English

Abdel Hernandez San Juan

The Interpretation of Discourse

The Analysis and hermeneutics of visual Discourses and rhetoric’s/

Contents

Heuristics: Virgil Grotfeld (USA).

By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Houston, Texas, USA

Cultural Bodies: Cristina Jadic (USA).

By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Houston, Texas, USA

Aesthetics of the Remnants: Leonor Antoni (Venezuelan-American).

By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Oakland, California, USA

Ethic Bodies: Antonieta Sosa (Venezuelan).

By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Caracas, Venezuela

Dialogic installations, juan carlos rodriguez (Venezuelan).

By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Houston, Texas, USA

Evanescence’s of the Image: Surpik Angelini (Venezuelan-American).

By Abdel Hernandez san Juan, Houston, Texas, USA

Mobile: Heidi and rolf {colombians}. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Los Angeles, california

Cinema before: Heidi and rolf {colombians}. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Los Angeles, california

The Venezuelan Plastic Art Palestra (Venezuelan).

By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Caracas, Venezuela

Subtly Paintings: Manuel Espinosa (Venezuelan).

By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Caracas, Venezuela

Letting Speaks the Materials: Fruto Vivas (Venezuelan).

By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Caracas, Venezuela

Archaeological Landscapes: José Bedia.

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

The Syntax of Being: Neoplasticity and Structure in the Retrocubist Abstractions of Monterrey

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Form and Contents in Lazaro Saavedra

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Houston, Texas, USA

Image as Literary Correlate: Robertico salas

©By Abdel Hernandez san Juan

Another Routes

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Heuristics.

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan,

Houston, Texas, USA

  The plastic work of Virgil Grotfeltd is sugeneris within Anglo art. His paintings based on loose shapes generally made in water, inks and various tones such as grays and sepias - some of them on recycled papers in his own artistic workshop and others on found papers such as moldy leaves due to natural effects - are surfaces that suggest almost always the passage of time such as sheets with inscriptions and vestiges of its lines and calligraphic indications, which refer in some way to the gesturalist impetus that characterized abstract informalism in the high post-avant-garde, especially the inclination of quite a bit of informalist painting towards stain. understood, not only as an expression with a material, color and shape on the fabric, but as grammar and vocabulary.

  In Virgil's paintings, the calligraphic effects refer to the way of treating the brush and the pigment, a way of approaching the stain on the canvas, rather than the form that that stain - understood as a figure - suggests on that paper or that fabric. These do not suggest the image of a calligraphy according to the features, but the calligraphic logic is in the way of carrying a certain stain from a previous form to a subsequent one, in the way of returning to itself from this, in its type of versatility, in its becoming form, in its taking the form towards another form.

  As in alphabetical language, it is a vocabulary according to painting as speaking, but the stain as a form seems more related to suggesting imaginative worlds and universes almost always related - in their allusions - to the same materials with which and on which he paints, than with calligraphy as an image. It is not, as in other painters, an analogism according to which the march in its figuration suggests - as a form - a calligraphy, nor is it a wide stain that in its entirety reaches towards the edges of the painting, resembling as a whole a large indecipherable letter in alphabetical language, nor of gestural strokes that painted towards the center or the margins suggest the sheet of paper, nor of those small spots that together suggest a type of incomprehensible alphabet or Jerigonza.

  Some of his paintings could suggest the inclination towards the visuality of books, old maps and scrolls, characteristic of many paintings in recent years, that tending inclination in some cases towards a melancholy of visual effects and a nostalgia for the image. of objects, as well as in others towards visualities in unknown worlds such as medieval painting and alchemy, but in Virgil's paintings these allusions find peculiar developments. (8)

  As I said, some of his pieces are made on found papers which can be literally found or intentionally collected as relics, papers on which you can see old calligraphy with lists of names, accounts and classification tables, medium format surfaces that, either they had been folded repeatedly until they formed a small square and then they had been opened, leaving as a result a surface in which the grid is a consequence of the traces of having been stored, or the artist himself imprinted this result by making the same. work of aging the material obtaining the desired effect. His paintings in ink on paper preserve something, or we could say, the most general gesture resulting from the first stains in ink and wash paint, but then from these original forms he begins to take the stains towards certain imaginative forms that in some cases can seem like figures atavistic images related to those worlds evoked by paper, and in other cases they can suggest universes in nature such as ferns, plants, mollusks and in some cases, through washes, the human body.

  The homologies between natural forms, whether they are terrestrial plants or maritime plants, and human forms are suggested, but they are obvious; The natural world and the human world appear united as if they were one form to the other and from the other. It is neither a stain in which the artist allows the accidental results of the pigment to remain as they occur on the surface without his intentional intervention, nor such an induction of the stain according to which the initial forms are modified. Without leaving traces of his first spontaneous forms, the artist rather creates shapes and figures that depart somewhat from the initial experimental results typical of spontaneity in working with inks and water paint, but not completely.

  In his paintings there is an exaltation of the infinite and the language of nature in the sense that a simple fragment of nature can be a universe with an infinitely rich language from which there is much to learn, his paintings seem more like heuristic paintings, that is That is to say, moved, in one sense, by search motives aimed at the discovery and investigation of worlds and universes, this from a spirit of adventure that in many paintings also suggests a playful and even childish sense of play while, in another sense, there is an openness to the language of nature in the sense of "listening."

  Concepts such as the indexical sign that refer us to a suggested dimension that is not present in the sign itself, its indication of a gesture, its indication of a certain visuality, can be fruitful for reading his pieces. It is not, however, like the interest in children's painting that turns to the child's ways of painting, their figurations and ways of creating forms - adult representation of children's iconography - but rather a way in which The child in the adult painter is kept alive in the sense of curiosity and adventure through the worlds of the imagination.

  Presenting his plastic work mainly in Nordic countries and Europe, as well as having made several trips to China, his workshop as an artist has been mainly in New York and Houston where Virgil's paintings have been related to those of others of his generation. whom I will discuss later, such as the critic and historian Thomas McEvilley, the informal abstractionist Terrell James, and artists such as Walter Hopps and Tracy Hicks, all of whom have had, in very different ways, an interest in Duchamp and Beuys. . Thomas McEvilley is a professor in the Department of Art History at Rice University, and author of books such as Art and Otherness, for years he has been a theorist of exhibitions and collections at the Menil Museum, as well as presenting his lectures semiannually at Rice University , Walter Hopps as an art critic was the one who presented at the Menil Museum an exhibition of Duchamp in which he focused on what I have discussed elsewhere as a Duchamp furniture, a Duchamp inserts, a Duchamp postal art, a philatelic Duchamp, a Duchamp travel objects; the different ways in which his entire series of objects have been auratized, and Tracy Hicks who has also been a suigeneris material artist interested in nature.

  Virgil's works are meticulous, detailed and delicate, but this delicacy, this finesse of his paintings seems to be a function of the type of atavistic atmospheres that I was referring to before rather than in the sense of other painters more interested in nostalgic or melancholic visualities. who make their paintings with the meticulousness of, for example, the altarpiece maker or restorer, and who are also fascinated with the world and the values ​​of such references. The concept of the atavistic, due to its reference to the timeless, is a concept that refers us to a time that can be the same as the constant character of the physical time of the world, the constant universal time of nature and the cycles of life. , it can be the present time in the course of daily life, the allusion to an immemorial time, the universal planetary, constellational and global time, a time that cannot be referred to a precise time, or that can refer to a time of the antiquity present in our present day through the validity of the thought of ancient philosophers in modern thought and creation.

  The concept of the atavistic can, however, due to its immemoriality, also refer to a certain hermeticism and stoicism that can be, on the one hand, given the character of immutable time, resistant to transformations, while, on the other hand, It can refer to a sense of honor or the defense of certain values ​​that for Hermetics and Stoics may be in danger of extinction. The permanence and constancy of universal physical time does not have to be, however, relative to an immemorial since the very idea of ​​what is called immemorial refers to an interest of these artists in the universality of that time as the universality of a given time, the antiquity, for example. There have been many, however, artists who, in the sense of imagination, have been interested in the immemorial. Virgil's paintings do not properly allude to an immemorial sense of time, but the atavistic nature of his atmospheres to which he alluded before are a function of an atavistic and hermetic whole, which translates into the type of ambivalence that can be perceived when trying to see their spots as figures by analogies or suggestions.

  The degree of ambiguity of a message brings information closer to so many multiple and infinite interpretations that it approaches entropy, a level that can reach zero, that is, the same can allude to those worlds that Spilber works on so much in his children's films. , worlds in which something is discovered, a hidden chest, old pirate ships that suddenly become universes for children, which can simply be mollusks and sea ferns, which can be inscriptions on old parchments, which can be literal traces of some dye on aged paper, coffee, tea or other infusions based on natural plants, tree trunks transformed by the effects of rain and humidity, which can suggest all that and, at the same time, when you look closely, no longer be any of those things than the others and, therefore, return to the pure abstractionism that initially provoked the imagination of the spectators.

  Virgil also shares the experience of his partner Debora Grotfeld who develops an original and creative space for fine arts from the recovery of traditional architecture among African American communities in the City of Houston. Maintaining this exact balance where the suggested abstraction may be less than a literal abstraction, but as much or much more than a literal abstraction due to its ambiguity of being able to be anything and nothing, can have several meanings. On the one hand, he invites viewers on an imaginative journey by poetically evoking a universe as vast as the experiences of multiple viewers can be possible when they are contemplating his paintings, while, on the other hand, he questions interpretation as speculation, i.e. both to that viewer who wants to assign their cultural meanings once and for all around certain symbols and forms with their prejudices, clichés and stereotypes, and in general the tendency of interpretation towards fixation and paranoia.

  In this sense, this could refer to the rich problematic of the need for interpretive polysemy as well as the criticism of the ossification and fetishization of the senses that Sussan Sontag clarified early in her book Against Interpretation, as well as it could refer us rather to Virgil's painting as one in which hermeticism does not have a nihilistic inclination or sense, but rather an affirmation of values. The relationship between abstract stain and an incomprehensible vocabulary made us think about the relationship between quite a bit of high post-avant-garde abstract painting and the so-called Japanese and Chinese ideograms or calligraphies, as these have always evoked for us as Westerners, a type of ideography. gestural whose semantic senses and meanings we usually do not know, just as it made others think of a certain pictographism.

Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Houston, Texas, United States,  

1999

cultural Bodies. 

By Abdel Hernandez San Juan,

Houston, Texas, USA

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

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

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

The exhibit presented here, "Cultural Bodies", is an example of the above. The Exhibit is presented as aesthetic pages or slides that work as expressive interfaces of the Artist's  living process. The pieces that constitute the exhibit are the result  of a year of research done by Cristina to explore her own identity, memory and cultural heritage developed during long processes of migratory dynamics and bilingualism that were present when she was growing up and that constituted her own ethos, values and emotional world that elapsed between her and the society she grew up in. 

But in addition to this intimate exploration, Cristina's work also communicates individual introspection with collective abreaction. By means of an archeology of what is yours, of relics and personal belongings using her own body as an inventory of "blind marks," visiting herself as though in an excavation session, exploring her own shadows and sewing languages inherited from her predecessors traditions, Cristina discovers in her own oblivion of Cuban culture, forms of aesthetic memory hidden and masked by remembrance.   In addition to the myth of the search for self, the artist wants to make us understand how even in oblivion and at the bottom of individual experience, we again find culture, solidarity and connection with others.The exhibit is expressed as a journey going from the personal-intimate to the collective-cultural, the culture is a universe of evocation of bridges full of metaphors of solidarity and integration in the ethos.  In this sense, each canvas is done as a sensory cultural body, a sensitive surface covered with forbidden areas, silent spaces, places that show lack of determination, and, above all moments of hope.  Evoking geometric languages, old graphics and numeric maps on the high plane, highly poeticized, the works, project amazing tension which borders between the rational and the emotional.  Each piece is expressed as a biographic vehicle as well as a sensitive body in which we can find the traces of time, the marks of gestures thst occurred some time ago, transient inscriptions of faces that were seen some time ago, evocation of sounds, the presence and absences that appeared in memory some time ago.

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

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

Texas, 1998
END.

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Aesthetics of the Remnants.

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan,

Oakland, California, USA

  Feminist art in Caracas and Oakland, San Francisco, has among its young artists a talent in Leonor Antoni. Ecological in her vision of art, her works range from objects that she collects after several months on various beaches, objects that she then gathers in the form of inventories in her own studio and artistic workshop, to collages, plastic and photographic montages on these presented , sometimes from computer art, designs to be displayed on the computer, or printed as paintings and drawings.

   Without being an artist interested in religion, the curiosity of her work has moved her towards knowledge of various cultures and her pieces, sometimes very simple in which she introduces elements alluding to the spiritual universe of femininity, are based, as I said , in the found object, its fascination, its charm, its peculiarity, as well as in the photographic recreation of its images. Some of the many objects that Leonor accumulates in her studio and then chooses for her pieces are natural; however, they have the peculiarity that they are chosen according to almost always enigmatic details, the unique results that on an aesthetic level the natural encounter of two objects on a beach, a comb that remained embedded in a rock for years, eventually merging between the saltpeter and the mosses, a tree branch with exuberant and umbilicated shapes in which small stones of intense intensity were embedded colors as if they were garments, a fragment of a tree bark to which fragments of colonial architecture from some old house were attached, leaving the beautiful tree and the fragments alluding to volutes and capitals fused into a new shape, among hundreds of other possible e unusual combinations.

  The objects chosen by Leonor and presented in her works, whether in photo collages or directly, have the exclusivity, however, of being each and every one astonishing for their unique quality and the always exclamatory enigma raised by that alloy and conjugation. singular and unrepeatable that gave rise to them. These are objects that can consist of the natural and organic fusion of two or more natural elements, in some cases, a natural element and an artificial one, in others, one natural and another social, in also peculiar forms. One of the impressions that Leonor's aesthetic can communicate is that related to the image of recycling if we consider that many of these fused objects were discarded and then transformed by nature. However, it is not precisely the image of recycling, since nature has transformed them over long processes and periods of time, modifying their semiotics and semantics.

   It can also be said that not only does the time elapsed for them to emerge provide them with an astonishing strength and a suigeneris aesthetic beauty, but also the balance and balance of being things raised by nature that integrate natural and artificial elements. , gives them a unique look of curiosities. Leonor Antoni's objects thus form a plastic vocabulary. This vocabulary would not be possible without the long hours, sometimes he goes to the beaches for weeks for extensive search processes to find and choose them, then he brings them to his studio and begins the creation of his plastic works with them. The vocabulary they make up, however, would be nothing without the feminine and sensitive gaze through which Leonor forms with them, through some piece, a voice that is both expressive and critical.

  From the articulations that the objects themselves form, according to their significance, the artist works meticulously like a semiologist, studying what these relationships between elements can provoke, even if they are casual, if it is an object that refers to one thing, if it refers to another. , the peculiar way in which they are fused, and of those relationships, informs their own way of forming a language with them that always moves from feminism and femininity. It is interesting that from this perspective the narratives are significant and we could say that almost all of Leonor's interest in these objects has in itself a literary inclination, this refers to the idea of ​​imagining what that other story is that formed her conjugations, it also refers to the idea that by doing this kind of heuristic investigation of the objects, the artist herself is extracting from these other narratives that can be either creative, forming a narrative text that in its relationship to the image becomes evocative and poetic, or They may well have a connotation related to their experience, depending on the social aspect that they decide to allude to.

   Another interesting aspect is that, unlike simply taking these objects as they are and using them directly as art, they rather serve as means for your plastic research, something that can later become a piece of writing, a collage, a photographic montage or some other means, but not necessarily referring to the object, sometimes he does use the object directly, but this depends on what he wants to communicate in his work. Exploration based on found objects is also not the only inclination and series. Some of his works may remind us, due to the way he approaches the object, of artists like Ana Messenger, to cite an example, who sometimes places those wooden sticks on the walls in shapes that could well refer to a simple object in life. everyday life that was placed there, transforming the image of that side of the gallery into something domestic, due to its delicacy and subtle form. The photographs also have this character of being like new levels in which the artist does with the images of the objects something similar to what she did with the objects, she rearticulates them again.

  I wouldn't say that the viewer is a relevant concept in Leonor. The spectator as a concept is significant in artists who either anticipate their concept in the very way in which they give language to their works, the inclusion of an anticipated spectator inclusive of the form that the language acquires in the work, or they make the work directly to stimulate viewers in all its immediacy in the exhibition space physically in front of the works. In Leonor's works there is no anticipated spectator or a spectator encouraged by the immediacy of her physical presence before her, but rather a spectator and a reader who could have experienced something similar to her, something that could intensify her own experience.

  This somewhat recalls the type of reader and spectator that was sought in modernism, the reader and the spectator experience, although the former was magnified and the latter rather desacralized. He must be, like his own plastic art, a critical spectator, one who is at the same time as the artist makes her criticism, making, for his part, his own criticism.

Grades

  The motivation in the narrative and the literary as something that occurs from the same plastic language, is a recurrence in many contemporary artists. For another reference to the narrative as part of the plastic language, read my essay on the Texas painter Terrell James, Metaphors of Processes/Plastic Prose, who for similar motivations is entering writing.

  This essay was possible thanks to my month-long stay with Leonor in her Oakland studio during 1998 and before that in her San Bernardino studio, in Caracas in 1993, as well as thanks to conversations with Leonor about her art and artistic process. Leonor's artistic search has led her to relate her art to her own lifestyle, environmentalism is explicit in her plastic pieces, such as in her participation in collectives with Lihie Talmor, Ricardo Benaim, Nelson Garrido and María Clara Fernandez, read in In this sense my essay How to Be Ecological in Art around the exhibition of these artists on the topic of water, published in Economía Hoy, 1992.

  Also striking is the growing incursion of Venezuelan plastics into writing. Around 1998 Ernesto León compiled his first little book in Houston, that same year Leonor compiled his, Leonor and Herself, a few years before Manuel Espinosa, compiled his own, also small, and during those same years, Surpic Angelini, who had been dabbling before poetry, he accentuated his foray into writing, moving, like Terrell James, towards criticism.

  Leonor's little book, however, has peculiar characteristics due to its proximity to what we currently call creative writing, although this also comes from her plastic searches as a type of poetic writing. In her little book Leonor's voice flows in the first person. of the creative and experimental singular, it is the intimate voice that comes from the alone and solitary woman, towards the voice in which she sees herself, changing the time of the situations in which she describes herself immersed in her narratives, an experience , something lived.

    Work and life have led her to live between different cities, staying for periods of time in Caracas and San Francisco, Oakland. Experimental in the type of plastic works she makes and presents, her individual searches have brought her closer to other artists towards whom she expresses affinity, such as the German Jorge Estévez, who has lived in Caracas for decades, in Atillo. The multiculturalism, as I said, resulting from her searches in various cultures is expressed in her works but also in her lifestyle, her culinary searches, her sensitivity towards clothing and interior design, for example, although there is something in Leonor of A feminist critic of how art is usually reproduced and symbolically distinguished, with its recurring tendencies towards the ossification of value and its distance from the dynamic processes of criticism, is in this sense a radical artist.

Abdel Hernandez San Juan

San Francisco, Oakland,

United States, 1998

Ethic Bodies: Antonieta Sosa

©By Abdel Hernández San Juan

Caracas Venezuela

   Ethics are decisive in the nature of art. The latter offers an idea of ​​ethics that in no other way can be obtained from the rest of the natural, individual or social experiences that involve language, expression and communication, philosophically. On the one hand, art is the elaboration and intensification of our most immediate senses of lubricity and affectivity, at more evolved levels. Affection and ludricity are given to the experience since we receive the world given to vital impressions as sensations first and as items transformed into data of the senses later, these also suppose the ability to relate to others, give, receive, express, communicate and exchange, as well as the forms of relationship to that world given to vitality as surrounding, the lifestyle, the scope, the habitat, and what we do with the given in the direction of the not given, our capacity for creativity and inventiveness. , as well as relationship, association and imagination.

  What is ethical means well-being and satisfaction, if it is a relationship it means reciprocity, a relationship that is not reciprocal cannot be ethical. If we insert a visual or aesthetic form in nature as well as in architecture, for example, this will be all the more ethical as it does not impose itself on the forms that host it but assimilates the way they are and adapts plastically to them. understanding them and in turn offering them something specific to the new element that is inserted, that is, establishing a relationship of reciprocity in which giving and receiving are equitable.

  What is ethical, for the same reason, must be ductile, since without ductility and plasticity, neither adequacy, nor assimilation, nor openness of one to the other, or of one to the other, are conceivable. Between one and the other, as between two self-absorbed monads, or as between two forms of matter, there always mediates in some way an exteriority; plasticity consists in the adaptation of these samenesses to each other, reducing extrinsication. The ethical question lies at this point. The one and the multiple suppose the undifferentiated sameness of an absolute one, the self of any one in front of the multiple of many ones or of that which is not one, but the individuated one, whatever the form of this singular individuation, It supposes the relationship between two samenesses or between two self-absorbed forms in the case of the monad, whose samenesses seen from their individuated forms are not the same or the same.

  The ethical question therefore moves between the philosophical issue of sameness and that of the individuated, between the ductility of an adaptation or an assimilation and the exteriority of a relationship, when there is exteriority there is intervention, this is consubstantial to nature itself. , so that the new element must oscillate between plasticity that avoids extrinsication and a dissolution that obviates intervention and by ignoring it may also neglect, for the opposite reason, the ethics of reciprocity.

  For it to be reciprocal there must be an ethical sense of exteriority, without this there would be no reciprocity, nor would the principles of adaptation or assimilation be given to ductility and plasticity. This ethical question is inherent to art and therefore the very nature of art could not be understood without a keen philosophical sense of the ethical question developed in this way. For art, a standardizable instrument on how the knowledge of an object of study can be better controlled, or the latter and its corroboration with respect to the former, is not decisive, but rather developing an ethics of relationship, the telos and the ethos of ethics understood in this way. , surpasses the instrumental question in art even where the latter is subordinated to truth or knowledge. This does not mean that truth is not a matter for art, that it is exogenous or dissimilar, but rather that it is not sought as something that is out there in a single way, or here in a single way, or according to a invariant relationship between the subject and the object that must be that for all cases, just as a constant or continuous correlate of verification, invariance or corroboration.

  What is not reciprocal and generates harmony, ductility, plasticity, adequacy and ludricity, is not affective in the relationship, it can be true as opposed to false according to the notion of truth is subject to a pragmatics of truthfulness or convenience, but It can't be the truth. Finally, also towards monadic self-absorption, to art, as it involves language, expression and communication, the ethical question in a philosophical sense is inherent. Typification based on repetition is required by experience, but what is individuated since it requires language, expression and communication, cannot be reduced by typification to extrinsic forms of typology or classification. If this were the case, the cutie would not be able to develop her language nor would a form of expression and communication for herself and others evolve in her or according to her.

  A society in which individuals are not in communication with themselves suffers from a language vacuum. Like when we say it's something that doesn't have language or to which we haven't given language, or like when we say, I don't know how to say or express it.

