The native gaze

The native gaze

By abdel Hernández San Juan

Culture in art from united states

Contents

Heuristics

Cultural Bodies

culture in art from Texas

The Principles of informalism

The Paintings of Terrell James

Art and the city

Young Anglo Artists

Another Polysemy’s

The gaze resilience, a dúplex archaeology

Earlier and late mc evilley

No siting the site

The degree Zero of the screen

Cinema and gesture

A medlee way between narrative and non narrative

A Sense of communion

Heuristics.

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan,

Houston, Texas, USA

  La obra plástica de Virgil Grotfeltd es suigeneris dentro del arte anglo. Sus pinturas basadas en formas sueltas generalmente hechos en agua, tintas y diversos tonos como grises y sepias --algunas entre ellas sobre papeles reciclados en su propio taller artístico y otras sobre papeles encontrados tales como hojas enmohecidas por efectos naturales-- son superficies que sugieren casi siempre el paso del tiempo tales como hojas con inscripciones y vestigios de sus líneas e indicios caligráficos, las cuales remiten en algo al ímpetu gestualista que caracterizó el informalismo abstracto en la alta posvanguardia, sobre todo la inclinación de no poca pintura informalista hacia la mancha entendida, no sólo como expresión con un material, color y forma sobre la tela, sino como gramática y vocabulario.  

  En las pinturas de Virgil los efectos caligráficos se refieren al modo de tratar el pincel y el pigmento, una forma de abordar la mancha sobre la tela, más que la forma que esa mancha --entendida como figura-- sugiere sobre ese papel o esa tela. Estas no sugieren la imagen de una caligrafía según los rasgos, pero la lógica caligráfica está en el modo de ir llevando una determinada mancha desde una forma anterior hacia una subsiguiente, en el modo de regresar sobre sí de esta, en su tipo de versatilidad, en su volverse forma, en su ir llevando la forma hacia otra forma.  

  Como en el lenguaje alfabético, se trata de un vocabulario según un pintar como hablar, pero la mancha en tanto forma parece más relacionada a sugerir mundos y universos imaginativos casi siempre relacionados –en sus alusiones--con los mismos materiales con los cuales y sobre los cuales pinta, que con la caligrafía como imagen. No se trata, como en otros pintores, de un analogismo según el cual la marcha en su figuracionalidad sugiere --en tanto forma—una caligrafía, tampoco de una mancha amplia que en su totalidad llega hacia los bordes del cuadro semejando en tanto un todo una gran letra indescifrable en lenguaje alfabético, ni de trazos gestuales que pintados hacia el centro o los márgenes sugieren la hoja de papel, ni de esas pequeñas manchas que sugieren en conjunto un tipo de alfabeto incomprensible o Jerigonza.  

  Algunas entre sus pinturas pudieran sugerir la inclinación hacia la visualidad de los libros, los mapas viejos y los pergaminos, característica en no poca pintura en años recientes, esa tendiente inclinación en unos casos hacia una melancolía de los efectos visuales y una nostalgia de la imagen de los objetos, así como en otros hacia visualidades en mundos desconocidos tales como la pintura medieval y la alquimia, pero en las pinturas de Virgil estas alusiones encuentran desarrollos peculiares. (8)  

  Como decía, algunas entre sus piezas están realizadas sobre papeles encontrados los cuales pueden ser literalmente encontrados o intencionalmente coleccionados como reliquias, papeles en los cuales se pueden ver caligrafías viejas con listas de nombres, cuentas y tablas de clasificaciones, superficies en mediano formato que, o bien habían sido dobladas repetidas veces hasta formar un pequeño cuadrado y luego habían sido abiertas quedando como resultado una superficie en la cual el cuadriculado es consecuencia de las huellas de haber sido guardado, o bien el artista mismo le imprime este resultado haciendo el mismo el trabajo de avejentar el material obteniendo el efecto deseado. Sus pinturas en tinta sobre papel conservan algo, o podríamos decir, el gesto más general resultante de las primeras manchas en tinta y pintura aguada, pero luego desde estas formas originales comienza a llevar las manchas hacia determinadas formas imaginativas que en unos casos pueden parecer figuras atávicas relacionadas a esos mundos evocados por el papel, y en otros casos pueden sugerir universos en la naturaleza tales como helechos, plantas, moluscos y en algunos casos, mediante aguadas, el cuerpo humano.  

  Las homologías entre formas naturales, bien sean estas vegetales terrestres o vegetales marítimas y formas humanas están sugeridas, pero resultan obvias; el mundo natural y el mundo humano aparecen aunados como si se fueran uno una forma al otro y desde el otro. No se trata ni de una mancha en la cual el artista deja que los resultados accidentales del pigmento queden tal como estos se dan sobre la superficie sin su intervención intencional, ni de una inducción tal de la mancha según la cual, las formas iniciales se modifican sin quedar indicios de sus primeras formas espontáneas, el artista más bien crea formas y figuras que se alejan algo de los resultados experimentales iniciales propios de la espontaneidad en el trabajo con las tintas y la pintura de agua pero no totalmente.  

  En sus pinturas hay una exaltación del infinito y del lenguaje de la naturaleza en el sentido en que un simple fragmento de la naturaleza puede ser un universo con un lenguaje infinitamente rico del cual hay mucho que aprender, sus pinturas parecen más bien pinturas heurísticas, es decir, movidas, en un sentido, por motivos de búsqueda encaminados al descubrimiento y la indagación de mundos y universos, ello desde un espíritu de aventura que sugiere en no pocas pinturas también un sentido lúdicro y hasta infantil de juego mientras, en otro sentido, hay una apertura al lenguaje de la naturaleza en el sentido de un "escuchar".  

  Conceptos tales como el de signo-indicial que nos remiten a una dimensión sugerida que no está presente en el signo mismo, su indicio de un gesto, su indicio de una determinada visualidad, pueden ser fructíferos para leer sus piezas. No es, sin embargo, como en el interés hacia la pintura infantil que se vuelca hacia los modos de pintar del niño, sus figuraciones y modos de crear formas --representación adulta de la iconografía infantil--, sino más bien un modo en que se mantiene vivo el niño que hay en el pintor adulto en el sentido de la curiosidad y la aventura por los mundos de la imaginación.  

  Presentando su obra plástica sobre todo en países nórdicos y Europa, así como habiendo realizado varios viajes a china, su taller como artista ha estado sobre todo en New York y en Houston donde las pinturas de Virgil han sido relacionadas a las de otros de su generación a quienes discutiré más adelante, tales como el crítico e historiador Thomas McEvilley, la abstraccionista informal Terrell James y artistas como Walter Hopps y Tracy Hicks, todos los cuales han tenido, en sentidos muy diferentes unos de los otros, un interés hacia Duchamp y Beuys.  Thomas McEvilley es profesor en el Departamento de Historia del Arte en Rice University, y autor de libros tales como Art and Otherness, durante años ha sido teórico de muestras y colecciones en el Museo Menil, así como presenta semestralmente sus conferencias en la Universidad de Rice, Walter Hopps como crítico de arte fue quien presentó en el Museo de Menil una muestra de Duchamp en la que enfocaba lo que en otro lugar he discutido como un Duchamp furniture, un Duchamp encartes, un Duchamp arte postal, un Duchamp filatélico, un Duchamp objetos de viaje; las distintas formas en que se han auratizado toda su serie de objetos, y Tracy Hicks que ha sido también un artista matérico suigeneris interesado en la naturaleza. 

  Los trabajos de Virgil son minuciosos, detallistas y delicados, pero esta delicadeza, esta finura de sus pinturas parece estar en función del tipo de atmósferas atávicas a que me refería antes más que en el sentido de otros pintores más interesados en visualidades nostálgicas o melancólicas los cuales hacen sus pinturas con la minuciosidad por ejemplo del retablista o el restaurador y quienes se fascinan también con el mundo y los valores de tales referencias. El concepto de lo atávico, por su referencia a lo intemporal, es un concepto que nos remite a un tiempo que puede ser lo mismo el carácter constante del tiempo físico del mundo, el tiempo universal constante de la naturaleza y de los ciclos de la vida, puede ser el tiempo presente en el transcurso de la vida cotidiana, la alusión a un tiempo inmemorial, el tiempo universal planetario, constelacional y global, un tiempo que no puede ser remitido a una época precisa, o que puede remitir a un tiempo de la antigüedad presente en nuestra actualidad a través de la vigencia del pensamiento de los filósofos antiguos en el pensamiento y la creación modernas.  

