis of a possible relationship to the origin of the visual-iconographic, a hypothesis that inverts our usual logic according to which we were first pictographic and then differentiated ourselves. writing evolved, the most legible thing when reading us is to think that for some reason the modern and the synchronic, the technological and the ritual tend to meet again.
  The visual image according to some is mute, obtuse, as passive and immediate to the senses as mere objects, polysemic and entropic in its meanings because it is prismatic, mimetic and imitative with respect to the world it analogizes, it is here restored, writing is palimpsestualized on the canvases. by Luis Alberto to tell us about a certain participation of hers in the very origin of the visual iconic sign, of the tropological symbol, she is sometimes in the front, other times in retreat but always participating in a certain sacrifice to the images as if the altar were the venerated iconic image and the writing were the offering, or as if most of the time, the writing that can no longer be present other than a gesture capable of sedimented stratifications, emerged in unison from the pictogram generating strange visual chrysanthemums that hover around crosses and visual circles like the saints surround the gods, which contrary to our usual logic would make it older than the pictogram. In the beginning it was the verb, certainly, certain theological writings said.
  Although it would not be out of place to say, Derrida reminds us that certain Indo-European languages ​​did not have the verb to be.
  Strange absence that its Indo-European origin may not be as disconnected as we believe from the way in which European philosophy for a long time confused being with nothingness, including arithmetic calculation and studies of quantity in the sections on being, not without seeking refuge for the nothingness in the ommmmm of the Hindus and the tip of the nose.
  The very idea of ​​hermeticism without even referring to far-fetched references means that we cannot access the code, if it is hermetic in a certain way we cannot decode or elucidate it.
  But something can be hermetic in many ways and senses, so for example if a Spaniard is among Venezuelans and hears them speaking in slang dialects, he will not have the codes in his language to understand what pana, vaina, arrecho, guachafita, cachucha, means. Damn, or coroto, we also use the computer and the mobile phone but if it breaks, only a computer scientist can decipher the logarithmic language of numbers, letters and points that defines the universe of software, in the same way, to understand philosophy classical or linguistics as well as engineering, it is required to master the codes
  But the inaccessibility of the code, the idea of ​​the uncodifiable, has also been related to theology and the idea of ​​God, something that in Luis Alberto is relevant but within a more abstract idea of ​​what he calls the sacred or the sacred.
  It is around these intercultural complexities where their assemblages appear where at times very universal signs and symbols, that is, not reducible to a specific religion, although the cross itself tends to be Christian and the circle has largely governed our Western mysticisms. even in mathematics and geometry, but where for example the couries of the African religion appear, snails used for divination on the orula board, or suddenly symbols of India and other religious traditions.
  The value of faith before reason as well as the relativity of naming in the face of cultural relativism and interculturality have been behind a series of new sacred resurgences that no longer refer to a specific religion but to cultural neologisms, to reinventions.
  The latter, however, no longer occur in pre-secular conditions but rather as post-secular neologisms, the arts can no longer in modern conditions return to the rite that kept them undifferentiated from religion in pre-secular times when science, religion, art and morality went one within the other and had not been separated in the institution of art, law, the church and science, social conscience had not experienced the social division of labor and technical-professional specialization, history was diluted in mythology, but if art wants to recover its relationship to the rite, it has to reinvent itself and reinvent the rite post-cularly, that is, as a differentiated form of both technical-professional specialization and social differentiation of consciousness.
  Even more so, the neologisms in question are of a new type.
  It is true that our current time, in the 21st century with the development of new technologies, is increasingly pictographic and visual, increasingly iconic, something that in this evolutionary modern sense seems with the prismatic spells that refer the visual and pictographic to what synchronous and intuitive, which is paradoxical because for a long time we believed, and I would say that we still see it this way, that writing, due to its high complexity, was more differentiated and, as such, scriptural civilizations were more differentiated than those that were pictographic and based on oral memory.
  But the times we are living in tend to confirm the opposite, the modern seems to coincide more and more on the contrary, with the pictographic, with the visual and sound image, and increasingly make us feel a certain atavism in writing.
  It is as if the new speeds of modernity were not reconcilable with a certain ancient atavism of writing, as if a new meaning emerged with respect to writing, the fact that no matter how differentiated writing is, it is necessarily less atavistic and even archaic, Something in its complicated mechanism refers to temporalities that do not keep up with modern speeds.
  But despite this, we are still very far from the times in which this consciousness allows us to do without it because we have nothing to replace it, not even speech and languages, it is as if in a certain way its atavism and that of languages ​​do not exist. were other than that of the human being himself, if writing is atavistic it is so in a certain way because we ourselves are a certain atavism, in fact, we know that we are irreplaceable by robots, perhaps they seem too human to us, since to do without writing would be to give up to understanding as well as everything that it makes possible for our understanding.
  A certain multimedialization would not be amiss to be pointed out as pictographism to the aforementioned.
Stephen Tyler has repeatedly insisted on this paradox of the pictographic versus writing, although without failing to say that at the same time the visual means of technology do nothing other than repeat the same problems of writing and that, according to Stephen, There is no technological solution to the dilemma.
  However, beyond a technological issue, it is about the relationship between synchrony and diachrony, our contemporary world is increasingly synchronous, simultaneous and de-diachronizing.
The plastic and visual work of Luis Alberto Hernández is itself a colloquium for philosophical, semiotic and anthropological reflection on all these things, generating around it an infinite number of readings, including his own, French, Arab, South American, Caribbean and other writers. latitudes have written from different perspectives about their valuable, beautiful and unique art.

Landscaping earth art

©Por Abdel Hernandez San Juan

  When one sees the paintings and drawings of Manuel Espinosa, contemplates them attentively, observes them, enjoys them and reflects on them, one can never imagine that this artist who was so crucial as a predecessor and inspiration at the height of the so-called drawing boom in the eighties as well as so elucidating and clarifying with respect to the previous rise of kineticism in Venezuela and above all, from my point of view, promoter of a completely new redefinition of the landscape – I never before saw that the landscape achieved, as in Manuel Espinosa, such a high philosophical dimension— I am referring to its summer landscapes—and even less what could be achieved as a genre, being so old in itself, so current, whether Manuel Espinosa himself is an assiduous and dedicated writer and, above all, the same one who wrote the theories on transdisciplinarity, new paradigms. and complexity that guided and gave life to the Armando Reveron university institute of plastic arts.
  One cannot imagine it in principle, because Manuel Espinosa, writer and epistemologist of transdisciplinarity, impresses with his overflowing and intellectually enlightened imagination, while Manuel Espinosa, painter, is sober, concise, restrained, minimalist.
  This conjugation between two apparently antinomic things makes it clear that he is a great teacher. Rarely have I been able to say this expression, feeling a more exact coincidence in what she expresses and the one about whom she expresses it.
  When we analyze his works from this side, we come to the conclusion that he is one of the few, but in my perception the only visual artist who has surprisingly managed to show what ancient genres of painting can be today – when they already seemed exhausted, exposed to new philosophical questions completely renewed
  I think here of his summer landscapes, which I interpret as a surprising statement about unique land art in two-dimensional language, these show how land art is a philosophy, a way of looking into subjectivity and a way of exploring the relationship between this and natural exteriority, without necessarily going beyond the limits of the painting towards natural locations. This is new.
  It is, however, relevant to understand that these works are not made in the traditional way of landscape in the form of a mere perceptual contemplation of pre-given landscapes taken as a model of perception, but rather they emerge, as I said in another text, from extensive processes of immersion in large natural areas, in this way, unlike Walter de Maria or Richard Long, Smithson or Le Wit who went to natural spaces, geological landscapes, to display their works in them as sites and locations of exploration , Manuel does the opposite
  You go to those places for long periods of time but not to intervene in them, it is not about staying in them,
but of a routine activity in everyday life, that is, on his daily journeys on the way from Caracas to Anzoátegui, he stops his car and immerses himself exploratory in these spaces, he does so, however, not to exhibit his works in them, but to create two-dimensional works that are ways of transforming the landscape as a genre into earth art. This is somewhat reminiscent of the attitude of the Cuban Bedia in his first landscapes, but what Manuel does is different, a true assumption of the fabric as a surface for land art that renews the landscape from within, made on land brought from those geological sites and carefully classified, transformed into pigments
  In the same way, his drawings and his kineticism clarify many things about both Venezuelan drawings and kineticism since, as happens with his landscapes that seem like philosophical landscapes of earth art, his drawings and his kinetic works are more reflective than those of other cartoonists and kineticists. from the same boom
  In Manuel there is a movement towards the interior of subjectivity with the aim of exposing to philosophical reflection in plastic language issues that other artists displayed outwards in a more objectual and retinal way. Manuel thus calls both landscape, drawing and kineticism a kind of chair of inward reflection that transforms them or turns them into a workshop of questions and less in the outward affirmation of a single answer.
  Despite this, the purely visual discourse is still compelling when we have it before us in comparison with its writing, in the latter the concept of imagination has possibilities, paths and itineraries that in themselves are far from our usual meanings of this notion.
  In fact, imagination, as we usually understand it, both in philosophy and in art, usually refers to something that is separated from the restraints of reflexivity and freed in a space of dreams, tropes, metaphors and allegorical construction, He deals here, with his writing, unlike that, with another different concept of imagination, one to which Miguel Posani has also referred. This makes us think at times of the unusual turn that Bachelard took between rationalism and the philosophy of imagination, but although related in the sense of the attitude towards knowledge, it is different.
We say imagination with respect to Manuel Espinosa because starting from a perspective that is undoubtedly rationalist and even attached to scientificity, he explores the possibilities of a new conjunction between epistemology and intuition, between rational knowledge and intuitive knowledge, giving creation a prominent place that in case this does not usually have in rational thought,
  In fact, the center of his texts lies in the way he combines the rational with the intuitive, the reflective rational with an idea of ​​hypothesis that goes from the mere experimentation of laboratory tests, towards the implementation of design notions that move from reflexivity towards reality, that reality, however, towards which a design idea that combines the reflective rational with the imaginative visual moves, does not refer in Manuel to urban spaces or architecture as in zoto, alejandro otero or cross ten, or towards natural sites or sites as in the land art that I referred to before, but towards the creation, for example, of the cid, the iuesapar research center, towards the definition of the learning workshops themselves or towards experimental projects like the eco-eia. Unlike Zoto's physiological, optical and ludricist retinalism, Otero's logarithmic and architectural kineticism or the geometric design of the ten cross, are kinetic pieces, in the same way as his landscapes with respect to gender and land art, or in which His drawings, compared to the drawings of the eighties, are more philosophical and reflective than strictly attached to illusions or effects of perception, line or matter.
  I have not yet read his book one and multiple, although I have read some of the essays that he published on his page one and multiple, but I am referring mostly to his essays that circulated and inspired the programmatic texts that define the art university that were at the base of the creation of the iuesapar as well as the cid.

Grades

  That Manuel Espinosa is a great teacher, a masterful individuality in the Venezuelan intellectuality is not at all my perception or opinion, other colleagues have confirmed it to me, friends and colleagues such as Miguel Posani, epistemologist, environmental psychologist, Venezuelan theorist, and great artists. Venezuelans like Antonieta Sosa and Jacobo Borges also see it this way.

Indexing subjectivity: oscillations between the self and the social
©Por Abdel Hernandez San Juan