    The same issue we saw before is now seen again. If our relationship to others or to ourselves is limited to extrinsic forms, the lack of ductility, adequacy, assimilation, plasticity and affectivity makes relationships subject to the repetitions of these externalizations, because although without typification there is a lack of a type of experience, without introspection we lack another, for example, that which we need to express, as well as to reflect or modify. Understood in this way, language becomes something other than a simple instrument available for communication, or a continuous and invariant socially regularized form such as style, generic or exemplary modes. Thus requiring an increasingly introspective language again, the individual in contact with himself, and through his expression, of the one with respect to the other, the self with respect to the social, the I with respect to you, the self with respect to the other in itself, the, them, us, the language in artistic works is a kind of interface, a linguistic concept according to which the media in its material and visual presence is a vehicle through which previous, simultaneous and subsequent processes are they continually remit.

   When this object becomes an artistic form in interface, the element or simple artistic spring refers to a broader process with respect to which it is a tangible form, the artistic piece becomes ephemeral in a new sense. Although it is not ephemeral in that sense of works made of imperdurable materials, waste, residues or remnants, or the documentary irreconstructibility of passing processes, it is ephemeral since the plastic, aesthetic and conceptual whole, sometimes also visual, requires the relationship of that visible element with that process. The above defines the art of Antonieta Sosa whose artistic works are a sophisticated sui generis response to and about the aforementioned.

    In Antonieta's pieces, however, as in the Brazilian Ligia Clark, it is not about loose elements like objects about which one later or simultaneously one finds out, thanks to photographs or according to Ligia's narratives in the catalog, which formed part or were in an experience, a thin strip of paper, for example, placed on a table, which we later see in the catalog can either serve Ligia in the therapeutic process of spending hours or days cutting out, or mediate as an element in a process Ligia's communication with others, where viewers in the art museum or gallery have the option of imagining what the experience evoked by these elements would have been like, when at most sensory environments are elucidated, the place that corresponded in those, in that it served as this or that, in that it was used in this or that sense.

  Although some of this aspect is also implicit in the element in Antonieta, the piece as a whole in the artist makes explicit the media and its interface, each time returning to the question about the form that the work acquires for the viewer, the anticipation in its configuration, from the point of view of the latter. The piece in Antonieta is thus the interface not as a memory of something that is no longer in its present only evocable, less as the classic dilemma of documentation that has defined process art since Fluxus, and more in its place, the disposition in the present of the work of a language reconsidered for a new viewer.

  The interface is like this at most, the way in which the medium of that presentation conveys the coming and going of a continuous reflexivity, the coming and going of it, where the questions are each time asked again for each work, in each sample occasion. In Ligia what is involved is to evoke something experienced that is not always or is no longer what the viewer is experiencing, making the visual present the ultimate metonymy of a partial or more or less total reconstruction of something as it could have been experienced. Although the assumption about the total or partial irreconstructibility of an experience is implicit in Ligia, and instead, its evocation, its elements and spectators, as in the classic dilemma of documentation in process art, continue to be referred to visual memory, sensory or narrative of an experience.

  In Antonieta, this worrying documentary or relative to an unfinished but perennial memory is surpassed in the recognition of partiality, the work of art as a media-interface offers itself every time as something new. In no case does what has been said imply that the documentary or reconstructive-inconclusive question as given in Ligia is exhausted or lacks interest for certain forms in current art, Ligia itself offers interesting answers in that sense, it means rather that not all forms of the processual in art, they represent a work of art whose first and last reason for being lies in its relationship to a reconstructive memory.

   Antonieta Sosa is a clear example in this other sense. The relationship and its ethics in the sense explained above matter here as much or more, a relationship between forms that themselves suppose what in my books in recent years I have referred to with respect to cybernetics and the Internet as in abstracted formal logic, the relational affectives. of the forms. In their visual aspect, Äntonieta's works are thus, in one form, minimalist plastic developments and in another, elaborate developments aimed at a viewer intensely awaiting the physical work in space.

  Thus it is not a simple subjectivity spread into the other according to pure desire or simple seduction in which the exteriority implicit in every relationship does not mediate as much as the plasticity or relational ductility of an adaptation or an assimilation. If where there is art there is intervention even if it has a direct relationship to life or vivacity, the ethical question is at the foreground. On the one hand, the artist with respect to himself, a self-absorbed monadic sense, search for languages ​​that ask questions again, on the other the spectators increasingly considering the work for the occasion. The artistic piece in Antonieta Sosa is thus an interface not because it is removed from its aesthetic, stylistic or visual form. These are colorful plastic developments aimed at the viewer in space, and where the piece is the interface in which these moments are resumed or left, thus leaving the works not subject to either the partial or evoked reconstruction, or the phenomenology of the presence and the absence to which so much art in that sense has been referred.

  Its overlapping geometric shapes like white chairs are an example in this sense, a kind of comprehensive and adequate coupling in which one form welcomes and embraces the other, forming a new one between the two. These are species of sculptures in which, however, in the mode of sophisticated geometry-chairs, the sculptural is plexed or made ductile in the design here as in the Bauhaus typical of the chair whose functionality is, however, simultaneously nullified but evoked, so are its spatial warps created with strips of fabric such as three-dimensional drawings in which her own body and that of others participate, creating aesthetic shapes that move, in a certain plastic dance way, as well as in the splendid and rich forms and volumes recently exhibited by Antonieta for her exhibition at the Venice Biennale.

  It is not that subjectivity without reciprocity or a sense of plasticity and exteriority that has led to so many other forms of possession according to some or appetite according to others, aporias of subjectivism that Bourdieu already anticipated in his early criticism of the relationship between substantialism and psychologism. , and that according to the drive one can only either possess or eat.

   Antonieta offers an overcoming of those fatal strategies alluded to here, split and alienated. The ethical question here is rather the philosophical question of sameness since the antiquity of man and not that other one that relates mimesis to desire or possession and alterity to a difference that can be something more than surplus, residue, remnant of a sameness or the same in its uniqueness and multiplicity, its individuated monadic self-absorption or its relational plasticity. In Antonieta and her works, in the form of a sophisticated modern minimalist art, the animal escapes the hunter and invents another language, affective and relational, ductile and minimalist, which is not the one supposed to marry, possess or eat. Ethical Bodies.

Bibliography References 

GWF Hegel, Objective Logic, The Doctrine of Being, Science of Logic, original title Wissenschaft der Logia, Verlag von Félix Meiner in Leipzig, 1948, published in Spanish in Ediciones Solar S:A and Librería Hachete S.A, private bookstore of Abdel Hernández San Juan

Gilles Deleuze, The Problem of Knowledge and the Problem of Ethic, Pp 21-36, Empiricism and Subjectivity, An Essay on Hume Theory of Human Nature, Columbia University Press, New York, Libreria Privada de Abdel Hernandez San Juan   

Dialogic installations

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Houston, Texas, USA and Caracas, Venezuela

  In 1994, the art gallery of the Rómulo Gallegos center exhibited an individual exhibition by the young Venezuelan artist Juan Carlos Rodríguez, which consisted of covering all the walls of the gallery by painting them with mud, footprints from walking on that mud, and a solitary leaning chair in the middle of the space.

  That same year, the Pireli salon held annually at the Sofía Imber Museum of Contemporary Art, stood out in the Venezuelan plastic arts arena in its 1994-1995 edition with a moving installation by Juan Carlos Rodríguez for its humanism and spirituality consisting of hundreds of thousands of human hair forming a three-dimensional volume of approximately three meters in diameter, and one and a half meters high, displayed in a relatively informal way, a large piece.

  One of the strongest creators of the scene, the young plastic artist and seminarian pastor Juan Carlos Rodríguez, exhibited at the Mendoza Foundation in 1996 an installation exhibition developed in duo with Maira, a waste collector in the city, whom Juan Carlos met in the neighborhood in which he carries out his work as a pastor.

  The installation displayed in the mode of shelves, consisted of exposing a selection made by Juan Carlos of objects, dolls, utensils, elements, things, that are part of Maira's collections, creating with them an aesthetic and harmonious environment resulting from the dialogue between Juan Carlos and Maira in order to satisfy him as an artist and satisfy her in her tastes and preferences, given that it was a montage made in the way she would want to see it in her own home.

  During those same months, Juan Carlos and Maira exhibited a piece together in the landscape room of the Mario Abreu contemporary art museum in Maracay.

  This series of Juan Carlos with Maira is generally based on something very simple, he puts up a shelf and between the two of them they choose a doll, some collected task, then they discuss how it looks, and the museography or assembly must please both. Although they are simple pieces, to agree they have to dialogue which requires them to be together.

   Perhaps because of the aforementioned, Juan Carlos decided not to propose an exhibition with Maira for my curatorship but rather, like the two exhibitions that I referred to before, only one in which, however, he deals more broadly with the issue of the community in the neighborhood. where he met Maira and where he does his work as a Pentecostal seminarian pastor.

   In this new installation, Juan Carlos Rodríguez intervenes in the Rice Media Center in a large space with a system of clotheslines that cover a perimeter and diameter of 10 meters by 8 meters, on which he hangs wet sheets of different colors, patterns and motifs. The clothesline system is structured around wooden assemblies approximately 3 meters high made by Juan Carlos with scraps and pieces of wood to each of which, approximately 15, he ties three or four little books of the Christian gospel. The installation extends in an area that is covered in corrugated cardboard on the floor. These stretched sheets tend to create passages through which the viewer passes. Throughout these rooms, Juan Carlos placed approximately 30 water buckets with water at different levels while setting the scene with a general recorded sound of people in the neighborhood while they were washing clothes. In this room he set up a television monitor on which images of a performance that Juan Carlos did on the day of the opening of his exhibition, consisting of him sitting for several minutes dressed as a hummingbird, showing the spectators the palms of his palms, were repeated in a continuous loop. his hands with writings.

  Although Maira did not participate in this exhibition other than the fact that it was an installation in the neighborhood, Juan Carlos requested that the Rice Media Center give him permission to intervene during the days of his exhibition in the Coca Cola machine that is used daily with a coin to get a can of coke. On the part of its plastic surface, he then taped the pages of one of the chapters of a novel that Maira writes about her life in the neighborhood.

  Titled for this occasion Installed Ethnography of Barrio la Bandera, Juan Carlos's exhibition concludes the series begun in Mendoza

Grades

  By virtue of Juan Carlos's solo exhibition at the Rómulo Gallegos, his installation work at the Salón Pireli and his series of two installations developed as a duo with Maira, while I was a curator at the Alejandro Otero Museum of Visual Arts I included him in conferences on contemporary art from Venezuela that I offered in the museum's lecture auditorium.

  There I discussed it with other artists of his generation in the foreground such as Argelia Bravo, Dulce Gómez, Luis Poleo, Alexandro Balteo, Cipriano Martínez, Juan José Olavarría, María Cristina Carbonel y Molina, among others. Later I chose him to be included in the curatorship that I was preparing at that time in the museum where Juan Carlos visited me, we talked and saw his new works. In those years I gave a conference on Juan Carlos Rodríguez in the Mendoza room regarding his exhibition.

  For other references of mine to exhibitions in the gallery of the Rómulo Gallegos center, see An Erotica of Tiredness. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, illustrated color catalog by the artist Jasón Galarraga with text by Abdel Hernandez and Rafael Arraiz Lucas, Caracas, Venezuela, 1995

  For my other references to exhibitions at the Sofia Imber Museum of Contemporary Art see Neither inside nor outside. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, color illustrated catalog of Lihie Talmor's solo exhibition at the Sofia Imberg Museum, with texts by Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Luis Angel Duque and Adolfo Wilson, Caracas, Venezuela, 1994, also published online on the site by Lihiewww.lihietalmor.com

  Juan Carlos Rodríguez, as he explained to me, took Antonieta Sosa's plastic language workshops at Cristóbal Rojas years before what was discussed here. Antonieta had been offering these plastic language workshops also at the IUESAPAR, where we have been colleagues since 1991, at the beginning I offered lectures on experimental teaching at the IUESAPAR and then I established myself as a researcher at the CID since 1992. All those years Antonieta offered the Plastic Language workshops and each year she presented a collective exhibition with the results of the closing course in the Reveron space. , currently the IUESAPAR is also alternatively called UNEARTE.

  The curatorship to which I refer is one that I conceived during my stay as curator at the Alejandro Otero Museum of Visual Arts starting in 1994, at the beginning the list of artists that I formally chose for it according to my printed curatorial documents and discussed at the museum was: Artists Formally Selected as Curators at the Mavao in Curatorial Project Printed in 1994, Juan Carlos Rodriguez, Juan Jose Olavarria, Algeria Bravo, Ali Gonzalez, Alexandro Balteo, Luis Romero, Dulce Gomez, Antonieta Sosa and her Students, Alfred Venemozer, Manuel Gallardo, Nela Ochoa, Eugene Espinosa, Paul Ballini, Ricardo Benaim, Maria Clara Fernandez.

  With Juan Carlos included from the beginning, these artists that I chose would develop a work on the theme of the market for a room titled Artists in Trance in which they had to explain in the museum their methodologies of relationship with the market, leaving the museum in their works, in the manner of a metaphor as if in a trance of the market, because his works deal with the relationship between two forms of market, the sanctuary and symbolic of the work of art, that of the museum, and that other one over there, of a car, the market of inputs, food and ordinary merchandise, the market of the market.

  Juan Carlos visited me every week at the museum and was with me in the process of my curatorship, my meetings with the artists, my conversations with them in the museum, my conferences about their works in the museum, my visits to museums and markets. as research on the market topic.

References

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Juan Carlos Rodríguez, Conference offered at the Rice Media Center Lecture Auditorium, Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA, 1997

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Homo Convivalis, Conference on Juan Carlos offered at the Rice Media Center Lecture auditorium, including the presentation of the Video Homos Convivalis, with and about Juan Carlos Rodríguez, Rice Media Center, Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA, 1997

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

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

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Neither Inside nor Outside, Catalog text, catalog of the individual exhibition by Lihie Talmor, illustrated in color, with texts by

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Luis Angel Duque and Adolfo Wilson, English and Spanish. Also posted on the Lihie sitewww.lihietalmor.com

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, An Erotica of Tiredness, catalog text, catalog of Jasón Galarraga's individual exhibition at the Rómulo Gallegos Center, illustrated in color, texts by Abdel Hernandez San Juan and Rafael Arraiz Lucas, Rómulo Gallegos Center, Caracas, Venezuela , nineteen ninety five

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

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

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

 Mobile. 

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, 

Los Angeles, California, USA

   Durante los últimos meses del año 2002 yo estoy viviendo en Houston en Timmons Lane, entre las avenidas Westheimer y Richmond, me encuentro en ese momento decidido a viajar a Caracas con la finalidad de restablecerme en la ciudad y viajar luego a vivir en Manhattan unos años, obtengo rápidamente la visa venezolana, pero con las maletas hechas, reviso mi inbox en Rice University y tengo un email desde Los Angeles invitándome a participar con una ponencia en un panel para un llamado así Festival de Arte de Los Angeles. He estado antes en California en el 98 donde me he establecido un mes con mi amiga Leonor Antoni en su casa en Oakland, y he realizado una rica variedad de Field Photographies en Berkeley, San Francisco y Santa Cruz, no conozco Los Angeles, me motiva el email y tomo una decisión, ir. 

   Además de mi ponencia Relaciones y Diferencias entre Las Artes: Un Asunto de historia de la Conciencia, que doy en el panel, visito esa misma noche una muestra que se inaugura en la planta baja del mismo edificio en que toma lugar el panel y en el que horas antes he discutido mi lecture, se trata de la galería expositiva de la casa de la cultura japonesa, en ella Heidi Abderhalden and Rolf, artistas colombianos del mundo del teatro, directores del grupo Mapa Teatro, despliegan una pieza en la que sus distintos elementos transcurren simultáneamente, sin comienzo o final, entrada o salida.

   El sitio expositivo, que describe una L dispone dos puertas amplias a cada lado, los espectadores no pueden volcarse enteramente dentro del espacio expositivo por cuanto en el mismo transcurren desarrollos corporales que envuelven movimiento y actores, se amontonan entonces alrededor de estas puertas intentando en lo posible obtener una visual que les permita entender que transcurre adentro. Este modo teatral de tratar el espacio expositivo, la galería de arte, dándole a los espectadores una pauta preestablecida sobre cuando entrar o en qué momento de algo que transcurre, permaneciendo así en tanto auditórium, a la manera del teatro, delimitada la distancia entre el espacio en que transcurre la obra, que en teatro algunos llaman escenario y otros plataforma, y el espacio del publico o platea, situando a los espectadores afuera, llamo mi atención desde el inicio, sentí de inmediato la galería de arte tratada como un espacio de mise in scene, algo que no deja de ocurrir en modalidades del performance como lo entendemos en artes plásticas cuando estos son algo mas teatrales que otras modalidades. 

   La separación entre el público y la mise in scene, sin embargo, dura apenas unos minutos, unas imágenes son proyectadas de modo continuo sobre las paredes, escaleras automáticas de corredera que suben y bajan, y de momento se da el paso al auditórium, la galería expositiva de inmediato se llena, Heidi Abderhalden and Rolf están moviéndose por todo el espacio con una cámara de filmación haciendo tomas rápidas del público y el modo en que el público se relaciona con distintos performances artísticos que están ocurriendo de modo simultaneo en distintos puntos del espacio, la movilidad es rápida en base al presente ahora/aquí de aquel seetting, se requiere consultar minuciosamente el material visual/documental posteriormente. 

   El modo en que Heidi Heidi y Rolf trata la cámara llama mi atención, no se trata de tomas hechas con sobriedad en actitud documental tratando de lograr  minuciosamente la relación entre una pieza, la iluminación ambiental y su registro, se trata de una cámara que entra a formar parte de la escena visual, es decir, de la mise in scene expositiva en un modo de performance, tampoco es un acento sobre la imagen de la cámara, sino del ocurrir in situ de un cuerpo que se mueve como una gestual por el espacio con una cámara como artefacto tecnológico creando in situ una gestual, la cámara sobrecogida por la instantaneidad de una relación.

    Moviéndose de acuerdo a la misma instantaneidad que caracteriza aquello alrededor de lo cual se despliegan como settings, esta capta las relaciones únicas entre un público que está recorriendo el local, el cual en pocos minutos dejara de estar, su objetivo es una variedad de rápidas escenificaciones que están transcurriendo simultáneamente en distintos puntos de ese espacio, es una muestra que ocurre un solo día durante una inauguración en el espacio repleto de un público caracterizado por tratar de ver por encima de los demás lo que nadie a ciencias ciertas puede más que asir de modo parcial, fragmentos rápidos que cada quien ha podido ver, elementos los cuales luego no prevalecen en el espacio sino que como en el cine o el teatro, tienen o reciben una duración, definida esta ultima por el tiempo que toma el transcurrir mismo de los espectadores por el espacio. 

    Esta relación entre una mise in scene en la que transcurren cosas simultáneamente en el espacio pero cuya duración es definida no por la temporalidad de los elementos que la integran, sino por la duración del tiempo en que los espectadores entran y salen, relaciona esta obra de Heidi y Rolf con ciertos aspectos espacio temporales propios a lo que en artes plásticas llamamos happening, sin embargo, considerando los elementos en sí que la integran, no se trata propiamente de happening. En el happening los elementos que integran la muestra, aquello en lo que ella consiste, aquello que se ve como mostrado o expuesto, es acerca de, versa sobre, o tematiza el hecho mismo de que los espectadores están en una muestra que dura lo que dura el recorrido de esos espectadores por ese espacio. En tanto en realidad, los elementos que integraron esta muestra de Heidi adquirían ellos mismos por lo que en si consistían, un sentido semántico propio a lo que esas escenificaciones describían.

    La proyección de un lup continúo sobre la pared de escaleras automáticas de correderas atraves de las cuales como en los aeropuertos o en grandes moles, las personas se trasladan, suben y bajan, una chica parada recta recostada con todo su cuerpo y su espalda a la pared como si estuviese mostrada o expuesta cuya única acción es permanecer comiéndose algo mientras transcurre la escena, encontrar en el publico una chica vestida de payaso de cuyos ojos pende una lagrima pintada, no sabiendo si forma parte de la obra o corresponde al público, la proyección de un setting visual en el que los espectadores pueden percibir a unos travestis, o Heidi y Rolf con la cámara y un joven tocando guitarra, entre otras pequeñas escenificaciones que me fue imposible retener, no son acciones que se refieran, como su tema o asunto, al hecho de que un grupos de espectadores recorren el espacio de una obra de arte cuya duración será, en tanto obra, la misma que dure el recorrido de entrada y salida de esos espectadores en su recorrido por ese espacio.

   Dado lo antes razonado, por aquello en que los elementos consisten, versan, remiten, denotan o refieren, incluido el campo semántico tomando a cada uno en su especificidad, se trataría antes bien de lo que en artes plásticas entendemos como performance y más específicamente, dado el uso en esos performance de proyecciones de imágenes, se trataría de una modalidad que en artes plásticas llamamos multimedia performance. No debemos, sin embargo, dejar de apuntar, el que siendo en tanto elementos, modalidades de multimedia performance, este último en artes plásticas no recibe su tiempo y duración del tiempo y duración del espectador, antes bien, si es un performance, o un multimedia performance, entonces es aquello que los elementos proveen, lo que exige a los espectadores supeditar su tiempo a la duración que esos elementos requieren, a los imperativos espacio-temporales que esas escenificaciones, desarrollos corporales y proyecciones de imágenes piden y exigen como relativos a su propia estructura.

  Cuando aquello en lo que la obra consiste versa sobre aquello que le ofrece a la obra misma en su conjunto su propia realidad, incluida su realidad física espacio-temporal, aquello gracias a lo cual se puede decir que la obra existe porque consiste en esto o aquello, que mide tanto o dura tanto, supeditándose en lo que consiste la obra a aquello que le da su realidad, hablamos en artes plásticas de un happening, esta es pues la diferencia principal entre el happening y el performance en artes plásticas, en tanto el performance en plástica no requiere remitirse a aquello que da realidad a la obra como fenómeno físico, espacio temporal o relacionado a sus espectadores, puede versar sobre cualquier otro asunto adentrándose incluso dada la consistencia propia a los elementos que la integran, en temas otros no relacionados a la obra, de narrativas, aspectos visuales, plásticos, estéticos, corporales o dramatúrgicos a la semántica de la obra.

    Si bien el concepto de performance en sentido lingüístico tanto como en aquel más amplio que significamos cuando decimos la performance humana, entendida como el conjunto de las actividades que realizamos entre el día y la noche, abarca y supone relaciones espacio temporales que son las mismas que se extienden como el transcurrir de nuestra vida cotidiana, las actividades en qué consiste nuestra vida diaria, esta acepción de performance corresponde a la lingüística y a la sociología, en el lado de las ciencias humanas, en tanto en las artes plásticas, cuando comienza a tratarse del sentido de esta acepción, comienza a dejar de ser entendido, visto o mezclado con lo que especializadamente entendemos como performance, una modalidad proveniente de la pintura de acción, y comienza a entenderse a través de una relación que definimos como arte-vida, en pocas palabras, el arte acoge en el arte mismo a esa performance y la diluye en la relación arte-vida no llamándole entonces para esas acepciones propiamente performance. 