  El concepto de lo atávico puede, sin embargo, debido a su inmemorialidad, remitir también a un cierto hermetismo y un estoicismo que puede ser, por un lado, dado el carácter de tiempo inmutable, resistente a las transformaciones, mientras, por otro lado, puede remitir a un sentido del honor o la defensa de determinados valores que para los herméticos y estoicos pueden estar en peligro de extinción.  La permanencia y la constancia del tiempo físico universal no tiene que ser, sin embargo, relativa a un inmemorial pues la idea misma de lo llamado inmemorial refiere un interés de estos artistas en la universalidad de ese tiempo como la universalidad de un tiempo dado, la antigüedad, por ejemplo. No han sido pocos, sin embargo, los artistas que, en el sentido de la imaginación, se han interesado en lo inmemorial. Las pinturas de Virgil no aluden propiamente a un sentido inmemorial del tiempo, pero lo atávico de sus atmósferas a que aludía antes están en función de un todo atávico y hermético, se traduce en el tipo de ambivalencia que puede ser percibida cuando se tratan de ver sus manchas como figuras por analogías o sugerencias.  

  El grado de ambigüedad de un mensaje acerca la información a tantas múltiples e infinitas interpretaciones que se acerca a la entropía, un nivel que puede llegar a ser cero, es decir, lo mismo pueden aludir a esos mundos que tanto trabaja Spilber en sus películas infantiles, mundos en los que se descubr

e algo, un cofre escondido, barcos de viejos piratas que de pronto son universos para los niños, que pueden ser simplemente moluscos y helechos marítimos, que pueden ser inscripciones en viejos pergaminos, que pueden ser literales huellas de algún tinte sobre el papel avejentado, café, te u otras infusiones en base a plantas naturales, troncos de árboles transformados por efectos de lluvia y humedad, que pueden sugerir todo eso y, al mismo tiempo, cuando se lo mira detenidamente, no ser más ninguna de esas cosas que las otras y, por lo tanto, regresar al abstraccionismo puro que en un principio provocó la imaginación en los espectadores.  

  Virgil comparte, además, la experiencia de su pareja Debora Grotfeld quien desarrolla un espacio original y creativo para las bellas artes desde la recuperación de arquitectura tradicional entre las comunidades afroamericanas en la Ciudad de Houston. El mantener este equilibro exacto donde la abstracción sugerida puede serlo menos que una abstracción literal, pero tanto o mucho más que una abstracción literal por su ambigüedad de poder ser cualquier cosa y ninguna, puede tener varios sentidos. Por un lado, invita a los espectadores a un viaje imaginativo evocando poéticamente un universo tan amplio como amplias pueden ser posibles las experiencias de los múltiples espectadores cuando están contemplando sus pinturas, mientras, por otro lado, cuestiona la interpretación como especulación, es decir, tanto a ese espectador que quiere asignar sus significados culturales de una vez y por todas en torno a determinados símbolos y formas con sus prejuicios, clichés y estereotipos, como en general la tendencia de la interpretación a la fijación y la paranoia. 

  Ello pudiera remitir en este sentido a la rica problemática de la necesidad de la polisemia interpretativa tanto como de la crítica a la osificación y la fetichización de los sentidos que tempranamente Sussan Sontag esclarecía en su libro Contra la Interpretación, así como pudiera remitirnos más bien a la pintura de Virgil como una en la que el hermetismo no tiene una inclinación o sentido nihilista, sino más bien afirmativa de valores. La relación entre mancha abstracta y un vocabulario incomprensible, hizo pensar en la relación entre no poca pintura abstracta de la alta post-vanguardia y los llamados ideogramas o caligrafías japonesas y chinas en tanto estos siempre han evocado para nosotros como occidentales, un tipo de ideografía gestual cuyos sentidos semánticos y significados usualmente desconocemos, así como hizo pensar a otros en un cierto pictografismo.  

Abdel Hernandez San Juan 

Houston, Texas, United States,  

1999 

Cultural Bodies: Cristina Jadic (USA).

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan,

Houston, Texas, USA

Ethnographer and Cultural Theorist, Research Associate, 

Anthropology Department- Rice University

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

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

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

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

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

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

Texas, 1998

END.

Culture in Art from Texas (USA)

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, 

Houston, Texas, USA

Written and composed in English by abdel Hernández san Juan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nota

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

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

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

Bibliography

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

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

The Principles of informalism

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Houston, Texas, USA

   I am hearing someone naming Terrell James, speaking on her in a thirst person and my feeling is depth, Terrell James, Terrell James, it is like saying Mel chin, or Tracy hicks or Grotfeld, a regional, Texas local art which has being always a characteristic of usa art first strongly stablished in cultural regions and later moved through national or international scenarios,

   she is a subtly, delicated and refined woman, whose work communicates something of the soul of a cultural region, Houston-and Texas, she has explored a cultural informalism something unknown yet previously through informalism even in the united states, her work communicates cultural resonances of Texas land and the border culture, but from the individual person interior subjectivity perspective

   We have in Texas two artists with this mud. 

    Cristina Jadic, on the one side, looking to it through bilinguism, her mother and family customs, and Terrell James a unique artist too, an art teacher and editor, exploring the cultural memories not as much through figurative icons as in Christina images or the resonances of matter, but through the pure abstract focusing the organic relation between forms and habitat, forms and the body 

  she have something europeans too, her informalism remains something of the earlier usa informalist turn of the late fifties and sixties—Tombly, tombey, Klein, and something of the earlier european informal expressionism, Kandinsky, klee, however, exploring something new, not as much evolved in paying attention to the mere accidental of the chemistries and effects of pigments informal gestures on canvases –or the illusionism’s possible to be created within it, as Tombey did, nor even a microscopic attention to gestures as clues as Klein did, or like it was in usa sixties when the canvas was conceived as a surface interface to inscribe the clues of unpredictable spontaneity of color, forms and matter, not as much concerned with an idea of the order of cosmogony, religious ecstasies or mere attention to principles of abstract orders such as structures and geometries in earlier Mondrian, or the expression of interior dramas or existential states as it was in Kandinsky or Klee, it is instead another kind informalism more organic in the way it distribute the grammar and sintaxis of elements, forms, colour, tones, atmospheres, elements and backgrounds, etc, 

   Something remains me to be more near to Cezanne because of his attitude to the canvas, even when there is not like in Cezanne figurations not realistic representational images, we should remember that Cezanne was important to cubism when something to be discovered, synthetized and or analyzed while being abstract, Cezanne, for example, he painted the river water with the qualities of the sky or the trips consistency or perhaps he painted tries with the liquid qualities of water fluids exchanging subjects and predicaments, names and qualities, painting the river water as if impregnated by the consistency of tries was not yet regarded to put out or socialize interior expressionists states of the subject dramas, but yet to explore relations between subjectivity feelings and nature

   Something like this can be perceived in Terrell informalism while nor only in regard to nature but to the inmediacy of habitat both to the body as to the soul. This is on the other side, a kind of more philosophical meaning of informalism, in fact, if we really ask ourself on the deeper sense of informalism, its primary regards to human principles, we will note that, like expressionism was ultimately regarded to the basic principle of expressing since childhood, surrealism to imagination, and abstraction, cubism, minimalist and conceptualism, to analysis, synthesis or engineering logarithms, the primary regard of informalism is related alive environment, to life and to habitat. She has clarified and lighted that about in informalism and never before another artist. Why informalism should be here the question, how to answer the regards of informalism to main and basic human principles without confusing it with expressionism and abstractionism which are certainly apparently nears to the informal. Terrell James answered that question as never before

   Terrell work suggest to be or evoque something of the Cezanne attitude to the canvases like cubist painting was, that kind of equilibrium or balance, while at the same time she is not a cubist, but an informalist, there is not only an organic assumption of form, surface or colour by which I mean a relation between her informalism and the body on the one hand meaning with organic something effacing the boundaries between body and its environmental immediacies, habitat and related notions such as custom, habits, everyday rituals, surroundings, but also a very subtly and refined sense of the soul harmony in space and time. Her work should be perceived with details and proximity minuciocity, the form she applies the stein, the calm and composition of forms in the whole, the tones. 

   Her work is not dramatic or theatrical, all the opposite, it is diaphanous and honest

   She is however at the same time, something itself amazing, a field artist, her awareness to field studies and field issues even considered culturally can be defined as really unusual and unique, something explored not in the sense of things done out of the canvases, like for example in her labor as art editor or art teacher, but in her canvas, in the semantique and meanings of her atmospheres and universes. In this sense, she is always over.

The Paintings of Terrell James

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Houston, Texas

Para analizar la obra de Terrell James uno debe ubicarse a través de orientaciones que fueron generadas por el abstraccionismo. Algunas de las piezas de la artista sugieren formas y mundos que parecen recrear elementos de la naturaleza, lo orgánico y el mundo de la vida cotidiana, lo abstracto en sus obras no debe ser entendido en ningún sentido como aquel que se hacía abstracto por su contraposición a la representación con base en un modelo, sino como ese abstracto en el que, al igual que pasa con el signo acústico o el signo arquitectónico, el signo plástico encuentra su propia expresión potencial en elementos abstractos tales como la línea, el color, la superficie; campos atmosféricos. 