   Currently, and I would say that there has always been an extremely lack of projects like "ria" by Lihié talmor and Ruti talmor, very necessary experiences both seen from art and from anthropology, for that reason the very little that there is is very exclusive and valuable as an effort.
"Ria", on the one hand, is a collaborative project between anthropology and contemporary art that forms as a whole at the same time and simultaneously an experience of conceptual art, a possibility for the anthropology of art and a research of cultural anthropology.
  The components of conceptual art are given in the simplicity of its logical-descriptive principles, a journey that involves a journey around the life of an icon as a pretext for a photographic essay including the visit and tour of geographical locations.
  The relationship between the written text and the visual as its correlate, together with the fact that the project is defined as an idea, gives it its character as conceptual art.
  But in a second and third term, it is a project that promotes the anthropology of art and the research of cultural anthropology, the latter insofar as it relates certain suburban and rural springs of country cultural identity in the United States -- although paradoxically around a pop media icon which places the dilemmas that are not always resolved and mostly broken between popular ideosyncracies (tradition, folklore, etc., living there in the small towns in situ) and massified homogenizing culture.
  However, the folk ideosicratic is accentuated in going out in search not of the visual icon as it has been industrialized by the mass media, but of the rural towns, communities and landscapes that human beings inhabit, which are still there or with which have given for one reason or another around that exploration.
  But at the same time, photography, not only in its correlative relationship with the written text, but also as a visual code in itself, acquires peculiar semiotic connotations in the project.
  I think that the photographic sign defined by the mere relationship between the photographer's gaze as indications of his subjectivity - here that of lihie - and the way in which his way of working here, (the visual sign) is not the same. , and there, (the referentiality of denoted objects), or here -- the book -- and there -- the places visited, when what gives the whole to the visual discursive text is a mere "theme" or " topic" to be visually rehearsed, that when the photograph is indexed not only to the written text as its correlate but also to what we could define as a "research problem" (here he emphasized that a research problem as much or more in that it is have questions, it is more complex than a theme or topic), because in the latter case it--the photograph--is not merely discussing the universal codes of the gaze--although I am also referring to Lihie's gaze as a photographer. as a one singularized from the one of any look, as when a natural landscape is merely captured for what it is in itself as something pre-empted, but what makes the photograph have that frame and not another, or what is taken Be it certain domestic scenes, certain objects or landscapes, etc., it is your going after experiences, facts, experiences, places, etc. related to a person's life, as happens for example in museums, where you see the furniture that the person used, the places where he sat or frequented, etc.
It is true that this could refer to the genre of reportage where also the angle that cuts the gaze and defines the "what" and the "so that" of the shot seems to respond less to a universal idea of ​​the gaze (the singular-plural of a your gaze as it could be that of anyone else) but as I understand it, as Ruti says in the text: "something dances in the stillness of the image, there are landscapes of nothing, windows covered with lace, abandoned structures, an empty beach, a piece of land wasteland, they are the opposite of the 'decisive moment', they capture a non-event, they document a search" and I would add from what I saw on Instagram geological places.
  Therefore there is a play with the possibilities offered by the genre-- here the genre between document/report/search but around a subject-- since the image is not alone but indexed by the text that refers to the trip, which tells you places visited and traveled after the indexicality of someone's experiences--but to explore a poeticization of the habitat, dimensions of subjectivity, memory or existential.
  On the other hand, in grammatical terms, here going after the life of a subject attributes to the text-visual syntagm a certain dramaturgical component that, because it is photographic language, refers more to cinema than to theater, so in a certain way we could say that it governs the documentary genre. although this is a guideline for the language game and less of a straitjacket.
  Here, of course, it would be crucial to differentiate the texts that are included within the work, at least the one that forms an inclusive part of Ruti talmor's experience and not those that are rather metatexts since the latter are a kind of outside of the work as a peri -texts or architexts that surround from another exteriority what makes up the work itself, given in the images and texts referring to the trip, the route, the itinerary.
  There is also a relationship with the idea of ​​a guideline or script where, as in cinema, something is not filmed merely because it was presented as it was to perception, but rather there is a kind of inclusive although not literal script that forms a text-guideline. which tells you why to film this and not that (he sat there, he frequented this place, he was born here, this was seen from his window, etc., etc., this or those people referred us to this or we found this because we had to pass there according to the why and what we were looking for, etc.), a previous guideline text that says you have to go here and not there, take this path and not that other, these and those locations and not those others because that is what the script establishes. In reality, here it is not a script but the conceptual idea that defines the work, -- go and film this or that -- obviously it is not something rigid in the way explored but let's say what I want to emphasize is that it is not the journey that any way they would have done or what they had to do through experience, which they later reflected upon, or along which they took images that are now an inventory, but one based on the "what" and the "who", -- Despite how more or less random the freedom of the choices may have been in situ, the text Journey After Elvis indexes the image, this recalls the relationship between the pattern and the places, the map and the territory, the photography and the sites in certain forms of conceptual art even in certain forms of land art that are very unusual and scarce indeed.
  That is to say, I try to establish that although choosing is always in a certain sense indexing the image of a predated reality as it occurs in photography, here there is no mere choosing but let's say that the sites are indexed by body-site relationships that have been established. with those sites before the arrival of Lihié's "gaze" to those sites, that is, what makes them chosen sites and places is not the mere selection given in the relationship between Lihié's body and those places but relationships that other bodies have had with those places previously, (that of Elvis with those places, or that of those who knew him or who simply inhabit those places), or even why not other memories, other memories or other experiences.
  So the idea that "the relationship to the photographed place" takes shape as for the first time is relativized by that textual indexication of the image and the subject of the photograph, the eye, the camera and the site-- it is not the gaze. "virgin" as for the first time of a series of sites, but the look of sites as other bodies have been related to them before.
  Again regarding the latter, it would be necessary to analyze whether the photographs comment on this previous body-site relationship, which could become a certain form of intertextuality, or if, on the contrary, they avoid it, using it only as guidelines for a freer language game. beyond the intertextual" which according to what I know so far seems to be the latter what happens.
  Despite this, it is something that cannot stop being there even if they avoid it by not accentuating it, since the photos as a whole are indexed by the travel text and although the latter and all the texts included are visually diagrammed through the images as Mainly, even so, I do not doubt that the proximity of these peritexts codify and add meanings to the poetic level of the images and the way in which subjectivity is read in them.
  This again in either of the two variants is very conceptual and reminds me of what happens with the site in the landscapes of José Bedia or the text-place relationship in Tatiana Mesa.
  This gives the photographs a unique and special "aura" where behind the images there seem to be stories or narratives-- those of all those people who say they have known Lihié and Ruti or who say they have known, seen or heard of Elvis, but If the photographs that I have seen online that are new to me are simply pieces by Lihié but that are not part of "ria", then it would have to be said that "ria" accentuates or emphasizes something that in itself and in a certain way was already in the photographs. previous ones of Lihié because precisely without knowing what "ria" consisted of, I had comments on photographs of Lihié that I have seen that made me reflect on things of the same type without knowing what they were part of.
  I am a sympathizer, I am inclined and I have a preference towards the practice of cultural anthropology research that presupposes mass codes for no other reason than because we cannot avoid the fact that between usually urban mass culture and suburban and rural cultural spaces new formations take shape. cultural identity or more precisely cultural identities in formation not entirely well studied due to their proximity to modern life - the observer's usual culture - but in reality linked to a domestic culture.
  Elvis in fact was a television icon and inseparable from the domestic culture that television created with its usual genres, its customs and its aesthetics-- it can thus be affective for Lihié and Ruti just according to those rituals not so related to his music or less, as to the home culture that the memory of those genres evokes.
  Focusing on what relates the standardized mass, including the iconographic - here also sound and music -, with the less massified ideosyncratic customs as they are achieved directly in suburban and rural spaces tends to facilitate the understanding of how between both moments of culture There is flow and traffic that is not a matter of watertight universes separated by insurmountable lines, that the springs of popular culture - folklore - not massive, even alive in local traditions, permeate and recreate mass culture from their societal readings and conversely, New cultural identity rituals are generated around the latter.
  Here it is clearly expressed in a visual culture, a material culture and an aesthetic that refer to a memory or heritage of the body, the habitat and the domestic and cultural rituals as they are expressed in terms of spatialities, perhaps the window with lace that Ruti mentions, the decorated dining room set in the photo and the wallpapered walls.
It also helps to avoid the usual clichés of anthropology by promoting the cultural anthropology of the contemporary, which in itself is quite scarce, at least as I understand it, where the media and the exclaves of folklore cannot be studied separately, despite the fact that in terms of spatialities, it is sometimes necessary to separate them methodologically as well as to understand that visual imagery cannot always be understood by what cuts them off as visual culture merely from the media that rather tends to profuse them, but at the same time the latter have formed themselves in interaction with the media where the aesthetics of the latter are recreated.
  It is for all these reasons that the project, due to its chosen theme in conjunction with the how or know-how, the idea of ​​travel, visits, tours, is conducive to cultural anthropology research in addition to being an interdisciplinary collaboration.
  But with this feed back focused on potentialities I may be moving away from an ideal of research of what in an effective and concise way was done in that specific work entitled "ria" consisting of a book.
  According to the images I have seen, the work in question seems more inclined towards subjectivity and the poetic.
  If this is the case, I don't see any major obstacles, since this could be developed outside the work in its own right, just as in another sense, the text of art criticism that discusses it as visual arts remains outside the work.
  From Ruti's text narrating how the process was from Lihié's initial interest in Elvis to his later interest until they began to work together on the project, I deduce that the personal testimonial of a self-narrative of experience has more prevalence in the work than all that turning towards the text of culture and the relationship between texts of visual culture that my inferences about their potential for cultural anthropological research have implied.
But if this is so, it is also what I assume about the type of images that until now I have seen more related to subjectivity, while from the point of view of art that type of basic testimonialism that then encourages visual discourse enters into Questions of subjectivity, sometimes existential, sometimes autobiographical, are common -- here Ruti's narrative "me and my mother, etc., etc.", is less common in anthropology, however, not because it is negligible unusual, the confidential first-person approaches "I lived this and felt that, me and my mother, etc., in this or that way", offer interesting possibilities to the voice of certain forms of anthropology and I am also interested in that.
  I can imagine the work more as an experimental exercise of a random nature with that expressive force that brings Lihié's works into searches around subjectivity and thus the text/image relationship as something intermediate that complexes more of an art project than properly anthropology where the latter would be referred to the level that I mention, the exploration of first-person narratives where the intimacy of the relationships between self-narratives and image would be the crux of her interest in the anthropological but the latter would incline her more in the direction of what I have called self-ethnography as a work, that is, it would be less the exit towards culture by relating externalizable textual forms in it and more ways of relating narratives of experience with cultural self-reflections, less the pop mass culture text. and the text country cultural traditions of local American ideosyncracies put in relation from the outside by an idea of ​​travel and travel texts that index it and more Lihié's own self and that of Ruti as emigrants doing a kind of self-reflection on the subjectivity of both insofar as all this affects or permeates the formation and transformation of cultural resonances such as emigrants, mother and daughter, sensitivity, cultural permeability, Israel, the United States, Venezuela, a study on a nomadic subjectivity
  Here the notions of theme and topic previously left aside could paradoxically return since they are generally the ones that constrain the discursive whole of the text in any text, from writing essays to groups formed by texts that surround the visual discourse that is at the center as major.
  Yes, in a certain way, a kind of inscription of the ungraspable resulting from the mother/daughter collaboration is explored by indexing the subjectivity of the images with Ruti's text, but above all it can be inferred from how Ruti evokes in her text.
  In fact, I was wondering how to give Lihié a feed back of so many emotions together? So much so new for me in his art, always so exceptional not only for his usual virtuosity but for his ability to achieve such beautiful and convincing works that move not only one's intellect but also the finest fibers of sensitivity.
And then on top of that the excitement that it is for me to know about your daughter with such a beautiful young career, her very interesting thesis "crafting intercultural wishes", her years of eager ethnographic field work and that conjunction that occurs in her, cultural anthropology, curatorship, so similar to me, you are interested, for example, in the inscription that I have also worked so much for, etc.
  But hey, it's not about a feed back of just expressions of feelings or praise because I was supposed to reflect and that's what I've tried to do with this short text that I hope will be useful to you.

Bibliography

Barthes Roland, The photographic message, Pp, The
Responsibility of Forms, Critical Essays on Art, Music and Representation, The University of California Press, 1985
Barthes Roland, rethoric of the image, Pp, The Responsibility of Forms, Critical Essays on Art, Music and Representation, The University of California Press, 1985
Barthes Roland, right in the eyes, Pp, The Responsibility of Forms, Critical Essays on Art, Music and Representation, The University of California Press, 1985
Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Relation and differences between the arts, conference lectured at los ángeles art festival panel, lectures by Abdel hernandez San Juan, surpik angelini, Robert, villegas and others, panel, The japanice house of culture, december, los ángeles, california, 2002

A triadic reading

By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

   What I propose next is to develop a reading of "Ria" as a text made up of two texts that run and discourse in parallel as if distributed in a diagram of two columns, a reading that proposes in turn to interpret what happens when Lihie's perspectives overlap. talmor and Ruti talmor, thus creating a triadic reading between my interpretation and their interpretation

   It is not, however, literally that "Ria", a work developed and conceived by its authors as an artist's book, is visually diagrammed according to the visual criterion of parallelism in columns as a way of distributing the blocks of texts, but rather that in terms of grasping the meaning and meanings of a work that is a conceptual, aesthetic and stylistic whole, it is made up of two perspectives that run in parallel while intersecting, presupposing and indexing each other. .

  Both courses, one visual, developed in photographic language, the other scriptural, coincide on a point which if we could draw the coordinates of a map whose territory were the course of their speeches, it would be something like the same theme or topic that makes an idea of in turn the conceptuality of the project, a trip with itinerary and route, with cartography and topography, map and geographical territories, but a trip that is also culturally and sentimentally motivated after Elvis presley, while at the same time, the point at which they intersect The coordinates refer to the same spatiality, which however, and this is crucial, in one perspective, the scriptural perspective, is treated diachronically and temporally, and in the other, the photographic perspective, in a synchronic and spatial manner.

  It is true that in the literal sense the texts of "Ria" are diagrammed in two columns but in all cases it is the same text that runs from one side to the other as its continuity.

   In contrast to this, beyond the logic actually diagrammed, I have wanted to imagine in a way to capture how these two perspectives are related in the work, in a column Ruti's scriptural text that would always continue running in the same column without going over to the another, and in the other column Lihie's visual text in a way of reading and seeing them simultaneously, exploring both my reading of their separate perspectives and also the reading of one according to the other.

   I think of Derrida in his essay on "Listening" "criticizing philosophy" when he theorizes on the left listening in a column while a poem by Michael Leiris can be read page after page simultaneously in the right column with the difference that here It is not a current author who cites another from another era in his own text without agreeing, but rather two current authors who share the authorship of a mother and daughter work after reaching an agreement.

  While the concept of text is defined according to the concept of reading - everything that we read or find legible and intelligible is a text - acquiring the text thanks to the latter, reading, meanings that extend it beyond the literal book of texts, the city as a text, fashion as a text, advertising as a text, the concept of reading that led to the extension has not been equally explored in its possibilities beyond the reading of writing and the textbook.

   Thus, if instead of interpreting the deep south between the body and culture, one chooses the perspective of a tourist, one does not read the deep south as a native gives it meaning and means, nor according to what an emigrant means, one reads a culture. according to the tourist, just as another culture is read according to the native or according to the emigrant, three readings result in three texts of the culture, one can also clearly try to relate these three types of texts by reading one with the other or according to the another which is not unreasonable since these are angles that are presupposed.

  Thus, the idea that culture is something in itself that can be separated from the textual forms of its reading supposes that the ways in which culture sees itself excludes the ways in which it assimilates the images that it assimilates to its ways of self-signifying. It is made from images about her that do not arise from herself.

  In the same way that the image that San Francisco has of itself cannot be separated from the image that San Francisco has made of the image that tourists have of San Francisco, the deep south and even more so because they are small suburban towns. , semi-rural and rural areas where the contrast between the endogenous and the exogenous is greater, also experiences these dynamics.

   That is to say, like a map, whether geographical or the map of the routes of a trip, is a text of the territory text or of the traveled text, Elvis is a text of the culture text here in the deep south.

   A text because it once stopped being an inseparate expression of tupelo, of Memphis and was decoded by textual forms external to the provincial situation, the most media, the music industry, rock or nationalized and transnationalized deregionalization, Hollywood, decades of aesthetics television, etc., the culture that "Ria" places as her itinerary began to see herself both with and without Elvis.

   It began to see itself according to the Elvis text because of everything that recoded it communicated exogenous springs and because of everything that through Elvis at the same time made the culture begin to look at itself according to that text.

  Elvis is therefore a text of the text of culture or more precisely of culture as a text and it is usually in two forms, on the one hand the Elvis text brings together enough recodings to be able to study culture according to that text that is no longer completely internal and on the other it is not possible to read the culture text with the Elvis text, ignoring the fact that Elvis comes from that same culture and that he textualizes it as much as he recodes it.

   In the era of digital media and the interactive fractalization of the Internet with its Inner time and its orbited universes, the television culture of yesteryear with the domestic habits and aesthetics that standardized the family and social ethos of our grandparents, our parents and even our generation , progressively enters the museum of antiquities.

  This museum is no longer usually, at least not recurrently, one in the literal sense of houses of antiquities displayed as set in museographic scenes, but rather it is achieved mostly in the memories and imaginary of culture as visual imagery and generic modes that they are becoming extinct.