    A pesar de ello es preciso subrayar que tampoco en la relación extensiva o diluida entre el arte y la vida, las relaciones espacio temporales transcurren en los términos en que definíamos antes esta relación para el happening por cuanto importa poco en la relación arte-vida el que haya tomado lugar o no alguna escenificación o el mostrar de alguna obra, y el que la duración de esta haya sido o no la duración misma del itinerario de los espectadores. Lo anterior explicita como en las artes plásticas se trata de mantener la noción de performance supeditada a una cierta idea de estructura interior, o consistencia espacio-temporal provista por los elementos mismos que conforman la obra, y muy especialmente, por el hecho de que aparezca la imagen del cuerpo entendida como un elemento que entra a formar parte en la propuesta plástico visual de la obra evitándose así el performance la tendencia del happening a supeditar la estructura espacio-temporal propia a la obra a una relación espacio temporal otra, como aquella propia a la duración que toma el recorrido de los espectadores.

    Sin embargo, al mismo tiempo, debemos subrayar que esta nuestra tendencia especializada a supeditar el performance en plástica a una estructura interior proveída por la consistencia misma de la obra en su unicidad, explicita relaciones poco elaboradas en nuestro ámbito sobre las relaciones entre el performance en artes plásticas y las relaciones o distintos modos en que suponemos en plástica la relaciones entre imágenes y textos, las fenómenos texto-visuales y por el mismo motivo, en unas modalidades cuestiones relativas a subyascencia narrativa de la imagen o la materia, es decir, supuestos implícitos como subyascencias narrativas propias a la imagen misma, bien implícita a su propia descripción, los modos en que el performance hace referencias a sí mismo, sus recursivos tautológicos o sus bucles, bien relacionadas a su propia dramaturgia, es decir, a relaciones semánticas y de sentido que aunque entendidas de acuerdo o en adecuación a su estructura interior de obra, suponen una cierta narrativa con la trama que esta sugiera.

   Destaca respecto a lo anterior el paradójico hecho de que mientras el performance en plástica no cede su carácter de estructura correspondiente a la consistencia interior de la obra autoral, por otro lado, evita y se distancia ante aquello que mantiene el performance propiamente teatral, proveniente del mundo del teatro, supeditado a unas relaciones entre narrativa, dramaturgia y drama que quedan absorbidas por supuestos de ficción escénica más o menos acentuados, o impregnando en cualquier modalidad las relaciones narrativo-dramatúrgicas, y texto-visuales, o bien a relaciones entre ficción y realidad o bien supeditadas a principios miméticos que subordinan el performance proveniente del teatro a relaciones entre mimesis y representación en cualquiera de los modos que esta relación adquiere. 

    Si bien es sobre todo por este motivo que el performance considerado teatral queda excluido de las acepciones plásticas del performance, no debemos dejar de subrayar que en sus relaciones texto-visuales el performance de plástica esta inevitablemente compelido a considerar bastante más de lo que usualmente, y sobre todo en aquellas modalidades algo más teatralizadas, cuando los movimientos que el cuerpo describe con objetos o por el cuerpo mismo como imagen, suponen una cierta dramatización, relaciones texto-visuales que supongan, no solo las preguntas por la instancia documental y reconstructiva que han centrado la atención del performance plástico en su recursividad tautológica o su bucle autorreferencial, o texto-multimediales, que han centrado nuestra atención hacia las formas modales de su presentacionalidad y su desenvolvimiento espacial como obra, sino también relaciones texto-visuales que suponen tanto preguntas narratológicas como preguntas dramatúrgicas aunque lo sean de un distinto orden.

    Como desarrollaba en unas conferencias recientes,  la dimensión espacio temporal del performance en artes plásticas es determinante tanto a su praxis artística y estética, la elaboración de las obras, como a su análisis y a su crítica. Imaginemos que consideramos un ámbito social dado hipotético el cual aun no decimos cual es y dejamos por el momento como un espacio sin escribir, imaginemos ahora que lo escribimos según una dinámica sociocultural dada, hipotética, al precisar ese ámbito social como de socioculturalidad, las relaciones entre sujeto y objeto implícitas al performance se definen como una interacción simbólica de equivalencias, anticipaciones y supuestos implícitos que entran a formar parte en el lenguaje de la obra, es eso que llamamos el espectador implícito, en tanto si borramos nuevamente ese ámbito y en vez de escribirlo con sociocultura, lo hacemos con vida cotidiana, dos relaciones enteramente distintas espacio-temporales, la relación no supone ya una interacción en un espacio sociocultural de supuestos omitidos o sobre-entendidos de socio-culturalidad implícitos a la obra, nuestro dominio de un cierto acerbo, por ejemplo, sino que es una relación de participación, restituido el ahora aquí de esa interacción, el interactuante se vuelve esta vez en participante, bien sea que hablemos de arte aleatorista o experimentalista, donde el espectador puede ser uno lúdicro, o bien sea que hablemos de modalidades interdisciplinarias como en la relación arte –sociología, o arte-antropología, donde ese participante, aquí el artista mismo, puede ser bien un observador participante, donde el espectador puede ser uno critico-reflexivo, o simplemente la invocación de un presente participativo suponer la revocación del presente absoluto como espacio-temporalidad terapéutica. 

    Primero hemos considerado el ámbito social prestando atención a la elaboración de obras como un asunto relativo a la anticipación de un espectador en el lenguaje mismo de la pieza, luego hemos considerado un espectador directo en la espacio temporalidad en que la obra es contemplada in situ, también hemos considerado una crítica de esa obra que al contemplar la relación entre la obra y sus espectadores valora la crítica de esa relación como un ámbito social. 

    Hemos precisado, sin embargo, como la relación sujeto-objeto implícita a todo performance, (sujeto de la percepción, que percibe o recibe el mundo dado a los sentidos, sujeto de la observación, el análisis o la crítica, objeto de esa percepción, esa observación o esa crítica), puede ser distinta según precisemos la espacio temporalidad de ese ámbito social entendiéndolo una vez como una dinámica sociocultural, ocasión en que las relaciones se tornan interacciones simbólicas, supuestos implícitos, anticipaciones tipificadoras, correlaciones acerbicas, sobre entendidos contextuales de socioculturalidad, y entendiéndolo otra vez según el transcurrir de vida cotidiana donde lo que tenemos en frente no es una dinámica de socioculturalidad, sino un transcurrir de vida, pasando el interactuante ahora-aquí en el mismo espacio y tiempo a ser un participante en tanto la relación sujeto-objeto implícita al performance se dota de preguntas sobre el modo de esa participación, si es un simple participante, un observador participante o se revoca, como decía, una relación terapéutica. 

   En años recientes, mientras la plástica tiende a una autotelia respecto a estos temas, algo que nos ha caracterizado desde la temprana vanguardia plástica en Europa, más bien tienden a ser las artes escénicas, sobre todo la danza y el teatro las que están haciendo un esfuerzo mayor por comunicar y tender puentes entre las artes en estos aspectos. Así, mientras antes he querido precisar, en consecuencia con mi lecture ofrecido en el panel de los Ángeles, peculiaridades propias a especificidades espacio-temporales que distinguen y diferencian nuestras acepciones especializadas sobre performance o happenings desde las artes plásticas en sus diferencias con las mismas acepciones en las artes escénicas, ahora quisiera subrayar que debemos valorar en sentido hermenéutico y axiológico el esfuerzo que artistas provenientes de las artes escénicas como Heidi Abderhalden, están haciendo por comunicar las artes. 

   El esfuerzo que Heidi Abderhalden y Rolf vienen desarrollando en este sentido lo considero  sobresaliente no remitiéndome únicamente a esta obra, sino también a otras obras suyas desarrolladas en Colombia e internacionalmente las cuales Heidi me mostro en aquella ocasión. Abundare a continuación en otras riquezas de lenguaje artístico, formales y estéticas, no sin apuntar la obvia y notable originalidad que caracteriza a Heidi como artista, propia a aspectos facticos, por ejemplo, relativos a la exploración del medio y el media de su efectuación escénica, otros semánticos, o relativas a relaciones de sentido, gracias a los cuales considero las obras de Heidi Abderhalden y Rolf de un gran alcance en tanto ensanchan y amplian posibilidades y potencialidades comunicativas entre las artes.

    Volviendo sobre mi análisis anterior en que pongo el acento sobre la relación entre un plano extensivo de simultaneidad, el espacio expositivo tratado como una variedad de puntos sobre un plano de simultaneidad en cada uno de los cuales transcurren pequeñas escenificaciones no necesariamente relacionadas unas a otras, al cual superponemos otros tres planos, uno primero en el que, como en el happening, la duración de lo que vemos, la obra en sí, dura el mismo tiempo que toma el transcurrir de los espectadores por el espacio, su recorrido unos minutos ese solo día esa sola noche, uno segundo, mi acento sobre la gestualidad corporal propia al modo en que Heidi hace entrar la cámara como un elemento gestual-participativo en su relación al todo espacio-temporal de esa mise in scene tratándola no como un elemento exógeno o extrinsecado que interviene con una lógica otra para obtener una documentación, sino como un elemento que es parte de la situación y se ocupa en captar relaciones espontaneas que tienen lugar entre el público y estas pequeñas escenificaciones, cuando en realidad debemos hablar aquí de la presencia de dos planos de cámara, uno que se mueve a gran velocidad en relación al todo que transcurre, el otro ocupado en las relaciones de puntualidad, cada escenificación como punto en su carácter de performances en sí.

    Algunas de estas escenificaciones o pequeños performances son multimedia-performances, dada la inclusión junto al cuerpo, de imágenes proyectadas, y el efecto que de estas singularidades se obtiene en tanto propuestas visuales por lo que cada una es visualmente y por el todo visual que proveen a esa muestra rápida y gestual en su conjunto, cuando percibiéndole desde distintos ángulos del espacio en L, forman un todo cambiante o improviso de panorámicas diagonales, lo que desde una recta de la L se puede percibir en diagonal hace simultaneas imágenes próximas en este lado de la recta y alejadas en su otro lado, o rectas en sí, esos clouse ups que desde cada rectángulo de la L hacemos hacia cada escenificación o performance por lo que este propone visualmente en sí. 

    Falta, sin embargo, respecto a todo lo hasta aquí discutido sobre Heidi y Rolf a propósito de ella, abrir una pregunta sobre el todo estético de esta pieza u obra, específicamente la mostrada en la casa de la cultura japonesa en Los Angeles si mal no recuerdo titulada Prometeo in the Making. Cierto es que en las últimas décadas en las artes escénicas, sobre todo en los ámbitos del cine, el film y el video, aunque no menos también en la danza y el teatro, el arte de búsqueda o experimental a tendido a evitar o eludir la propensión del canon dramatúrgico a la construcción de guiones, libretos, estructuras dramáticas o suplementos textuales y argumentativos de tipo líneal en favor de una desnarrativizacion que elude la subordinación a un eslabonamiento aristotélico, introducción, desarrollo, nudo, desenlace, o en su lugar, a simplemente revocar las posibilidades que ofrece el fragmento de retomar relaciones más metonímicas con el todo estético de la pieza disminuyendo el carácter Hexotopico provisto por una sola posibilidad de relación entre sus elementos y explorando posibilidades mas aleatorias. 

    La muestra expuesta por Heidi y Rolf en los Angeles podríamos considerarla dentro de esta ultima inclinación, bien tratemos de entender su conjunto entrándole desde un lado o el otro, supeditando por ejemplo los pequeños elementos a ese Pasaje Ritual que es la pieza en su conjunto y que la cámara evoca al acentuar como cuerpo-cámara móvil, la instantaneidad y velocidad de escenificaciones simultaneas relacionadas a un solo movimiento de duración, el del recorrido de los espectadores que está por concluir, o bien sea que miremos hacia las impresiones de conjunto que obtenemos desde cualquiera de los ángulos de esa L tratando de asir un sentido del todo artístico de la pieza, el centro de esta pieza, como en otras de Heidi y Rolf, parece la exploración aleatorista. 

    De hecho, si miramos desde acá en un angulo lateral percibiendo su perfil,  la chica rescostada a la pared como si estuviese expuesta en ella y comiéndose algo y por detrás de su cara en la pared de background, la proyección en gran escala de imágenes de travestis, o bien sea que la miremos desde otro angulo, en el primer plano la chica con la lagrima pintada en su rostro de payasa en medio del público y en su trasfondo,  sobre un lado, Heidi-cámara móvil, (y varias cámaras que captan relaciones publico-performances), sobre el otro, el chico tocando la guitarra, y allá en lo lejos, en la pared de trasfondo, al otro lado del espacio, la proyección a gran escala de escaleras automáticas de corredera en algún gran mol o supermercado urbano trasladando personas que suben y bajan, o la chica con la bandera de EUA y los huevos en el piso, sobre cuyo cuerpo las escaleras automáticas se proyectan, parece obvio que los elementos en si distribuidos en el espacio en tanto imágenes no guardan una relación ilada o relativa a una trama supeditada a un texto dramatúrgico, algún guion, librero o incluso, a alguna textualidad subyacente o relación texto-visual sobrepuesta o fija, dada de una vez y por todas en un solo modo, que le ofrezca a todo aquello una relación de conjunto, antes bien, se trata, como decía, de una experimentación aleatorista con el fragmento. 

   Esta fragmentariedad, sin embargo, y me remito esta vez a otras obras que la artista me mostro en el computador, parece en Heidi Abderhalden y Rolf mas relacionada al cinema que propiamente al teatro o la danza aunque provenga de aquellos. Que podría relacionar escaleras automáticas y una chica recostada a la pared que come?, porque come?, porque recostada a la pared?, porque una chica con la bandera de EUA?, que relaciona a una chica que come y a otra con la bandera de EUA?, que relaciona escaleras automáticas y travestis?, o travestis y chicas que comen recostadas a la pared?, o travestis y bandera de EUA, o bandera de EUA y chica que come recostada a la pared?, que relaciona bandera de EUA y huevos en el piso?,  o travestis y huevos en el piso?, o huevos en el piso y una chica que come?, que relaciona un chico que toca la guitarra y travestis?, o chico que toca la guitarra y bandera de EUA?, dado que no parece darse una relación precisa entre estos elementos, las relaciones entre ellas solo parecen discernibles o como tropos o como relaciones cinemáticas.

   Trasformar las relaciones espaciales en tropos atraves de la imagen especular, es una tendencia recurrente que he discutido antes como Tropos Espaciales en unos casos y como impulsos sinegdoticos y posinegdoticos en otros, la creación de tropos espaciales ha sido una respuesta en años recientes a cierta tendencia a la abyección de las imágenes a la que tendió el imaginario visual del video beens y la proyección de films o cinemas en settings multimediales, la muestra de Heidi parece moverse dentro de este ímpetu. 

    Mientras nuestra identidad sexual se define y transcurre como heterosexuales alrededor de la identidad y la diferencia entre nuestra sexualidad, masculinidad versus feminidad, como elementos que se necesitan, se complementan y se armonizan ello ocurre en la misma medida en que se son distintos, a los hombres nos gustan las mujeres por su feminidad, todo lo demás que pueda hacérsenos imprescindible en la mujer está supeditado a este principio básico de relación entre identidad y otredad el cual es a la vez genérico y sexual, supone pues una mismidad, es decir, la identidad del sexo uno para consigo en su identidad consigo mismo, lo idéntico a sí mismo de cada identidad sexual como su mismidad, el travestismo, sin embargo, supone el abandono de esta identidad sexual propia para adquirir la identidad de su otredad sexual, dado que ello es imposible, esta trasgresión ocurre solo en un nivel simbólico, es decir, imaginario, se trata pues con el travesti de una negación de la relación entre identidad y otredad, acudirá Heidi a un principio de transgresión genérica respecto al sexo como una metáfora o un modo tropológico de aludir a cierta transgresión genérica que podría estar supuesta en lo que hemos discutido antes sobre las relaciones entre las artes?.

   Son las artes tan distintas entre sí en sus diferencias que solo podrían conciliarse en términos de transgresiones simbólicas o imaginarias de relaciones entre identidades y otredades, o identidades y alteridades propias a cada arte en su diferencia a las otras?, O se trataría acaso de un modo en el que Heidi y Rolf simplemente se pasan hacia las artes plásticas?. Cierto es que pasarse enteramente, es imposible, sin embargo, sabemos de relaciones de pertenencia aceptadas de unas artes en las otras.

   Dejare sin embargo abierta otra pregunta que solo Heidi y Rolf podrán responder, coexistirían acaso estos distintos elementos aparentemente no relacionados, que definía antes como relaciones entre fragmentos o imágenes cinemáticas especulares, de acuerdo a  una forma textual por Heidi yRolf prevista, como por ejemplo, un lecture o un paper para el cual las imágenes de esta muestra de un día serian sus ilustraciones?, esta pregunta, estoy seguro, en tanto Heidi incursiona escritura y lectures, solo podría responderse con ese texto cerrando así este primer esfuerzo respecto a Heidi y Rolf, con un Despues de los Hechos en alusión a este poco divulgado librito de Geertz.

Notes

- See Relations and Differences between the Arts: A Matter of the History of Conscience. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Lecture discussed at Los Angeles Art Festival Panel, with Lectures by Abdel Hernandez, Surpic Angelini, Villegas and Robert, The Japanize House of Culture, second flour, December, Los Angeles, California, USA, 2002

- Para ampliar sobre estas correlaciones en sus variados aspectos en un sentido propiamente filosófico, leer mi libro The Subject in Creativity, book

  - Para abundar sobre otras relaciones experimentales implícitas a estas relaciones leer mi ensayo Regarding the Inmaterial: Lyotard at Pompidue 

- Reports from The Threshold of Art and Anthropology. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Stephen A Tyler, George Marcus, Surpic Angelini and other ethnographers, rice anthropology, Houston, texas, usa, 1997 

- Para un modo una incursión de Heidi en modo escritural de ensayo, paper y lecture ver su ensayo-lecture El Cuerpo del Texto y El Texto del Cuerpo, una ponencia discutida por Heidi en Peregrino, Heidi abderhalden y María Teresa Incapie, peregrino@colombia.com, Bogota, Colombia

Cinema Before. 

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, 

Los Angeles, California, USA

Los Angeles, 2002-2003

Heidi Abderhalden: Estas que están aquí, me explicita Heidi mostrándome imágenes en el computador, son las imágenes de las filmaciones que hicimos de la muestra, estás aca son las imágenes de las piezas de los artistas y estas otras, son las imágenes que filmamos antes de la exponer la muestra

Abdel Hernandez San Juan: Ello fue un workshop?, un taller?, allí se ven discutiendo, criticando, analizando algo.

Heidi Abderhalden: Si lo que iríamos a exponer, la muestra y lo que cada uno haría

Abdel Hernandez San Juan: Lo que me resulta quizás interesante a subrayar respecto a la imagen en esta pieza, le digo a Heidi, mientras nos decidimos a sentarnos a visualizar las imágenes de su muestras, es su relación a una cierta idea o concepto de cinema que podríamos entender como un cinema anterior, en esta noción de un cinema anterior, el concepto de cinema, sin embargo, no puede ser entendido en el sentido del cinemascop o por mediación de la cámara con su sentido del encuadre o de las tomas a 24 por segundo, tampoco de cinema en el sentido que esta expresión adquiere para referir la idea de una cierta secuencia de planos que, aunque no sean sucesivos, pues pueden estar juxtapuestos, superpuestos o montados según una lógica otra de intencionalidad expresiva, no respondiendo la imagen que se sucede en la secuencia fílmica a la misma secuencia que las imágenes tenían en lo denotado, aquel mundo de sociedad o naturaleza del cual son tomadas, si conforman en su conjunto un todo más cinemático que fílmico o donde lo fílmico se diluye o queda estéticamente supeditado en términos de impresiones fenomenológicas al cinema que lo hace posible, como, por ejemplo, puede percibirse en las primeras formas del cine silente, aquellos films en que las escenas, como en el teatro, se separan con una pintura bastante escenográfica de la parte uno, la parte dos, la parte tres, y luego se suceden en blanco y negro las escenas, los films de Chaplin son paradigmáticos aquí, esa línea en el imaginario visual del filme silente a principios de siglo, no se trata de ello.

   En aquel cine silente, el efecto cinemático de las imágenes más que fílmico, estaba en realidad dado por cierta relación que el mismo mantenía aun con el teatro, por aquellos modos de relacionar lo visual y lo dramatúrgico, en que la imagen, parecía relacionada a un texto muy sencillo, para el cual la puesta en escena fílmica, desplegaba una sucesión de actos, con sus pinturas de las cortinas entreactos, en tanto las tomas mostraban desarrollos corporales de los actores quienes como los mimos o los fonomemecos, desarrollaban situaciones, que estaban por un lado, relacionadas al tema y por el otro, sobrecogidas por la parafernalia fílmica, aquella impresión de cinema venia dada más bien por el hecho de que el texto dramatúrgico que componía el film, no se adentraba en el mundo de la mimesis al punto de devenir complejas o densas tramas. 

   Cuando te hablo de un cinema anterior es necesario quitar toda esta densidad o saturación propia a la parafernalia fílmica e imaginar una relación entre la imagen como efecto visual y la toma en la cual la naturaleza y la realidad entran a lo fílmico sin mimesis y sin representación, por lo mismo, también sin dramaturgia, como cuando un conjunto de imágenes son tomadas en la vida cotidiana por el simple objetivo de retener una experiencia vivida, una familia que se va de vacaciones, por citar un ejemplo clásico, y necesita de la cámara para grabar lo vivido, una ocasión dada de vida, como se está viviendo, algo que trae su propia lógica de vida y experiencia y cuando algo en lo vivido deviene significativo para los participantes, alguien sugiere grabar aquello, acá entonces el efecto de cinema viene dado por una relación anterior a lo fílmico, anterior al cine y anterior al video. 

    Si bien no se trata en esta muestra entendida en su conjunto, como tampoco en el visualizar que estamos aquí mismo haciendo del conjunto y de las distintas piezas que la integran, de imágenes que remitan a pasajes de vida retenidos por el recorder como simple registro de experiencias, la modalidad a la que recurrí antes sobre el modo como entra la cámara con su sentido semántico para retener una experiencia vacacional de familia o recoger momentos de una ocasión que trae como vivencia una lógica propia que no trae consigo la necesidad de la cámara, sirve para explicitar y hacer inteligible el tipo de relación que el sujeto de la percepción, aquí el que tiene la cámara y hace la toma, mantiene en la relación entre sujeto y objeto, es decir, entre el acto de tomar la imagen, hacerla, generarla, componerla, y aquello que la imagen es, su propia naturaleza en la relación analógica o digital entre la materia de esa imagen una vez imagen grabada y el referente que denota o supone, en pocas palabras, para explicitar y hacer inteligible la naturaleza de esa relación.