Entonces, aun a través de la semiótica del plano pictórico, la abstracción plástica en James se relaciona más con la noción de lo abstracto en música, poesía y literatura que con lo abstracto entendido en el sentido de algo más o menos realista por el modo en que refleja o no lo real. En este sentido, su trabajo debe ser entendido como una pintura generativa. Esto puede ser visto por la forma en que las líneas delinean formas melódicas y hacen alusiones indirectas a la caligrafía. De hecho, el proceso creativo en sí mismo en la obra de James envuelve la gramática. Sin moverse más allá de los límites de la metafísica del cuadro pictórico, sus pinturas sugieren aquel concepto de Benjamín de la unicidad de la obra de arte y se trata de pinturas que aluden más directamente a Twombly—en su relación con la música, la literatura y la vida de todos los días, pinturas que hablan de un continium de vida, la continuidad constante de la vida. En sus pinturas nosotros encontramos elementos tales como síntesis, acentuación, estilizaciones que relacionan sus obras con un impulso clásico por el modo de relacionar la figura con el fondo, la forma con el ambiente, algo que puede ser visto como un reinterpretación personal informalista del informalismo en la historia del arte. 

Sin embargo, debemos analizar las pinturas de James sobre tela comprendiendo el funcionamiento de la tela como un interfase, telas sobre las cuales ella ilícito un juego propio de la experimentación con pintura y los efectos de cambio del pigmento sobre la tela creando imágenes sutiles y evocativas. En este sentido lo que nosotros encontramos en sus pinturas son instancias en las cuales líneas, planos y colores funcionan como trazos del proceso creativo pero explorando armonía en el todo de las piezas, lo cual debe ser leído como un tipo de pintura orquestada que parece sobre la tela como suspendida en el tiempo. Estas capas de diferentes instancias en pigmento aclaran la forma gravitacional del modo como es trabajada la luz, algo que nos trae a una conciencia de la duración del tiempo en los términos en que Bergson´s se refirió al concepto de tiempo. 

Este tipo de movida en el abstraccionismo ha sido relacionada como una reacción contra el canon de la representación así como una reacción de la pintura contra el surgimiento de la fotografía. Sin, embargo, más pertinentemente, el abstraccionismo está relacionado con un impulso que hemos llamado en artes plásticas autoconciencia del arte. Incluso a través de la metafísica y la fenomenología del plano pictórico, nosotros podemos encontrar que abstraccionismo y conceptualismo se relacionan en varios momentos epistemológicos del concepto y de la abstracción. En sus pinturas en metal de 1996 la artista expuso el material a la erosión intencional para que recibiera los efectos de la luz natural así como a efectos artificiales haciendo su consistencia más rústica. Así, mientras la exploración de tales efectos son el resultado de sus preguntas personales, ello también le confiere a sus pinturas un nivel metatextual. Una dimensión de juego es visible en estas piezas las cuales nos remiten a un proceso creativo en el que la artista está aprendiendo con cada pieza, entendiendo cada pintura como un proceso de aprendizaje.

En sus pinturas “estudios de campo” de 1997 varias pinturas sobre papel fueron juntadas por la artista y reunidas como un sólo trabajo. Aquí la artista propuso diferentes perspectivas y puntos de vistas sobre un mismo proceso expresando la forma como se percibe la luz y el color, algo que la artista llamo notaciones de color. Estas piezas hacen eco a aspectos de otras entre sus pinturas pues en estas ella recicló elementos derivados y hasta residuos del proceso mismo de pintar en su estudio. Tomando estos elementos espontáneos y luego componiendo con ellos, la pieza derivó en formas inventivas de pintar nacidas de lo que había inicialmente obviado en su estudio. Por ejemplo, en sus pinturas llamadas Habitad de 1999, un número de monotipias de mediano formato no fueron expuestas a efectos ni naturales ni artificiales, así como tampoco hubo en ellas referencias a un contexto determinado sino más bien un arte que volvió el proceso de trabajo y la vida cotidiana en un tipo inscripción pictórica sobre las telas. 

Este tipo de características que trajo sus pinturas cercanas a la escritura, no se refieren a la caligrafía en sentido literal, pero se trata de obras que requieren un análisis gramatológico, para entender, por ejemplo, porqué, aunque no encontremos referencias directas a la naturaleza en forma representacional, se trata en realidad de obras que hablan de la naturaleza. Las exploración de Terrell James nos remiten a nosotros as ciertos aspectos de un espíritu de juego sobre el cual hablaba Humberto Eco cuando definió la “obra abierta”, un concepto que supone la idea de una obra de arte que está abierta a múltiples interpretaciones. Sin embargo, este carácter plurisémico y polisémico adquiere en sus pinturas una forma peculiar pues los niveles de significación y evocación se relacionan con el proceso más que con significados, algo que nos remite al hecho de que la anticipación del espectador a nivel experiencial en la creación misma de la pintura es central. 

Con esto dicho, nosotros debemos clarificar que no estamos hablando acerca de una artista cuyas obras son concebidas para ser vistas por primera vez en el espacio y tiempo en que son presentadas en el espacio de galería. Pero lo que es peculiar es como una vez que el espectador va a la galería y contempla sus pinturas en estas se han explorado niveles cenestésicos y de comunicación, ósea que en este caso el concepto de una obra abierta funciona en una manera similar a como funciona en la crítica literaria en el sentido de que las imágenes en las pinturas de James parecen relacionadas con determinadas narrativas personales y puntos de vista. Asuntos críticos relacionados a las relaciones entre imagen plástica y narrativa podrían ser pertinentes en un análisis de las pinturas de la artista si nosotros consideramos las relaciones sugestivas de sus abstracciones con la música y la poesía. 

Claro, podemos hablar de narrativas en sus pinturas únicamente en un sentido muy general, un sentido sintagmático, notaciones, puntos de vistas, etc., como momentos en los cuales elementos, formas y líneas se desarrollan en sus composiciones, así como por cierto carácter escritural de su modo de pintar sobre la tela. Aun cuando no hay escritura propiamente en las pinturas de James, ni referencias en forma de imágenes a la caligrafía o la escritura alfabética, su modo de pintar funciona fenomenológicamente como un tipo de pintura inscritural y escritural. Su trabajo es un tipo de prosa plástica que es como una plástica en prosa.  

 Art and the City

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

 Houston, Texas, USA

Abordar la ciudad desde el arte ha sido por mucho tiempo un deseo y un esfuerzo en recurrentes certamenes del arte contemporáneo. La ciudad como concepto vivencial y paisaje, --ha sido motivo de salones y bienales en las que deviene el tema convocado, Pinturas, dibujos, fotografías, esculturas, instalaciones ambientales y muestras, sorprenden por los modos diversos en que los artistas abordan “la ciudad”. Desde expresiones figurativas que la representan por sus zonas tipificables, tipos de edificios, de paisajes, aquellas que la abordan desde sus mapas, pinturas y dibujos gráficos de las calles, su norte, su este, su oeste, su sur, hasta aquellos que se refieren a la ciudad mediante abstracciones materiales, objetos encontrados, lajas, nombres de calles, la vivencia sensorial de la ciudad, ello, además de los proyectos para espacios públicos como son las esculturas en parques, hoteles y lugares de recreación, monumentarias o ambientales.

Pocos son, sin embargo, más allá de lo temático, los esfuerzos para pensar las relaciones entre “arte” y “ciudad” en un modo más rico. La Bienal Internacional de Fotografía Fotofest concebida y conducida por la crítico anglosajona Wendy Watries en Houston representa un ejemplo iniciador en este sentido. 

Más allá de asumirla como un tema—aunque en ocasiones también—se trata de un modo de asumir “la ciudad” en relación al concepto de “utopía”. Como espacio en sí mismo Fotofest aborda “la ciudad” deviniendo en ella un programa con su “circuito”. El concepto de “circuito” supone que, al recorrer la Bienal, los espectadores se desplazan en una forma en la que visitando muestras se adentran en la ciudad, espacios, galerías convencionales, edificios del Down Town, viejos espacios semiabandonados restaurados y recuperados para la muestra de “arte contemporáneo”, edificios provistos de una historia, pacillos, cafes como espacios de galerías, así como muestras en reconocidos y prestigiosos museos. 

La Bienal en sí misma supone “una mirada hacia la ciudad”, un concepto sobre las relaciones entre “arte y espectadores”, “arte y público” a la vez que contempla una mirada a “la ciudad desde el arte” y “al arte desde la ciudad”. Lo anterior tiene interesantes resultados. Durante el periodo de preparación, el trabajo urbano en Fotofest contempla no sólo a las instituciones del mundo del arte, también a la ciudad en general ampliando, por un lado, su universo de referencias mientras, por el otro, las formas mismas en que se generan y producen las bienales, áreas modernas, áreas históricas, áreas en restauración, áreas donde están los estudios de los artistas, opening houses, áreas de vivienda y, entre una cosa y la otra, la imagen promocional de “la Bienal en la Ciudad”; especialmente diseñada para el tránsito y la circulación urbanos. 