  They are also achieved by searching through diagonal routes through newspaper archives, video libraries and audiovisual archives, western films, romantic genres of yesterday's cinema, music videos from the fifties, sixties and seventies, either in the form of stagings. for tourism or entertainment, museums of old cars, advertising designs from yesteryear with their fonts and slogans.

    It is a kind of retro visual, material and auditory culture that invites us to reread ourselves in our own memory to which we otherwise have no access other than by resorting to memories.

  But in the contemporary circumstances of mass consumption we no longer only notice that effect that the imaginary museum of ourselves creates for us in everything that television and radio culture retains and archives of our rituals, our sentiments and social cosmetologies of yesteryear, modes of clothing, body aesthetics, stage attitudes, hairstyle modes, is also recreated by new inventiveness explored as market niches and targets of the retro-reinvented from marketing.

  That is, ways of making tangible the extent to which reading us in the past still has the charm and persuasive vivacity of making us feel to what extent we would be willing to live in our present in the manner of those rituals and aesthetics that the dying genres evoke in us, so we not only have museums of vintage automobiles from the 70s back, or museums for tourism around icons and characters that epitomize those genres as inventories of memory as when a cinematheque today programs films from the fifties and sixties in the winter, in the summer of the seventies and eighties with their faces and aesthetics from then.

   Today's cafes and restaurants are also reinvented that make us feel like a retro evocation of something still alive in our memory and that we choose to meet with someone, to read or have a pleasant time.

  The birthplace of Elvis Presley, a kind of museum with domestic objects scenically re-spatialized as it was in his life but for regional, local, national and transnational tourism, the swing chair and the façade, a tourist complex that includes a church reconstructed The one I attended as a child, a museum, a souvenir shop and some sculptures next to which visitors are photographed, is today a reinvention of this type as a tourist conglomerate, as is Graceland in Melphis, the 1939 mansion that Presley acquired in 1957. for his parents, opened to the public as a museum in 1982, including the annexed museum of the cars that belonged to him, such as the pink Cadillac isolated by a museographic cordon from the public.

   Also in Tupelo are the fairgrounds, an urban conglomerate fairpark where the Stax Museum of American soul music was built in 2003 and why not, as well as more or less abandoned locations, others such as the Ranch radio club, the Pelican reef restaurant, the radio station wmob 1360 , the Building of the old Pink hotel, or Mobile Stadium Ernesto f. Ladd memorial stadium show hank snow al starts jamboree, ladd peebles stadium.

  Of all these things give constancy Lihie talmor and Ruti talmor is their project "Ria", conceptual artwork and interdisciplinary collaboration of art and anthropology co- authored by both mother and daughter.

  Reinventions of this type have been taken increasingly seriously by some who sometimes decide to restore or redeem the place that certain things had or should have. Lihie and Ruti with their project are an example of these interests as much as was the biography "Elvis day by day" that Ruti intersperses intertextually.

   In Lihie's photographic perspective that runs for my interpretation in one of the imaginary columns, she eludes the condition of the local, national or transnational tourist implicit and inclusive of any form of visiting and traveling-- as users, spectators, consumers, clients, or museum or university project researchers the conglomerates of the Elvis text, to instead propose a perspective that I would like to call archaeological here.

  Why archaeological?

   If, as I said before, we have several texts from the culture text, the tourist one - which Lihie and Ruti cannot avoid even if they avoid it -, the text from the native point of view that in principle we can define as one from the spatialized habitat, that is, related to the fact that where the museums and tourist conglomerates are there live human beings whose culture can be read at the same time with and without the Elvis text, the emigrant text and between the three the possibility of relating them, ways of meaning the world according to the images that each angle has been made of the images of itself that the other angles have, the native culture seeing itself as the tourism text travels through it, or this one according to that one, etc. the Elvis text appears as a dual text in itself, it is that is, endogenous and exogenous at the same time.

  Seen in this way, we can consider that the entire photographic survey that Lihie makes tries to locate that in the margins, behind the curtains, in the between acts and spaces, in the dressing rooms, in the residual texts and apparently left aside, a tombstone, a label , an aimless street returned to nature, a never-before-seen radio station, a restored hotel, the names of streets or places changed, a set of scenery, some humble objects, etc., senses and meanings, memories and crucial experiences work tangentially in terms of a subjectivity of the habitat, that of all that culture that has had to be made and remade in the margins of the Elvis text.

  It is not that Lihie, through a revocation of the authentic, which we could understand as the cultural identity of the deep south, develops against the grain a reading that rejects the vanalized, artificial or theatricalized that is usually related to tourism as an added superimposition that According to inveterate memories, it is epidermal in contrast to the authentic autochthonous or provincial nostalgia that sometimes favored and other times disfavored Presley, nor of a dramatization that exacerbates the dislocated or disjointed pieces of a fragmented and unreconstructable subjectivity as a consequence of the erosion that for all culture can imply the loss of resonances of the ethos of cultural authenticity and folk ideosyncrasies in the face of the homogenizing and prosthetic effects of certain massive and vanalizing codes, since once these relationships between market, tourism and culture exist only through them, culture itself survives. and reproduces by reinventing itself economically.

   Aren't the same biography of "Elvis day by day" and even "Ria" examples of those reinventions that come back to life?

  Instead, it is about evoking springs of a remaking subjectivity which outside the culture of the spectacle understood from the spatialities and inhabited sites of those places means them both in the simultaneous present, site by site today, and in memory, Lihie in a certain way. In this way, what he eludes and at the same time rearticulates is the profusion between the private and the public that the spectacular culture of the music industry, consumption and tourism tends to, in order to instead archaeologize a gaze enacted as visual experimentality through his own photographs, that continues to distinguish with great precision the private from the public, she in fact opts for the private through a kind of intimacy with the native point of view which is very typical of the migratory perspective.

  Obviously in front of places in the landscape, anterooms and vacant lots between buildings, ruins, museum objects, dilapidated cars and names of places, streets, etc., it is not properly private as they are places of communal access, however, it is not something literally private that is explored but rather the intimacy clothed and protected from a privacy of the gaze, this is obtained not only by avoiding the common places through which the visitor's eye would be expected to follow the cuts with respect to the reality of the settings. on stage that they themselves presuppose an idea about what to look at and how, in which the private becomes public, for example, Elvis's objects in his birthplace or the cars he used.

  Lihie thus notices the residual, the dilapidated car, the vacant lot left aside at the back, the replaced name of a sign, among other things, presuppose memories that the subjectivity of the habitation has about that whose meanings have been displaced by the text. scenic and yet they refer to an eye or look, to an even affective or more intimate memory that only the native has.

  Lihie's perspective thus archaeologizes, by enacting it itself, a complicit intimacy between the living memories of the native point of view and the gaze of a visitor from whom something else would be expected, claiming or subtracting from the staged object with verisimilitude its scenic artificiality to recover in that the humility of its affective and familiar aura, taking advantage of the same verisimilitude of the replica but decontextualizing it from the framing and the detail of the whole in which it has been placed and re-inscribing it according to another grammar, that of a photographic sequence made of remnants, of apparently residual places which by the way also includes natural landscapes.

  But Lihie's perspective not only explores the archeology behind everything, the affectivity and familiarity of an intimate and private look at subjectivity as a way of recalling in those subjectivities their own experiences that live on the margins of tourist and spectacular discourse, also towards photography as a language, its exploration archaeologizes photography itself and its usual genres.

  In fact, never as in the photographic sign, is the relationship between the cut of the gaze, the eye, the framing, the shot, and a certain idea of ​​reality with respect to which it is clear whether that gaze is subjective or objective.

  By avoiding the didactic representationalism according to which we come up with an idea of ​​the real that is in reality an illusion produced by representation, Lihie is demarcating and decentering for the purposes of both the native point of view there in the culture and for the purposes of the viewer. genres instituted by the convention that have codified certain places according to these are presupposed to be staged, they are in fact directed to an idea of ​​gaze that they anticipate to take photographs in them there is therefore an eye omitted but expected in them which is none other than the image that the tourist must carry about himself in relation to an idea of ​​culture textualized by a certain Elvis text.

  And this I would say is a crucial point in which the readings of Lihie and Ruti collaborate, both in different ways, Lihie through photography recalling in fragments the affective spatial memories of a body that inhabits those places which is not situated from the culture in the same angle as the paraphernalia of tourism, Ruti through writing that situates the temporal narrative, the voice and the quote inscribing the point of view of those same inhabitants.

  Lihie's photos thus decenter one reading with another, creating a dialectical dialogue between the locations of her gaze which brings with it the assumption of being external and that of convention - museums, hotels, radio stations and tourist conglomerates - exploring the relationship between two eyes, his and that of culture, with respect to that budget for the spectacular staging.

   However, it is not merely a matter of parodying the latter or denying it because ultimately, like every peritextual and architextual relationship, its own perspective develops as if through the margins of the former and in this sense works with respect to it.

  On the other hand, as I said in another essay, it is not about looking at something as if for the first time in a 'virgin' sense, but rather about looking at something right there where looking at it has become a whole anteroom of common places and previous relationships. of other bodies with those places. And this now in a double sense, not only do Lihie's photographs refer to places with which other bodies have had a previous relationship that makes them sites or that defines them as such, places, according to and with respect to those bodies, also of places on and around which the looking of the gaze has become in itself a genre explored by tourist staging.

   Lihie's views cannot thus be understood without the way in which they comment on those others, not precisely by calling them literally to their images, or not always, but by moving the axes of attention towards their margins, the result is at once meticulous and powerfully evocative display of sites that are less contexts as they were predestined to perception and more productions of locations, places and archaeological sites.

    In a certain way, in all archeology one searches for nothing more than one origin since this is not rarely unreconstructable, at least capable of prior perceptions that are not in the foreground, that is, closer to a previous stage, closer to an original state of the subjectivity, here the memories of a more human and accessible stage of the sensitivity of culture, removing it from the tourist and spectacular artifice, seeking in it its authentic stage, something that Ruti also does with her voices. From my point of view, it is an exploration of subjectivity rather than culture, despite Ruti's effort to culturalize her approaches.

  But at the same time this archaeologization of the sites is not here literal archeology but rather is given by an affective subjectivity that is in a certain way alerted to extinction and which Lihie evokes with a moving poetic force.

   Here it is necessary to understand of course that this is not alone but at the same time related to Ruti's exploration more focused on that affectivity and whose play continued between the structure of the trip, the transcription and the quotation contributes significantly to the indexicality of visual images as discussed in my previous essay.

  In fact, in the other perspective, Ruti's scripture that runs parallel in the neighboring imaginary column, the written text follows in its structure the moments of a trip Alabama: in search of the deep south, Mississippi: return home, Tennessee: the farewell, a final, the same journey that in turn defines the idea of ​​"Ria" as a work of conceptual art and that both have taken together.

   If textualizing is not merely bringing to the page as an inscription but also treating as text the non-textual, the extraverbal, for example, the tone of a voice, the movements of a body, the way a costume is worn, in addition to taking notes of experience, transcribing orality or ambient sounds such as those of the cemetery, or giving the order of writing the order of a trip, it could be said that Ruti's inscriptional textualization follows a similar path to that of Lihie but with some differences.

  Ruti's emphasis is not placed due to the diachronic temporal character and not to the synchronic spatialization of the visual image in the sites, but rather on the collage and juxtaposition of scriptural forms that exchange the logic of the journey "back home" "onwards". to the deep south", "the farewell", with the confidential first-person testimony, my mother and I, it was not easy to write it, the green surrounded us, we never found the street, the reworked survey of inscriptions, the inscription of the trip itself step by step, interviews, as well as especially in things such as the way Elvis ran from his mother's lap to sing in the church choir, or how his movements and vocal expressions were those of African Americans

    Ruti's perspective could thus be characterized as therapeutic, this is made up, on the one hand, of the authentic situation of the culture which is treated by Ruti as self-transcendence in the ethos of the community as an expression of itself, here everything, the The way it treats the confidential, the access to Elvis's acquaintances, the ways of transcribing and quoting, seem to want to return Elvis to the cultural ethos of the community from which he came, much as the interrupted aimless street was returned to nature, on the other hand. Ruti side explores the possibilities of ventriloquism in the Aryan Anglo-Saxon language of African American culture in the voice and movements of Elvis, Afro histrionics in churches, Afro expressive catharsis, the ways of wearing frack and finally the relationships of acceptance or rejection of provincialism, textualizations of culture that seek to ontologically reintegrate Elvis into culture as its authentic expression.

  This may in turn be related to the fact that although Elvis was once a text of mass culture, today he is progressively ceasing to be so and this generally has a therapeutic meaning. I, however, consider that this is impossible and that therapy only works at the level of the evocations of the anthropological text. A convincing and powerful emotion in a film can be moving but it is still just a film. It is not, however, that anthropology is fiction, but that studying cultures by producing texts that understand it is not operating in them.

  Archeology and therapy thus come together in that great collage of juxtapositions together with that photographic and poetic essay on subjectivity that is "Ria"

  I would thus say that the glass of Elvis liquor treated by both Lihie and Ruti is a point at which their perspectives come together, in both of them in fact there is an internal religious limit in terms of ethics, Lihie archaeologizes with his gaze something in the senses and meanings from the native point of view through an intimacy of the privacy of the readings, there is ethically something religious in this as ruti returns Elvis to his self-transcendence in the cultural ethos of his authentic culture exploring the therapeutic possibilities something also religious

  In fact, the glass is almost a reliquary, almost an altar in ruins, it could be the expression in visual and material culture of the direction or interpretive routes that this textualization must follow that seeks to reintegrate it into the culture from which it was separated.

  It is the idea of ​​something that popular culture and folklore treats as an almost religious saint, a work of textualization to which Ruti contributes with her expressions of shyness, vulnerability, that empowered women, etc., this acquires an expression in the glass of liquor. clear of material and visual culture, as much as in another sense the window with lace, the wallpapered walls and the atmosphere of Elvis's birthplace.

Grades

1- Barthes also has this concept of a 'plural listening' and I believe that there is something with the voice and listening that deserves to be deepened with respect to Ruti's effort, although possibly not exactly around this work that she herself describes as not it was easy.