   Sin embargo, es distinto y debemos precisar esas diferencias. Mientras en las modalidades explicitadas, films vacacionales de familia, recorders de ocasiones que traen su propia lógica de experiencia, la experiencia viene predada ciertamente con su propia lógica de vivencia o experiencia a la cámara, que solo interviene ocasionalmente o a posteriori, en las piezas que aquí estamos visualizando, en este momento, las piezas concretas de cada participante, las imágenes han sido idas a buscar, hay un trabajo pues, como en la fotografía, de escogencia de la imagen que relaciona el acto intencional expresivo a la construcción tropológica que con ella se quiere crear, el cinema anterior entraría entonces solo en ellas para hacer inteligible la naturaleza de la relación sujeto, objeto implícita por un lado, a aquello que hace de esa imagen, la de cada pieza precisa, un pequeño cinema, como también la naturaleza de la relación sobreordinada que entonces a su vez mantienen tu y rolf con el siguiente plano de cámara que entra a la escena del día de la muestra en el modo de una cámara que esta, por un  lado, documentando el conjunto de la muestra y sus distintas piezas y, por el otro, entrando a formar parte como una gestual improvisa y performatica mas el dia de la muestra, en tanto si nos alejamos del dia de la presentación de la muestra y de las piezas que la integran, para en su ves, prestar atención a estas otras imágenes que estamos visualizando aquí las cuales son literalmente anteriores a la muestra y en las cuales se ven tu y rolf desarrollando un workshop y una crítica con los artistas en el cual discuten en anticipación las piezas que serán mostradas, el conjunto y el modo en que lo harán, si estaríamos directamente ante una forma de cinema anterior, aquí literalmente anterior en tanto se remite a un proceso previo, que la muestra una vez presentada no refiere para el público que la visita el dia del opening, pero que si tiene relevancia, por un lado, para ti y para los artistas participantes, en tanto saben lo que van a presentar proviene de esa experiencia de workshop previa a la ves que también en el sentido de los modos en que la experiencia regresa sobre si misma, vuelve sobre ella, hace referencia a ella misma, se autoremite, se autodiscute e incluso se documenta.

  Aquí mismo, de hecho, yo, que tuve la posibilidad de visitarla también como espectador el dia del opening, me estoy dando cita con un setting visual que incluye los tres planos de la cámara, uno el más anterior, este que remite a ti y a rolf en un workshop previo con los artistas discutiendo las piezas que van a exponer, en ese plano que es un plano de vivencia y experiencia la cámara entra desde el principio como un elemento anticipado por el modo como la experiencia misma se sabe ha regresar sobre ella luego, la relación, en términos de sujeto y objeto ha de ser la misma o similar a aquella por medio de la cual la cámara entra en una experiencia de vida, pero reviste este carácter critico de ser incluida desde el inicio en aquello que la experiencia misma contempla como críticamente implícito a su naturaleza de experiencia, de modo que mientras la naturaleza del modo de la relación entre el sujeto y el objeto en términos de la cámara debe ser la misma o al menos similar, no lo es así, en igual modo la naturaleza de la experiencia, por este motivo, aunque la relación sujeto objeto es la misma para la cámara, no lo es para la experiencia que necesita recurrir a la cámara en un modo distinto, haciéndola formar parte de la crítica que discute la experiencia misma. 

  Los otros planos son el conjunto de la muestra y el modo en que entraran los dos ambos con la cámara para documentar una experiencia que ocurrirá durante ese solo opening, finalmente el plano de las tomas en si atraves de las cuales podemos aquí y ahora visualizar que fueron esas piezas, plano el cual, paradojicamnente requiere, el plano  de tu y rolf grabaron pues es el único en que se retienen y documentan, serian entonces las tomas de los pequeños cinemas el plano más puntual, aquel respectivo a las pequeños proyecciones inclusivas a las piezas especificas mostradas por lo artistas las cuales, supongo podrán visualizarse una a una sin recurrencia al todo que tu y rolf proveen, es decir, sin el plano de ustedes dos ambos. 

    El primero de estos tres planos, que antes vi como el ultimo, reúne en realidad, respecto a la experiencia en su conjunto el carácter más implícito de un cinema anterior, en el, encontramos, como decía, una distinción respecto a los ejemplos vacacional de familia y de ocasión que veíamos antes, aunque en este plano de cámara esta última también se supedita a una experiencia que trae su propia lógica de experiencia, en el mismo la cámara ha debido entrar a formar parte desde el principio, porque?, ampliando en ello, porque es el plano sobre el cual la experiencia artística que es su objetivo y razón de ser, habrá de regresar, el plano desde el cual surgió y el plano en el cual se recoge esta vez en términos de reflexión y de crítica.

   Si una experiencia ha tenido en aquello que la genera un setting critico que le ha dado surgimiento, aquí un workshop, un taller critico, en la referencia a si misma, la experiencia no puede evitar incluso después de haberse corroborado y de haberse hecho pública para un publico en el espacio público del arte, para esta muestra aquel solo dia de la inaguracion, volver sobre si misma, sobre aquello que la genero, sobre el setting a partir del cual surgió, esto, que de por si supone una critica sobre las relaciones fenomenológicas entre el adentro y el afuera en el arte, por un lado, y entre lo privado y lo publico, por el otro, supone también, sin embargo, una axiología, una hermenéutica y una critica que es consustancial a la experiencia misma y que remite la discusión no ya a la cámara y a cuestiones de documentación, en ultima instancia, supeditada a la lógica de la experiencia, aquí la cámara es solo una instancia subordinada, sino a cuestiones mucho mas ricas y complejas que competen en las artes plásticas a lo que entendemos como procesual arte, arte procesual, con el taller y el laboratorio que el arte procesual mismo conlleva, hacia ese arte en si mismo y como taller critico en la plástica.

   En tanto en el teatro es aquello que establece las separaciones y distinciones entre entrenamiento y obra que torna en grotowski los rituales de ese setting a puerta cerrada luego ellos mismos en obra, deviniendo entonces la relación entre el carácter ritual de la experiencia vivida por el grupo y la exposición al publico en motivo para una experimentación con los espectadores. En Eugenio Barba es algo que remite a un concepto de ensayo o setting de entrenamientos que deviene a su ves anterior y posterior, anterior porque en el mismo se entrenan los desarrollos corporales que luego serán puestos en escena, aquí las salidas del ista a culturas alejadas, pueblos, comunidades, viajes y posteriormente, porque las experiencias recogidas y aprendidas en esas salidas que son a su ves corroboraciones de las formas corporales previamente entrenadas y aprendizajes de formas culturales aprendidas en esos pueblos, comunidades y viajes, enriquecen, nutren y modifican a su ves las siguientes o próximas formas corporales que serán ensayas en los sucesivos settings a puerta cerrada.

Heidi Abderhalden: Quiero mostrarte otras cosas que estoy haciendo en Colombia, esta, por ejemplo, es una obra que estamos preparando en Colombia en estos momentos en función de hacer algo con ello.

Abdel Hernandez San Juan: Es trabajo de reciclage?

Heidi Abderhalden: Si, estamos trabajando con reciclaje ecológico, esto que ves son solo las cosas con las que queremos trabajar, estamos recopilando estas cosas para luego hacer algo con ellas, una obra pues digamos tenemos definidos los materiales, el tema, aquello con lo que queremos trabajar, pero aun le estamos dando taller

Notes

1- See Relations and Differences between the Arts: A Matter of the History of Conscience. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Lecture discussed at Los Angeles Art Festival Panel, with Lectures by Abdel Hernandez, Surpic Angelini, Villegas and Robert, The Japanize House of Culture, second flour, December, Los Angeles, California, USA, 2002

The Venezuelan Plastic Palestra

©By Abdel Hernández San Juan

Caracas Venezuela

  Contemporary plastic arts in Venezuela have seen a boom in recent times. The city of Caracas has been, as capitals usually do, the main scene of this boom. Three institutes of plastic arts, the Universitario Armando Reverón, the oldest Cristóbal Rojas and the private and modernized Federico Brand and a formidable network of museums that range, the Museum of Modern Art, beautifully located, surrounded by nature, in the park area central, the National Art Gallery in the same area and the Sofía Imberg Museum of Contemporary Art, join CONAC with its National Directorate of Museums and Sector of Visual Arts, and the national and international salons, stimulating both young art, as promoting the presentation of valuable exhibitions each year, from the exploration of new forms for the presentation and representation of retrospectives, anthologies, current individual and collective exhibitions of Venezuelan artists, to the presentation of international exhibitions that are brought from Europe, the Anglo world , South America and the Caribbean.

  The Pireli salons at the Contemporáneo Sofia Imberg and Aragua in Maracay, contribute to publicizing the new national plastic talent by encouraging the meeting of very young artists from different parts of the country, many of whom know each other and exchange experiences, they also offer a idea to the plastic scene about how the searches and developments peculiar to the individual trajectories regarding contemporary art, art today in the country, in its moment and era are going. The Venezuelan plastic artist is one of the freest artists in America in my vision and experience. Evidence of the boom is that an infinite number of self-managed alternatives have arisen spontaneously by the artists themselves to do their studios, from creators who have rented garages, to others who have joined forces to have warehouses in which they can paint. The ways in which the Venezuelan plastic artist manages to paint, sculpt and dedicate his time to art are fabulous and do not fail to include those who have built their studios in the mountains, whether in Ávila or in some of the the beautiful mountain ranges that can be visited from Caracas.

  While the Sofia Imberg Museum usually hosts contemporary art exhibitions that have a relatively canonical profile, Picasso retrospective, Beuys Anthology, to mention two examples of the type, while during the year it echoes spaces more open to life artistic of the country, Salón Pireli in the National and Bienal del Barro in the Pan-American, a biennial, by the way, unique in its kind, and while the Museum of Modern Art is characterized by presenting classical and modernist artists of European and Venezuelan modernism, the National Art Gallery has had a more national focus, as its name indicates.

  Other spaces, such as the Alejandro Otero Museum of Visual Arts, have been characterized by presenting current exhibitions in their languages, types of materials, new genres, works in modern materials, new concerns with the gallery space, etc. Generalizing is not always the best way to express synthetic ideas through which to best gather useful reflections, just as typifying, typologizing and characterizing are not the ways I prefer to refer to art, in the same way as typifying or typologizing art. people can be a consequence of stereotypes, or a lack of openness towards their experiences and processes, but if I had to trace a route around the types of sensibilities that these museums usually represent, I would say that:

  The Museum of Modern Art tends towards the classical conceptions of the limits and differences between the plastic arts according to the techniques, their relationships where the intersections between them are visible and eloquent for both painters and draftsmen, engravers and sculptors, designers. and architects. Today, when when mentioning the word engravers we do not know what we are talking about, the same is an artist who directly uses the blocks of wood and linoleum with the marks of the gouges to make a three-dimensional assembly, or an installation with those elements, presenting samples in which the techniques are well distinguished by their own elegance, is one of the things that a modern art museum, even if it takes a risk with a different sample in the transitional gallery, does not fail to do. The same applies to painting and its differences, watercolors, temperas, acrylics, pastels, oils and the very diverse media. Technicalities are not the only way in which the modern art museum distinguishes its classism, but what I am interested in pointing out is that they are both complementary and well-differentiated spaces.

   If the National Art Gallery had to emerge it was not for anything else but because of the relationships between the contemporaneity of Venezuelan plastic arts and the problems related to living national processes, a country that was very young in its structures despite incomparable wise men like Simón Rodríguez, the great teacher and educator, other more agile, less canonical dynamics were required, more related to the relationships between a given contemporaneity and a living contemporaneity becoming, presenting itself, self-presenting, self-representing, constantly changing its look, encounter of points of view, gazes, sensitivities. The national art gallery thus came to meet a need by nourishing it while also providing complementary views from and to, between and in counterpoint to the Museum of Modern Art, because in the end, on one side and the other, things are presented that are of interest on one side and the other, just from different perspectives.

  But the National Art Gallery, despite its contemporary vocation, was created to relate the contemporary and the national, something very necessary, not to replace the broader and general issues of contemporary Venezuelan art, not everything interacts or is related to questions of a national nature, many times they are simply expressions that reflect urban and metropolitan sensibilities, works that express perceptual processes of very varied and wide richness and singularity, not to mention the relationships between the countryside and the city, agricultural culture and urban areas that are important in Venezuela.

  Venezuela also has a very rich ecological art to which not all the effort it deserves has been dedicated. Not only in Venezuelan artists, but also in artists from various countries who live in Venezuela for its splendor and natural wealth, as well as for the warmth of the Venezuelan people, one of the most open cultures in the Caribbean and all of America. Other experiences have been extremely interesting, such as the phenomenon of athenaeums throughout the country, from Caracas to the most remote province, each city in Venezuela has its athenaeum, a kind of hymn to the unity of man, a dream of the union of all the arts and their coexistence, something that secularization has not made possible as a desired utopia.

  Marx said that one day the separations between the arts should disappear, but that day dreamed of by Marx is very far from coming, techniques separate men. The Ateneos de Venezuela thus complement the rest of the artistic scene by offering an overall vision in which the contemporary art gallery, plastic arts, the sculpture gardens, the cinema, the platform for the presentation of works come together in the same space. theaters, the concert and ballet hall, the gathering room for reading poems and, very important and in the center, the classrooms and auditoriums for conferences and seminars.

  It is interesting that while the Sofía Imberg Museum of Contemporary Art has welcomed a lot of young contemporary Venezuelan art, its profile inclined towards salons has been to collect the heat of what is developing among the youngest, just like the Aragua salon, The Alejandro Otero Museum of Visual Arts, the most modern and contemporary in its spaces and architecture as well as in its approach, has been characterized by taking a certain distance from that same process, that is, receiving and welcoming it, but in a more decanted and selective.

   Developing sharper and closer, calmer, more balanced and selective views towards the same young art is the peculiarity of Otero, presenting an exhibition with ten or fifteen young artists at the beginning of the year with one approach and another with another ten or fifteen with another. focus at the end of the year, being at the city level the one in which we can most directly look at young plastic arts while looking at the views that have approached it. The Alejandro Otero Museum of Visual Arts has maintained, due to the city nature of the type of aesthetics proposed by the artists, in addition to the scientism of the name it bears, interesting relationships for some exhibitions with Fundarte, which is an institution for the arts well related to the relations between art and the city horizontally, such as the Venezuelan Drawing Biennial of which I had the pleasure of being a juror along with Ariel Jiménez and Eliseo Sierra in 1994, represents the so-called boom of Venezuelan drawing in the eighties, which the Contemporáneo later welcomed in its spaces, while Pireli and Aragua once again give an idea of ​​generality every year. I have not mentioned other salons here, and it is for no other reason than because I have already written something about them, such as those private ones like the Dimple or the Arturo Michelena in Valencia.

  But didactic issues have also been significant. As a teacher, Antonieta Sosa has been a laboratory of new experimental pedagogical forms and has had great importance in promoting new Venezuelan experimental and contemporary art. She has been a decisive stimulus in the rise of young artists involved in their works in introspective search processes. which have a lot to say both towards their own reality, and in general at a global level. Significant young Venezuelan artists have emerged from Antonieta's workshops, both in Cristóbal Rojas and Reverón.

   I would place three coordinates to read the Venezuelan plastic arts scene in a city and urban sense, the experimentalism of search, conceptual but introspective, that is, moved by fundamental questions and the relationship of these to the processes that the artists carry out, more than by any considerable relationship from the outside, (epitomized and exemplified in the work and didactic work of the Venezuelan artist Antonieta Sosa), the physicalist experimentalism, more random, abstract and concerned with materials, epitomized by the Venezuelan artist Ricardo Benaim, and finally an experimentalism moved towards communication with the art institution in an architectural sense, (epitomized by the Dutch emigrant Alfred Venemozer), from these three coordinates a reading could be undertaken towards the wide and versatile range of proposals and languages ​​that define the rich and heterogeneous concert of plastic arts. contemporary Venezuelan with its infinite individualities.

   Antonieta Sosa's work is the most experimentalist inclination in the arena, although from time to time she has presented exhibitions in galleries and museums, her plastic work as well as her didactic work have been radicalized towards the creative process itself and its importance, on the one hand, towards herself and on the other, towards her students and the experimental results that can be obtained from these workshops. Over several decades Antonieta has developed minimalist works that have nourished her didacsis, on the one hand her geometric objects based on simple modular forms turn on themselves as well as in relation to space, foldable and unfoldable, both minimal geometric figures as elements useful, on the other hand, its peculiar modality of relations between the creation of plastic forms and dance forms, plasticity of the forms and plasticity of movement in dance choreographic works that generate visual volumes with materials, strips of fabric, string, hand paper, etc. , materials and forms that he folds and unfolds, articulates and dismembers, relates and harmonizes, finally, the relevance that experimentation around the viewer in the spaces of the University or the museum acquires in his pieces, the development of three-dimensional forms in space conceived for this, which are also beautiful performances.

   These examples by Antonieta, some presented in the late sixties and around the seventies, others developed in the eighties and nineties, are works that assume her direct bodily presence and are at the basis of the type of didactic work that she has developed in her workshop. plastic language resulting in a rich space in which she pours her ideas and reflections while the students create, propose works and learn at the same time from what she says and from the resulting works.

   Alfred Venemozer in another coordinate has assumed the museum as a space before the viewer's vision, always accentuating that liminal space that can exist between what is there as a tangible reality and what is not or could be as a utopian or imaginative dimension, between the use that Usually the viewer makes the building in his journeys towards the samples and the building itself in which it is, drawing attention to that place in itself as space and architecture, sometimes through subtle elements that can in some cases simply delimit something to the building. As mentioned, others result in utopian modes, of improbable realization, but imaginative, in which the building would have continued or developed if this or that possibility had been the alternative, obviously imagined by the artist.

   From a very liminal modification of a façade in one of the usual small pediments of the art museum where, when the viewer looks what he sees is that that part is modified in color and if he sharpens his gaze more that such modification would seem to correspond to another architecture , which could perfectly be a fragment of a church, or a bell tower, etc., their pieces are developed around and around artistic institutions as spatial, architectural and city dimensions, sometimes working directly with the maps of art museums such as buildings and maps of the city, others within these spaces, on their stairs, their columns, or in their nearby exteriors, gardens, walls, pediments, etc., their works are accents over the very elements of what they It is perceived in reality by actually modifying this or that part of the museum building, or simply by presenting photographs of what those modifications would be like.

   While Venemozer has come to represent that kind of liminal aesthetic towards the very architecture of the museum and its spaces, where the art institution is assumed in its two forms, as language and as space, and while Antonieta has come to represent the subaltern counterpart, a artist who gives conferences and talks at the institution, both his own to which he is invited and his recurrence to participate in conferences and forums that are developed and presented throughout the year, Ricardo Benaim is that creative personality that represents the artist who produces his own work, who becomes manager and organizer of the promotion of both his own and the work of other artists in the foreground.

  While the concept of experimentality in Antonieta Sosa is related to the searches, her own and those of the artists as investigations that acquire a density and consistency of their own in their depth, sometimes conceptual, sometimes expressive, sometimes strictly intellectual and sometimes personal. introspective processes resulting in extensive investigations that lead to installations, search works, performance, etc. or works that reflect his own dynamics of self-therapy through art, experimentalism in Ricardo is less introspective to the person and more creativist in the sense of outward inventiveness in the relationship with the materials themselves as media.

    In Antonieta the medium is just that, a means to express or communicate something that in itself becomes an object of search only where the artist's search for himself, towards his interiority, towards his processes and towards the investigations he directs, is carried out. coherent to explore this or that thing in the materials, in Ricardo experimentalism anticipates the possibilities of search in the search itself with the materials, the most interesting and radically experimental in his case is the intense and very rich experimentation with stockings, the varied possibilities and multiple ways of presenting the work of art according to the new media and the potential offered by technology as well as the experimentation of production, distribution and presentation possibilities of the work of art.

Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Caracas Venezuela

1998 

Subtly Paintings: Manuel Espinosa

©By Abdel Hernández San Juan

Caracas Venezuela

 Manuel Espinosa is an expert in floors and his studio includes, in addition to his office, his painting studio and his bookstore, a room exclusively created for his shelves with inventories of small bottles in which he classifies natural pigments that he himself searches for, researches and It collects clay pigments from the ground that it then classifies as a result of its trips to natural sites and areas. With these pigments he develops his fabrics. Manuel is not about the classification that would be made by a botanist, a geologist or a chemist who classifies clays and substances according to their properties in accordance with descriptive, technical or functional utilitarian principles, but neither is it about the classification that an artist not very busy in theoretical issues, rather it is a type of scientific-humanistic classification, whose scientificity comes from the place they have in their investigative search.

 All of the above becomes in Manuel a sober painting, where sobriety in color, atmosphere, environment, range and tonality is given not so much by the preparation of a previous palette, but by the colors themselves that he discovers in nature. Thus, the grays of Manuel Espinosa, his beautiful grayish paintings, are not so much the result of an exploration on the palette or on the canvas, as those grays previously found, found, we could say, in reference to the concept of findings, in the nature itself. It is not that Manuel simply takes a color as it is pre-given in nature, or a certain substance taken from the earth, the plains or the mountains, as if he were making a simple ready-made with found colors, or as if His entire palette was only a parody of the idea of ​​a palette in favor of one that was entirely brought to life, although there is an ecological position in this gesture of natural pigment, but rather the artist works with principles of harmony and his works are in themselves harmonious proposals. . There is in his paintings this presence of natural color in its condition as a substance and textured matter as a criticism, although subtle and elegant, towards industrialization and chemical oversaturation of the world of color and its manufacturers in the plastic arts.

 Manuel is in fact an environmentalist in his own practice of the body, he is a radicalized vegetarian both in his eating style and in his philosophy of life carried into his plastic work, the artist starts from a noble conception of materials, making the most of energy. alternating and alternative, from the body to the habitat, his paintings, his drawings and his essays in which he develops his reflections on these and other phenomena, his book Uno y Múltiple, would be the example here as a compilation of texts. Sober Painting could be the title for this approach more focused on his pictorial and drawing work than on his writing. The canvases of this unique painter in the Venezuelan plastic arts can be perceived with the restraint and placidity that they suggest, both in classic collections in museums of fine arts and contemporary art, as well as in art galleries, offices and meeting spaces; Even in the main universities of Venezuela one can usually find his paintings in natural pigment on canvas and paper. His plastic works express an interesting conjunction between pictorial classism, abstract informalism and landscaping. Its forms seem to emerge from what in the paintings relates those abstractions to their denoted and referential levels.

 His main works are landscapes, but in some paintings, both pigment and drawing, the idea of ​​the painting developed around a still life prevails, such as flowers, models, vases, vases. Taking as a reference the cubist principle oscillating between analytical decomposition and synthetic integration of elements, figure and background, subject and context, we could say that an imaginative way of deploying plasticity, color and figuration around abstraction, and the relationships between abstractionism, They are destroying new types of figurations that are being expressed in contemporary art.

  In the landscapes of Manuel Espinosa as a good researcher, for whom painting is related to extensive heuristic processes, the notions of inventory and collections resulting from travel seem the most significant, both in Venezuela, his travels between Caracas and the plains area. where in the little town of Clarines he has his traditional adobe house, as on his trips to the USA and around the world.

Abdel Hernández San Juan, Caracas, Nov 1998

Letting Speak the Materials: Fruto Vivas

©By Abdel Hernández San Juan

 Caracas Venezuela

  Known is the aesthetic disquisition around the fact that architecture, given its relationship to functional matters, housing function, protection and habitation, is not considered on the formalist side a “great art”, according to the aesthetic sublimation of architecture as art in its relationship to styles. The work of Fruto Vivas offers novel alternatives in this sense. On an aesthetic level, he resolves ideas where universal proposals about form are intertwined with responses arising from the analysis of cases, something that provides his works with their own style and versatility according to the examples.