Muy bien organizada, el concepto de “diseño” ha sido central para su éxito, así como ha sido un formidable ejemplo de las “interacciones contemporáneas” entre “alto arte” y “formas presentacionales modulares”, “dinámicas”, “minimalistas” y relativamente “estandarizadas”, tales como las que se pueden utilizar en “ferias del libro”, por citar un caso, donde las distintas editoriales universitarias y de otro tipo presentan sus títulos y libros publicados. La “mirada clásica”, la “mirada contemplativa”, la “mirada investigativa”, la “mirada heurística”, la “mirada corporal”, la “mirada sensual y sensorial”, la “mirada elocuente y sintética”, la “mirada testimonial”, la “mirada nostálgica y melancólica”, la “mirada experimentalista”; todas ellas se han dado cita en Fotofest.

La mirada desde adentro del arte ha sido en este sentido única, pues propiciando un movimiento a la vez “inclusivo” y “extensivo”, “hacia adentro” y “hacia fuera”; “hacia adentro”-- desde “la percepción” y “la mirada”—trae al arte una ciudad sensorialmente vivida, mientras “hacia fuera”, hace extensivo hacia la ciudad en sus espacios objetivos, “miradas sensibles e intensificadoras” de percepción de “la ciudad” desde el arte. La fotografía se enriquece así de “la ciudad” en la creación de estéticas que reifican “material perceptivo y sensible” proveniente de la relación al espacio pre-semiótico en que están dadas las cosas en “la ciudad” misma, mientras “la ciudad” se enriquece de la fotografía recibiendo de esta un modo distinto y más intensificado de mirar, contraponiendo las representaciones rutinizadas y estereotipadas a esta. 

Pero no se trata simplemente –como fue entre los formalistas rusos—de familiarizarnos en nuevas formas con “percepciones extracotidianizadoras” que desfamiliarizan nuestras “percepciones rutinizadas”, sino de propiciar --hacia “la ciudad en la ciudad”--, posibilidades que actualizan el discurso sobre estas –desde las imágenes de “la ciudad vivida y experienciada”, hasta las “imágenes extrañadas” que suscitan un “extrañamiento crítico”. 

Si el concepto de “Fotografía” supone “géneros” variados que van desde los más atábicos como la “caja negra” y el principio de la luz, los lentes, los filtros, la creación de imágenes de laboratorio, las imágenes que sugieren lugares y espacios citadinos, el paso del tiempo físico y la memoria en estos, la fotografía de “la ciudad como paisaje”, “panorámas”, “la ciudad desde si misma”, “la ciudad hacia la naturaleza” o desde esta última hacia aquella, la “fotografía en interiores”, la trabajada en el computador, las nuevas técnicas de fotografía pictórica que han resultado de ello y las distintas formas en que está presente en la fotografía en la “instalación contemporánea”, las Bienales de Fotofest han presentado un basto acercamiento “en géneros” de “la fotografia hacia sí misma como arte”. 

Se ha llegado en muchos casos a cuestionar el carácter exógeno de una para la otra, “la fotografía y la ciudad”, enfocando sus inclusivismos. Dos años entre una bienal y otra no resulta muchas veces el tiempo suficiente, pero Fotofest “se retroalimenta” no sólo “desde adentro hacia fuera”—como por el efecto únicamente proposicional de sus organizadores, sino también en forma múltiple, “de afuera hacia adentro”, los “problemas conceptuales” a ser enfocados en cada Bienal provienen de las conclusiones que en la Bienal anterior se sucitaron en ambos sentidos, por lo que resultó del “viaje de la fotografía hacia sí misma”, según los problemas indagados, y por el resultado ante los espectadores?. 

Recientemente la cede de la Bienal se ha trasladado a un galpón renovado en Downtown. Este movimiento desde las grandes urbanizaciones acomodadas, Riveroaks, el circuito galerístico de Colquit, Richmont, Montrouse, el museístico de Rice University, el Museo de Ciencias Naturales y las urbanizaciones aledañas hacia el Downtown, desde las primeras ediciones hacia las últimas, tiene que ver no sólo con la revitalización del Downtown, que ha sido emprendida en la Ciudad de Houston en los últimos años --el estímulo a las actividades artísticas y el uso citadino del mismo--, sino también con esa “relación retroalimentadora” a la que me refería antes; se siguen, de hecho, presentando --y más que antes-- muestras en las galerías y museos, hasta en el Museo de Jung encuentra uno muestras de Fotofest durante el programa bianual de la Bienal. 

Indudablemente una de las bienales de fotografía más importantes del mundo gracias a su visión y probablemente “única en su género”, su interés y calidad se ha relacionado al de otros espacios de avanzada en el campo del arte hoy que se han caracterizado, en un sentido u otro, por indagar las relaciones entre “espacios convencionales” y “espacios no convencionales”, incluyendo artistas jóvenes anglo, anglosajones, europeos del oeste y del este, cubanos, africanos, asiaticos, una bienal abierta a la sorpresa y “la motivación heurística” hacia “el aprendizaje” resultante de la corroboración de las muestras. Varios artistas cubanos de calidad que viajan desde Ciudad Habana han presentado sus obras y a “la Fotografía Cubana” se han dedicado significativos esfuerzos. 

La noción de “circuito” resulta, obviamente, estrecha, pues no contempla los elementos de espontaneidad y azar que tienen que ver con el principio de “circulación” que caracteriza a grandes ciudades modernas como Houston; las probabilidades son de recibir en las galerías, tanto a un “espectador” que se guía por el programa, como a otros que acuden a este motivados inicialmente por alguna muestra ocasional. Tampoco esta noción contempla la orientación y relación comunitaria de Fotofest a nivel educativo, pero sugiere el hecho de que --mientras en un “espacio muy convencional” como las salas del museo--, tienes una muestra de fotografías de investigación sobre “espacios no convencionales” en la ciudad, en “espacios no convencionales, puedes tener una muestra sobre “espacios convencionales” de la ciudad.

“Circulando por las galerías” estas “recorriendo la ciudad” según Fotofest, mientras “recorriendo la ciudad” te encuentras que en esta hay una constante; está teniendo lugar Fotofest. El concepto de actualización puede ser relevante para analizar Fotofest. Se presenta una muestra de arte jóven en “género testimonial” que tiene una relación a “la experiencia” y una en “género documental” donde prevalecen la “metonimia” y la “metáfora”, mientras se inaugura una muestra retrospectiva de un fotógrafo en el cual tenemos una forma más tipificada en ambos géneros décadas antes, actualizando con ello los géneros y mostrando perspectivas nuevas. Se ofrece así una mirada en la que distintos géneros se hacen “contrapunto”, a la vez cuestionando estereotipos y reabriendo perspectivas. 

En un dibujo de 1995 en el que expresaba preocupantes intelectuales yo hablaba de una “estructura que se actualiza” indagando la idea de que, más allá de la ausencia de estructuras, o del fin de estas, la “actualización de una estructura” nos remite a un nivel de “plasticidad”, que bien se nos aviene en la era de la cibernética y la informática. 

El concepto de una “estructura que se actualiza” cuestiona la bipartición “sincronía” (simultáneidad)-“diacronia” (linealidad), según la cual, para hayar la “estructura” hay que tratar el “objeto de estudio” como si estuviera “disecado” o “sin vida”, fuera de la “praxis vital”, algo que dominó la imaginación del estructuralismo hasta Lacan y Bourdieu. En la “estructura que se actualiza” –el movimiento progresivo de Fotofest desde galpones de feria, hacia un sólo espacio galerísico y luego hacia toda la ciudad, la forma como se actualizan perspectivas sobre la ciudad desde el arte y del arte desde la ciudad, los modos en que se actualizan las narrativas sobre los géneros fotográficos, por mencionar tres ejemplos de lo que llamo estructuras que se actualizan—la “diacronía” no es ya aquello que le llega a la “sincronía”, sobrepujandola como a su imposible, porque en la “sincronía” según cortes que suponía aquel concepto de “estructura”, la “estructura” no podía actualizarse, la estructura estaba tan “simbólicamente muerta” como aquello que para estudiar debía darle muerte simbólica. 

No es aquella “estructura” que, como por un efecto podría sobrevenir desde su subyacencia hacia una condición otra. No es una “estructura” que se busca por debajo, hacia adentro en dirección a una “profundidad” o sobre la “superficie” en dirección a una “latencia”, sino una que “se actualiza en la actualidad del presente” que es su dinámica y su lugar de efectuación. Wendy Watries a hecho un valioso trabajo, su lectura de la fotografía a través de las muestras ha reunificado “sensibilidad” y “percepción”, “lo sensible” y “lo perceptivo”, “lo contemplativo” y “lo visual”, la imagen en su memoria. La contemplación como tal requiere tiempo para contemplar, es una actividad socegada, en la que lo contemplado es objeto de la contemplación tranquila, apacible, ella requiere la reunión del tiempo de los sentidos con el tiempo inerte del mundo físico, lo cual en ella acerca a su vez el “tiempo de la sensibilidad” y ese “tiempo inerte”. 