2- The deep south is nothing more than cultural identity, I know it well, I visited it in 1998

between Houston and Louisiana town after town but live without the Elvis text

3- With all of the above in no way do I detract from the merit and interest that the texts of Palomero and María Fernanda have in Ria both undoubtedly contribute, Palomero's perspective is assiduous and assertive in clearing step by step the relationship between the choices of Lihié and the placements while María Fernanda's is more poetic, however, both interpretations are for me metatexts, texts that, like mine, make ria the reason for their interpretation and as such are not part of the inside of the work, Rather, when they are included in the book, they tend to ambiguize their genre between an artist's book and an exhibition catalogue, something that could undoubtedly happen if in the future Lihié's photographs in Ria are exhibited in galleries.

Bibliography

Barthes Roland, The photographic message, Pp, The Responsibility of Forms, Critical Essays on Art, Music and Representation, The University of California Press, 1985 

Barthes Roland, rethoric of the image, Pp, The Responsibility of Forms, Critical Essays on Art, Music and Representation, The University of California Press, 1985 

Barthes Roland, right in the eyes, Pp, The Responsibility of Forms, Critical Essays on Art, Music and Representation, The University of California Press, 1985 

Derrida Jacques, criticizes philosophy, margins of philosophy, professor

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Relation and differences between the arts, conference lectured at los ángeles art festival panel, lectures by Abdel hernandez San Juan, surpik angelini, Robert, villegas and others, panel, The japanice house of culture, december, los ángeles, california, 2002

A new balance: the aperceptual objectivity of architectural photography

By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

   With the criticism of the subject that has characterized postmodernism, all our attention in the criticism of photography has come to fall on how the photographer manages to deal with various paradoxes that architecture supposes for photographic discourse.

  Despite the fact that in terms of style, architecture has become after Ventury and the new ecleptisism an operational paradigm of its own languages ​​that we understand as "postmodern work", another variety of questions are added that architecture involves to photography, those related to discerning the question of the subject and subjectivity so crucial in general for postmodernism even beyond photography and architecture.

  On the one hand, being a two-dimensional language, the crux of photography is that it takes over, from the angle and the visual perspective, the way of communicating relationships with spaces perceptually, but since architecture is itself a space, photography from its perspectivist logic does not can subtract space from architecture, which when appearing in the image is all space and perspective in itself, it seems forced, on the other hand, to assimilate to the spatialities that architecture supposes, something that represents an aperceptual challenge.

   Far from replacing our spatial and bodily senses of three-dimensional perspective with its super-subjective two-dimensional illusion, photography finds in front of it captured by the lens referentialities that are themselves space and perspective, the usual domain of the subject-object relationship, gaze- things or something, eye-world, "I was there" or "I am here" typical of the enunciative subject of photography as discourse, --its usual super-control in deliberating a balance on the subjectivity-objectivity relationship is challenged by its object denoted, architecture being perspective and space brings with it a deliberation that is different and typical of those relationships.

   The sign in architecture, as Eco said, unlike its usual reference to an external denoted object, does not have a reference that is external to it, the reference in it is the sign itself as a function, given that the useful function connotes more than it denotes. things like habitation, shelter, interior, exterior, going up or down, etc., the subject is not in front of the object as is usual but rather well understood by the latter in space, in architecture the object surrounds the subject and spreads it in its spatial functions, thus what is usually understood as subjective or objective from the perspective of the subject appears as another objectivity not related to the perspectivism of the subject but rather to the other spatial objectivity of the object that surrounds it.

  Even in landscape photographs where nothing in them usually assumes a subject, the inclusive look at the selection of the shot is imposed above everything else, with architecture on the other hand the idea of ​​the subject is disseminated by the sign function.

  To photograph architecture, which has been fashionable for a few years, is to work with these paradoxes, there is nothing more related to a subject in control of himself than the idea of ​​camera, framing and shooting, but when faced with architecture it is no longer the photographer who establishes that is objective and subjective, architecture itself establishes another balance of those relationships

 In summary. Photography, something that has put it in trouble in the face of criticism's predilection for the postmodernist subject, more than any other language, greatly controls the idea of ​​the omniscient subject that decides everything, perspective, angle, shot, sequence, sign-referent, Like cinema and cinema, it presupposes behind it a kind of supersubject, but architecture is the opposite, a superobject with respect to which the subject must give up his control and surrender to something that overwhelms him, his body is enveloped by the functional space that surrounds him. it sensorializes everything and in front of that superobject the photographic supersubject tends to remain scattered, it is as if, placed before its limits, the architecture told the photography how the subjective and the objective should remain.

  Situating the above, we can ask ourselves what is this other objectivity that results in the photographic exploration of Lihié talmor, understanding that another balance between subjectivity and objectivity can be concluded from the challenge that photography was faced with here in the face of architecture.

   In my opinion, the peculiarity of the photographic exploration of Lihie talmor included in "ria" must be inferred from the very reading of that kind of almost inventory-like care of places and sites that characterizes it, that kind of almost cataloged presentation of buildings, houses, places, between spaces, that seem to be photographed to be conserved, preserved, identified.

  It is as if a logic of inventory, restoration, reconstruction, etc., regulates the gesture, the manner, the why of the how, something legible in the attitude with the camera towards things, gestures that communicate through their manner, something of a photograph that is put at the technically meticulous service of an indexing, that is, of another function that indexes it, that gives it that sense of listed things.

   This is in literal "ria" since it is a work made up of the relationship between a written text, Ruti's, and Lihie's images, but it also seems to result from this relationship with the architecture, places and sites that I I mean, especially because of that relationship that occurs in the series with the relationships between heritage, memory, museum and budget tourism in the houses, places and sites in question.

 In fact, notions such as preserving, inventorying, restoring, collecting, etc., typical of such constructions and places, seem to explain the attitude of the camera throughout the series, its relationship to that objectivity, another characteristic of architecture, of land, there is in it , implicit or explicit, a kind of intra-commentary in the sense of the type of places in question, as I said in another essay, it is on the one hand the relationship to places according to how Elvis related to them, but also of which the culture has made museological stagings, tourist tours, heritage restoration where rebuilding, preserving the original or producing its effects scenically, tourism, museum, is the basic code. Lihie's series thus seems to capture something of this code and this comes through or can be interpreted according to the gesture of his speech.

  Instead of introducing disruptive codes that strange, defamiliarize or superimpose other ways typical of improvisation, the juggling, acrobatics or imaginations of a hypersubjective camera, highly permeated by internal intentions of the artist's world, the lihie camera in this series, the form in that the way of his shots reveals being in situ, it is appropriate.

  The emphasis on the sites is already made explicit-- as I have pointed out before-- in the photograph of the map on the fence, Mississippi, Tupelo, Tupelo fair grounds, but it is generally treated in that contiguous perspective that goes all the time as if from place in place presenting one after another as in an inventory of locations, one place, the other, one after the other and the next and the next each always indexed, its name, its location, its relations with the subject or subjectivity, terrain vacant lot of an old hotel for sale, riachuello, avenue tal with its labeled directions, Presley's birthplace, cadillac in the museum of its cars, etc, etc

 Lihie puts the camera in a situation that recalls the photographs taken of a place under restoration where the latter, the photograph, has to be very technically precise, putting itself at the service of the hermeneutical work of reading an older stage according to the indications in capable of the sign in vestiges, where it is about finding out how to restore the original.

  This is obviously not about restoration per se since his photographs were not made to restore, but since conglomerates of this type such as Casa Natal and Graceland usually carry and even their languages ​​are based on the possibility of restoration recovering the original, something In the gestures of the manner it adapts to the code to the point of governing the way of presenting.

 It is true that in this process of presenting which lihie inventory is interspersed not only architectures that are at the same time heritage, museums and tourist conglomerates, but also vacant lands, streams, between places, streets, etc. but this already leads us to the diagonal perspective discussed in my previous essays related to that between scenes or by its margins to which I referred, this time however we emphasize not the senses that contribute to the deviations that complicate the interpretation but the expository generality that through gestures regulate the general relationship From the photography in this series to the code to which they adapt, it is that relationship to house-heritage-museum-inventory-reconstruction of the original, etc., etc. in its relationship to tourism.

This is what seems to be behind why the images are what they are, a house in front view, it is also the way of treating the camera, the readable gesture of being in situ with the image, as an intra-commentary of the photograph on photography, a camera not only very respectful but also very aware of the reconstructive gesture of something that is being done as an inventory since it must be carefully returned to a previous stage at the same time as it must be preserved.

  Lihie retains that gesture in the way he takes the photos that comes through, it is that in the way as if his camera were at the technical service of a work that is part of the reconstruction of that heritage and yet at the same time not to be instrumentalized Due to the touristic and spectacular staging, it is as if she were doing a parallel work of the same type but recovering the affective and aural aspect of a gaze that sees from a culture that is alive there and inhabiting from there that accent on the residual, about what's left out by staging, vacant and for-sale land, creeks, street signs, Mississippi, mud creek, tupelo, swimming hole/creek, Alabama, fowlriver, belle fontained, cedar point road, cedar highway, Alabama, the cause way, batleship parkway, mobile, empty lot, the old pink hotel, vacant lot, Alabama, fowlriver, belle fontained, pelican reef restaurant

   Here we are dealing with the concepts and notions of heritage and museum which are not always united, in fact mostly not, but when they are united, especially if tourism intervenes, the result is fascinating as I have analyzed and discussed in my essay "performativity in the research" on relationships between heritage, restoration and tourism according to my experiences in small towns on the outskirts of Texas, in Mexico and in the restoration of Old Havana.

   This fascination, however, in itself is paradoxical since it tends to be conservative, preserving at all costs a heritage so much so that some of its expressions become museums, has come to reflect over time a pole of mutual temptations between conservatism and avant-garde.

  Postmodernism, with its interest in memory and the past, with its retro turn, has come to mediate this relationship, tending to articulate experimental possibilities of the neo-avant-garde with respect to memory, the point of relationship of course is culture, the heritage relationship , museum, tourism is a privileged intersection for postmodern theorization and understanding of culture.

   With the above I try to place the axiological reference points in this third interpretation of "ria" this time focused exclusively on the 37 photographs that were printed within the book.

Again, this is also the birthplace of Elvis Presley, a museum of domestic objects, the swing chair and the façade, some sculptures next to which visitors are photographed. It is also Graceland in Melphis mansion from 1939 that Presley acquired in 1957 to his parents, opened to the public as a museum in 1982, or the museum of his cars.

   Tupelo is also the fairgrounds urban conglomerate fairpark where the Stax Museum of American soul music was built in 2003 and why not as well as more or less abandoned locations such as the Ranch radio club, the Pelican reef restaurant, the wmob 1360 radio station, the Building of the old Pink hotel, or Mobile Stadium Ernesto f. Ladd memorial stadium show hank snow al starts jamboree, ladd peebles stadium.

 Or the carnival plate, Alabama, dog river, belle fontained, carnival glass, from the collection of Beverly and George hall, the Elvis liquor glass, Alabama, mobile, Elvis shot glass, from the collection of Dennys and wanda howard, The store's display cases decorated with motifs of Elvis, Mississippi, Tupelo, Main Street, as well as the different beautiful scenes dedicated to Elvis's birthplace, the panoramic view in which Elvis's baby chair is seen among other domestic objects, that of the humble curtain in which you can also see the wallpapered wall of the previous one, or the details of the woven rug and the lamp in front of the window, or the portal and the facade of the house with the swing, Mississippi, tupelo, the Elvis Presley birthplace.

Bibliography

Barthes Roland, The photographic message, Pp, The Responsibility of Forms, Critical Essays on Art, Music and Representation, The University of California Press, 1985 

Barthes Roland, rethoric of the image, Pp, The Responsibility of Forms, Critical Essays on Art, Music and Representation, The University of California Press, 1985 

Barthes Roland, right in the eyes, Pp, The Responsibility of Forms, Critical Essays on Art, Music and Representation, The University of California Press, 1985 

Eco Umberto, architecture and communication, pp 285-284, sign and function, The Absent Structure, Lumen

Eco Umberto, the architectural sign, pp 279-295, the sign and the function, The Absent Structure, Lumen

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, The Posmodern Work, paper, transart Foundation of houston, Houston, Texas

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, theorizing architecture, lecture given in the art and architecture panel: a possible dialogue/past, present and future, consolidated foundation, Caracas, 1991

letting the Space Speak

©By Abdel Hernández San Juan

  About the meaning that spaces, intervals, pauses, voids, vestibules, rests, interims, interludes, breaks and margins acquire in the compositional whole of a work, be it an exhibition or a writing, wall and pages, we know, both in the abstract painting as in experimental poetry, in post-plastic minimalism as in the poetics of the random, but the ways in which spaces, halls and margins participate in the semantics of the works are as rich as what fills those pages. and spaces, words, writing, materials, pictures, objects or installations.
  Although the significance of space is high, it is so in different ways, something that is expressed in various pieces by the visual artist Tatiana Mesa. In previous pieces such as The Writing of the Instant and Cabinet of Archeology the above can be perceived, working with remaining, residual or waste elements and found objects, glimpsing nothing other than that translucent space through these transparencies, a place is set with a pre-made shape, it is an extensive semi-transparent surface coextensive with the space that is brought to it as a kind of plastic filigree made of album pages unfolded as they have been joined to each other, all reticular or a kind of reticularium of the urban formed by pages of objects found in the city converted into a sublime versus the routine of an ordinary which is installed towards the space according to a relationship of color, visuality, aesthetics and poeticity, highlighting this with that spatialized two-dimensionality that becomes, given the supremacy of a continuous support, in mixed technique mode, thus letting the space speak through the sifted and semi-transparent form.
  But where letting space speak comes to the foreground in meaning and becomes a plastic language defining the aesthetic and visual whole is in his recent exhibition Gabinete exhibited at the Center for the Development of the Visual Arts. Made up of five large installations, two shelves, two cabinets, a porcelain and three sets of objects, in this more random-looking exhibition, the walls, ceiling, floor and gallery participate as a space in all its aspects, achieving a balanced balance between the left whites that drive the interrelationships of the visual sense of the set, the pieces in their details with the semantics of their materialities, fabric, wood, porcelain, and that certain randomness of the playful and experimentalist set in relation to the architecture.
Creativity understood as experimental potential seems to be the element of main quality and value here. It is not a gesture that makes the designation of the wall the way in which it completes itself with the exhibition into an art concept. Far from collecting in his gesture an idea about art that returns, redounds or self-refers, rather here the deixtical and indexical relationship piece-wall-space supposes a whole that is completed in an aesthetic and visual sense. However, this exhibition continues to open up on the side of its relationship to materials, evoking a sublime that is processual, thus alluding to the passage of time and daily life, something more typical of post-minimalism.
In three works in this exhibition, Tatiana brings her relationship to the wall to the foreground, not, however, in those with more accentuated attention to experiences or processual narratives of experience, but rather in those in which the experiential is evoked from pure semantics of the material.
Skein, Madures and Utopia and Un Lugar no Mirado, developed around the wall as metonymy and synecdoche, are the three main works of the exhibition at the formal level, while, conceptually, the two closets-cabinettes play a role in it. prioritized place for Tatiana, one defined by the notebooks and agendas in which the creative process itself is collected, graphics, drawings, writings, notes, preliminary projects, the other, more visible in the whole, simply collects objects, fragments, small pieces , collections and collections which make up elements that are important in this creative process.
While the ceiling is approached as if it were a constellation of stars in the celestial vault through small ritual objects related to the body, earrings, miniatures, delicate belongings and memories that defines as a piece as Archeology of Use, the floor, like the shelves, It is with a more objectual language made explicit in a narrow but long installation defined by objects from everyday life distributed on folded sheets which have been torn and have been repaired by Tatiana, a succession that runs throughout.