  The artist elucidates another way of relationship between critical questions and his conception of architecture as an alternative functional modality, resulting in a type of “high art” tailored to new technologies, taking advantage of the new paths of alternative energy and potentialities. noble materials. This is an artist who lets the materials speak in their texturality and ecology, exploring a type of house in which all the senses function integrally, acoustics, tactility, sight; without the preponderance of some over others.

  As a material, wood is predominant in his plastic work. From natural logs directly taken from nature, to prefabricated wood in its natural tones and varnished, its walls and floors extend and unfold as abstract surfaces that invite to be contemplated for their aesthetic beauty, as well as integrating into the habitation in an environment of quiet and relaxed life. Its structures, visible inside and out, are a predominant aesthetic element. In some works, assembled directly on logs, the structure is used as an element in the simplicity of its forms, being perceived both from the inside and from the outside and making the house a virtually transparent form, the fact that it is, not infrequently assembled on stilts many meters above ground level, it is perceived in its entirety as a game of lines, natural trunks or thick wooden slats that accentuate the straight lines and angles in which the walls, columns, pedestals, lines on the that support floors, walls and ceilings, walls that serve as supports, triadic forms of the ceiling; structural elements highlighted and transformed into aesthetic aspects.

  In some works by Fruto Vivas, mansions in nature or several kilometers from the city from which the latter can be seen on the horizon, the use of glass in large dimensions is observed, such as front walls drawn in glass from the boundary line of the floor to ceiling. From inside the house you can see the natural landscape on which the work is located, generally with a curtain that can be closed or opened. When one sees and enjoys Fruto's different proposals, one observes, in fact, this character of being both the same aesthetic search and a specific response to problems that each project poses, according to the people or families who will inhabit them.

  His architectural work is a plastic work. He has related in a sui generis way contributions to universal forms of art, the creative inventivism more typical of a Renaissance attitude towards man understood as a whole, man-habit, man nature, man anthropology, the abstractionist interest towards material art, the material language as art and the study of the specific people or groups to which his works are intended. In some of his works we can see his style intertwined by the way in which he responded to questions from a family, a German and a Venezuelan woman, a philosopher and a writer, as well as works in which he proposes an interpretation of languages. traditional, in some cases, relating to traditions of different cultures such as oriental cultures, or to local traditions in others.

  While the different modes of search for novelty that characterized postmodernist architecture since Ventury began around what I have elsewhere called an “aesthetic of fatigue,” the neoclassical return to eclectic forms, passing through the generalization of the “pastiche” as form of intra- and intertextualist reference, until the exacerbation of syncretism in opposition to the ideology of style itself, Fruto Vivas thought about the possibilities of innovation and renewal in architecture, alternatives that distanced themselves from the contrast between style and anti-style, towards a architecture that arises from its relationship with the ecological environment, the nature of the materials and the direct relationship to its inhabitants.

  His best-known architectural works are mansions made for high society families, particularly large, well-ventilated and naturally illuminated projects, as well as large dimensions, shapes and solitary environments located in natural landscapes towards mountainous areas with views of the city, a large number of them consisting of residential houses that stand out for being immediately welcoming, that almost always striking way in which, as forms entirely based on natural materials integrated into the ecological environment, they stand out in the landscape either because of the character of being mounted on high platforms. held to the slopes, or by the way in which the general shape of each one suggests an aesthetic gesture of relationship in, from and on that natural space understood in its various senses, as an environment and as an environment.

  The character of being answers to specific questions becomes defined, crisp and clear in the works conceived by Fruto in response to studies of the situation in the poor neighborhoods of Caracas, his well-known project “Trees of Life” which consisted of an innovative model to solve housing, architectural and habitation problems, making the most of people's creativity and what the artist defined as creative responses that the architect must know how to appreciate and value. In his “Trees of Life” project, Fruto Vivas studied those forms that resulted from popular creativity in the finding of housing solutions by poor people. His project understood and at the same time proposed, in the form of an applicable model, and not as a definitive solution, an aesthetic proposal and an alternative functional response for the architecture of the neighborhoods, accentuating the ecological component and conceiving the houses as tree houses.

  Fruto's proposal was utopian in a sense, but its utopian content is related to his teaching. Fruto's architecture has been characterized in this sense, both his works for high society and for poor spaces, by the relationship in his homes between the language of materials and an anthropological conception of architecture, a very anthropological sense. related to the ideal of the Renaissance man. The Renaissance conception, however, seems more related to his drawings because in his architectural work a scale prevails in which the house and its spaces seem more in relation to nature and the environment than actually to man.

  Fruto Vivas was in fact in Cuba several times in the sixties and seventies where he proposed a series of significant anthropological drawings to solve transportation problems at that time, generating projects for inventive automobiles made with recycled material, which could be used with the lowest possible cost and fuel consumption. His early drawings could seem utopian due to the highly individualized nature of the proposals, something that made his ideas seem very dependent on the individual owner of the invention, but it is true that his creative inventivism at that time has a lot to do with what was happening in Cuba. investigated with the so-called ANIR, National Association of Inventors and Rationalizers, characterized by making the most exponential in its scope, the capacities of Cuban researchers to develop their imagination to conceive alternative ways from different disciplines and professional acquis.

  The relationship between architecture and creativity, which requires a high index of singularity from the architectural form, has been susceptible to criticism from those who had to face the imprints of the standardized building of micro brigades as a massive solution, as well as the other way around. have been susceptible to criticism from this other side. But the ideological contrast between both positions has not been beneficial, in the same way that the dilemma of the contrast between the supporters of photography as art and those of photography as testimony and document was not useful in photography; both forms must be exist and should be respected.

  The plastic work of Fruto Vivas makes the structures visible and thereby creates an aesthetic of transparency, putting the concept of structure to work beyond the dichotomy between aesthetics and functionality, moving the structure beyond itself, outside its many character. sometimes not shown, interspersed or relegated to a functional level, bringing it to the language form, “letting it speak” in that same “letting speak” of the materials, thereby providing his works understood as an aesthetic whole, with a level of transparency in which these, visible by the very structures that give them their shape, seem to emerge from the land in which they are located, the landscape itself that provides a horizon for the viewer's view from within and for the visitor's or passerby's view. from outside on nature background.

  Beyond simply showing the structure as a ruse of an art that was interested in undermining it as a way of showing the artifice of effects, many effects cinema, literary works, plastic and theatrical works showed the way in which they were made and their structures as a device to refute an effect in favor of the veracity of a message, or as a way to draw attention to the work of art itself.

  In the work of Fruto Vivas, showing the structure is not a resource of suspense, a technique of tautological return or an aesthetic of the structure, in them the transparency of the structure is what provides the work with its ecological, aesthetic and anthropological, the fact that the work itself is a structure which makes the work speak in its entirety. The above could make us think of Fruto Vivas as a structuralist architect and although we would not be far away in understanding that he would undoubtedly be one of the few truly structuralist architectural artists in an aesthetic and critical sense, the structure in Fruto is not that. that has to be found as if by meticulous decomposition of a form towards its unmanifest or unexpressed essence, but rather that which makes each work visible as a living piece in relation to its surroundings, its environment and its habitation; everything visible as such is precisely its structures.

Abdel Hernández Sa Juan, Caracas, Nov, 1998 

Archaeological Landscapes: José Bedia.

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

   In my interpretation, Bedia's plastic and visual work includes three major searches, anthropological and ethnographic works that range from his first archaeological landscapes to his first large installations that I understand as plastic forms of a visual rehearsal of art and anthropology, ranging from The Persistence of Use until American Chronicles.

   Bedia's second quest expressed in his drawings and paintings is developed from a trans-avant-garde perspective. Bedia's third search begins with also installation works that were possible thanks to the results he obtained in the aforementioned installations, which are also nuanced and impregnated with results that he achieves in his most trans-avant-garde searches in painting, but that begin a transition towards a new experimentation, the two great exhibitions or installation works that define this transition are En la Línea and El Golpe del Tiempo, in which the anthropological search continues to be present in their early samples, but the latter moves from a prior attention to archeology and anthropology of the prehistoric world focused on very general questions about the relationships between man and material culture, towards an anthropology of ritual.

   The motivation and interest in ritual changes its installations and samples, which progressively become visual and installation essays on the ritual dimension of art and culture. Before referring to Bedia's work as a form of research on material and visual culture, it is necessary to develop some analyzes of these same three searches from art and towards art.

   Returning to the archaeological landscapes, these in themselves are of great importance in the discussion of landscape as a genre within the plastic arts at the same time that they offer a very fine commentary on the relationships between landscape, conceptualism and archeology that results in both the understanding of that relationship, landscape, conceptualism and archeology, as in general for a very fine understanding of land art. I will therefore expand on the Archaeological Landscapes of the beginning.

   Landscape as a genre supposes the relationship between a predated world that is out there as it is given to the gaze, which can be understood and defined by what it consists of in and of itself, independently of the gaze that cuts it out and he chooses it, however, at the same time, it is not possible to define a landscape out there in the predated world that corresponds to it in and of itself without the cutout that the gaze offers, the latter is ultimately what defines what that landscape is. , the relationship between a predated world and the cut that the gaze defines together form what we ultimately understand as landscape, it is enough just to imagine that we arrive at a certain place in nature and decide to show another a certain fragment of that nature that our gaze has chosen and we want this other to also look and contemplate.

   What has been said before, supposes a primary relationship with the concept of landscape, one that supposes the genealogy or archeology of the concept itself, which raises its different aspects to find what in the very relationship between the subject and the object defines both in terms formal as well as conceptual that which forms a landscape. Landscape as a genre in the plastic arts and in painting, like genres in general, is usually understood as something highly superadded, saturated, given the very fact that we do not usually contemplate landscapes in generic terms in a way that does not suppose as The genre itself has been formed from the infinity of ways in which the landscape has been painted and interpreted in the tradition of a wide variety of styles, customs, manners, types and typologies, from a space devoid of this archeology of the genre,

   I am referring not only here to archeology, which itself shapes what forms any landscape in the relationship between the subject and the object, not only the fact that the landscape is conceptually defined by the relationship between a predated world and a gaze. that chooses and selects it, but the attention to how that relationship between what is prey and the cut that the gaze makes is in itself what defines at the same time conceptually and formally not only the landscape but also the site.

   By visualizing the archaeological landscapes of Bedia and realizing that they consist of landscapes of archaeological sites in which certain archaeological excavation sites are marked with the inventory of archaeologically found pieces distributed like show cases on the very edges of the painting, we could make think that the above is a hermeneutical development of mine which does not necessarily coincide with questions that Bedia could have asked and that in reality his search was referred to and limited to what his paintings literally made explicit, being thematic landscapes whose theme would have been the archaeological excavation.

   The problem of whether the hermeneutics of the work of art and specifically of painting should remain at the level of the physical work as a material and structural reality with the visual elements that it makes explicit on its surface susceptible to a posteriori interpretation, or should In turn, trying to find or approach as much as possible the horizon of the author's motivations, the desire to say, the motives of expression, has been a decisive theme in the theorizing about the limits and relationships between phenomenology and hermeneutics in the plane of the exegesis of art, but beyond the pretension of answering this question in accordance with what the artist wanted or failed to want, explicit or failed to explain, said or failed to say, the relationships that lead me here to focus My attention in this way of discussing the matter are paradigmatic in semantic terms and the works and the relationships between the works and the objective field of art are sufficient, without the need to resort to authorial motivation.

   Beyond the fact that Bedia has focused his attention on the fact that his paintings were literally landscapes of archaeological sites and less on archaeologizing the landscape itself as a genre, he is not presenting where the genre is the landscape any type of landscapes, but rather precisely landscapes of archaeological sites where what is expected of artists is to see that they propose precisely in terms of that genre in painting, so it would obviously be naive to assume that exhibiting a landscape where it is about landscape as a genre, Consisting of archaeological sites would be anything but a commentary on the genre.

   But, so that this does not seem like an unnecessary digression into the conceptual tautology of a relationship between what the work is and the genre it comments on, let's try the route in exactly the opposite direction, let's notice this time not that it conforms to a landscape in terms of a first form of the landscape where everything is discerned in the relationship between a predated world and a gaze that by choosing it defines and specifies it both as a view and as a site, let's do the opposite, let's now go to these relationships taking as a parameter only and precisely the archaeological site that those literal landscapes describe.

  A question will help us in this new journey, what makes those paintings that we see in front of us landscapes, more specifically, let's pay attention to the specific paintings and ask what defines them as a landscape. We will not answer it immediately, we will leave it open while we imagine our reader contemplating at this precise moment the archaeological landscapes of Bedia wondering what makes them a landscape, we will return to it.

   The world that the paintings show us is not clearly as usual a landscape, a fragment of nature chosen just as this one was prey to the gaze and with respect to which the painting barely offers a stylized version, a subjective interpretation or the result of a relationship that has nuanced, colored or enriched, the relationship of the artist with his reference, the world that the paintings show us makes explicit in graphic and meaningful terms an extension of land in which a relationship has been previously established with that landscape, the extension of land that the landscape shows painted, has been previously treated by another deixtic as a site, the landscape that we have in front of us, shows an extension of land in which we observe signs of precise points in that extension of land in which the plain has been intervened as a site by an act of search, research, exploration, archaeological excavation, indicative lines index the extension of land according to the locations of places in which certain elements have been found or in which a certain search or excavation is being carried out.

  If the extension of land or painted plain that, from the edges of the painting seen as a whole, describes a horizontal plane in depth perspective between the horizon line and a subsequent plane of sky, offers the group of these paintings the impression of being landscapes and nothing else in terms of genre fulfilling the typological requirements of the genre, horizontal plane of land or bushes extending in depth towards the horizon with another plane of sky, the first relationship shaping the landscape as a view, the fact that the cut through from which the gaze selects and chooses that this is the landscape and not another, it appears here exposed to question marks and transformed into a critical relationship, another cut prior to that which the gaze makes in the choice of that view and that site as a landscape. , has been related to that same extension and has previously treated it as a site for reasons other than those that make or can make that extension of land a choice of the gaze.

   If the choice of the gaze itself shapes the landscape both as a view for the gaze and in terms of a site, here what makes room for this cut is the fact that it constitutes a site delimited by an archaeological excavation, that is, chosen due to the fact that there are remains of pieces to be found, many of which, in addition to having been found, are then found as fragments of remains of ancient ceramic pieces, of archaeological remains, of small fossils, then exposed in the same painting, in the same painting, in the ways in which this type of redoubts are usually sampled in inventories, as if the painting itself became an archeology museum or archaeological showcase.

   The external limits of the painting that usually indicate the metaphysical convention that affirms in the convention that this is a painting, do not describe here the lines from which the painting begins as a landscape, the lines that correspond to the perspective in depth that defines the planes of earth and sky that encode the set of those paintings within the landscape genre, rather the metaphysics of the painting that affirms that it is a painting painting, has been accentuated and emphasized in the form of another rectangle that returns to repeat the external rectangle that affirms the convention of the painting, treating it as a rectangle for the sample of archaeological remains after which the next rectangle begins that cuts out the extension of land, horizon and sky, in which the points on the site are marked object of archaeological search.

Diagram of the box, a rectangle within another rectangle and marking of the area in the painting where the archaeological remains found in the marked sites on the expanse of land are displayed in the same painting as a showcase. archaeological

   While the perspective planes that define the extensions of land and sky above the horizon encode the painting as a whole within the landscape genre, the box that repeats the rectangle that defines the convention of the painting, making it a delimitation in the painting arranged to sample and expose the inventory of fossils, redoubts and pieces found in the highlighted sites, codifies the convention of the painting as museography of archeology.

    In the first reading, the genre of these paintings is the landscape, but given that what makes room for the chosen view is its character as an archeology site, the painting becomes a painting as a whole in an inventoried sample book, like a museography of archaeology, of the found objects, fossils, redoubts and residues, in a second reading the genre is here an archeology of the genre itself. The archeology of the landscape as a site and not as a metaphysics of contemplation or the perception of the predated world of reality that the gaze cuts out, refers in the field of art to a trend that treats the landscape as a site, reestablishing the space and temporality of the site as a place. What is land art?

   If we could affirm that in Land Art, what defines in itself the specificities of any modality of Land Art is precisely the implicit way in which in this space, temporality that treats and reestablishes the site as a place, we suppose a denial of the relationship between the subject and the object that defined landscape as a genre, this problem had not been brought to the foreground, it had not been objectified or discussed in art in its relationship to landscape as a genre, Bedia is the first to bring it up, puts it in the foreground and discusses it, at the same time, the problematic that Bedia raises sheds new results not previously explained or understood on the relationship between conceptualism, landscape and archeology on the one hand towards the landscape itself as a genre and, on the other , towards the relationships between conceptualism and land art.

   If Bedia's archaeological landscapes become, like paintings, species of museographic displays of archaeology, this archeology suggests the archaeologization of the landscape itself as a genre, on the one hand, and the archaeologization of the relationship between landscape and land art on the other, here precisely in that which, upon becoming the plastic whole in archeology museography, makes explicit on the side that corresponds to the plain that encodes painting as a landscape genre, the reestablishment of the spatial and temporal dimension of the site as a place assumed in land art with the denial that this relationship supposes the relationship between subject and object that interposes the gaze in the landscape as a contemplative view of a predated reality, then indexing it as an archaeological site, thus archaeologizing both the landscape as a genre and land art, not in vain in its I return to the primary relationship between the subject and the object implicit and required for any form of the landscape, defined as a view, and denied in the indexing of the site as an archaeological place, the subject and the object meet in archeology, no longer in archeology is that there, which the signs evoke by highlighting the sites, but in archeology it is here, it is precisely in that the paintings as a whole themselves become samples on their edges of inventoried fossils, remains and redoubts.

  The body of Land art that we usually recognize crouching on the site is here also archaeologized not in the sense that Bedia includes the image of the body on his painted plains, but by the way he resolves to treat the relationship between here and there. Let us notice here the strictly symbolic dimension of these paintings. The deep symbolism of these paintings refers in my preference to two different but related planes, hermeneutically intertwined with each other, one of these planes that we could underline as an underlying plane is Magritian, in this plane Bedia's archaeological paintings are correct in the statement and in the question This is not a Landscape question which cannot be covered with the answer this is a representation of a landscape. The second symbolic level of these paintings is no less related to this recursive and tautological loop, which now supposes the relationship between reality and fiction.

   The relationship between fiction and reality in the plastic arts, as we know, is not usually discerned in the same terms in which this relationship occurs in literature, film and the performing arts, in itself, the sole character of the world or universe. corresponding to the material and symbolic reality of the work as a symbolic language in itself which runs in and towards the symbolic as its first and last reality, not only for the artist, but in general for the way in which the works corroborate and are interpreted, read or simply synesthetically felt by spectators and audiences, it itself supposes the way in which distinction occurs in the plastic arts.

  It is not required in the plastic arts that the work specifies or makes explicit the relationship to another level of textuality that in its relationship to the level or order that corresponds to reality distinguishes, by what in the language it denotes, refers to or codifies, a fiction. of a reality, it is not about a language here which, in the manner of reality, distributes fictional characters who establish relationships as they would be established in reality, but deployed in the mimesis of the artistic text as something that the way of reality occurred on its opposite plane, that of fiction.

   In the plastic arts, the sole symbolic character of the work of art as a symbolic world or universe in itself, for itself, and for the spectators and as a way in which the work finally inhabits a real world as a symbolic reality, establishes the relationship between fiction and reality, but the fact that Bedia emphasizes in these landscapes the extensions of land as archeological sites and the paintings as symbolic ensembles, accentuating this becoming, symbolic languages ​​that display the sample as an inventory of fossils and archaeological redoubts, does establish a relationship between the fictionalized visual symbolism of that museography in which it becomes, with the relationships between here, the edges of the painting that they sample, and there, the sites that it describes, turning it into a symbolic form about the superadded, even superordinated, reality of the fiction of museography and the museography of fiction.

  Certainly in no plane of his archaeological paintings does Bedia draw attention or bring to the foreground as necessary the literalization of which are the sites that his paintings describe nor on the fact of whether or not those sampled redoubts are actually objects found in archaeological excavations. made with their dates, their geographies and their places of development, nor are they paintings that repeat, as in the case of conceptual works that take as reference documents from real expeditions, of going to excavations made to discern or converse with their paintings the precise archaeological themes that such searches or archaeological finds have entailed.

  All the more reason given the above, this previously developed hermeneutics places emphasis on the type of things that are relevant and at the same time paradigmatic at the semantic level in Bedia's archaeological paintings. The symbolic dimension continues to be present in Bedia's later works but in the order of that symbolism itself as a means of language, the allegorism of certain images that they evoke, but this progressively changes in the nature of its accent due to the installationism that Bedia later developed both in his anthropological and ethnographic search for the principle focused on general questions about the relations between man and material culture in the prehistoric world, and above all, in his later move towards ritual in culture and art, if It becomes a true research of material and visual culture, not a research done by others that Bedia comments on but the research that Bedia himself creates in his samples.

   This research does not occur in Bedia, as the landscapes would have suggested, developed in the way of the relationship between his work as a superordinate visual text and documents of things done by others that his work comments on or discusses, like Brey for example in his work on Humbold rather in Bedia his own samples and installations, as occurs in certain modalities of the experimental research film, are themselves the result of that research, they are that research of material culture turned work. This makes Bedia's samples and installations very exclusive.

  I have never seen an anthropology about the instruments and means in culture, which refers us as Westerners to man in society since the hominids, and for what, when understanding it in its most primitive forms, explains to us about the relationship between man and society. material culture, more complete and exhaustive than that developed by Bedia in the modern and contemporary form of an ethnographic conceptualism in his exhibition The Persistence of Use.

   Although the installations in this line, attached to the anthropology of the prehistoric world, were few, The Persistence of Use or American Chronicles, their subsequent exhibitions and installations focused on the ritual dimension of culture and art, continue to be equally significant this time. as research on material culture in contemporary conditions.

   The fact that the relationship with the ritual dimension of culture and art that the artist deals with in his versions of material and visual culture also develops and becomes inclusive of a ritualized relationship between the artist and his subject is in general a characteristic of the new age. Western towards the cultural motifs that become the object of its attention, its fascination and its search and is in general a propensity of the avant-garde in conditions of cultural postmodernism as at the beginning of the century in Europe it was for the first avant-garde, the ritualized relationship with motifs and references that enchanted the stylistic preferences of cultural modernism.

   The possibilities of the work of plastic arts to explore its themes not only in the thematic horizon but also gathering the synesthetic experience of the spectators establishes in Bedia's samples a relationship between the lifestyle in which an artist develops in plain sight to the viewer immersed like no one else in the investigation of a ritual dimension of culture that, involving his own life circumstances, takes shape in plastic works that are made explicit in discursive, syntactic, enunciative, semantic and plastic results about a material culture that the artist is studying and at the same time communicating which in no other way could it be better studied.