Por eso en la contemplación decimos que “lo perceptivo” se pone en función de “lo sensible”, una forma “inclusivo-extensiva” en la que la contemplación de la ciudad y la ciudad contemplada coinciden como en la “imágen fotográfica”. Ello diferencia la perceptividad del perceptivismo que ha derivado en mucho arte óptico de efectos. Dado que la fotografía es por excelencia un arte que necesita del “perceptivismo óptico”, no poca fotografía más interesada en sus tecnicismos, ha sido reticente a esta conjunción entre “lo sensible” y “lo perceptivo” que ha sido priorizada por Wendy más bien hacia una “fotografia de las miradas”, lo que en un ensayo hace muchos años llamaba “El Mirar de la Mirada” que se refiere no ya a “lo que mira” y “al que mira”, sino al mirar de esa mirada haciendo extensiva la mirada en lo sensible. 

El concepto de “contrapunto” que he mencionado en otro momento para referirme a formas de la crítica de arte y que proviene de la mùsica de Bach puede resultar eficáz y sugerente en este sentido; distintos acentos y matices que se contrastan y se relacionan, se diferencian y se complementan, se extrañan y se aprenden. Se presenta una muestra de arte jóven en “género testimonial” que tiene una relación a “la experiencia” y una en “género documental” donde prevalecen la “metonimia” y la “metáfora”, ampliando con ello más allá de la idea de que los géneros en sí se correspondan con tipos de imágenes y figuras retóricas a las que se han relacionado determinados estereotipos, mientras se inaugura una muestra retrospectiva de un fotógrafo en el cual tenemos una forma más tipificada en ambos géneros décadas antes. 

Se ofrece así una mirada en la que distintos géneros se hacen “contrapunto”, a la vez cuestionando estereotipos y reabriendo perspectivas. Mientras salía de las muestras que mencionaba, andaba con un libro de George Gadamer en la maleta, “Estética y Hermenéutica” que he leído varias veces porque me gusta y sabía –me lo recordaba incluso en ese momento--que leería ese libro siempre como un libro nuevo, y que libro bueno no es realmente uno que puede leerse siempre, una y otra vez con la misma vivacidad como un libro siempre nuevo?. Aunque entendiera en profundidad los problemas abstractos estos podían recobrar nuevas posibilidades.

Young Anglo Artists 

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

 Houston, Texas, USA

La galería y el museo de arte contemplan, para la presentación de muestras, espacios que tengan la suficiente neutralidad como para que las obras presentadas puedan ser mostradas por lo que son, paredes blancas que las ayudan a lucir, modos de iluminación que acentúan aspectos que ambientalmente se quieren enfatizar. Las paredes blancas y los modos de montaje e iluminación, no dejan de ser un elemento de lenguaje que participa en las lecturas que los espectadores hacen de las obras, las presentan. Del mismo modo que el “ready made” llamó la atención sobre el “nombrar arte” como momento “institucional del arte”, las paredes neutrales blancas e iluminadas por lámparas--, suponen modos en que la institución arte está presente en forma inclusiva en la institucionalización de los “modos de recepción y asignación de “significado” a los “objetos” y “obras” que allí se presentan. 

Las paredes y los códigos galerísticos mencionados, a fin de cuentas, no son del todo neutrales. Su ocasional neutralidad deriva en dependencia del tipo de “obras” y “significados” en función de los cuales esos “modos presentacionales” y de iluminación funcionan. La literatura sobre el concepto de “institución arte” no contempla las “axiologías” que explican los modos en que la “institución arte”, además de algo comprensible en su objetividad externa—tal institución, tal otra--, está presente --como “formas inclusivas”—, en las “formas retóricas” de “presentación” y “representación del arte”; modos en que la institución, de un modo parecido a cuando decimos que la lengua es una institución por el hecho de que es aprendida y hablada sujeta a cambios sólo, sin embargo, tras varias generaciones, la institución arte esta también inscrita como institución en las formas; cuando todavía no nos referimos a ella como una institución en sentido literal. Los modos de disponer los espacios para presentar las obras son ejemplos de la institución en la forma.

Toda retórica supone una práctica de lenguaje y, por lo tanto, no sólo lo que se quiere y desea expresar, sino también las formas en que los “modos de significar” vienen inscritas “formas retóricas” las cuales ellas mismas, tienden a “hablar por los sujetos” y “hacer hablar sus lenguajes”, a mueven sus lenguajes hacia modos de significación en los cuales no hablan el “sujeto individual”, “la persona” o “la intención expresional”, sino lo que esas formas “han hablado”, los modos en que “han sido habladas”, formas que tienden a “hablan por los sujetos”. 

Qué ocurre entonces cuando los artistas traen nuevas propuestas las cuales en sí mismas suponen formas de plantear el espacio con sus obras. Cuando digo que la galería de arte, el museo de arte o la sala de muestras, devienen objeto de atención para las obras que los artistas presentan, me refiero no a propuestas estéticas en las cuales ello deviene un contenido en las obras, una literalización mediante textos o un arte que se va a la calle, sino a los modos como las obras mismas se plantean estos asuntos. Si los espacios del mostrar el arte han devenido objeto de atención, ha sido precisamente en este sentido y ello a dado al traste una multiplicidad de nuevas formas artísticas, versátiles y renovadoras. 

Las muestras de artes plásticas presentadas por Kimberly Davenport en años recientes en la galería de la Universidad de Rice han ofrecido formas variadas y ricas de lo que he discutido antes. La galería de arte de la Universidad de Rice, un fabuloso espacio entre cuadrado y rectangular de aproximadamente 15 metros de ancho y un puntal que asciende a más de 7 metros, cuya entrada principal dibuja una de las imágenes frontales más hermosas de la Universidad de Rice en Houston, situada en el Sewall Hall entre el Edificio del Departamento de Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales y el Departamento de Historia del Arte en la Universidad, ha sido receptora de una serie de muestras que se encuentran entre las más originales e innovadoras de los últimos años en Estados Unidos. 

En los artistas presentados la galería como espacio deviene objeto de la búsqueda heurística en las obras. En este ímpetu varias muestras pueden entenderse como modalidades en que los artistas han asumido ese “espacio”, desde artistas que reinscriben transitoriamente el “espacio galerístico”, transformándolo con otro lenguaje superpuesto, hasta otros que hacen de sus obras experimentaciones para estimular un tipo otro de relación al espectador menos pasivo del usual. No faltan los que asumen el espacio en un modo convencional simplemente diseñando en este con lenguajes entre lo bidimensional y lo tridimensional o, como decía antes, proponiendo diseños desde el ordenador computarizado, obras en las que comprenden el espacio en sentido virtual, luego presentando sus diseños virtualizados en el espacio real. Las muestras presentadas se han caracterizado por propiciar las condiciones para que los artistas invitados presenten obras que asuman, no sólo el espacio de la galería, sino la galería como espacio, su principal reto.

En la muestra presentada por la artista anglo de Mahattan Phoebe Washburn True, False, and Slightly Better, Rice University Art Gallery, 24 January - 24 March 2003, ella creó un mundo o universo el cual los espectadores tenían que recorrer más allá de simplemente modificar las obras con sus cuerpos, adentrándose en un universo que invita a la curiosidad heurística, la idea de que el espectador tiene realmente algo que indagar si se mete por los recovecos de esta e incluso, como dice la artista, “subirse y caminar en los diferentes niveles de la obra”. La muestra consistió en una transformación casi total del espacio con cartones que la artista reúne en su taller y los pinta, deconstruyendo, de algún modo, las referencias neutrales a este e inscribiendo en su lugar, como muestra transitoria, una metáfora y una poética sobre el proceso creativo. Incluyó—como parte de la pieza, señalizaciones en las que iba indicando el proceso a la vez creativo y de montaje de la muestra, donde culminaba el trabajo de un día dejaba la marca, mientras donde dejaba el trabajo del próximo día dejaba otra marca; sucesivamente hasta que concluyo la pieza. 

La artista dirigió su obra al espectador explorando una forma inicialmente bidimensional desde las paredes hacia una forma tridimensional en el espacio. Una movida desde lo bidimensional hacia lo tridimensional, esta consistió en cubrir las paredes y el espacio con cartón, adhiriendo los cartones a la pared. La pieza se desarrolló como un discurso plástico por series de capaz superpuestas unas sobre las otras, dejando en cada una, reminiscencias de la anterior, como un número de niveles que funcionaban tanto a nivel matérico y textural –desde las paredes hacia el espacio y desde este hacia aquellas—como en el sentido de una forma tridimensional en el espacio—semánticamente aludiendo lo mismo a un “mundo ecológico” de acumulación de remanentes vuelto arte—material usualmente desechado—y recuperado como material prima para el arte, que un paisaje. 