Skein.-Matures and Utopia

Hank is an overwhelming piece. If kept at an average distance, the viewer sees in front of him the empty white wall and on the floor a wooden reel, while approaching the visual subtlety is almost imperceptible, but intensely poetic, tiny horizontal lines that become explicit, they are collected hair.
Madures y Utopia is another piece defined by the display from another wooden reel in subtle and poetic horizontal lines of strips of frayed fabrics on the white wall extracted from disused wardrobes and clothes whose scattered scraps and the accumulation from which they come are also included. . Here the wall is not painted or designed, less collected by the concept as an idea about art, rather by the effect of a subtle intervention, it becomes part of the work in its visual and aesthetic totality, although ephemeral.
We must not forget that the work ultimately, when collected, is a simple wooden reel in which the entire extension of the hair remains wound on one, and all the strips of fabric on the other. Subtly displayed in the exhibition as the two most visually attractive and large pieces displayed in their relationship to large white walls, both remain, however, in his studio, when the hair and the strips of fabric return to their reels, as objects .
It is therefore about the ephemerality of a relationship to space and with this to space in its potential to participate in the formation of another synegdotic trope, on the one hand, that of letting the space speak whose intervals, breaks, pauses, parentheses, margins or silences, as on the white page in creative writing or the poem, acquire meaning, on the other, that symbolic figural of an elusive, processual time, exalted here in its irreducibility.
If seen from Gabinete as a sample, the space in its white neutrality comes to the foreground, while the processuality suggested in the collected material becomes the poeticized aspect of the piece, the one that unfolds and is collected, whatever it is. a collection that expands her material, more hair-more fabric, as long as you see them from the processuality, the artist in her studio, being both collections that highlight encounters, contacts, relationships, communications, is the exhibition space in its white neutrality, which becomes the synegdotically poetic trope of the pieces as time as a process is referred to something that I have defined as the correlate, that is, textual forms that make a tiny correlate of that visuality.
In recent years I have referred to a synegdotal impulse in certain forms of the readymade in contemporary art.
Visually in synecdoche, unlike metonymy, where a tiny fragment, the detail of a texture, an element or image, evokes as a part, detail or fragment, an absent whole to which it is related, the whole, here the wall denoting context, it becomes a fragment of context treated again as a text or fragment when inserted between other texts and the contexts in which these texts refer.

Superadditions: A Place Unseen

An Unseen Place is the piece that explains this most clearly. The piece itself, somewhat more conceptual, focuses on the question of how references are made from one place, here the wall of the art center, to another, any place in the city, and conversely, how the that this other place is or has been in itself or for the artist, in the first. The traditional dilemma of documenting an experience in process art is therefore treated here in a peculiar way. Answering the issue not according to the relationship between a representation and its referent, a language and its denotator, a photograph or video as a document and the experience that it preserves or fixes in the visual, but according to the relationship between two spaces, the work moves in around the written description of that place that the spectators have not seen. 6

From the viewer who arrives at the work, he reads in calligraphy a description that describes what has been contemplated or seen from a body position in a stipulated place, assumed to be real, which is located at a significant distance from the exhibition space, that is, outside. under the ceiling. The rest of the work is the immensity of an empty white wall in the center of which, at the height of an average view, a simple hole has been opened, like an exhibit that exhibits or like a niche in whose depth a fragment of mosaic is perceived, we suppose extracted or brought from the place described, fragments of mosaics also distributed on the floor and intersected by a wooden line that, like the delimitations that define the visitor in the museum, does not pass towards the exhibition area, underlines the distance between that area and the viewer's terrain.
The white wall of the art exhibition space ordinarily referred to that neutral display on which paintings are placed, is treated here as a metonym of the art building in which it is located, obtaining a subtle ambiguity between the question of whether it is the wall that shows, which archaeological museum, relics extracted from the place described, or if the reverse is the exhibition mode provided, vestige, discovery, rest, remnant, redoubt, niche, mosaic fragments, line that separates, that shows the wall transformed into a The sign of the resemanticized building is on its axis as if it were an archeology museum added to and from the art museum.
This refers to the relationship between objectivity and inscription. If what is inscribed is in what is described and the exhibition exhibits the inscription in the description, the two spaces, the one looked at and the one not looked at, the gallery wall versus the place referred to in the description, maintain an added and superimposed relationship. according to which the archaeological question, a description-unseen place relationship, would supervene on and in the artistic question, thus leaving the art wall as displaying and as shown, as exhibitor and as exhibited, as museography and as museographed, something that makes this more conceptual work of art.
If the description does not imply inscription, something that we can know according to the visual language of its exhibition becomes more or less governed by the imperative of objectivity-description - found object, discovery-vestige-redoubt--, or by that other aesthetic, formal and visual, the element found is demystified in its ability, that sublime defamiliarization of the ordinary typical of its reticular installations, then valued in its form by the form, a Kantian question according to which, paradoxically, the artistic wall in all its physicality and thingness of tangible matter, transforms the archaeological into the object of a formal question about the relationship between the subject and the object, one according to which the description is not what is described. 7
The issue of superimposed superimposition is significant in process art again as a question of form because if only in something like a description the unseen place subsists, it is assumed that this arrives inscribed in the description, a central dilemma in everything. body art and process according to which a documentation whose space and time can be at the same time a representation of another reality denoted in the time and space that corresponded to it, and materiality itself in its objecthood, in its thingness, does not seem possible. without being inscribed by the inscription that it inscribes, a relationship in which the unseen place, understood, for process art, the experience not lived by the viewer, supervenes in the description.

Ready Made, Place of No Place and Site Specific

Although the set does not close on a concept whose subject is the answer to what art is, this time the wall does become that wall. It is not, however, strictly speaking a site specific as it could be any wall. Although every installation, as far as the specificities of the genre are concerned, is a type of site specific, defined as the language that results in the relationship to that space, here that space is still an abstraction of space, it is that, but It could be anyone else.
What do we call site specific then? Regarding technicality, every installation is adapted and born as a plastic language only in relation to a specific space, but a specific site would have to, either for architectural reasons or for social reasons, make that space the object of some exploration, search or research irreducible to any other space.
Although there is a specific site in Gabinete, here it is rather about what I have defined as the utopia of the insitu, which is the non-place of that place, unlike its singular, which referred as its own to the relationship between repetition and objects found again. again dissimilar in its previous pieces, here it is rather what would make it universal, by homology or equivalence.
The semantic horizon, however, remains impregnated with that relationship that then becomes in its subsequent cuts and cuts, already devoid of physical relationship to that place, or according to the readymades of its transportable memory, its photograph-object and its digital flash memory.

Inspiration Cabinet

Despite what has been said before, the main experimental question in this exhibition by Tatiana is that of the relationship between how a work of art closes on itself and how a work of art remains open, an authorial complexion and a conclusion are not the same, The work may be finished as authorially constructed, composed, conceived, but not necessarily concluded. Rather, the above describes matters that can be addressed as a point on the plane of a broader surface, the center of this exhibition and what makes it in and for itself, as much as for Tatiana in her artistic process. and creative, is this relationship between each piece, the elements and the whole.
The concept of Cabinet in fact comes to underline here, the very creative process in which Tatiana finds herself with respect to elements, fragments, pieces, which emerge which can be placed or distributed in the cabinet as collections, some close on themselves like works, while others open new relationships, a process which is still free of visitations and revisitations that in turn become a reason for experimentation.
If a cabinet shows an arrangement it is because it displays an inventory, here the same inventory of artistic pieces, as in the atelier. In the inventory, the elements are not yet covered with that dry conclusion that closes the works in a way in which they can no longer refer or relate to each other, although a tangible physical reality, the work can also remain open on several of its sides. , not only that which concerns the indeterminacy of the meanings and interpretations with respect to the spectators, also in that of that which distributes them on an exteriority arranged according to which what is next to it is always the form of a phrase or plastic statement whose elements can be collected again, such as thread and fabric on the reel, both works that deal with this heterogeity.
The notion of cabinet focused Lissinstzky in his museography of abstract art back in the 1920s, his well-known Abstract Art Cabinet in which he related pure visual abstraction, the plastic support transformed into a sensitive surface and the exhibition space, walls, architecture and space. The notion of cabinet is related in plastic arts to the process that goes from the collection to the gallery and the art museum, collection and collection in this exhibition being both significant, the artist shows in fact, both in the closet-cabinet and on the floor collections and collections of his and his close affections.
The Cabinet thus designates the first distributionality in which objects, curiosities and relics are inventoried to be studied and displayed, sale, contemplation, enjoyment, museographic display. In this the forms of placement come to the foreground in a sense not merely random, but through their collation, not in vain the first paintings, drawings and engravings of museography, represent the museographic set as a cabinet whose lines of perspective, those that form the room of that cabinet, are the same ones that would go in perspective from the corners of the painted picture towards its depth, while curtains were painted on the outer edges as in theater 2.
Cabinet, however, is also related to the artist's atelier or studio among its creative elements, as well as to the closet in which things are distributed 3.
To what extent do the modern and the ancient in art not coincide with Gabinete and in what ways is this relationship proliferative from his own questions to the processual art that focuses his passion as an artist coming from engraving. Among the first cabinets are those of copper engraving, 4 and 5.
In Lisstzinky's Abstract Cabinet the sensory, sensitive and visual effect from the abstract forms in the paintings to the walls of the museum was museographic, these did not merge as an installation, the paintings-forms on walls intervened with painted vertical lines, stood out at a level semantic the philosophical and visual relationship between the abstractivity of the forms, those painted paintings, and the walls in their abstract relationship to space-architecture.

Vestiges of the City: Text and Place in Tatiana

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

What is striking and remarkable in the exhibition The Text as Vestige of Tatiana, is the emphasis that can be interpreted in it is accentuated regarding the relationships between text and place, present in the previous ones, but not brought to the foreground in them. This accent is given by the fact that I include, along with his installation The Writing of the Instant, three new pieces, actually previous, but until then not exhibited, based on relationships between texts and photographs.

In The Writing of the Instant, as I said before, Tatiana extracts the transparent pages of some albums of photographs and sews them together, joining them until they form a kind of extended form, co-extensive in the gallery space, as if it were a poetic membrane of the urban, when the viewer walks through this installation in which the way of being mounted in the space is part of its aesthetics and language, and sees all these residues in which he finds as images the physical vestiges of time, of the physical memory of the city, perceives that it is a work that can evoke the world of lovers, couples who love each other in parks and leave each other a love note, but also about other broader concepts such as memory, writing or time.

  It is not, as we can see, that abstraction that was typical of material art in its beginnings, when the materiality of the surface itself was discovered in a literal sense, but rather an intense semantic density of hyperimpregnated matter, whose thickness reaches be so intense, the vestige, the filigree, the plot, the interspersed nature of that grid, which is an agglomerated thickness not so much due to the inscribed or suggested elements, although also in their saturations, but because of that other field that they suggest, a field semantic moved by the senses and the evocative possibilities of the signifiers.