   That the works communicate something more than a simple naive representation of a culture distanced as a simple object of study that does not involve subjectivity and experience, but rather communicates affective, poetic, lyrical dimensions, is no more an assertion of common sense than that according to which he said it would be naive to think that landscapes of archaeological sites exhibited in contexts where artists are expected to make proposals on landscape as a genre would be anything but a commentary on the genre, and it is no less true than that according to which It would be assumed that in the risks entailed by ethics that deconstruct the relationships pre-established once and for all between the subject and the object, the ritualized relationship of the artist with the expressions of culture he studies would not imply his own ways of take distance between what it means to ask questions and answer them about culture and what it means to be an expression of it, as I recently said to a Cuban art critic in the form of a closing question:

  How can the subject be a subject in the sense in which we require it for any mode of the relationship between the subject and the object, in the landscape itself, for example, between the subject of perception and the object of this, the world? prey to nature that the gaze approaches, wrapped as a relationship in the single question of what a material culture consists of, a meaning that would be required here by the subject and there by the material or visual culture in whose objectification as a material reality that subject could develop his or her research on that culture. And for the same reason, aspects such as those that interest you about cultural identity are expressed in that material culture, and at the same time be the subject of that cultural identity?

   If the subject does not distance himself from the object, he cannot even ask the question, he cannot even place in front of him, as the object of his question and attention, the precise forms of that material culture that will become the object of his curiosity about that culture and the questions that concern you about cultural identity.

   Therefore, even to do research where your question is cultural identity, you are forced to leave the subject of that cultural identity, and distance yourself from it in order to once be, the subject of the relationship between the subject and the object, methodologically required, for which, the subject is no longer the same subject of cultural identity, and again the subject of the aforementioned, this oscillation between two forms of the subject is itself a methodological question, even where the dimension Ritual is at once the reason for the search, the object of exploration, and the dominant mode of relationship, nor when the relationship is ritual, does it stop this oscillation of being dominant, otherwise you would not be able to develop the research.

References

José Bedia. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Lecture discussed at the Rice Media Center Auditorium, Houston, Texas, USA, 1997

Beyond the Intertextual. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Paper conference Lectured at the Fondren Library Lectures Auditorium, Rice University, Transart Foundation Papers Collection, Attention: Surpic Angelini: Transart Foundation President, 1412 West Alabama, Houston, Texas, USA, 1997

1999-Two Lectures on Art from Cuba. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Office of Provost, Latinoamerican Studies Faculty, Lake Forest College, Illinois, USA

The Syntax of Being: Neoplasticity and Structure in the Retrocubist Abstractions of Monterrey

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

  It would not be an adventure to say that deploying six large canvases in space, no less than three meters by three meters each, in which seventy percent of the painted area is pure abstraction and thirty percent an area in which the abstract becomes retrocubist, it is a clear proposal to the current and contemporary situation with abstraction on one side, and on abstractionism and European cubism on the other, it is about Flavio's recent paintings, his large retrocubist abstractions that was preparing in his studio-workshop in Monterrey, northern Mexico, when I visited from Houston.

  In the United States, the parameter for discussing these pieces is the current situation with abstraction in the country, not high informalism and abstract expressionism in the high post-avant-garde period.

  Perhaps it could be said that in these abstract canvases the small, somewhat more figurative areas in which a retrocubism is suggested, are treated with a softness and subtlety in which the abstract without leaving itself meets the cubist and the cubist the abstract without leaving itself, the which would allude to the way Cy Tombly treats figuration in the midst of his abstractions. But this, although suggested with respect to the abstract-figurative pair, would be an adventure not only because the figurative areas in Tombly are not cubist but rather aleatorist and sponteist in the sense of line graphics, but also because they are different plastic approaches in its aesthetic and visual everything.

  Despite this, Cy Tombly being the most lyrical artist of abstract informalism and probably of all painting in the 20th century, although less so and not focused on it, a certain subtle lyricism would not be entirely exempt in these paintings by Flavio.

  The current situation of abstraction in the United States is between two coordinates, the first has to do with a world where sensoriality has come to the foreground in which abstraction is the ideal vehicle for feeling and thinking, two concepts that were once opposed when It was believed that thinking and feeling were incompatible. Currently compelled to offer answers to this, abstraction develops proposals that offer new ways of looking at what is not completely new if it is young enough. Flavio's retrocubist abstractions offer unique and innovative answers to this discussion. Calling these paintings retro-cubist, however, although it serves us well, may be an oversimplification since they have gone to cubism to rediscover relationships from the moment in which abstraction is found today.

  Cubism has not been resorted to here for a simple postmodernist ploy of commenting on painting in painting or playing with a simple retro attitude as a way of recreating in the present a style of life and painting that evokes early modernism, but rather before Well, a journey has been undertaken from abstraction towards itself that has had to be situated again in the questions of cubism to answer them as questions that affect us today. In these brief areas, Flavio proposes a pictorial view of Cubism that does not quote or refer to it as it was, but rather immerses itself in it on a visual level to ask new questions and deliberate new plastic conclusions.

  One goes to cubism to immerse oneself from today's questions in the questions of that, to deliberate relationships of plastic language that from the parameters established by cubism, the relationships form-structure, figure-ground, plane-surface, analysis-synthesis, syntax- space, settle plastic relationships that return to abstraction and its questions today.

  A relationship from abstraction to cubism and from that to this is deliberated at a plastic-visual level, which as a visual-text supposes both at a procedural level and in its phenomenological-visual result, something beyond the intertextual, that is, that transcends the intertextualism and with this they leave behind the quote as a simple parodic game, the game of simple iconographic-visual textualism.

  There is a consistent freshness and creaminess in the large abstract areas in which the neo-plasticity of a loose, fresh, creamy and spontaneous painting gives way and moves away from a plasticity that tends towards polyethylene or that seeks indexical gestures in references that refer to other plasticities. specific to the presence of plastic in society, to in turn suggest a relationship between language and nature, of the latter in the former and the former in the latter.

  The way in which this relationship is deliberate in the abstract paintings of Monterrey is new in the evolution of painting. The positive key of neoplasticism in general has been to explore how an exacerbated neoplasticity can find eclecticisms that desaturate the painting, but in many forms of neoplasticity this has led to the pictorial plasticity being reduced by another plasticity that refers the plastic to polyethylene, the paintings of Flavio are neoplasticists due to their determined immersion in the mere versatility of plasticity, but they do so by moving away from a dissolution of the plastic-pictorial in other plasticities to, in turn, propose a neoplasticity that explores its springs in the relationships between painting and nature. .

  Coming from Derrida's phenomenology, the concept of stratum or stratification suggests a certain warp that relates, on its phenomenological side, language and nature, between fabric and meaning, between fabric and text. The concept, according to Derrida, is a geological metaphor, hence its relationship to the natural, the stratum or the stratified. The earth and the natural origin of pigments and materials maintain the geological dimension, but although in these Flavio canvases due to their high plasticity we could say they move away from a direct geological sender, as in the stratum, these paintings also suggest an underlying relationship between a structured order relative to the syntax of plastic language and a surface that deeply relates that syntax and nature in a phenomenological sense.

  It is about the reference to the idea of ​​a structure that unites language and nature, but not according to the free will of the former, but rather to the order of the former in the language, the painted whole, and the way of treating its parts proposes a reading which suggests that all of this corresponds to a structured order and yet, when explored in its plasticity, I consider it to be a reference to being.

  The actual warp of these paintings, and that through which the syntax is phenomenologically harmonized with nature is here the being, the syntax of this. From the grammar of being, whose plastic language is syntax, the general spirit of these pieces is classic in the European sense and I would dare to say that despite the sobriety of its tones and ranges, the ultimate expression of its spiritual complexion is still in them the baroque something with which Flavio has come closer to me in them than in his previous work.

  But what was said before, had been happening to abstraction as a progressive symptom since almost the second half of the nineties, something that led to the necessary deconstruction of previously conflicting precepts about abstraction. If thinking and feeling in a sensorialized world can no longer be incompatible things, then practically everything that had previously contrasted the types of abstractionisms would have to be rediscussed again, despite this the efforts, in my experience, of the United States and Venezuela, They were perceived as searches scattered in general trends of the new abstraction.

  Since the mid-nineties, concerns could be seen about new relationships between abstraction and architecture, the panoptic imagination, the sensorialization of the relationships between the map and the territory or different ways of relating the random with the geometric and the relationship of metonymic fragments to surface and spaces, but the tendency to a certain disjunction of the spatial was an example of the still dispersed character of this search, sometimes more related to the transposition to painting of issues brought from the reading of philosophy, and not properly found or discovered from the same paint.

  Time showed, however, that the symptom was not an epidermal manifestation, the pluralism of options and the wealth of coincident variants in what was said far overstated the indisputable reality of a phenomenon that, both in social and sensitivity terms, reflected something more decisive than a simple idiom or game to keep up to date.

  More than a simple exogenous or juxtaposed transposition brought from a knowledge foreign to painting, the versatile, complex, rich and extremely productive situation, thousands of mostly very young artists, far exceeded any epidermism, what emerged with it was a new metabolism at a technological, social and subjectivity level.

  Flavio's abstract paintings in Monterrey are the most complete and mature exploration of this phenomenon that I have seen as a plastic expression on canvas up to the present. Made in 2001, these confirmed to me that Flavio, as I always thought, is not simply an artist who is up to date for the sake of being up to date but is thoroughly up to date.

  The second coordinate that I was referring to before is that of the general situation that the painting was experiencing with the exhaustion and fatigue of its saturation, a consequence of the postmodernist and intertextualist game that ended up practically leading to thinking about its death.

  The death of the painting is of course impossible, but being the last thing we would have thought could happen, it happened, that is, we also came to think that the painting was dying.

  That it was Flavio Garciandia who stopped and said the game was over does not seem coincidental, it is just Flavio who went the most in taking it towards culture.

  As I argued in a text I wrote about my books, literary works of thought, avant-garde and postmodernism are not the same, just as avant-garde and cultural modernism were not the same at the beginning of the century. We have coexisted with postmodernism as a type of cultural life in the same way that the first avant-garde coexisted with modernism as a type of cultural life and we have offered innovative and friendly responses towards it but the friendship could end.

 Flavio's paintings in Monterrey say the game is over. The language discoveries of the first avant-garde in Europe are not little costume games, nor mask parties or entertainments in the theater, nor film inventions, they are findings and discoveries about early life, language discoveries about deep problems of the phenomenology of being. , of the individual, of the person, of language, of expression, of the body and of life that begin from childhood and are at the center of the relationships between genesis and structure that generated our modern civilization and in it our childhood and a new human being. Do not open death to the avant-garde, nor to painting, nor to modern civilization.

  What has been said before is intended here no more than to place Flavio's paintings between the two first coordinates, the relationship between feeling and thinking in a world of generalized sensorialization, on the one hand, and the relationship of painting with painting as a theme that goes from intertextuality and intratextuality, until the exhaustion of its meager saturation. Located from both coordinates, Flavio's paintings in Monterrey offer a rich, complex and versatile response.

Simple Abstractions: Shape and Color

 The series of small to medium-sized paintings exhibited by Flavio in Sicardi made explicit his continuous conversation with the situation of abstraction in the United States from their very titles; many of them, in fact, were titled as conversations with different Anglo-Saxon painters, including the names of these in the same titles.

 In visual terms, they stood out for being paintings with simple motifs generally around the circle and curved shapes such as geometric figures and a quite accentuated and noticeable colorism but not in terms of a variegation of colors but of clear and clear colors, red, blue, green, a mode of relationship of color, plane and area that suggests Matisse, to use an example that helps to understand although it does not refer or allude to him, rather it seems related to the discussion about color that Flavio brings with the painters Anglo-Saxons whose names are in the titles.

  Starting from the parameters discussed around these two relatively recent series, I will attempt a revisit to other works and samples by Flavio.

The Hammer and Sickle

  The series of Russian paintings that I exhibited at the Valencia Athenaeum, University of Valencia offers a reading from the plastic arts to the discussion on how to translate into a visual phenomenon what is actually a cultural phenomenon, the supposed postmodernism.

  The procedure here of the visual in commentary on the cultural consists of developing a series of medium-format canvases in which the same motif is repeated many times as it is serialized in pop, the motif repeated due to its high level of iconicity, meets the type of requirements of what we usually typify as pop serializations, the fact of being images with a high level of massive coding, these, however, do not appear referred to as they are coded in that mass culture, but rather refer to a vernaculization that is, to references of a culture that is more popular than properly mass.

  This distinction between the popular and the massive as different things, differentiates at a sociological and anthropological level the meanings of the popular and the massive as is the usual usage in the United States, which does not mean that it cannot be understood in the United States.

  In the United States, there has been a tendency to treat the mass, that is, related to the mass media, technology and consumption, as the popular, among other things because, on the one hand, media culture mediates traditions in a percent and It becomes a media tradition and, on the other hand, because consumer culture based on customer demand transforms the homogenized standard of consumption into cultural tradition, but in the United States there are idiosyncratic cultural traditions with their urban, suburban, community and rural expressions. , per se to the media and consumption, and are much more alive than many might suppose, it is the latter per se to the media and consumption, which we call popular in the sense of the meanings related to Flavio while we would maintain a distinction between the popular, understood by the word, to translate it culturally to the United States, --as traditions related to media and consumption--, and the mass. It is therefore required to understand the massive and the popular as different things.

  We say that these massively coded visual and iconographic references in Flavio's Russian paintings are vernacularized in terms of popular culture, that is, assimilated by the non-media tradition perse to media and consumption.

  Instead of paying attention to how the media mediates cultures and traditions, establishing itself as the culture and tradition of the media, here attention is paid to how a culture in the sense of traditions per se to the media and consumption, reassimilates and reinvents towards those traditions what it receives from the media, mass culture and consumption, vernacularizing it, references that progressively demassify and decode. Completely decoding previously massified visual referents is impossible from the point of view of the visual iconicity of these referents, but their vernaculization by a tradition pertinent to media and consumption can, as happens with dialects in sociolinguistics, change significantly. their senses and even resemantize them at a level that the mass culture from which they come cannot re-codify.

  The relationship here to sociolinguistics is central, the parameter of dialects that work with pre-established codings of a language and reinvent them in a way that almost requires learning that dialect is the reference here, well let's talk about spoken language as well as clothing, ways of painting cars or decorating houses, you have to get into a culture that has reinvented the mass assimilation of media and consumption, turning it into a new material culture that is no longer massive in its codifications, to fully understand that is being talked about.

  The specific images treated by Flavio are quite personal to me because I had two serious Russian girlfriends in the past whom I have never forgotten nor do I think they will forget me.

  They are images of the hammer and sickle making love, that is, the motif that is continually repeated is not referred to its usual form but is vernacularized by its assimilation from a culture that has affected and assimilated Russian culture to its traditions, This allusion of assimilation refers here to Russian culture itself, forms through which collective symbols are desacralized from their hieratic contents and recalled by a new culture that everydayizes them and assimilates them as visual imagery in a culture of habitation, the body and even relationships.

  Flavio's boldness in bringing these references into everyday life lies in developing a visual proposal that is relevant to the urban Russian culture of the period as well as to the Cuban one. For the purposes of the Russian culture of the moment, assimilating discursive parameters related to pop was a challenge due to the strong urban and rural traditions that define the Russian idiosyncrasy, but at the same time it was right at that time that the relativization of an inside of the cultures by On the other hand, the acceptance of their interrelationship was presented as what was the order of the day in Russia, as something that had to be prioritized for the discussion of the contemporaneity and relevance of the new Russian art as well as its general nature. new urban culture.

  Making everyday symbols that for decades had been made inaccessible by an overshadowed halo of official culture, was then a necessity and an urban truth of young people, while for the purposes of conservatism, desacralization implies at the same time demystification with the risk of devaluation that this could entail, Only their everyday nature ruined the emotional relationships through which popular culture resemantizes them.

  But the series of Russian paintings, due to its element that is more iconographically reminiscent of Pop, can help to understand the cultural relationships that exist between the mass and the popular discussed above, which otherwise could require a greater effort of intercultural translation, this reading helps. Vernacularized from pop from popular culture, it is understood as traditional perse to the media, which refers the signs of that Russian series to something as simple as a relationship, and making love, the hammer and sickle making love.

  From the hammer and sickle making love we can revisit other examples of Flavio in which couple relationships with their rapport and intimate, emotional and sexual communication that they imply, are not at all foreign, and in which they are in fact decisive, I am referring to expressions of visual culture that are related to romanticisms of popular culture of which we are all part, social genres such as the romantic song, the bolero and the traditional trova almost always related in their themes to couple relationships as well as to the whole. a social and cultural visual imagery related to it on both levels, mass culture and its reifications, on the one hand, and traditions, dialects and idiolects on the other.

  The exhibition Vereda Tropical by Flavio was a clear exploration in this sense; the title, in fact, refers to the title of a well-known romantic song in traditional Cuban trova, while the exhibition as a whole consisted of nothing but large pink swans. taking a leisurely stroll on a lake. The image of swans, due to the fine, delicate, splendid and slender lines that generally describe the long and stylized neck of swans, has become an emotional reference for popular Cuban romanticism to the femininity and beauty of women being on the one hand, a motif recreated by the Cuban woman to accentuate her femininity and that of her world by placing porcelain or fabric swans on the tables and seats in the living room, the television, the dressers, the shelves and even the bed, the pink swans They are also an image recreated by man as an emotional symbol that in contrast highlights masculinity, since putting swans on the top of the hood of trucks or as stuffed animals in cars, highlights masculinity by contrast, meaning I have my wife or I have women.

  But titling Vereda Tropical in direct allusion to this piece from the romantic songbook in traditional trova, a sample consisting of splendid swans walking calmly in a circle on their lake, not only alludes to the image of the swan as it has been vernaculized by man, woman and habitat of both in popular culture, it also proposes a tropical re-reading of this vernaculization of the image of the swan due to its relationship with classical fine arts since, paradoxically, Swan Lake is exactly the title of a piece well-known and notable classic in the interpretive repertoire of classical ballet which communicates the symbolic meanings of the swan in the culture of the aristocracy, the swans on the lake are thus, also, the princely symbol par excellence.

  We have heard a lot about Marco Polo's travels through Asia if not read directly in Marco Polo's books, but assuming that the Travels of Marco Polo could be made by Pidio Valdez is only possible as a script for a fictional comic according to which the well-known character from Cuban comics who symbolizes the brave mambís who freed Cuba from the Spanish, instead of being located in fictional but realistic plots due to his recreation of the colonial era, could be transformed into a postmodernist trope located in a plot of fiction in which, like Indiana Johns in the temple of perdition or the travels of the monti paitons, he would go through the vicissitudes of Marco Polo.

  This installation by Flavio, which requires imagining the drawing of the fictional comic strip, proposes, in large dimensions, an Asian re-reading of Pidio who now arrives from his travels imbued and permeated by Japanese and Chinese culture.

  The Asianized Pidio appears with his typical and usual comic characteristics but dressed in an oriental style surrounded by Japanese calligraphy and Japanese-style ways of decorating environments.

  Permeated by Japanese culture and returned to it, he cannot, however, stop being Pidio Valdez, and his entire new Japanese look is nothing more than a new age aesthetic that is again in turn, as in the hammer and sickle making love, due to the extensive mass codification of the pidio as a character on television, at the same time a popular Cuban vernaculization of Japan and a Japanization of that mass Cuban tradition resulting in a new visual invention which, however, occurs only in the visual proposal of that visual text that the piece proposes.

  Flavio's most sociolinguistic piece was his installation of proverbs. In it, each of Flavio's works was the visual recreation of a proverb. Proverbs in Cuban popular culture are generally short types of phrases that have a high metaphorical level and that, paradoxically, despite their notable tropologism, their senses and meanings are mundane and direct, which makes the phrase, as happens with dialects, and the ideolects, are incomprehensible to those who do not know the ins and outs of that dialect and idiolect.

  Usually a very elaborate metaphor in the poetry of high literature can also be hermetic or incomprehensible for contrary reasons, but while in that case those who do not understand must resort to the explanation of the author or some critic and while ultimately the inaccessibility of that language would require for its understanding to understand something that in its senses and meanings would continue to be highly poetic, the proverbs that Flavio studies are the opposite, equally inaccessible and extremely complex due to their metaphoricity, the meaning that must be understood once the dialect is known, that is the opposite of the poetic, a direct mundane content related to common sense truths, for example, Camarón que se sele lo lev el tiempo. Nobody is a shrimp, this is a metaphor, but the shrimp could be you, it could be me, it could be him or her.

  A circumstance of work life or a simple conversation in which you remain entertained, is not a current, it metaphorically alludes to the movement of water in the river or waves in the sea, but its meaning is a lesson for you and me, For him and her, if you fall asleep, what is happening drags you, you stay outside and you no longer know what it is about.

  The proverb usually involves a teaching or wisdom of common sense, better known good than bad unknown, Flavio's sample was a collection of popular Cuban proverbs with these characteristics, each piece titled with the title of the proverb, the text of the proverb and an image that visually recreated and signed it, making each proverb a visual version, an installation of visual sociolinguistics which, like Swan Lake in another way, related a piece of classical high ballet with the romance of the bolero. tropical, they relate highly symbolic metaphors as in the most elaborate poetry but that refer to mundane meanings. .

Grades

  1-I take as references here the paintings from Monterrey, our day of conversations there, their exhibition in Sicardi and our conversations in Houston at the Black Labrador.

  In the discussion of these two series, I try to offer as much as possible a simple revisit to other exhibitions and works by Flavio that I came across in different ways in the past.

  For those who know my essays on avant-garde theory from the early 20th century in Europe without fear of being wrong, this series by Flavio in Monterrey is an unprecedented innovation in the evolution of painting from the early 20th century in Europe to the present day, both towards abstraction as well as cubism, and finally, also, towards the current circumstances of painting in the United States and Europe. The fact that it is a series made in Monterrey, northern Mexico, is good for it as it is a privileged position to discuss its coordinates in the United States and Europe.

  I traveled to Monterrey from Houston to meet my parents at my sister's house, whom I had not seen for more than a decade. Three years before, Flavio had come to Houston for an exhibition of his at Sicardi Gallery.

  2-What I have just explained is what is usual in the United States everywhere, the Saideco phenomenon in Houston is just an example that clearly illustrates it, there is practically no way to understand American communities at an urban level, not just African-American ones. , but also the Anglo-Saxon ones, without this knowledge. This versus the fantasy of those who believe that in the United States mass culture is everything, it is also continually reified, reinvented, reappropriated and recoded at incomprehensible dialectal sociolinguistic levels without delving deeply into living traditions.

  3-I exhibited the Hammer and Sickle series in an exhibition that I curated in 1991 at the Ateneo de Valencia, University of Valencia, so I know it well. I had the opportunity to visit her exhibitions Vereda Tropical and Proverbios both on the day of their inauguration so I know them very well. I also saw Los Viajes de Marco Polo live in her first presentation at the Havana Biennial, knowing her very well, in So much so that I know less about Flavio's previous work, thus leaving his works prior to the samples mentioned here, those from the volume period and his previous hyperrealist painting to be commented on in some future effort.

References

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, The Subject in Creativity, Authorial Literary Work of Thought.

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Anobjectuality of the Object, Pp, The Subject in Creativity, Authorial Literary Work of Thought.