En su caminar por la galería, el espectador podía encontrar momentos en los que esta forma acumulativa se extendía ante sí a la altura y por debajo de sus ojos como un paisaje de diversas capaz, mientras por momentos caminaba por debajo –como siendo su techo, otro techo de la galería--de esta gran forma, observando el sistema de andamios sobre los que estaba montada, andamios que en otras partes quedaban inscritos dentro de las grandes cantidades de cartón. Como una muestra montable y desmontable las fotografías de esta revisten un sentido que va más allá de la simple documentación deviniendo importantes. En estas, por momentos, podemos ver a la artista rodeada por el ambiente de la pieza durante el proceso en que la montaba, el cartón como un mundo alrededor suyo del mismo modo en que este está alrededor suyo en su estudio de artista; su medio ambiente de vida. En otros momentos el cartón deviene una capa densa de gestos e inscripciones del proceso de haber sido hecha como obra de arte; podemos ver a la artista subida sobre andamios o sobre el techo. 

I consider that “True, False and Slightly Better”—younger Anglo artist—is one of the more relevant piece of our time, a piece created by a younger Anglo artist which is a piece of conceptual and procesual art and which represent a powerful conceptual and emotional metaphor about the possibilities of conceptual art between the more younger generation inviting to reflection and ethically engaging the spectator in the here and now of the piece presentation. Un ejemplo muy distinto fue representado por la muestra del artista de California Stephen Hendee SuperThrive 20 January - 27 February 2000--quien literalmente cubrió pisos y techos en planchas plásticas transparentes entonadas en un verde claro iluminado entre la pared y el plástico, creando en el espacio formas irregulares iluminadas. Lo peculiar de esta pieza, que revestía una atmósfera más bien aparentemente fría por la simpleza de las formas, es que se desarrollaba esencialmente como un lenguaje adjunto a las paredes y el techo, más que como formas que formaran en si algún desarrollo hacia el espacio mismo, es decir, era la obra que más directamente creaba un universo nuevo en la galería, daba a la galería misma como espacio nuevos significados y sentidos. 

Mientras la obra de Phoebe parecía deconstruir la idea de obra cerrada a favor de sugerir nuevos sentidos y significados relacionados al proceso creativo— y mientras la muestra de Jesse Bercowetz y Matt, reinscribía transitoriamente el espacio galeristico según un tipo de relación a y con los elementos más propios del juego y los sentidos de la aventura, la muestra de Stephen Hendee parecía sugerir los sentidos y significados de la galería misma como espacio según otro tipo de espacios. En la muestra de Phoebe el proceso creativo mismo estaba vuelto lenguaje plástico de la obra en el espacio, las diferentes capaz de textura y materialidad, eran metáforas del tiempo y el espacio del proceso creativo, tiempo y espacio físico-literales usuales en la galería en la galería de arte, estaban --en su devenir una forma tangible, material y apaisada en el espacio--abordados en el sentido de ese tiempo y ese espacio propios del proceso creativo.

En la muestra de Stephen se sugerían muchas cosas. Lo mismo los efectos lumínicos de la ciudad en la noche, la sensación de plasticidad iluminada del espacio citadino trabajada en una forma abstracta y alusiva, que, por el efecto de un circuito abstracto-verde e internamente iluminado, podía sugerir esos espacios de juegos virtuales que juegan hoy los niños en sus computadoras, o en determinados espacios de entretenimiento donde todo parece provisto de una plasticidad otra más bien imaginativa. Según el artista la muestra se avenía a sus búsquedas sobre los problemas y paradojas que plantea la tecnología en un mundo globalizado, el hecho de que estas inciden en la evolución y el progreso, tanto como son tendientes a la deshumanización. 

Su crítica podría estar relacionada en su imaginación creadora con el hecho de que estos plásticos iluminados en verde los trabajó con una líneas negras que bien podrían sugerir en la forma de analogías imaginativas a diferentes cosas al mismo tiempo, el sistema circulatorio del cuerpo humano, los circuitos que son propios de las tecnologías computarizadas, el atary, el nintendo, una especie de universo de ciencia ficción, la forma de un árbol entre su tronco y su desarrollo, la forma de una hoja con su línea central y sus líneas varias, los causes de un rio o, simplemente, el propio sistema de iluminación que hacía posible la iluminación de la obra en la galería. Estas analogías imaginativas le sirven al artista para metaforizar la idea de las relaciones entre tecnología y ecología, así como ciertas alusiones a lo biológico que tal imaginación a supuesto en lo que fue la ideología de las ramas, una vieja concepción de las ciencias en las que estás, trayendo cuestiones provenientes de las ciencias exactas, imaginaron que las separaciones, especializaciones o disciplinas entre las ciencias se daban como por ramas. 

En otro sentido también la muestra presentada por Jesse Bercowetz y Matt The Re-creation of Fort Discomfort, significó la transformación casi total del espacio con materiales varios haciendo de este como si se trata de un espacio de habitad o taller de los artistas. Ellos representan distintas modalidades mediante las cuales los modos de abordar el espacio fueron también directa o indirectamente modos de asumir el espacio de la galería misma, borrando con un nuevo material las referencias físicas convencionales al espacio e inscribiendo como muestra transitoria un nuevo modo, bien fuera en términos del material, en términos funcionales o en términos del espacio como ambiente. Mientras la muestra de Phoebe, como la de muchos otros artistas, se podía ver desde afuera en su totalidad--, la pared frontal de la galería de la Universidad de Rice que da al hall del Sewal Hall es un gran cristal a todo lo ancho a través del cual se puede ver la galería completa y el modo como se ven en ella las muestras presentadas-- Jesse Bercowetz y Matt pintaron el cristal intencionalmente de negro dejando sólo unos pequeñas ranuras en cristal de modo de incidir en que desde la primera visual externa los espectadores se acerquen a la muestra en una actitud de curiosidad. Esta idea de un espectador curioso que es llamado a adentrarse en la obra más que a simplemente contemplarla se aviene a cierto ímpetu de aventura que se puede percibir en la obra de los artistas en su totalidad y el modo como los espectadores ya recorriéndola la viven y perciben. 

La obra estaba creada como una serie de mundos desconocidos parecidos a eso que se inventan los niños cuando se ponen entre ellos a crear casas y espacios de habitad con cualquier mueble u objeto que encuentran en sus casas. Con materiales como madera y papel maché, además de todos los tarecos que pudieron encontrar de esos que están a veces en los cuartos de desahogo de las casas, los artistas modificaron enteramente el espacio creando una suerte de nueva estructura creativa con elementos reales. El universo creado por los artistas, integrado por varios subespacios o mundos independientes unos de otros, podía ser percibido desde sus afueras o desde sus adentros, pues incluía espacios para que los espectadores se desplazaran, especie de entrecaminos o pasillos irregulares, y adentros a los cuales debían entrar. Así, por ejemplo, para accesar uno de los espacios estos tenían que subirse a una escalera y entrar a un lugar individualizado al que sólo pueden entrar espectador por espectador el cual semejaba en algo—hecho con cualquier material de la vida cotidiana—esos laboratorios científicos renacentistas en los que se creaban cosas nuevas. 

En otra parte los espectadores tenían que entrar encorvando sus cuerpos debido a la poca altura del entretecho para no encontrar otra cosa que un mundo internamente iluminado desde el cual por unas ranuras era posible mirar hacia el resto de la obra, un poco como pasa cuando los niños miran por un orificio algo que descubren. En este espacio los espectadores podían mirar a otros espectadores y a la obra. Los otros dos espacios que integraban la obra era uno, un hall techado construido a la manera en que generalmente son las galerías como un pasillo de paredes y techo, pero en el cual sobre sus propias paredes, los espacios donde usualmente van las obras eran pequeñas overturas en las cuales colocaron diapositivas de la obra misma tanto en el proceso en que la estaban haciendo como ya después de la obra terminada. El espacio final de la muestra era ya propiamente una galería blanca sobre cuyas paredes los artistas presentaron dibujos y pinturas sobre papel. 

Hecha con cualquier objeto de la vida cotidiana, desde botellas plásticas de agua desechadas y recuperadas como materias primas, hasta trozos de muebles rotos y estructurada como lenguaje en general a través de materiales varios donde primaban la madera, el papel mache y las estructuras montadas sobre listones de metal fino y madera, la obra en su conjunto tenía un aspecto que parecía como si el universo desarreglado propio de espacios residuales tales como los áticos y otros espacios donde se acumulan los muebles que no están en uso en la casa, hubieran sido transformados en arte desde una actitud creativa, ya decía, semejante a esa que vemos en los niños cuando jugando a las casitas transforman cualquier elemento, usan los sillones como casas, etc. La muestra era, en varios sentidos, una genealogía sobre el principio de juego a partir del cual determinadas invenciones pueden hacer coincidir elementos en un modo en el que parecen anacrónicos según la nueva función, y no su sentido usualmente entendido como surrealista. Los artistas realmente transformaron el espacio de la galería como si estuvieran en sus casas.

a problemática de lograr que la obra de artes plásticas estimule un tipo de recepción en los espectadores menos pasiva, ha sido un motivo para no pocas formas de la experimentación plástica durante mucho tiempo. Es algo, sin embargo, que ha tomado diferentes formas. En artes como la danza, el cine, el teatro, entre otras, la totalidad de la obra se forma de imágenes que aparecen y ya no están, imágenes que tienen que ser recordadas por el espectador en quien se forma una idea de totalidad que nunca está del todo presente ante su vista. En obras de artes plásticas como las antes discutidas, por el contrario, la pieza como tal está fija ante los ojos del espectador quien puede recorrer con su mirada y su cuerpo la misma forma detenida tantas veces como lo desea. 