By presenting it, however, together with the photographic pieces, they highlight different relationships between the notions of text and place as the title of the exhibition evokes, The text as a Vestige, that is, as a clue, indication or reminiscence of something that is suggested, more not literalized.
One of these relationships between text and place through vestige occurs in the installation that centers the exhibition, defined as a collection of waste that Tatiana has collected in the city over the years after meticulous research walking, visiting places chosen, prowling around areas, places chosen for their aesthetics, the aged effect of mold, the sensation of places related to architectural or other types of memory, their urban character, etc., which the work evokes in that unfolding as a poetic grid, those pages of the albums in which she collects them during the year, thus creating a kind of inventory with her days and places, a search focused on the collection of fragments of writing, which Tatiana later extended to objects of various types such as in her piece Cabinet of Archeology , for example, or his later series Pages in which he has gone beyond collection or simple inventory, to become organized by type, one page, remains of peeling walls, another, small rusty objects, and so on.
It is therefore a text-place relationship related to the memory of the body, on the one hand, and to the subsequent memory of that relationship, on the other, that is, the activity of the inventory and its being deployed, something that supposes, as a relationship text/place, not only the connection between its title and its visual form, but the punctuation or emphasis on the diary itself of taking notes of the day, place, time, etc., in which the elements in question are found and then collected and inventoried.
The remaining pieces try to accentuate these possible different relationships between text and place.
In one of them it is a text where the place is specified as described by the fiction, as in the case of a film, novel or play, here the artist extracts a text in a relatively arbitrary way, choosing moments or parts in which describes a place, and then goes to the city to look for a place that approximates the characteristics described in the text, the piece consists of this fragment of text taken from a book, framed in itself in wood and the photograph of that place in the city chosen by the artist as when in the cinema a location is decided as a location to make a film in which the actors will move and a scene will unfold.
In the following relationship between text and place that Tatiana explores, the place is not defined perse or in anticipation by some text, neither as a pre-given place, nor as a place described in a text, but rather it results from the meeting between two people who They decide to meet in the city and arbitrarily choose a certain place according to their convenience, here the place is not chosen for what it is in itself or according to an attention paid to it as a space in itself, but according to or according to another physical and meaningful mobility which is that which relates both people and the motives or goals involved in the activity they carry out for which they decide to meet, however, as someone who does not want things, at the same time, as long as piece the attention falls on how the relationships between text and place occur, it is ultimately important to pay attention to this way of being the place of the place, and for the same reason, although relatively arbitrary, attention is paid to this according to how the situation itself means it. . Specifically, this piece deals with a map of that part of the city where they decide to meet and the documentary photography of the moment of the meeting.
The following piece is a revisitation of places known to the artist in which she herself lived at another time in her life, that is, they are places previously inhabited by her, currently by others, which she revisits, the piece consists of the photographs of those places when she returns to them in the situation in which they currently find themselves, here the concept of place is defined according to that of memory, bodily memory, affective memory, or the simple narrative or episodic memory in which she remembers is here the text, silent or written in the mode of notes to remember, while the text-place relationship is made explicit in the photograph of the place in question revisited as it is today.
Composed in summary of this large environmental installation on the left of the gallery, The Writing of the Instant, and on the right, on the walls of the entrance, by contrasting photographs mounted on wood of the places previously explained, this exhibition seems to address the relationships between text and place through the possibilities offered by the concept of vestige.
We have here, on the one hand, The diarist text in which the text-visual relationship of the installation in space maintains and at the same time repeats the principle of collection that made it possible, the text that is here that same inventory, day, time, date, place, the unscriptural nature of the moment that it evokes, the pieces of paper compiled with writings, and the woven grid that poetizes, pages of albums, with whose transparency it poetizes the places, evoking them, vestiges of the city that poetize the urban.
On the other hand, the fictional text as in the traditional parameters of the relationship between the text and the staging, the script in the theater, the script in video and film, or even the pre-given text in a work. literary that is taken up as a guideline to be taken to staging in cinema or theater.
Unlike the writing of the moment, where the place is those places visited by Tatiana throughout the year while collecting papers or objects, that is, where the places are understood as objective spaces in the sense of "they were already there" and then recalled by the piece according to the memory of the body in the city and its inventory, (without excluding the way in which they are later compiled in the studio), in the text-fiction relationship, the place is not pre-given but rather is gone to search, that is, it is defined not so much according to the sense of “how things were already predetermined there”, but rather in that of “how the text asks for it, demands it or wants it”.
The text here is an appropriate place which, however, does not fail to open the question, once chosen in the city, about its character as a tangible place in it as a city.
In turn, given by the meeting of two people in the city, the following that I define as The text as intersubjectivity discusses the ambiguity of that relationship of a place that is not a place, or that is a non-place, or a place according to a situation semantizes it and not by what it supposes to be in itself.
While the last modality, The text as memory while literalizing more than the rest the tangibility of specific places in a visual sense, photographs of old places revisited, these are not places in a present sense that means actuality of place for it, other than by the way they are remembered.
The whole of this exhibition, which includes typographic texts in some pieces and writings in calligraphy in others, concludes with a group of random things, dry leaves, for example, placed by Tatiana in the window sills.

Grades

The Text as Vestige, in addition to being here this individual exhibition of Tatiana as a visual artist, is a notion that Tatiana has explored in different ways, on the one hand, on the day of the opening of the exhibition, she distributed the reproduction of a small book of the same title consisting of continuous and subjective poetic prose written by her. It was also the title chosen by Tatiana for both things, her experimental thesis book upon graduating from ISA, 2004, a sort of experiment between visual poetry and conceptualism, the book here treated as a logical game between the visuality of typography and the use of margins and the white of the page in the possibility of accentuating the poetic sense, and her graduation text in 2004, also titled The Text as a Vestige in which Tatiana focused on revisiting the very different ways in which the book As an element or object it has appeared in some of her pieces, such as intervened readymade, where the artist takes any book, editions of the Bible, an edition of Romeo and Juliet, a dictionary, etc. and intervenes.
A Book in Common, the bible of many friends collected and displayed on a shelf, Dictionary, a dictionary with each of its words cut out, Romeo and Juliet cut in half, a theater book in which the artist highlights the use of words he and she in their entirety, or The book as an object in the performance, Reading between Two, here a book of poetry chosen by Tatiana to be read at the same time by two people in two distant countries, then exhibited as a testimony of the simultaneous reading activity as a relationship, space/time, until finally the artist's book as author, here not the ready-made of a book by another previously published and intervened, but one created and composed by the artist herself in all its aspects, which I mentioned before, experimentation of visual poetry with the graphics of typography and the play with the margins, the white of the page and elements added as possibilities, or the prose text distributed at the opening of this exhibition.

Retroarchaeological readings: A semantic analysis

©by Abdel Hernandez San Juan

   The question of retromodernism, as in general of the retro turn that has characterized a part of visual postmodernism in the arts, has generally been referred to self-references of art to itself via ways of recalling, going, assimilating or going back to moments of painting. that for some reason were interrupted as isolated islands or archipelagos in the middle of time forgotten by the speeds of new metabolisms that post-war art and culture generally experienced with the post-avant-garde by some called high modernism, we thus have retrocubisms, retroabstractionisms, retrodadaisms and retrosurrealisms of very diverse types in the visual culture of contemporary art.
  Those have, however, generally focused their attention on the merely retinal, on the modes of painting, on the painter's attitudes towards the canvas and on certain stylistic issues specific to those that are taken up, evoked or revalued in the present. , few or less common, however, have been the efforts to make the retro turn the reason for an exploration that moves beyond a mere intertextual, intratextual or alluding game to art as art, to immerse in possibilities that the retro look can offer. to a discussion about culture in a broader sense beyond art.
  In my opinion this is the main quality of Justo Amable Garrote's paintings, a visual exploration that transforms retro into a means to discuss broader questions about culture.
  It is true that in principle we have in his art also intra-artistic allusions in a retro modernist sense, such as, for example, “The Abduction of the Cathedral” is a work that directly alludes to or takes up “The Abduction of the Mulatas” by Carlos Enrique, his melons, pumpkins, chili peppers and cucumbers with wheels recall the way in which Acosta León transformed any object into the symbolism of what rolls or moves by placing wheels on coffee pots and other utensils or domestic objects, just as an allusion to the peasants cannot help but be perceived. by Víctor Manuel, Eduardo Abela and Carlos Enriques among other Cuban modernists who focused on the country girl, the peasant and the habits and customs of the Cuban peasant family
  In another sense, certain allusions in the titles such as “Red does not fade with saltpeter” could be discerned as intra-artistic, an emphasis on the mere pictorial that explains how its attention does not stop falling on the gestures of painting implicit in that retro look of painting. herself, or more ambiguous and ironic titles alluding to the theme in question such as “The Night is Good” that could be read in one sense or the other, or the peasant in his real and imaginary world during a splendid moonlit night. , or as in “The red that does not fade with saltpeter” as an allusion to the fact that his world is inscribed as a representation within the stylistic customs of painting, as if to say, --the painting that falls at night is good to live in that night. --, which is no longer the literal night of the countryside but the night of painting - or the two nights one in the other - of a painting that falls into darkness according to pre-postmodernist parameters but that the retro in postmodernism has taken up as a value of the “outdated” deconstructing the illusionism of the new, where the peasant theme returns but of today's peasants through the retrospect of a painting that recalls their cultural values ​​in a postmodernist sense.
  In fact, one of the characteristics of the retro imposition has been the deconstruction of the ideologies of the new, the fact that what is merely new for the sake of the new is empty, wanting to break with tradition for the sake of breaking falls into a lack of connection. with values ​​and vital processes of culture without which art itself cannot truly renew itself and ends up biting its own tail.
Although within the retro impulse some artists have been interested in taking up issues of early modernism, exalting its values ​​from yesteryear in the present, others have been interested in it from the point of view of a late fatigue that is intra-stylistically recalled as, a conversely, to make visible the fatigues of the modern and the new against the background of tradition.
  As I said in my essay “An Erotica of Fatigue” about the Venezuelan Jasón Galarraga in his exhibition “Serial Seal” that treated flower paintings as a pop theme that were retro towards Matisse's way of painting but reveling in the intra-pictorial exhaustion of the motif itself and relating that retinal fatigue of flowers as a “late night” theme or nightfall of painting, with the also tired repetitiveness to which pop tends with its serializations – flowers as motifs repeated in series until tiredness like Coca Cola cans. , hamburgers or Marilyn's faces, showing the late fatigue implicit in the serializations of pop, of a massive culture that presumably refers to the new or modern
  There is, however, in the retro imposition an implicit although not always explicit interest in moving beyond art towards culture in a broad sense, gathering values ​​in tradition understood in a culturalist sense and from a suspicious critique of the modern.
  I would say that this is the main motive for the retro turn in postmodernism in the cultural sense, tending to even proclaim the Western-non-Western dualism as made explicit from pop expressions such as Sting's music to searches that both in literature and cinema and music have immersed themselves in rescuing values ​​from archaic cultures, from Tibet to the Arab world or Africa, the juxtaposition of modern technological sounds with acoustic sounds, timbres and Arab, Hindu and African voices in the mosaics of many postmodernists in music, even to go to culture in the retro archaeological turn of some in postmodern anthropology who want to redeem in the discursive present of contemporaneity pre-Western moments of archaic cultures such as Hindu or Mesoamerican, the studies of Stephen A Tyler about religion, markets and castes in India according to ancient texts, or by Quetzil Eugenio about Mayan symbology, something that we can read alluded to - this ironic retro contrast between tradition versus modernity - in the painting of the peasant with guataca on a balloon that can be deflated at any time and hangs fragilely with images of the colonial city inside in the middle of the countryside.
  It is true that the intra-pictorial allusions to the peasant motif in Carlos Enrique, Víctor Manuel, Abela as well as Acosta de León, are still, in various senses, from the point of view of forms and aesthetics, retromodernisms, that is, turns of modernity. towards other moments of herself in the sense of mid-century Cuban Western painting, a painting made in the procedural springs of the European avant-garde as well as in terms of language, all of Justo's painting can be considered surrealist in the same sense, but On the one hand we have the modernity-tradition relationship expressed in the contrast between city and countryside, urban world and rural world, cosmopolitanism versus the bucolic universe of farmers and peasants and on the other, we have an allusion to pre-modern and even archaic imaginaries in pieces like those two of the ceiba, a tree with respect to which treated in this very symbolic way we cannot avoid the meanings it has in Yucatán and in the Afro-Cuban religion.
  Now, it is necessary to move beyond everything previously said in the analysis of the paintings of Justo Amable, who I consider to be one of those painters whose art calls for an archaeological interpretation where it is not simply a matter of interpreting a list of images as they are given. in the appearance of its presence, but in finding different semantic capabilities.
  On the one hand, in reference to surrealism, it is not strictly speaking a psychic automatism, a resource that governed a large part of surrealism since Max Ernst, thus distancing itself from surrealisms such as those of Ernst himself, Ives Tanguy, André masson, Desnos, Miro, Breton, Dalí and even Lam, and leaning more towards the dream-representation relationship present in all of them, but which acquires its most elaborate forms in the most figurative works that focus on objects and images as they exist in a representational sense such as Chagal, Magritte or de Chirico, especially the first in whom the theme of the couple, as in Justo, his world of dreams and illusions, is in the foreground and where it is around the volitions, the libido and the passions of that loving romance from which weightlessness emerges. of the imagination
  In them the meaning of reality and dream are exchanged, that is, where the concept of dream does not literally refer to dreaming while asleep compared to being awake, but rather to dreams implicit in desires and illusions specific to life around goals where symbolic imagination brings this second sense of the dream through the freedom of the first, the couple that floats kissing in the room as in Chagal's “Anniversary” or in the city around the architecture, in Justo the intimate kiss while the cathedral is kidnapped inside a pumpkin with wheels that flies, the couple in the pumpkin with wheels with fragments of guitar, telephone and lantern, the couple traveling on the lamp with the city of sky and the field of earth, the couple hugging inside two slices of melon with a wheel, inside the fruitbomba with a fan, doll and oil lamp, or on the chili with guano hut, dog and oil lamp.
  On the other hand, Giacometti's eroticism is given not in direct references to the genital organs or intercourse, but in analogies via other materialities with elements analogous to the human body such as his wooden ball with a female cavity suspended from a violin string, in Just the analogical allusions via sensoriality, freshness and shape to the pubis and vagina with a subtly erotic sensual sense in contrast to the literal image of the dressed women, but alluded to their nakedness through fruits, the interior for example of the pumpkin, the fruit bomb and the mamey alluding to the female sex and its intense sensuality.
There is, however, in Justo something different from those surrealists, the conjugation of the symbolism typical of the tropes and the surrealist figurative language - metaphors, (bicycle corn with garlic, slices of melons with a wheel, a flying lamp, a pumpkin with flying wheels, a pear that flies with an umbrella, fotingo that flies with a palm, etc.), metonymies (interior of the pumpkin, the mamey or the bomb fruit and the pubis or female vagina), synecdoches (hut with chili in the sea, hut with apple in the sea, air treated as pavement, sea treated as air, air treated as sea), with hyperrealism whose technique dominates with meticulous precision both the way of painting the human figure, animals, fruits, objects and the hut, as well as the entire landscape.
  And this is another of the characteristics that characterize his painting, the fact that the relationship between representation and dream wrapped in tropes is nevertheless in a world or universe that refers in a hyperrealistic way to human beings culturally inscribed in a certain social reality, in their case the Cuban one and specifically with accentuated emphasis the Cuban peasant couple.
But although there are some conclusions of meaning derived from this unusual conjugation between surrealism and hyperrealism, there is also a “primitive” symbolism that in the pictorial past refers to Rousseau in his painting, for example entitled “Dream”, a naked woman in nature surrounded by plants and animals, something that in the present refers to naive imagery in the so-called naive art, I am referring to a certain naivette that can be read indexically in the way of combining the symbols, the piece for example of the melon-boat with a latrine, the clothesline in the hut with a thong, surrounding the peasant in the elements of his ordinary environment of common sense, the peasant with a dog, mule, cow, plantain bush and guataca, thus exchanging relationships of meaning that inscribe his characters in a world of common sense and contrasting common sense and imagination in a way that subtly respects the order that this relationship already has in the worldly man who tends to imagine or fantasize about things familiar to his world.
  From this perspective, if there is something peculiar about Justo's paintings with respect to traditional surrealism, it is that in that case the subject of that imagination or psychic automatism was omitted; it was in a certain way the artist himself as a subject or even any subject abstracted in a certain idea of ​​the interiority of subjectivity, his surreal images were defamiliarizations that made the ordinary extraordinary by removing chewing gum or stereotypes tending towards common sense.
  On the contrary, in Justo we have less of a defamiliarization that makes the everyday extra-quotidian and more of exploring a vocabulary or grammar in which common sense continues to be present in the world of the imagination, the familiar is never completely defamiliarized, the everyday is not completely defamiliarized. extra-ordinary despite the unusualness of the imaginative solutions.
  In this sense, a balance is sought in which the logic of common sense based on typifications and clichés, continue their congruence of meanings even winged or taken to the world of dream and imagination.
  The formal solutions, the hyperrealistic way of painting faces and bodies, the hut, the animals, the landscape, the fruits, contribute to this, a way in which he inscribes his characters in a credible world, the relationship between the dream as an illusion of life and the dream as imagination suggesting an imaginary but measurable universe of objects surrounding common sense.
These paintings thus have their viewer not only in the usual recipient of a work of art but also in the peasant himself who will find in the realistic solutions something that satisfies his common sense expectations regarding representation. The world of representation and that of the dream are reconciled through the subject, one that in his works is not that abstracted and anobjectualized in the universality of the interiority abstracted in a subjectivity of the spirit proper to surrealism, the liberated interiority of any individual, but rather referred to a specific culturally inscribed – and thematized – subject where we do not speak of the dream of any spirit abstracted in subjectivity, but of the dream for the subjectivities of those peasants.
This is obtained through a certain exaggeration. In fact, the imagination when unleashed in the realm of dreams never keeps those almost anatomical or taxonomic proportions with the representation, there is in itself a certain asymmetry of dystopian disjunctions between the visual field of the imagination and that of the representation that never achieves in the experience of human subjectivity the congruence that Justo gives to this relationship, it is rather a solution through the control of the effects of representation, creating an image about the representation-imagination relationship that in itself is not what that relationship brings with it, something that refers to the idea of ​​special effects, that is, of forms of relationship between representation and imagination that are achieved as a consequence of the manipulation of the production of reality effects in the control of the effects. of the representation.
  But the latter also refers to a certain naivette that we can see in naïve art when usually the painter does not realize that he inscribes his typified universe of common sense in an imaginal sphere that is not the one that in itself has representation and imagination in his reality, the little town square, the neighborhood houses and the typical characters given in minute details wrapped in customs, habits and daily rituals, but painted on a flat geometry in which all the streets appear without perspective of depth where what walks and What flies seem suspended on the same plane or surface in which there is no difference between what corresponds to the sky and what corresponds to the earth, where traditional and familiar scenes suddenly seem like projections of a dream or figures winged by the imagination.
It is something that also refers to cinema solutions in terms of the fiction-reality juxtaposition, I am thinking about the way Disney solves this relationship in children's films like "The Lion King" among others where fantasy and reality seem mutually congruent through of credible mimesis, talking animals, the mammoth's pet, for example, effects given through the control of verisimilitude, the way of working with common sense typifications and clichés, a relationship that is not unnoticeable in one of the Two ceibas from Justo include these the least symbolist one that refers to animals and plants, and that has a little deer or bambi, in it something reminds us of the type of inventive artifices and the invoice with which reality is treated in Disney animations.
There is, however, in these two pieces of the ceiba, especially in the one exhibited in Mérida, Yucatán, an inverse logic regarding the symbolic in culture.
  Without referring to the concept of symbolism in its most literal meaning, we speak of symbols not to distinguish culture from nature or language from culture, a general meaning, if you will, of what we understand by symbolism in anthropology, but in reference to images, forms, objects, icons and signs whose symbolism derives from convention, codification, religion or mythology, while the rest of Justo's work abounds in symbols created by him, universes that in themselves are not themselves in reality. -Simbolic given, the sea, the mountains, the landscape, the colonial city, an avenue of the port, with the ceiba the opposite happens.
  Although it is a tree like any other for the layman, it refers to heterogeneous symbolism in different cultures. In the Yucatecan region where the work was exhibited, it is the sacred tree of the Mayans. In the Yucatecan Mayan language, it is the yaxche or ya' axche, tree green, yax: green, che: tree used in handicrafts carved in wood, in canoes and rafts.
According to the book Chilan Balan by Chumayel, she carries with her the origin of the world in the mythology of the Mayan culture where the yaaxche and the bacabes as divinities represent the harmony of the universe between the earthly, the celestial and the underworld.
  In the legend of Xtabay, a beautiful woman of this name combs her hair under the ceiba tree, seducing the night walkers who are attracted to death, assuming that she strangles them with her hair.
  In Yucatán the ceiba is also used to create centers for plywood and packaging boxes, etc. The seed is edible cooked or toasted. The oil from the seeds is used to make soaps. The cottony fiber that surrounds the seeds is used in industry as a thermal and acoustic insulator in cold rooms and airplanes and also to fill mattresses, pillows, jackets, etc.
  It is also used in green areas in urban areas. The cottons of the ceiba are known as kittens and on the Day of the Dead altars a green cross is placed next to the ceiba.
According to a legend in the popol vuh, the creator god planted ceibas in four regions of the cosmos, in the east the red ceiba, in the west the black ceiba, in the south the yellow ceiba and in the north the white ceiba and then a ceiba in the center of the four directions where they located the Xibalba or mitnal, related to death and where they planted a kab or the land where humans live. God was established in the trunks and foliage, at the base the kab where humans live and at the top above the origin of all the gods was located with a quetzal bird.
Given this importance in the Mayan civilization, the tree was planted in the center of the plazas and map representations of the towns.
It means life, perpetuity, the great, the good and unity, receiving offerings of all kinds such as flowers, honey and animals, the ceiba pentandra is also known as kapok or silk cotton tree. The Yaxche can be found in the center of almost all pre-Columbian Mesoamerican villages.
  Although the concept of a world tree dates back to the ancient Olmecs, the Mayan world tree image as a range corresponds to the late preclassic and late postclassic Mayan codices, the images almost always have hieroglyphic signs with quadrants of specific deities, the most Known are from the Madrid and Dresden codes of the early 16th century, highly stylized, they illustrate the deities of Chak Chel and Itzamna. Other images of the tree are seen in temples or crossing the palenques through the forest.