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Cubism and Deconstruction, essay included in selective compendiums

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Beyond the Intertextual, lecture I gave at the Fondren Library Lecture auditorium, Reading a summary essay of a larger essay, Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA, 1996

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Flavio Garciandia, Part about Flavio in the conference I gave in the auditorium of lectures, Latin American studies faculty, office of provost, Lake Forest College, Illinois, USA, 1999

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Flavio, Part dedicated to Flavio with slides of Flavio in conferences that I gave at the Rice Media Center Auditorium, there are also parts dedicated to Flavio in the films that I presented and discussed, Rice Media Center, Rice University, Houston, Texas , USA, 1997

Jacques Derrida, Genesis and Structure: Of Phenomenology, Anthropos

Jean Piaget, The Concept of Structure in Scientific Thinking

Jean Piaget, Learning in children

Mario de Micheli, The Cubist Lesson: Art and Science, The Artistic Avant-Gardes of the Twentieth Century

Mario de Micheli, The Rules of Abstraction, The Artistic Avant-garde of the 20th Century

Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art

Form and Contents in Lazaro Saavedra

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Houston, Texas, USA

    Due to the graphics, the immediacy of his lines and the humor that his works arouse, some have related the plastic work of Lazaro Saavedra with illustrators and comic strip makers who usually comment directly on the social world in their caricatures, but Lazaro's comics They are far from dealing with society in person, rather, they refer to intricate intricacies that related to meanings of rhetoric, ideology and the relationship between form and content, offer specificity to the ways in which the same materials assume a unique mode to art and its means of dealing with socioculturality.

   This unique way is not only based on the fact that art is provided with its own material means given in its technicalities, specialties and material culture, since this appreciation alone could lead to a separation of form and content according to which, if the means are on one side , techniques and materials, from the other there would then be the social world itself, separated as something else, with respect to which art, in the same way that journalism and other media do, would deal with society.

  Behind this separation between form and content is the assumption, on the one hand, that form is an instrument cut out on a background which is available as a tool so that language or language, what we ultimately want to say, is said. in that material as the means to that end in the same way that it could be in any other medium, on the other hand, the assumption that social reality is provided with its own ontology which persists in the ways in which we refer to it. , or the materials that we have for that purpose, demands that any form, material or language be subordinated to what it requests so that that medium, material or language is truthful.

  All of this as if the form were something that one puts on and takes off, picks up and leaves as a tool or means to an end, something that largely ignores the profound phenomenology of the forms and their very relationship with the content and with what a world and a reality are. The social world then, according to this separation, would be on the other side of the forms, and from its own ontology it would be passing the account to the forms, means and techniques, in the way of as if reality were saying, to use the type of resources that Lázaro uses where even the little frame of the work and the background can speak, --like in Disney stories where everything speaks, trees, animals, etc.-- "regarding me as a reality, all languages ​​are the same, comics, journalism, film, plastic arts.

  The reflection on the dilemma of the relationship between form and content as something intrinsically related, the fact that the contents cannot be separated from the forms and that the criticism of the latter is itself the criticism of the form that the former have acquired, is one of the most central if not the most important in all of Lázaro's pieces, a large number of them dedicated to reflecting plastically on this relationship, Lazaro has offered a way of responding to this issue according to the specificities of plastic art, how they contribute to its own way, intrinsic to its materials, media and specialties, of dealing with and dealing with the sociocultural world, ideologies and society.

  In his exhibition with Rubén Torres Llorca Una Mirada Retrospective Lazaro developed what he had previously dealt with in his individual exhibition Mesa Sueca and in his first eclectic installations in which, in a way that I would risk defining as Brechtian, he discussed the ideologies of art by art towards itself, the little frame of the work, while also putting everyone in their place in a desacralizing way from which nothing escapes, neither the mat of the work, nor the sublimated fetishisms of the form, nor the stylized little line and the itches of the academy, nor Carlos Marx whom he brings down to earth and tells him to leave all that fantasy of a German peasant impressed with the industry and put yourself here at the same human level as the mannequin whose throat was slit in biology class, nor the promulgators of social reality simply to whom he responds by transforming into a realized artistic piece a machine that points with its needle at ideologies, the detector of ideologies.

  Instead of the works being evaluated from the social outside by the ideologies of those who decide to what ideology the work of art responds, it is here the work of art itself that becomes a detector of the ideologies of the spectators and society. , a reverse evaluation resulting from his reflections on the relationship between form and content.

 The reversal that Lázaro performs with the ideology detector is not new as a modus operandi in art.

  When Christ decides to pack up an art museum, he does the same thing even if his theme is different. The museum, in which works of art are usually exhibited with all the assumptions, traditions, gestures, culture, styles, ideologies and relationships with authority that this implies, is packaged by the artist and transformed into an artistic piece, the instance that shows is then shown. Instead of evaluating the ideologies of art from a social outside, it will therefore be art that will evaluate the ideologies of society, transforming the work into a detector of ideologies.

  This iconoclastic and eclectic, anti-authoritarian attitude in which Lázaro and I have always agreed, does not remain only in the reversed ideology detector, it becomes a whole development through which his own pieces revert to the sociocultural reactions of the spectators to the works, turning these towards their next versions or according to new works, then deconstructions of the way that certain ideologies towards the works were acquired in the field, either in the press or in specialized opinion.

  Based on the above, for my curatorship at Rice University in 1997, Lázaro proposed an exhibition titled Masage Mental which included his work Curriculum Vitae and an installation that titled the exhibition.

  In Curriculum vitae it was a series where the pieces that should be the works were themselves the files of the works, that is, they were the files of the works in which the title, author, technical details and date are usually placed. , made in the size and format that the works would have, made on cardboard of about 80 centimeters by fifty each and approximately thirty exhibited on the walls of the rice media center art gallery, these then included not only the ordinary stuff of a file, but also a complete list of press clippings and compilations of materials on the reactions of spectators and criticism of his previous shows, which in turn became the object of Lazaro's new reflections within these files, transforming the usually file of the work, in a sample of the sociology of the spectators and their reactions, not precisely those who would attend my curatorship, but those who attended his samples before, press releases, publications, nothing was exempt from their re-comments .

   Mental massage, on the contrary, was a part of his notebook and diary that he chose to take to color paintings where specifically Lazaro painted everything he was thinking, reflecting and feeling during a period of his life in which he worked in construction. to obtain his own home, his life among the builders, the vicissitudes of being away from art immersed in the hard work of building, the vicissitudes of daily life in construction, these paintings as a color extension of his diary, were then exhibited in an independent exhibition system that Lazaro created installatively with materials typical of the world of construction, rebar, rubble, bricks, etc.

  The trans-avant-garde lies in this iconoclasm and the way in which each person adjusts their balance is a matter of individual authorial style.

  It is true that the mashed installations seemed like improvised class exercises and other ways of putting together what was within reach, a performative immediatism that broke schemes and assumptions, requiring the viewer to unburden themselves of stereotypes and preconceptions to open themselves to the casual, but in no way Although they were insignificant or irrelevant for this reason, there was in Puré a type of elaboration that stirred the spectators in all aspects of their receptive experience. Puré made it something accentuated and exacerbated until the works seemed part of an intentional paraphernalia, managing to communicate a carnivalesque and festive whole.

  The balance of Puré is a conjunction of its different individualities, Lazaro, the immediacy of the medium, the desacralizing casualness, the primacy of the concept and what is meant, Ciro, the baroque grandiloquence of an amalgamated whole of parts that must make harmony in which something of pop survives very much reinvented, Ana, the sensitive and feminine openness to the relationship between forms, being and the social, Adriano, the remanated and well-worn, the return of the tiredness of form, comments on culture, Ermi , the clear icon with its reference to standard culture.

  The characteristics of Puré continued to be present in Lazaro as the main exponent and progressively fell away towards his complete individuation.

  In a Retrospective Look, the exhibition began with a meeting of a group of supposed researchers of the future, who arrived many years later at the exhibition site and showed the latter, the specific exhibition of Lazaro and Rubén that the spectators toured, like a discovery of that research, that is, the sample was presented by those supposed researchers and the pieces by Rubén and Lazaro were displayed in the gallery as what they were sampling as a museum of curiosities.

  All made, of course, by Rubén and Lazaro, the vast majority as pieces based on street people's artifacts, strollers, chivichanas and other inventions, they were presented to the public as museographed by those spelunkers of the future, a game with a type of Science fiction.

References

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Lazaro Saavedra, untitled conference lectured at the Rice Media Center Auditorium, see tape recorded and film recorded contents at both transart foundation sound collection and the rice media center sound collection, as well as transart releases replacement of materials printed before the starting of the workshop, for more materials on Lazaro and pure see a paper on pure by Abdel Hernandez San Juan collected at transart, Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA, 1997

Abdel Hernandez San Juan and Fran Rodriguez, Curriculum Vitae: Curatorial research film on Lazaro Saavedra, including interview and visual documentation of his exhibits and works, directed by Abdel Hernandez San Juan and Fran Rodriguez and presented after the conference on Lazaro Saavedra lectured at the Rice Media Center Auditorium, Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA, 1997

Image as Literary Correlate: Robertico salas

©By Abdel Hernandez san Juan

 The question about what one's position should be when analyzing works and samples presented by artists who have their own ways of understanding what they do, has been a recurring topic that those of us who prioritize linguistics and semiotics when discussing works must clear up.

  If the above is something that has found different expressions among artists like Kossuth and Beuys who decided to write about their own works, it has been in the theater where it has been presented with the greatest emphasis.

  Artists such as Bretch, Grotowski and Barba have also written about their art and it has been in the theorizing of theater where the question about the position one should assume in theorizing art in the face of the artist's work has arisen most. However, we find differences between the type of literature that the artist is led to develop when he refers to his own works and those others that we generate, either about art in the abstract, or about the art made by others.

   This fact is given not only by the different position that we experience in writing from the outside making references to the art that others make, but also by the focus that we give to the invariances of language in an essay of systematization, something that becomes peculiar according to the artists in question.

  The theatrical works of Robertico Salas, my first cousin, offer a unique and fascinating modality in this sense.

  What follows is an effort to contribute both to the understanding of Robertico's theater and to his criticism.

  The word systematization can sometimes offer difficulties for those of us who understand writing about art on a level that is both hermeneutical and axiological, because although we do so, systematization in itself is still a partial contribution.

  We think that where science is required in the analysis it is made up of many works per author, as well as many authors, each of whom offer our own perspectives.

  Systematization may also be reticent for those of us who understand the theoretical essay also as a literary and aesthetic piece.

  The theater of Robertico Salas represents several moments, as an informed artist his images represent in the same as a theatreologist, his theater bookseller and his wealth of training, avant-garde theater, where language is the subject, but at another time, because it is a self-managed art that is economically nourished by the voluntary payment that people make as well as an art mostly for outdoor spaces, locations that involve a direct relationship with tourism and people on festive occasions, his art has also been related to culture as This is expressed around tourism, that is, tradition and folklore becoming at the same time an art that is produced and presented, and a laboratory for research on that culture, an ambiguity that requires Robertico to continually move between being the director theater, which produces and stages its different pieces throughout the year, while continually writing essays and texts that, around the plays, become essays on issues related to that tradition and that culture.

  The actors and dance forms, elements and costumes of his theater are nourished at the same time by both repertoires, the repertoire of the avant-garde theater in which Robertico became a theaterologist and the visual repertoire of folklore related to culture, the latter, utensils, elements, shapes and materials, although independent and autonomous with respect to the architectural locations in which the works are presented, the use of stilts and the recreation of forms around children's literature, we can also see them as a visual and aesthetic commentary on those spaces as architecture, the evocation of a material culture that involves furniture, doors, cobblestone streets, architraves, columns, ornate walls and ancient buildings.

  Robertico's theater, which has included staging and presentations in Italy, Ecuador and Mexico, and which usually revolves around cultural entertainment activities such as party occasions.

  The elements chosen by Robertico for his theater are the stilt, as he said, with its minimal and minimalist lines, both understood as wooden forms in themselves, and by the patterns they give to the body movements of the dancer actors, patterns of balance. and dynamism that come with walking, moving and turning on those vertical wooden forms perched.

  The other aspect that becomes part of the visual, aesthetic and recreational commentary of this material culture is the costumes, which in their art acquire a great creative and expressive plastic preponderance, sometimes even being related due to their creative anachronism with the circus, something that It is also expressed in the literary themes that become motifs of the works, usually related to children's literature, its adventurous character of prototypical and adjectival characters, the bold tribilin, the brave prince, and its ambivalent titles, The Incredible and Great History of the adventures of the knight Sir William and his Squire Kimbado against the furious dragon tribilin.

  Without overlooking the moment in which Robertico defines his theater as street, a juxtaposition like the one below which I obtained between the albums and compilations of images that Robertico makes for his art around the stilts, a topic which in itself has become a motive of his essays and writings on culture, exploring and reading different areas of culture around the possibilities offered by an element, here the stilt, can explain the type of impetus of this theater related on the one hand to the cultural ethos, the avant-garde invocation of values ​​of tradition in its cultural aspects as well as the experimentation of theater as a laboratory of a lifestyle or utopian commune from which, as in the traveling circus, its artists live.

Gladiadores (bestiary) with stilts, mosaic

3rd century AD Sousse, Archaeological Museum

Maya Actor on Stilts

Of the different kinds of games

1657, Dutch copper engraving, Leipzig, Heiner Vogel Collection

Harlequin on Stilts, details of an engraving by Recueil Fossard, Stockholm Museum

Men on stilts, ánfora de pitore dell Altalena, 6th century, New Zealand, Centerbury museum

Cuban farmer working in a tobacco plantation with stilts in Pinar del Rio

Actor on stilts, details of a Wei dynasty wall painting, Dunhuan, China

  To be considered from the point of view of avant-garde theater, its images could be understood from the perspective of a plastic theater, plastic theater, criteria, the type of thing that has been proposed for representation in Robert Wilson's theater with its flat image on stage, the plastic two-dimensionalization in the motion of the actors and their bodies as a visual effect even when these involve space and volume, while considering from the point of view of the type of interaction that the artist proposes in the street, that dance character which includes music and body movements, his works could be understood in the sense proposed to stage representation by Eugenio Barba's theater.

  However, in Barba, the bodily and expressive forms through which its actors interact before the spectators are highly elaborate and result from intensive research carried out before closed doors on the training set where these actors and dancers first explore those forms and movements. body movements from different cultures to then recreate them and include them as aspects within the modern lines and forms that they propose in their avant-garde body movements.

  The cultural aspects are thus visually recreated towards the forms of the artistic avant-garde and only then carried and tested in certain spaces through trips or itineraries to certain spaces, towns or festive occasions.

  The way in which in Barba's theater the actor comes into contact with an expressive form coming from a given cultural reference is by taking it into consideration at the very moment of elaborating that experimental form.

  In Robertico, folklore and tourism do not only become the motive that inspires the elaboration of an experimental form, here the experimental is the very character of being Robertico a Theaterologist and artist, but his theater proposes to establish itself as a form of economic life in the spaces of that tradition in order to foster a writing laboratory about that culture, at the same time, it relates two traditions, one, those of the visual, corporal forms and the material culture of its own repertoire recreated around the circus, the stilts and the literary motifs he chooses, and the other that of that cultural tradition in which folklore and tourism are related.

  This bringing into visual and expressive relationship of two traditions, one conveyed by artists who live, as a small community, from that form of theater as a cast in terms of a self-managed economy, and the other, that of that culture in which they are inserted and established as a weekly street theatrical show in interaction with tourism and people, highlights the inventive nature of cultures, generating a continuous dialogue that becomes not only and even at times less, between the experimental forms that it elaborates of avant-garde art and the culture in question, but rather between forms of culture whose only difference is that one is an active form defined as one proposed by a cast of artists in their costumes, artifacts, bodily expressions, etc., and the other a form of passive or given culture in a tradition in which its theatrical forms are presented.

  It is interesting in Robertico the way he prioritizes generic forms from children's literature which can be found in different traditions and cultures, as well as the inclusive reference to a literary or oral heritage, both living and bookish, that ranges from Greek traditions to Cuban traditions.

  This gives it a peculiar visual interest from the perspective of a plastic theater of the image and a dynamic relationship between the writer and researcher who practices a type of theater while it gives him the possibility of writing about these phenomena that I have referred to and the director. of theater who simultaneously ventures into his staging that includes musical instruments that range from Celtic, Anglo-Saxon and Nordic traditions to Caribbean traditions such as the tumbadora, the bomgo and other instruments of Caribbean percussion that are included in his choreographies, dance movements and sounds. .

  It is interesting that it is a type of theater that includes a kind of location where all the materials are gathered, which are collected, accumulated and collected from scrap shops of all kinds, largely fabrics of infinite colors and qualities, paper mache and other means. which usually require painstaking sewing efforts to create elaborate costumes as well as the careful makeup of the actors and dancers who paint their faces and sometimes their entire bodies.

  These materials largely have a recycled character and the place where they are accumulated, which in turn serves for group meetings, has for this reason a clear ecological character in its visuality. The figure of the same person who simultaneously works as a writer. Researcher and theater director, he raises questions about the Benjaminian concept of the unity of the work of art.

  If the work of art is covered by an indivisible uniqueness that closes it on itself as a finite physical totality, size, weight, transfer, transportation, presentation and as duration, fifteen minutes, ten minutes, one hour, also as an aesthetic or literary totality , the style of the author, his authorial and stylistic stamp, etc., in what way can the creator enter into it and leave it, being on one occasion the author who creates it and another one who takes it as an object for a writing that refers to others. aspects of material and visual culture, in addition to artistic ones?

  But the questions about the concept of uniqueness and the diatribes that once developed around it were not always clear-cut. The criticism of the unity of the work, as occurred in the invocation of art and life in the first European avant-garde, was not about denying that the works were provided by a physical uniqueness, their material, factual and phatic indivisibility, to refer to two notions of Jacobson that suppose its coseic tangibility, nor the fact that each work was provided by the specificities of an aesthetic or literary uniqueness specific to the way in which the authorial composition relates in ways specific to that author the parts that make it up with the all aesthetic, it was rather a matter of discussing the fact that in this closure on themselves of their uniqueness, certain works of art understood in an axiological sense could also respond to principles of fetishistic organization or to certain concepts of representation that were sometimes hypostatized, ossified or reified.

  Bretch's work produced interesting results in this sense, specifically his notions of distance and critical estrangement which were developed around the theory of the actor, the so-called change of roles in which Bretch required the actors to put themselves in each other's shoes. others and tried to argue their perspectives according to the role they assumed either as actors in the play during training or as characters in the dramaturgy of that play.

  But in his broader writings on theater, Bretch emancipated these concepts toward a broader scope, moving outside the precepts of mimesis and not being subordinated only to the dramaturgical imperatives of a specific work.

  Critical estrangement thus facilitates the author's distancing from the very concepts of work and spectator, or work and reader, and even the distancing of high art from other forms or visualities of the culture that this art wants to comment on, make inclusive or incorporate.

  Bretch's critical distancing has also been useful for something I have defined as methodological devices. If the defamiliarization of a form is implicit in avant-garde art, it comes along with the need to deroutinize a perception to discuss in the latter a form that has become stereotyped or repetitive in relation to the forms or contents of an ideology.

   In critical distancing there is defamiliarization insofar as to establish another relationship and distancing oneself it is necessary to defamiliarize, however, the defamiliarization does not become paroxysmal, it defamiliarizes what is necessary to re-establish a new relationship with a form or with an idea about which one wants return from another perspective, you want to miss it again and again to see it from all its sides, you analyze it in all possible ways to develop a new response that once again becomes a critical form.

  The defamiliarizing moment is related to the externalization of alternatives. The previous form that has been subject to defamiliarization is taken up by critical estrangement. Although there is undoubtedly ritual, the form is not entirely diluted in the ritual, nor is the rite completely diluted in the form since it is criticism that is ultimately interesting in the exploration of the form. In estrangement one is always thinking of a form that is the object of a thought that thinks of it as it is and how it plans to transform it.

  In a certain way, there were two works in a work, the work that it was and the work that that work wanted to transform into. The therapeutic effects and the ritual levels involved in those therapeutic effects resulted from the way in which defamiliarizations were reunited with the forms of experience, the things experienced or the realities addressed.

  For this reason, when the works were seen by the spectators, they seemed like reality in reality, peculiar images that seen live or through documentation always communicate a relationship between experimentality and reality, experimentality of an image of reality, reality effect of an experimental reality. .

  As in metatheater, it is not about the dissolution of theater in reality, becoming invisible to the eyes of the people, because in Robertico the works as staged are before the eyes of everyone, nothing is taking place that is not a work of art, a theatrical show, everyone is in front of a staging physically gathered.

  It is not, therefore, about realism or its antipodal of showing the devices that the fiction of a work of art provokes to present at the same time the reality of the filming and the illusory reality of the work, as can be the case in cinema or theater. of fellini or Saura, nor of hyperrealism or photorealism that made the aesthetics of reality modes in which the effects of its representation, that is, the effect of production of images of reality, became as if from another reality as real or more real than reality itself.

  It is not, therefore, that hyperreality of the image that is more real than the real, since it is not an effect of reality in the representation, but, quite the opposite, of what in the reality of that work insists as reality above any idea of ​​representation. , that is, in its now and its here in front of the spectators.

  In the theater of Grotowski, Barba and Becker, theatrical representation was questioned to obtain a dissolution, a concept of ritual was sought that was prior to theater in which the latter was either diluted or theater as a rite within theater was diluted. .

  One of the peculiarities that make Robertico's theater suigeneris is, not only what he said before about the way in which his theater is related to tourism, folklore and culture, which in turn becomes a reason for research in his writing, but also the balance that Robertico achieves between the plastic, the visual and the literary in his theater, a way that, although with all the rituality of the costumes, the makeup, the recycling of materials, the fabrics and the incorporation of dynamic forms brought from certain aspects of the circus, its staging is never completely diluted in the ritual, rather they create a balanced result that maintains the estrangement, although in Robertico the dimension of entertainment in culture becomes much more predominant and becomes an aspect decisive of its aesthetics.

  The acrobat, for example, which responds to principles of relationship between a dynamic interactive form and a reiterative structure, between amazement and geometry, not only in the preponderance of children's literature or puppet theater, but also in the incorporation of circus forms. .

  The critical estrangement is still there, between the artistic form and the culture, between the writer and researcher and the theater director, between reality and representation, the group that makes a staging, a tangible physical work, a theatrical spectacle. visible, presented in the reality of tourism and people, but from which it also lives, between the work as a physical reality and the laboratory that it provides for cultural research, something that explains the significance that Bretch had in his creation. theaterologist

Grades

  The motivation to write this essay arose in Caracas in 1994. As a curator at the Alejandro Otero Museum of Visual Arts, at that time I was working on the topic of markets and my cousin came to Caracas for two months, staying in my apartment with Yanisbel, also a theater artist. , in those two months we were able to talk extensively about his theater and view material, including two weeks we spent together in the German colony of Tovar.

  On that occasion, for the first time, Robertico explained to me what his experience consisted of since we had not seen each other since 1990 when his group did not yet exist. I learned about their performances in Italy at the international music and culture festival Ippodromo in Cappanelle, Rome, in Piazza Navona, in Parco Storico Rurale e Environmentale di Basilicata, Grancia, Poetenza, in Tricarico Province of Matera, in Grassano, Brindisi de Montagna, Province of Potenza in Vie de la Fantasie, Festivale internatinale deli artistic i strada, Orvieto, in Peruia Umbria, Italy.