La totalidad de estas obras de artes plásticas se aviene así, tanto en sentido físico como estético, a la naturaleza física de esta, su estar allí físicamente presente. De modo que es el tiempo del espectador –incluso en el caso de obras tridimensionales que requieren que esta las recorra a su alrededor--y no el tiempo de secuencia de las imágenes, el que define el tipo de recepción de la obra. Lo anterior es una verdad de lenguaje, pero diferencia los modos en que desde la plástica se ha explorado el asunto de estimular otro tipo de recepción en los espectadores, a diferencia de otras artes, como podemos ver en todas las obras discutidas. Mientras la crítica al espectador pasivo estuvo relacionada a un modo de ver el contemplativismo como una actitud consentidora ante imágenes muchas veces acríticas, determinadas formas de traer la obra bidimensional hacia el espacio estuvieron relacionadas con la idea de que los espectadores se relacionaran con la obra. La idea de que los espectadores se relacionan con la obra, sin embargo, tuvo diferentes desarrollos en las artes plásticas desde el origen de la vanguardia. 

No pocas veces, bien fuera en la forma de agregar movimiento a obras bidimensionales—como fue el caso en algunos artistas ópticos—o trayendo la obra hacia el espacio en una forma en que los cuerpos de los espectadores las activaran agregándoles movimiento, el concepto de participación del espectador no era tal, suponía más la conciencia conceptual de estar participando, pero no una relación más crítica con la obra. Este tocaba y era tocado por la obra, pero sabía que ello era más la idea de que el “espectador participa”, que una verdadera participación.

En una era en la que los discursos de generaciones anteriores, particulamente los que caracterizaron las movidas contraculturales de los sesenta en Europa y Estados Unidos, sus ideales de paz, amor, libertad y contra la guerra, han terminado por ser habladas por “retóricas” en las que ya no hablan sus sujetos, sino las formas en que tales discursos se han inscrito y han sido inscritos por formas retóricas que han hecho institución en las formas sin una conciencia crítica actualizada sobre ello, la conciencia crítica hacia la representación, hacia los géneros y las retóricas, el espíritu libre y el ímpetu a la vez deconstructivo, creador de nuevos significados, positivo y actualizado del arte de estos jóvenes, parece no únicamente iluminar los senderos éticos e imaginativos que las nuevas generaciones de artistas anglos representan, sino también mostrar las formas atrasadas de entender el mundo en el que vivimos, --formas muchas veces paradójicamente hoy reaccionarias-- en que han derivado sus modos confrontacionales

Another Polisemies

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Houston, Texas, USA

El arte anglo joven está viviendo—de acuerdo con visitas que hice a muestras, algún apogeo de proliferación con nuevos valores y talentos de creadores con sus propios lenguajes artisticos. En esta ocasión analizo piezas originales creadas por las jóvenes artistas anglos de New York, Manhattan, Phoebe Wasbum y Stephanie Martz. Cuando digo jóvenes artistas para referirme a Phoebe y Stephanie, estoy hablando sobre artistas quienes comenzaron sus carreras en los noventas con estudios finalizados recientes en la Universidad de New York –Phoebe—y el Instituto de Arte de California—presentando sus piezas más significativas entrado el nuevo siglo. En Marzo del 2003 Phoebe presentó su más grande instalación “True, False and Lightly Better” en la galería de la Universidad de Rice trabajando con caton reciclado como material para el alto arte, una pieza relevante debido al modo innovativo a través del cual la artista asumió el materiala artistico y la galeria como espacio. 

Ese mismo año Stephanie presentó una serie de relevantes dibujos y piezas tridimensionales en Glassel School of art. Ambas artistas han contribuido formas originales de relacionar lo bidimensional y lo tridimensional desde sus propias perspectivas, pero mienstras Phoebe viene desde la pintura hacia lo tridimensional pintando sobre un material reciclado que fue originalmente tridimensional, Stephanie viene desde el dibujo sobre papel hacia una forma tridimensional en madera. 

Como pintura bidimensional sobre una superficie de cartón, Phoebe, presenta en las paredes de la galeria una pintura en capas que van formando volumenes trimensionales. Phoebe deja hablar la inmediatez de la superficie enfatizando la materialidad y la textura sobre los planos, Stephanie trabaja con una linea sensible sobre el dibujo y dejando hablar lo bidimensional através de lo tridimensional. Viniendo desde lo bidimensional hacia el espacio, las formas de Phoebe sugieren para el espectador por ciertos momentos paisajes de material acumulado y, por ciertos momentos, un universo que invita al espectador a caminar y contemplar heuristicamente. a universe which invite the viewer to walk and contemplate within the piece heuristically. 

Su pieza sugiere una actitud como gesto emocional de una gran cantidad de material en la forma de una metáfora ecológica llamando la atenciñon sobre las relaciones entre su pieza y el espacio de la galería incluyendo explicitas referencias al proceso en que la pieza fue creada haciendo asentuaciones del proceso creativo en la vida cotidiana mediante pequeña banderitas como trazos que van quedando dia tras dia durante el proceso de crear la obra. Mienstras lo tridimensional en Phoebe sugiere una relación entre sus formas artisticas y la galería entendida como espacio, las formas tridimensionales de Stephanie three-dimensional consisten en pequeñas piezas sobre el piso a traves de las cuales el espectador puede caminar alrededor para ser vistas como objetos tridimensionales en el espacio. Ambas artistas crean piezas que puede ser tan instaladas como desintaladas. Las piezas de Stephanie mantienen una relación a lo bidimensional sin depender del espacio, sus obras tridimensionales perduran como artefactos tal como ellas son presentadas mientras que las piezas de Phoebe piece perduran como fotografía, algo que relaciona sus instalaciones con el performance. 

Una poetica de reminiscencias puede ser percibida en las piezas del Phoebe desde el momento en que ella deja a las formas hablar como un lenguaje de capaz que sugiere tiempo y proceso semanticamente. Plegar y desplegar una forma bidimensional parece ser, conceptualmente, la forma en que Stephanie trae al lenguaje sus objetos abordables en la medida en que estos son especies de ensamblajes de formas bidimensionales caladas. 

Teniendo en cuenta la sencillez y lacomplejiodad al mismo tiempo que caracteriza estas piezas, diferentes planos de alusión deviene sintetizados unos dentro de otros en un modo en el cual, sus piezas evocan el ciberespacio en alusón a un tipo de relación entre ética y cibernética, como una metáfora inspirada sobre nuestra actual sensibilidad hacia la relaciones entre lo sensible, etica, cibernética y ecología, más que ese tipo de minimalismo basado en alusiones logaritmicas a formas geometricas y la imaginación del esto más esto, un número de sillñas espontáneamente unidad unas con otras después de una conferencia?, una serie de simetricamente bien definida forma que sugiere un rombo?. Un rombo es una forma que sugiere una forma dinámica que cambia alrededor tan facilmente como raidamente uno puede mover la totalidad de su forma a traves de in simple movimiento en el eje central, algo que es usual en los niños cuando mueven estas formas romboides durante tiempos de festividades. Estas formas están, sin mebargo, en reposo. Estas formas están, sin embargo, en reposo, como si se hubieran colocado juntas después de una conferencia o de una fiesta de niños. 

Una tendencia similar a hacer inclusivo a traves de la abstracción alusiones multicapas a posibles formas e imagenes—el hecho de que las piezas aluden a diferentes posibilidades sin poder ser referida a una u otra de sus alusiones, parace ser una característica dominante también en las piezas abstractas de Phoebe. Sus instalaciones abstractas como también las piezas de Stephanie, puede sugerir un algo número de posibilidades, dejando abierta la obra para la experiencia del espectador y sin ser empobrecida por los reduccionismos, estereotipos y cliches del simbolismo. Mediante un perfecto balance entre lo bidimensional y lo tridimensional ambas artistas representan una movida original desde lo sensible hacia lo tangible, desde lo espiritual hacia lo físico, desde lo inmaterial hacia lo material, desde lo racional hacia lo natural, obteniendo como resultado algo que es más que pintura, más que dibujo, más que escultura, más que instalación, más que diseño, más que architectura, aunque pueda incluir aspectos que refieren a estas manifestaciones de la plástica. Sus obras indagan nuevas alternativas. 