   Currently, there is a craft Mayan beer in Yucatan called ceiba, created in 2012 by Carlos Alfonso Jaime Heredia, who died in 2017, leaving the administration of the company to his sons Carlos and Mauricio.
Justo titled his painting “The Yucatecan Tree of Life”, however, although the ceiba is not only symbolic in the Mayan culture of the Yucatecan context to which he refers it and in which he exhibited it, but also among the Quechuas, the Nahuas, the Peruvians and the Tainos of Puerto Rico, we cannot avoid, in the context of an artist who works with themes so closely related to Cuban culture, the symbolism of this tree in Afro-Cuban religion.
  From this perspective, images that made usually non-symbolic universes symbolic are distributed around the symmetrical order of the ceiba tree, its trunk and its branches, something that gives his painting a new tessitura with respect to the symbolism in his remaining work. To evoke how symbolic the ceiba is in Afro-Cuban religion, let us quote some passages about oroko, the orisha that corresponds to the ceiba in African religion.
In the beginning of the world, heaven and earth had an argument. The earth argued that it was older and more powerful than its brother the sky. “I am the basis of everything, without me the sky would crumble, because it would not have any support. I create all living things, feed them and maintain them. My power knows no limits. Oba Olorun did not respond, but signaled to the sky to be stern and threatening, learn your lesson, said the sky as he walked away, your punishment will be as great as your arrogant pride. Iroko, the ceiba tree, worried, began to meditate in the midst of the great silence that followed the departure of the sky. Iroko, the ceiba, understood that harmony had disappeared and that the world would know misfortune. Because until that moment, the sky had watched over the earth, so that the heat and the cold had benevolent effects on the creatures of the world. Life was happy and death came without pain. Everything belonged to everyone and no one had to govern, conquer or claim positions. But the enmity of heaven changed everything. It wasn't raining and a relentless sun scorched everything. The time of suffering arrived and ugliness appeared on the earth. One night anguish and fear appeared. Then all the misfortunes came, all the vegetation disappeared and only the ceiba iroko remained green and healthy because from time immemorial, it had revered the sky. Iroko gave instructions to those who could not penetrate the secret that was at their roots. Then they recognized the magnitude of the offense and humbled themselves and purified themselves at the foot of the ceiba tree, making sacrifices to heaven. Many messengers were sent to heaven, but none could reach it. Only Ara Kiole managed to transmit the men's pleas from above. The sky was shaken and great rains descended on the earth. What was left alive in it was saved thanks to the shelter that Iroko offered them. Iroko, is a greater oricha, lives in the foliage of the ceiba tree. He is a holy male and old, although some believers consider him to be female. His wife is called aboman and his sister is called ondo. As is known, the ceiba is a tree highly revered among Africans, Chinese and Cubans. According to some, it is an obbatala path and you talk to it when you are in front of the tree. The ceiba is the trunk or cane of olofi. It can be said that all the orishas go to the ceiba