  I also learned about their presentations in Quito Ecuador, their presentations in the Carolina Park, in the Ejido Park, in the Santa Clara Coliseum and in the Puyo Coliseum, in the Amazon region, Plaza Santo Domingo, in Quito, in the historic center of Quito, Balneario del Tingo Tulcán in the high school of the valley, in the valley of the chillos in the city of Otavalo, in the city of emeralds, Tolita I and Nueva Esperanza, in Quito festivals, parades of the fraternity national of the northern and southern zones, at the Ibro nightclub in Quito, at the Kinkenny in Mojandita curuvi, indigenous community of Otavalo, province of Imbabura, at the inauguration of the Mojanda café at Casa Mojanda Otavalo, at the Betti Sach kindergarten , at the Café Arte in the city of Ibarra, at the Castillo de Sabor with Son Cocho, all in Quito, also his explanations about the ways in which his group works in Havana in parks, squares and party occasions, among others, with the social and cultural anthropology workshop of the Casa de África, cigar festival, Torres wines, Los Frailes hostel, dance in urban landscapes, Retazos dance group, World Earth Day, international tourism fair, international poetry festival, artistic groups mountain integrals, la makumba carnival night, Havana carnivals, Dutch embassy, ​​street theater, the Cuban voyeur, meeting of commercial techniques, routes and walks, dream of a San Juan festival, hotels, among other spaces that me I counted working.

Another Routes

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Cultural theorist

Essay on cultural anthropology of the market and sociology of sport

  The concept of routes that can describe the simple itinerary that airplanes follow in the modern and postmodern world of global tourism with its continuous mobility and its day-to-day transportation of people from around the world from one side of the planet to the other, has usually had in the social sciences, without losing that atavistic visuality that still refers to its inveterate vestiges to the image of the route of a line on a map and to the relationship of the latter as a graphic abstraction of an imagined territory, a meaning more related to journeys and cultural and geographical trajectories related to compact cultures and societies in themselves, whether they were nomadic, formed by short-term emigrations, or sedentary, long-term migrations, which came to form ethnically relatively homogeneous groups around a territory such as enclaves, cultures or the former nations in a current and gradual process of interfusion.

  But the concept of routes has also been related to commercial journeys, not only those modern ones that describe the routes that goods and products follow with the businesses that market and distribute them in the global financial and advertising market, but rather the that followed the trade activities of merchants since ancient times related to routes, as well as those of trade in cultures considered primitive, such as those that followed the kula exchange as a commercial activity in the Trobriand Islands in the Polynesian New Guinea among the Argonauts of the Western Pacific that with their canoes throughout the entire archipelago transported objects related to cultural rituals and ceremonies, such as necklaces and bracelets, which were also, for that very reason, commercial goods according to the primitive economy that Malinowski discussed.

   In the first meaning, route maps describe two types of emigration, on the one hand, the route followed by a relatively recent emigration culture, which occurred in the late 20th century, such as the route, for example, of those of us who emigrated to the United States that we previously lived in. in Venezuela, or those of Asians, Hindus, Pakistanis and people from the Arab world established towards the second half of the nineties, and the route followed by emigrations that were established from previous centuries, such as the routes of those who emigrated from England, Nordic countries or from Europe, the Mexicans who arrived through California, Monterrey or El Paso, which continues with its current expression, the Africans who arrived from Africa, the Arabs and Africans in France and Europe, or the Italians, Portuguese and Spanish between Mexico and South America distributed throughout the continental geography, as well as that of those who arrived from Africa in Brazil and the Caribbean without excluding the most native peoples, such as the American Indians in the United States and the Andean and Indian cultures of central and South America that also had its commercial and migratory routes.

  The second meaning, related to trade routes, is limited in its specificity to current and contemporary routes followed by the activity of the market, trade and the global financial system, and to those followed by merchants of yesteryear, but does not exclude the fact that Maps of routes can be drawn in which the commercial route and the migratory route overlap because although they are specific they are also related, on the one hand many of the migratory routes have, above all, an economic reason for being, and on the other, because in the Today's culture of marketing and commerce, free and fast market expressions, and culture are closely related not only in aesthetics and lifestyles, but also in the cultural clutch of a value system, an ethos and a form relationship between culture and traditions.

  But despite this superposition of notions of routes in which we juxtapose those that describe those of us who emigrate in modern and current times or cultural contact according to routes of travelers and strangers, the drawings and engravings made by the English and Dutch in their impressions of customs In the colonial period in the Americas, the phenomenon of geographers and speleologists, Humboldt, for example, as an atavistic image of ancient routed explorers, or the routes of that family tree of ethnicities which are drawn according to where their ancestors came from, the The type of routes that I am going to discuss in this essay is one entirely, if not completely different from those previously mentioned.

  This time we are talking about sports routes in which, far from referring to the concept of routes understood in the sense of cultures, we refer to a modern and current concept of routes, one that, in the same way as the routes that tourism follows contingent on the selection of a territory that is visited, traveled and enjoyed, it refers to the selection of a territory from the perspective of a map which will be visited without maintaining any relationship with it other than that which will be transitory and relatively ephemeral way for a sporting reason, the fact of arriving at a chosen territory and camping there to explore it for a relatively short period of time, two weeks, three weeks, a month at most two months.

  This concept of a route that is somewhat reminiscent not only of tourist routes, but also of types of exploratory routes not previously considered strictly sports, although related to entertainment, rest and physical exercise, such as those carried out by climbers in the mountains. or the snowy areas, however, being an eminently sporting route, still and in a current way, it also has a sense of commercial route because although here what the route describes at the level of the line over the territory is not refers, as in the routes of commercial traffic, to the routes that goods follow, but to the route that the body follows in a territory, the activity as a whole that they carry out as a sporting activity is itself a commercial phenomenon and exclusive from from the point of view of both an anthropology of the market and from the point of view of a sociology of sport.

  In fact, the reason why I focus here on the concept of routes in its meanings in the social sciences is because writing on the subject immediately placed me before both things, although I practice sociology a lot, if not almost always, in my books and essays, I had never ventured into it with respect to sport, and although I had ventured into quite a few investigations into the anthropology of the market, I had never seen myself faced with a phenomenon where what makes up commercial activity is in itself a sporting fact and where what makes commercial that sport is in itself what makes the attractiveness and what makes the exclusivity of its symbolic and cultural values, one thing within the other intrinsically related.

  Although in my essay The Eclipse of the Eye I had already referred to the inseparable interweaving between business theory and cultural anthropology, I was not faced with a topic that, as in that essay, referred to our current society in general, which we call capitalism. neoliberal or late, and regarding the cultural anthropology that we do of any culture or society, but it was about an important person in my life who counts among my most beloved loved ones, my own mother and father sister, only children and a exclusive sporting activity that covers countless routes and marathon routes in natural sites in the United States, the Nordic world, South America, Europe and Africa.

  Since it is about my sister's life as well as her career, writing this was a challenge for me. Although I had previously ventured into writing about filial relationships like my own cousin, Robertico, who is a theater artist, this time the challenge is greater because writing about Nahila means writing not only about my sister but also moving away from the terrain of what we could call the symbolic production, at least if we understand it in the sense of traditional conventions according to which only art and craftsmanship enter into it.

  Here, then, it is a very exclusive modality of sport which, without being symbolic production in that traditional sense, not referable to artifacts, escapes both what is considered symbolic production and even what I myself to expand the anthropological notion to other meanings. beyond the object or artifact I have called material culture and which nevertheless does not cease to have a symbolic expression, as well as an exclusivity that distinguishes it in addition to, by the way, a notable creativity and inventiveness.

  Since it was my own sister, I had to stick to a main route, which is the one that placed our own relationship between me in Houston, Texas and her in Monterrey, Mexico because it was on that route that we met again and because it was in Monterrey where Nahila began the commercial experience that gradually led her to this sport, her work as commercial manager of a US transnational company in Mexico, Interlake, her own metal furniture marketing business in Mexico and after the birth of Carmen and Julia her determination towards the same one that from Mexico City led her to her current life with her new partner Cristian, also a marathon runner, with whom she currently lives in Chile.

  I will therefore focus here on discussing this experience of my sister whose exclusivity is given not only by the fact that it being her sport is the form that her own business acquired, at least until a certain moment, even today, but also by the fact that the anthropological about commerce here since it is not about a specific visual or artifactual product and has to be disseminated, as in the anthropology of tourism or in the anthropology of carnival, towards a broader experience, it cannot but also be a sociology of sport given that It is sport and nothing else what it consists of, no matter how exclusive that sport may be.

  Now, due to the usually standardized nature of any sport, it is necessary to say that in addition to the fact that it is not usual in writing about sport to write about one athlete, but about many or about sport in general and in addition to the fact that that here this cultural anthropology of the market and sociology of sport is also not only about my sister, her commercial activity and her sports career, but as a writing exercise about the relationship between the two, which, seen from Texas-Monterrey, also relates us in the revisitations of our own relationship through memory and experience of our past, being brothers and our parents.

  In the past, different efforts have been made about the inventive transformations of the market as a cultural phenomenon, starting with my own, such as my book The Subject in Creativity, which makes the anthropology and sociology of that creativity in which the subject becomes, or my project in Venezuela by in the mid-nineties that called from the bridge, which proposed a social science practice that would simultaneously curate, research and promote professionals from very different backgrounds, from an ecologist who lives making inventories of places in nature in Venezuela, passing through the forms of construction and architecture in mountain communities such as Ávila or eastern Venezuela, to collectors of parrot nests, makers of body prostheses or tracers of interpretive trails in caving or tourism, or the simple include economists and businessmen as individual theoretical research in my team, I believe that no previous project of mine such as Desde el Puente enables better in my own individual research in the past to write about my sister

  Now, the type of symbolic exclusivity, creativity and inventiveness that the relationship between business and culture acquires in this practice, both life and sports career of Nahila and currently of Nahila and Cristian together, are a good example of the phenomena that I I have been theorizing about which there is very little previous effort and work, although Bourdieu's theory of distinction helps to understand what is symbolic there may be in the way in which social groups distinguish themselves according to the ways in which they represent themselves, His theory is not in a position to encompass phenomena like this that arise from the pure inventiveness of the lifestyle and the economic needs of individual and family prosperity. In other words, the cultural recreations of consumption have not been theorized or studied as they are given here. .

  Here, what makes it possible for Nahila and Cristian to dedicate themselves to this sport and make their own films about their sporting journeys is something in which a style of vision, a concept of health, a sports career and an economic business all intertwine, since Self-financed or financed by others, their sponsors advertise both on their uniforms when they help them in races, as well as in their films and in all the promotional activity that Nahila then carries out in magazines and other media around her sports career.

  On the other hand, the values ​​of sport, physical health, a healthy lifestyle, and its other benefits never cease to be in the foreground since it is first and foremost about running large amounts of kilometers as a activity of being physically fit, in contact with the body, present in what they do and dedicated to the health that sport makes possible.

  In addition to being a lifestyle, here it is a remarkably ecological sport, which is what in turn makes it an exclusive sport, an exclusivity which is itself an expression of that inventiveness that culturally recreates consumption.

  The fact of moving long-distance marathon running and physical endurance from its traditional location on tracks or ring roads in the city, towards locations in nature, uniting or merging it with the type of ecological exploratory content that sports such as mountaineering, climbing, or skiing among other sports that have always been related to the natural landscape, is here from the anthropological point of view a matter of both inventiveness and creativity resulting from how consumption is culturally recreated and is also a movement that internalizes the world. of sport implies, with respect to its traditional form, a displacement of ideological axes.

  In the same way that in the arts there are arts considered high or fine arts, on the one hand, and others disdained or relegated for being considered, due to the preponderance in them of less aesthetic and more utilitarian functionalities such as crafts, ceramics or functional architecture, marathon running in athletics, due to its emphasis on the hedonism of self-health and self-resistance of the athlete in collective dynamics of group mobility that places less attention on the individual athlete, tended to be visually relegated in traditional competitions of Olympic sport, usually dedicating very sporadic camera shots subordinated to a camera focused on speed athletics and other forms more focused on the visual effect of the athlete's competitive skills.

   This, added to the fact of developing outside the tracks on external circuits, brought relegated attention to it in terms of the ideology of the sport.

  It is therefore a move that does the opposite, it moves marathon running from a sport that was once and even today undermined in Olympic events, to a sport of high symbolic, visual and also sporting exclusivity, moving marathon running towards ecological tourism, related to the style of life, transforms it into an activity of high cultural, social and economic exclusivity, turning the event itself into a contemporary expression of marketing creativity, a fact which, in its new and redeemed exclusivity, brings it closer to the sport of exploration and restores in its values ​​not only sporting but also cultural and visual.

  This move from the marathon towards nature, focusing on the selection of routes in relation to the demands of the terrain, running across large deserts, naturally very demanding areas, transformed marathon running into a new sport that became a new creative invention that combines sport, tourism and exploration.

  There is in this, returning to the relationship between the map and the territory, something that recalls the work of certain conceptual artists in the sense of a relationship with a territory by pure selection or even in some artists by chance, I am thinking here of artists who throw away the dice on a map and depending on where they land they go to that place on the map to make the work. Obviously we are far from this since in addition to not being art, but sport, here too the characteristics of the chosen terrain are not casual, gratuitous or random, but are very well chosen territories due to their characteristics for the challenges that sport poses with respect to to resistance, a fact that is also expressed in the great internal diversity of the careers themselves

  This great internal diversity of the modalities of each route then becomes a reason for an anthropological investigation of its different forms, which makes exclusive on a symbolic level not only the new sport in general, but also unique its specific relationship to each journey. The idea of ​​a route, moreover, is combined here with the literal concept of a trip, since it is not only a route from one point to another in geography, but to go towards that route and travel it, one must also travel. towards the location in question which transforms the athlete's activity and its visual expression into a phenomenon of intercultural interest.

  The attention to this, of course, may be more accentuated in some athletes than in others depending on their concerns, but the continuous production that Nahila and Cristian make of films through which they document and edit each of the journeys, makes the less of it not only a sporting expression, but also an interest in the subsequent formation of a visual material that acquires interest in itself in terms of visual anthropology because although in both it is not about a research or an investigation into a certain culture As one does in theory, anthropology and sociology, the making of the film does constitute, in its return to what was experienced, for a third spectator who did not live the experience, a material in itself of propaedeutic value.

   We start here from the fact that Nahila and Cristian's films, which have a correspondence in their style and design, with the work that Nahila does, for example, later in her sports classes with exponents of the new generation, in the interviews and texts that are published in magazines, in the promotion they make of the races, each one forms as visual material a direct relationship with a cultural and geographical location that constitutes in itself the motive and reason for being of the film, sometimes for example, these films include images of the two of them when they are shopping in the market while they are on their way to a road race or in situations that involve visual expressions of the towns, villages or cities close to the geographical areas in which the race will take place, areas that do not Rarely on their journey do they also involve passing through the towns and communities that live there.

  By simply comparing two films, the one about the crusade in the Atacama Desert in Chile and the one about the crusade in the Sahara Desert in Morocco, we have a visual complexion of what was said before, the second goes from locations in Paris in front of the camera to settings in the hotel , to Arab rituals that sanctify the event at its beginnings at the end of the desert, to camels lying or traveling everywhere, to Arabs with turbans who go to fetch water or carry food, or who simply walk around where they are. find, we therefore have between Atacama and Morocco an impression of these diametries that also allows us to move our attention from a modality relative to the meaning that this practice has at a micro level for Nahila and Cristian in their own lifestyle as a couple to how it is expressed. In terms of a sporting career in a collective competition like the one in Morocco,

  In the crusade of the Atacama desert in Chile, it is an autonomous production of just the two of them, it is only Nahila and Cristian who prepared to cross the Atacama desert, for this they have a car inside which is a team that includes one that He is constantly timing the race and making sure that they eat, have lunch, that they have the resources they need for the race in food, rest and intensive medical care, another who films and the one who drives, etc., a team that At the same time he is doing a medical investigation of both of them,

  They begin to run crossing the desert, the film shows maps of the entire desert with a line that describes where they start from and the route they have to take in the geography, then it shows natural landscapes of the desert and then it is made up of the two of them running in parts which are defined by a certain number of kilometers and the camping sites for food, rest and sleep, when they camp, they interview them both and talk to the camera, it is nice what they say and interesting how that team develops around the two both during the race and when they camp, they camp in their own tent, everything is self-produced with their own means including the film, it is also interesting that when they stop passing through small towns, places where people sometimes live , along the route that lasts more than thirty days, the girls go to one of those small towns and there they see them and eat with them, then they continue to the finish line.

  The Moroccan film is very different, it is about the Sahara desert, the film first shows the map of the location of the desert and the route that they will have to take in the geography as well as the points where they will make camps 1, 2, 3 , 4, 5, but this time it is not the two of them, but rather there are at least five hundred runners who come from all over the world from many countries, they all have marathon athletes' uniforms with their numbers, it is interesting that on this uniform there are the marks and stamps of their sponsors because the trip and all the equipment costs, this time the team that assists them is not the two of them, but rather it is a team that is attending to the campsite at the same time in a delimited area of ​​500 to a thousand people,

  The tents this time are not theirs, but rather the same standards for everyone, it is interesting how the team behaves, the main one who talks to them when they arrive from running and in the morning when they are ready to start, is a Spanish woman, but It is a team with Americans and people from all over, that team includes several identical cars that go with them throughout the race and a helicopter, this time the area where they camp and the start and finish area, the finish line, as well such as the signage of the area where they camp where, by the way, the tent houses are placed in a circle, they are inflatables like those inflatables that you see in large children's parks, but here those inflatables make up those signaling elements of departure, arrival, camping, and the sponsors of the entire contest are commercially advertised on those inflatables.

  The race is divided into camps for kilometers traveled, they all leave together and arrive as close together as they can, although already dispersed, when they travel and when they camp, the film includes from the beginning interesting moments of relationship with the culture of the desert as you see inhabitants with their camels continuously and at the exit when they arrive they make a kind of ceremonial ritual music for the event, the film begins in Paris, not in Morocco, because they travel from Paris crossing Spain to Morocco by plane and in Paris the two of them talk to the camera because it is a film of Nahila and Cristian, when they are in the hotel before leaving for the desert, they show on the bed all the elements or equipment that must be taken, which includes artificial feeding because in those conditions you cannot cook more than a small jar for something simple and small , are those foods that are a powder and when given a certain temperature it suddenly transforms into a coffee with milk, or macaroni and cheese.

  The possibilities of teamwork fostered by this essay written in advance agreement and after a dialogue with Nahila and Cristian about what they do allows us to draw attention and focus on the issues of both cultural anthropology and sociology of sport that I have previously focused on to discuss what what they do, the very fact that, in dialogue about the creative and inventive, the exclusive symbolic and its relationship to spiritual and cultural values ​​of the lifestyle thus contracted, Nahila explains to me that she experiences the proximity between what she does and the art given in which As with the creator absorbed in his world, here the athlete can tend to be seen for his hedonism or self-absorption towards his own world, something that experience contracts because it entails a rigorous discipline of dedication and a conviction towards what it and Cristian call being motivated not only by sporting but also spiritual values ​​so that it is an experience in which, just as in the sphere of the creator, the athlete experiences the suspicion of ideologies that perceive him as very absorbed in the autonomy of his own experience, hedonism without which the very philosophy behind his practice with its values ​​towards a vision of the body, health, and now ecology and culture would not be possible.

  The intercultural interest is given here not only in a fact of knowledge for the marathon runner of the geographical and cultural reality, although also, in what is related to ecological, cultural and knowledge tourism, but it is given in many different and specific ways. The contest brings together people from different cultures who come together in a common experience, the relationship of coexistence that they experience with each other and the specificities of the production of the contest, the peculiarities that it offers in each field with respect to the area of ​​​​habitation, geographical, natural and surrounding culture, towns, cultures, communities and the trip itself with its characteristics

  This fact then results in the nature and scope of the films, their visualization and propaedeutics, as it also remains notable for the way it is reflected in the eminently sports content that later, a posteriori and beforehand in anticipation, characterizes the promotions of Nahila and Cristian as athletes in magazines, advertisements and other media through which the attractions of the inventiveness of sport and its symbolic exclusivity continue to interweave as a clutch of cultural creativity and recreation of consumption, with the forms that marketing, target, the market niches, and the subsequent forms of economic creativity through which the economic and symbolic motives of both Nahila and Cristian on the one hand, and the sponsors in terms of values, on the other, are intertwined.

  Some questions to Nahila and Cristian about the intercultural learning of the experience, the emphasis on the settings in which both the trip and the days of long journey and camping take place, could revert, thanks to my incorporation with this essay, to the notion of team with which they have already been working, an attention now not to cultural anthropology of the market and sociology of sport but also to the cultural knowledge that the singularized experience reports for themselves as a process of learning as well as transmission of those values.

  a-What experiences have been significant for you in your different careers and journeys in terms of the cultures you have known? Could you mention knowledge and learning that you have achieved thanks to your practice, making references to those careers that in this specific sense have helped you? most relevant results?

Grades

Desde el Puente is a project that I conceived in Caracas, Venezuela in 1994, it was a form of curatorial research, a theoretical statement conceived so that its implementation propositionality was curatorial, which led to a form of curatorial project what I had previously conceived as theoretical projects. research projects such as Doing as a Laboratory, Doing as a Station that I had conceived in Caracas in 1992. I conceived from the bridge and discussed its implementation to develop it together with Félix Suazo for which we both wrote a text that year, and invited them to participate in the team to Bárbara Rodríguez, director of Bárbara Rodríguez y Asociados, economic advisor to Maria di Mase at the newspaper Economía Hoy with whom she had previously worked teaching a contemporary sociology course at the central bank of Venezuela, professor of economics at the central university of Venezuela and another on language for newspaper journalists, we also invited and included in the team Domingo de Lucia, an Italian businessman who owns Atenea paintings and director of the Artquimia cultural foundation of that factory. The center of the project was to curate exhibitions in which the work, in its visual expression, of professionals from very different professions such as those listed above, also including visual artists, were exhibited together.

Visual Illustrations

Fig. 1-Image of Nahila in magazine advertisements and her relationship that is both sporting and preparatory, emphasis on sports content, emphasis on economic content

Fig 2-Image of Cristian's Scientific Body costume, Sketshers performance

Fig 3- Images of the race route maps

Fig 4- Images of different selected natural locations and related cultures, markets, towns and traditions

Fig 5- Images of Nahila and Cristian preparing for a race, buying food, displaying furniture and resources for a race

Fig 6- Images of teamwork, Nahila and Cristian's relationship with the different specialists who work with them in the different aspects of the career

Fig 7- Cultural images of peoples, cultures and traditions of the best selected races

Fig 8- Images of the films direct and placed on the screen showing them to people

Bibliography

Abdel Hernandez San Juan, The Eclipse of the Eye, Pp, The Intramundane Horizont, Book

Pierre Bourdieu, On Sport, in Things Said, Gedisa

James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the late XX Century, Harvard University Press