Natalia Bolívar 207-208, the orishas in Cuba

  In addition to the explicit symbolism of this pataki that all the orishas go to iroko, it is enough to know the importance of olofi and obbatala to imagine the complex fabric of symbolisms that are articulated around him, olofi on the one hand is the highest god creator of everything included Man forms, together with Oloddumare and Olorun, the most important African triadic divinity at the origin of the world and Obbatala is the first and most important son or descendant of this trinity, sometimes man, sometimes woman, several of the most important orishas are his children, elegua, oggun, osun, oshosi, among several others
  Justo, however, does not place in his two ceibas the symbols that are common to them in the Yucatecan and African or Afro-Cuban symbologies but rather his own, bringing some among those that we previously saw in his landscapes now among the branches of the ceiba, Thus, the elephant, a sacred image in the symbology of India that we had before in his painting “The Night is Good” holding the traditional Cuban hut on its back, we now have it on one of the branches of the ceiba tree with the farmer on its back, the sugar apple, a suigeris and aphrodisiac fruit like the guanaba and the cherimoya that are still present in the Ewe mountain of the plants corresponding to other orishas but that do not correspond in the Ewe itself to iroko, is painted on one of the branches of the ceiba, also the mango, sacred fruit of India omnipresent in Hindu cuisine, Vedic religious stories and Hindu theater.
This, which previously appeared where the peasant extended his arms towards the horizon in religious expression to some god and inside the lamp as an imaginary form of transportation and light that guides the path at night, now appears painted on one of the branches of the ceiba tree. , a girl dressed in black with a short and sensual dress appears painted lying on another of the branches inside a mamey larger than her around her seed, again the metonymy of the female genital, and also an onion, a fish, a dove - a frequent animal in Afro-Cuban sacrifices to the deities -, a peaceful sea, a nest, some grapes and some flowers, I am referring to the ceiba tree exhibited by Justo in Mérida Yucatán, not the other ceiba tree, whose creation, as I said alludes in some way to the cartoon's creation and in which we find a deer, a mango, an iguana, a mushroom, a bird, a parrot, a pumpkin, a butterfly, a chili pepper and many flowers painted on the branches.
  Now, it contrasts with this allusion to the ceiba and above all with this turn that the symbolic gives in Justo's art, turning from the surrealism of the imagination towards the symbolism of certain mythologies in culture, the fact that Cuban peasant traditions They do not always refer to the Yoruba religion but rather to the traditional Christian religion, sometimes a certain form of primitive Christianity, as well as in the East, spiritualism, a religion very different from Yoruba, although according to Natalia Bolívar there is a syncretization between spiritism and Yoruba called kimbisa.
  How then or under what parameters of interpretation of culture do we allude to the implicit hermeneutics of these two paintings of the ceiba tree? The first question that arises is whether these are just two interrupted forays or a search in formation that will continue forward in upcoming works. The second question focuses on the fact that Justo ventures into the topic of the ceiba in a way that aims to take the symbol beyond its empirical and concrete ethnographic references, abstracting the strength of its symbology towards a comparative discussion with other religions.
  Regarding this, there is a phrase by Carlos Michel Fuentes in his words about Justo that I consider assertive when he talks about a black Fridda. I believe that this phrase by Michel advances suggestions for a possible path of interpretation to the type of game between a general non-African symbolism and its juxtaposition with a symbolic cultural reference as ethnographic as the ceiba in Afro-Cuban symbolism, the possibility of a therapeutic reading given in the idea of ​​a possible black Fridda.
On the one hand, from the Yucatecan and Mayan point of view there is a Frida museum in a town called Ceiba in Yucatán and in a general sense it could be said that the way in which Justo distributes the symbols as icons and images highly cut in the meticulousness of his colors or like small iconic islands distributed on both sides of a central line with a highlighted sense of symmetry in her two paintings of the ceiba is very typical of the way in which Fridda treated her icons placed on both sides of a central axis, it was also It is common for Fridda to alter the real proportions of her icons, as for example in Justo the mamey who is larger than the girl lying inside him, so that in the Mayan and Yucatecan sense these pieces could be discussed in Mexican terms around comparable symbolism. to Fridda's.
However, there are no ceibas in any of Fridda's paintings, at least according to my recent research in museum collections, although there are fruits, such as in her last painting “Viva la vida” full of melons or in her piece coconuts.
  But I consider that, although subtly legible in the way that the symbolic acquires in the two ceibas of Justo, as in fridda the symmetry on both sides, the proportions, the way even of paintings some of the icons in these two specific pieces, etc., We do not yet have in these two pieces the exploration of the Afro-Cuban around the ceiba, I do not see that path fully explored in the way that Justo has done it.
  On the other hand, it is a reading path that would be susceptible to ethnographic criticism because, being Fridda, it would not fail to have erogenous implications for the interpretation of a non-African symbology according to African symbology and vice versa, since a reading via Fridda of black issues could imply a critique of concepts related to reproduction that African religion assumes.
  The concept of son, daughter and children, for example, which comes in its genesis from sexual reproduction, acquires symbolism in this religion that does not follow the principle of biological genesis. Frequently, someone who is not a son or daughter by direct biological descent is called a son or daughter, something that contrasts as a reverse of Christian morality, and that is made explicit in terms of cultural anthropology in the notion used in Cuba of ahijado, godson someone. who is not necessarily a son, a notion involved in the Yoruba religion from the moment in which religious initiation occurs through godfathers and godmothers who give birth, the devotees remain linked to the religion and the orichas through godfathering, something that coincides with what At a mythological level, it happens to the orishas who are each the son or daughter of other gods of whom they are not biological descendants.
  As a mode of religious initiation this can be read as mere imagination within fables, legends or patakies at a religious level, but in the field of objective culture here and now it refers to forms through which tribal authority outside the religious field takes possession of those who are not biological children. In Christian and Western morality, it is not appropriate that through the tribal ancestry of the community over the individual person and the biological family, any other authority takes possession of the children of others, both in the secular and profane sense and in the religious sense, the Western sense that the children are from their biological parents is not susceptible to relativization.
  These are objective forms through which a culture outside the scope of religion as an explanation of the world, but in which that religion has been inscribed as a practice, can through the collective unconscious and according to indistinctions or symbolic transfers in the imagination of The society in which this religious practice is inscribed may tend to prioritize forms of tribal authority over forms of the biological right of parents over their children, taking possession of them in ways that have their origin in the ancestry of a form of tribal religiosity.
In African religion, children in mythology often come from androgynous deities who can be either women or men, as for example when it is said that Elegua, Osun, Ochun, Oshosi and others are children of Obbatala and Yemu, it is not specified. that obbatala could be the same man as woman and therefore it is affirmed not only a childbearing that does not respond to biological reproduction, but also that it could result from deities or gods of the same gender.
  Nor does it exclude the fact that this religion, as a consequence of its effects on the collective unconscious of the non-religious culture in which it is part, continually reinvents itself.
Oggun sleeping with his mother, for example, and everything that is generated around it between Elegua, Osun and Oshosi is so important in African mythology that it is in fact in the very genesis of Orula, the god through whom Ifa arises, the Yoruba divination system, in fact, through her brother Orula Elegua asks Obbatala for forgiveness from Oggun who slept with her mother and from this comes Orula's divinatory power conferred by Elegua, so that the very emergence of ifa has at its base an incestuous transgression.
  One could not speak of syncretism in the rule of ocha and Santeria between the Yoruba and Christian religions without discussing these issues that a black Fridda in the terms suggested by Michel regarding Justo would entail since the therapy implicit in this would involve praise and praise. , but also criticisms and suspicions, at least if, on the one hand, as Quetzil says, ethnography continues to be a moral science and if, on the other, we stick to this double character, both critical and affirmative, that therapeutic reading in itself via Fridda supposes.
  Moving away from our first approach to Justo's ceibas, I would like to return to the sugar apple and specifically to a piece that I consider offers alternatives to a reading route about the rest of his paintings.
  We had discussed that surrealism moves away from that subjectivity of the abstracted spirit implicit in the universality of the subject or the subjectivity of the inner world of the individual, inscribing instead that subjectivity around precise cultural subjectivities, the Cuban peasants in their greatest generality, the Universality in Justo, however, is not properly discerned around subjectivity, although the love of a couple is in itself a universal theme, but rather through an idea of ​​sensoriality that is ruling in his paintings and is related to the relationship between the skin of the fruits and that of the human partner, fruits whose freshness is continually in the foreground, in the ways of treating the landscape and finally as skin in general.
In this piece, the imaginary and dream universe communicated in the rest of the paintings in a figurative way becomes what makes up the landscape itself in terms of its abstract surfaces without subjections to additional figures, thus we have an extension of imaginary landscape and non-existent in contrast to the previous ones in which the landscape was always real, at times it seems here that it is the landscape of another galaxy or planet far from Earth but in reality its most evocative aspect comes from the fact that what it does The surface of the mountains is the fact that they seem to be made with the same syntax as human skin.
  In this landscape there are no trees or plants, no animals, no human beings, only large extensions of medium elevations formed by the syntax of this pink skin extended like a mountain range that is lost in the depth of the horizon while in the distance the only thing that is perceived As a living element it is a small lagoon in which there is an anon. I consider this relationship between the human skin that makes up the syntax of the landscape and the fruits to be implicit in the way in which fruits are generally worked on a sensory level in their relationship with the sensoriality of the human body in the rest of his paintings, in these it is highlighted. the juicy, the freshness and above all the sensuality of the surfaces.
On the other hand, returning to this unusual coincidence between surrealism and realism, I would like to review some previous cases in the contemporary arena. On the one hand, Daniel García, an Argentine artist, has explored a modality of this conjunction but from the psychic and existential universe given in the facial expressions of Large face-heads painted in the foreground in a way in which the surreal and the real seem to come together.
Flavio Garciandia, on the other hand, a hyperrealist artist in the past, has also explored paths to retromodernism in his retrocubist paintings from Monterrey and although we do not have surrealism itself, it would not be out of place to remember that in his texts on the language procedures that distinguish the surrealism of dadaism as something more than a simple anachronism Max Ernst defined the beauty of surrealism alluding to the fact that a sewing machine and an umbrella as random or found objects make love, recalling the paintings of Flavio in which the hammer and sickle precisely make the love.
  The way this occurs in Justo is, however, as I said, unusual since it extrapolates and contrasts these two concepts against each other just when the second, surrealism, includes within it the word realism, being nothing more than a reaction to it as a universe that is freed from the restraints of that towards imagination and automatism or creative spontaneity.
  It is in this sense that the way in which these two poles are contrasted has consequences, one and the other, not being from my perspective magical realism, the latter in fact presumably results from something unusual in reality itself and not from a effect of the liberation of the latter in the world of subjective interiority.
  A pumpkin that flies with wheels is not a magical form of a reality or a facsimile of it in a fiction that, when imagined, makes something magical seem like reality.
  The world created by the imagination is not returned here to the real as a form that is in itself but remains in the space of an impossible dream in the real as in the mode of a juxtaposed parallelism of a construction that can never return to reality. configuration of the real and reconcile with it as an unusual possibility of its being in its reality.
  The dreamlike imagination in the imagined dimension of the surreal dream remains on one plane and the real on another without exchanging their ontologies, that is, without both planes coinciding in the sameness of the being itself of the same reality, hence the effect that we said. He refers to special effects in cinema, something that is notable in his piece Tower of Babel where the cucumber with wheels brings with it a collage of unconnected juxtapositions of the colonial city.
  A fotingo that handles a palm that flies over the wall of the pier is a surreal construction like almost all of its images, a surrealism however that is contrasted with credible landscapes of the real world, meadows, mountains, seas although sometimes this principle It is also altered, as occurs, for example, in his guajiro with corn-bicycle, where the landscape around him has been exposed to a whirlwind that we do not know if it alludes to the flood or the creation of the religious world, to a disturbance of nature such as a hurricane or to the simple surreal effect that the movement of the corn through the environment stirs up the landscape.
Also in the piece where the city is the sky and the countryside is the earth, we have this.
We are therefore faced with a surrealist, not a magical realist, and although three of his pieces subtly allude to the Christian religion, such as this one of the guajiro on the corn-bicycle, that of the guajiro invoking with his arms on the handle and that of the traveler with a pear and an umbrella that flies away while he greets and says goodbye to his girlfriend with the tip of his finger as in a classic allegorical painting of passages from the Bible, and two to the Mayan world and the Afro-Cuban religion through the ceiba tree, the high contrast between Surrealism and realism help to ensure that neither plane is diluted in the being itself of the other, remaining as parallel series that exchange semantic meanings in language, --our analyzes for example on common sense--but not in that which relates language to the ontology or the being in itself of a reality.
A hyperrealistic cloudscape in the background is possible and refers to a reality in its own series, but flying melons with wheels is not possible, corresponding as juxtaposition to a parallel series.
  Both series are never integrated into the being itself of the same reality.
  Unlike those artists understood as magical realists where, in general, the imaginative, unreal or fantastic tends to unite on one of its sides with the being itself of some reality, bringing to the latter a sense of unusual reality, or merging with some dimension in culture that expressed in mythology or the imaginary is itself a real dimension of the imaginative or symbolic culture itself, as occurs for example with those artists in which working more directly with visual imagery of mythological religions, the artistic dream tends to share with the religious dream a dimension of real culture, in these cases not dealing with reality as it is reflected in its representation, but with the cultural reality of a determined form of the imagination as it occurs in religious expression in a way of visual culture.
The action of surrealism—Mario de Micheli maintained—had more scope than that of magical realism, towards which some of the German artists of the new objectivity were heading. Only De Chirico had already done something similar in 1910 with his squares in Italy, surpassing magical realism to reach surrealism.

   Retrosurrealism, however, has acquired in current contemporary art, especially in the United States, very different forms from that explored by Justo, preponderating what I have elsewhere called neo-minimalist liminal revisitations towards that where issues related to abstract space-time dimensions or minimalized in the logarithmic sense of the minimal syntheses of minimalism that involve the scope of surreal disjunctions in the exchange of sensorialities and senses of space and time on the one hand in terms of sensitivity and on the other in terms of the density of the effects of memory in culture producing novel effects in painting, installation and collage from neo-minimalism and in installation from neo-conceptualism, generally acquiring a non-representational abstract philosophical dimension as made explicit in three different ways in Ariel's paintings masson, the installations of Mel chin and the collages of Surpic Angelini.
  In this sense, from my point of view, the work of Justo Amiable Garrote, which juxtaposes surrealism and realism in such a contrasting way, is faced with several crossroads; the high contrast of surrealism-realism as juxtaposed parallel series currently leads the more immersed it is in the international art towards the world of special effects, cinema and Disney-type aesthetics, oneirism as a solution to the evocation of an ethos and cultural values ​​leads towards a progressive rearticulation of its symbolism into cultural symbolisms, or it moves away of the limits imposed by the parody of situating the peasant world debated as surrealism between dreams and reality, and explores with more emphasis the postmodern retromodernist interest towards fatigue in painting which could incline it either towards a more intertextual interest accentuated by the theme in the painting or towards bad painting.
  Will the newly initiated path of the pink-skinned extraplanetary landscape walk exactly opposite to this?
Something like the path taken in recent years by Ariel Masson and this pink landscape of syntax skin would be, philosophically speaking, in the face of the dilemmas of surrealism today, my choices.

Grades
The references to one of the pieces of the ceiba tree are to the work “The Yucatecan tree of life”, oil on canvas, art center, Mexico, Yucatán, 2018, Art 1010 gallery sample
The Peasant with Corn is titled “Mountain Suecador” and was exhibited at the Exhibition at the Cernuda art gallery, important Cuban art Works, vol 4, coral gables Miami, 2006

“The Night is Good” can be seen in the references to the Columbus in Cuba Exhibition, cuba in Columbus, Nov 10, 2019 curated by Joan Michael Reese

References

Bolivar Natalia Arostegui, gold, Pp 207-209, the orichas in Cuba
Bolivar Natalia Arostegui, The Olofi divinity, oloddumare-olorun, Pp 81-85, the orichas in Cuba
Bolivar Natalia Arostegui, Obbatala, Pp 97-116, the orichas in Cuba
Bolivar Natalia Arostegui, Oggun, Pp 66-71, the orichas in Cuba
By micheli Mario, Dream and reality in surrealism, Pp 234, The artistic avant-garde of the 20th century
Fuentes Carlos Michel, This is not a painting, Artepoli, no 15, 2017, Barcelona
Hernandez San Juan Abdel, An Erotica of Tiredness, Catalog of the Serial Stamp sample, Rómulo Gallegos Center, Caracas, 1995
Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Bodies Echos, text of the catalogue of argentinean artist Daniel Garcia, high quality full colour, Sicardi gallery, Houston, Texas, usa, 1998
Hernandez San Juan Abdel, The Syntax of Being: Neoplasticity and Structure in the Retrocubist paintings of Monterrey, in Hernandez San Juan Abdel, The Interpretation of Discourse: The Hermeneutic and analysis of visual discourses and rhetorics, book
Hernandez san Juan Abdel, The Subject in Creativity, book

General Bibliography

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

Eco umberto, the absent structure, lumen

Eugenio quetzil Castañeda, Eugenio quetzil castañeda, https://www.academia.edu/81422165/The_Invisible_Theatre_of_Ethnography_Performative_Principles_of_Fieldwork

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, 1996- Beyond the Intertextual. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Conference Lectured at the Fondren Library Lectures Auditorium as a guest of the faculty of classical and Hispanic studies in his area of research of semiotic, theory of art, anthropology, curator at the alejandro otero museum of visual art, coordinated by Surpic Angelini and Hector Urrutibeity, translated by Graciela daichman, 45 minutos version of a paper The posmodern work. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, translated by Gabriel, translations coordinated by surpik angelini and transart Foundation, Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA

Hernandez St. John Abdel, 1998- Cultural Bodies. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, published catalog, English, translated by Cristina Jadick, Sicardi Gallery, Houston, Texas, USA

Hernandez St. John Abdel, 1998- Bodies Echoes. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, published catalog, Sicardi Gallery, English, translated by Lourdes, Houston, Texas, USA

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, 1998- Anglo-Saxon conceptualism. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, lecture discussed at the glassel Schóol of art, cátedra of paintings, coordinated by terrell James, english by Abdel Hernandez San Juan, The Museum of fine art of Houston, Houston, Texas, usa

Hernández San Juan abdel, 1999- Art Pizte Exhibit: A Perspective from art critique. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, conference lectured in person at the Faculty of sociology and anthropology lectures auditorium on the museographizing of the exhibit of Quetzil Eugenio anthropology, five Maya artists and Quetzil collection of Maya art, a curatorial museography by quetzil Eugenio at Duran Gallery, with the participation in conceptualizing  and spatializing the mise in scene museography by Abdel hernandez San Juan and Lisa Breglia, a travel from Houston to lake forest  discussed as part in a panel Maya art and anthropology (anounced conferences by Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Alaka Wally, Stephen Eisenman, Richard Towsend, Quetzil Eugenio and Lisa Breglia, Lake Forest College Faculty of Sociology and Anthropology, included a workshop, tape recorded and film recorded Lake Forest college, coordinated by Quetzil Eugenio castañeda, 1999 Organizer and Chair. Forum on Maya Art and Anthropology. Panelists: Alaka Alí, (Anthropologist, Field Museum of Natural History),  Abdel Hernández (Artistic Director, Transart Foundation), and Maya Artists: José Kituc, Gilberto Yam Tun, Jorge Pool Cauich, Wilberth Serrano, Juan Gutiérrez. Durand Art Institute, Dec. 2, tape recorded, translated by quetzil Eugenio castañeda, assistance profesor of anthropology, faculty of sociólogy and anthropology, with college and high school students, Lake Forest, Illinois, usa, 1999

Hernandez St. John Abdel, 1999- Bodies Maps. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, published catalog, English, translated by Lourdes, Sicardi Gallery, Houston, Texas, USA

Hernandez St. John Abdel, 2000- Alchemies of the Senses. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, English, translated by Lourdes, Sicardi Gallery, Houston, Texas, USA

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, 2002- The paintings of terrell James. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, translated by surpik Angelini, Houston, Texas

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