Phoebe ha obtenido un tipo muy suigeneris de arte materico a traves de la relaciones entre cuerpo, textua, materialidad y voz, estos resultan para sus obras ambientales más presentes que en las de Stephanie, pues sus piezas son más que simplemente una forma en la galería. Tenemos con Wasbum una movida plástica desde lo abstracto hacia la semantica del material. Siendo una joven artista su obra “True, False and Slightly Better” es una de las más relevantes e importantes piezas de arte procesual y conceptual de nuestro tiempo, una obra que propone una experiencia ética para los espectadores. Como dice Phoebe “para mi el espectador tiene que de hecho venir a la pieza y estar todo el tiempo posible en ella para explorar e incluso ir hacia adentro y entrar en las formas y hasta subirse. Osea, que desde afuera los espectadores pueden ver esa gran cantidad de material crudo como una especie de estructura de una casa, pero cuando dedica más tiempo a la obra entonces comienza a recibir muchas más cosas de la obra, empieza a sentir otras posibilidades. Mientras más los espectadores interactúan con la obra, más cosas las obra sugiere. Quisiera que los espectadores entraran a la obra y caminar alrededor de ella para explorar, incluso que suban a la plataforma. El proceso creativo es lo más importante para mi en esta obra”.

Diferente en estilo a Phoebe, las piezas de Stephanie Martz una estética sutíl con base en una línea ductil cuyos itinerarios sobre el plano than the geometric minimalist approximation to doors, windows, walls and figures of houses, things she ussually use to represent in her drawings and images. Her drawings suggest something as the Deleuze reflexions on the soul as they are plastic explanations on the relations between the physical and the spiritual world, something expresed with the softness and plasticity of the lines. Beyond bricollage, pastiche, remedo and surcido her drawings and wood pieces, they seen to be more related with the natural dimension of the materials explored from the high plastic art, than as references to any kind of kraft expertise unnusual to the high arts. 

Bidimension and tridimension within her pieces seen to be assumed through the images by metonymic effects and forms seen to be related by their relations with the environment. Her piece on wood Porch Corner, in fact, can be mentioned; fragments of something which can be recognized as a porch but full created on wood and placed as a dialogal line within the gallery space suggesting the time and tempo of the porch’s, as they are ussually related with natural environments. Phoebe and Stephanie they are both art creators which seens to be inspirated artists and through their piece one can perceive the intrinsique relation between inspiration and creation as inclusive concepts.

In fact, the artist who really know inspiration is not only not a friend of one interpretation on his work --at least not a friend of a few interpretations, but of any interpretations as possible—some one who really know how important inspiration is to the good art criticism as to the good art creation. As any creation without inspiration, inspiration become impossible without creation, they are mutually necessary one to the other and mutually inclusive. When one say --I am inspired—one say-- I am creating—creative, and this is because a kind of silence appear between the moment of creating—generation—and the moment of been and becoming inspired--, but, inspiration and creation they are not the same; creation is what we make inspired, inspiration, what we need to create, creation; a tangible activity with a certain material—Phoebe--even if as such a material can be materic, textual, acoustic sound, geometrical forms, etc--,inspiration; something immaterial, and more than, one should say better, spiritual, as to be inspiration it shouldn’t be the immaterial of any material. To be inspired by a material –Phoebe--as by the immateriality of certain should be something possible, but inspiration itself is not originated in them and can’t be explained according to any material, any form of the incorporeal as the immaterial of a corporeal. 

Such immaterial of the material can’t work by itself according to the kind of moves and forms of relating that inspiration makes possible, can’t work according to the itineraries which makes the free travel and the free journey of inspiration, the spiritual form that characterize the free spirit of inspiration, what I would like to define as the inspirational-inspiritual, this is because one speak of inspiration as spiritual. On the one hand, if when one thinks on some inspired creation one think on something more than simply inspiration it is because in bringing something to form, creation has to work with a tangible material –Phoebe--. However, as long as one let creation remitted only to such side of the material without regarding the spirituality of inspiration, creation stopped becoming empty as only a productive activity. Seen as only a productive activity creation can’t comes from one form to another one, traveling, as should be in any creative activity, from the sensible to the visible—Stephanie--; the inspiritual impetus that creation received from inspiration. 

As can be perceived through their pieces creation is an inventive activity –Phoebe--which needs audacity, imagination and freedom of expression. Inspiration is a sensible, a state and a form of sensibility –Stephanie---. If there is inspiration, there is sensibility and by inspiration one should mean the creative form of the sensibility. As been a state of the spirit sensibility can’t create by itself, it is thanks to creations that one finally say “creations of the sensibility”, inspiration appears them withi both woman artists as the creative form of sensibility. Certainly, there is nothing to say such as to refer certain specific object as directly something created by sensibility, because sensibility doesn’t create itself, but as soon as one is inspired then one affirm—without feeling contradictions—“creations of the sensibility”. 

Creation refers to the activity of creating a world even before any reference to real worlds and to worlds of fantasy, because creation refers to the creation of worlds from the moment it create with language and signs, alphabetic signs, acoustic signs, musical forms, geometric forms, etc. There is no way to get the material form and even the immaterial of the material, to define inspiration by certain objects, but as soon as one is inspired—precisely because its spiritual form and quality-- inspiration bring us over the materials relating the sensible and the tangible of suh materials—Phoebe--, as the creative form of sensibility and as the sensible form of creativity. Inspiration is spiritual but as a form of her creative spirit, it is not the spirit itself in any form because the spirit doesn’t have in any form the inspirational form. 

When one say I am inspired one say that one feel to relate words, sounds and things in a form that as soon as we feel to relate such way, a new light of clarification and intensification of our perceptions let us to perceived such in new forms and senses, something should them provide us with a new stimuli of inspirations and creativity. One can experience something similar when listening to a piece of music, contemplating a square of painting and feeling himself inspirited by any other motive, a visit to nature, a relation of love, if there is inspiration, as in creation, we experience unique modes of visitations, sui géneris –Both, Phoebe and Stephanie--. 

In creation –as can be seen within the piece of both artists--takes place a unique mode of relating forms, sounds, words, images, suggesting fragments of experiences by modes in which such things, sound and worlds were not related as they were. A creation should be, of course, a linguistic activity, but from creation artists makes forms of visitations in a form that only takes place in creation—that’s because one say about creation as the absolutely singular, the sui generic and the reason because I has sustained on any creation as utópic. They are more than simply a relation from a position which is exterior to the things to be related. One can get inspired with certain things as they already are, as Klee use to say, there can also be art in relating things as they are, as they already comes to us from reality, but inspiration and creation doesn’t originate and doesn’t depend in them

 The gaze resilience: a duple archaeology

By Abdel Hernández San Juan

Conceived, componed and translated to english by Abdel hernandez San juan

   Light is in nature, this is out of doubt, but light forth participates in our sense of presence, something must thus be presence to us only when light is there, whence, while light is nature, it also participates in the phenomenological assure which made us have a certitude of ourselves, with our subjectivity under it. 

  A river, is a natural phenomenon out of us but as soon as a river made presence to us through light according to our gaze, we can’t simply set aside as easy our subjective impression evolved through our gaze from the pregiven nature of it.

  Remembering that according to barthes, the gaze and the soul grow and born together –the soul born exactly when we must say that the gaze is already formed in the child--, the gaze is not a passive perception of the pregiven neither simply an objective reflection of nature.

  Like in the relation between our subjective sense of presence—which can’t be reduced to simple how light made presence possible to us, between our gaze and the pregiven nature of the objects of perception, we have the formation of something new

   However, such a something new can’t be comply in itself or acceded by simply exteriorizing perception and its objects as we receive it in a mere physical sense, only through the repetition a sign means to us, through the formation of a language from which we exteriorize our gaze as a sign of the gaze in front of us, we are available to perceive to what points something new takes shapes in between us and that which we see.

  To see is not the same than to see seen, we can see of course, another person, for example, far to us seen, a river for example, but in that form we can’t comply his gaze, we can’t simply take his or her eye and set it upon our body, his gaze will ever pertain or belong to another body eyes, to comply his gaze –even to comply our own gaze beyond the mere distinction between the eye and the object, we need to see it exteriorized in a language, we need to see seen while not from outside as a body eye, but acceding the interiority of the gaze which seen.

   It leads us to a language of the internal states of the subject, his, her or our gaze, nothing must thus be considered as internal to subjectivity than the gaze, but by seen the gaze exteriorized in a language in which the gaze is a sign of the gaze, we perceive that to see a river, to look at it is not the same than to see the signs of a gaze seen it, what was external to us a few minutes ago, seen another seen the river, pass by to be internal according to an exteriorized in language sign of the gaze.

  The Cristina Jadick gaze allow us here the internal image of her own gaze exteriorized through a sign of the gaze. The external become internal and in reverse, the internal external.

   This is to me what "into resilience", the recent exhibit of cristina Jadick, shows us in between the gaze, subjectivity and both our internal and external sensibilities on the river, ---to us as singles in subjectivity or to us as plural in the city of Houston.

   That which a minutes ago was external, to see another body seen –without to comply its internal sense of the gaze--or to feel the apperception of seen the river from own body eye without assuring on it, might now be an exteriorized image of the internal gaze and its soul the gaze evolve

 Distributed on a language surface -the beautifull and suggestives photography’s and mix medias of Cristina "into relisience"--we comply a plenty sense of an internalized river to subjectivity, hence language seen as an individuated processing by which we perceive the river now through the internal sign of a gaze, we perceived thus to see the seen. 

   Therefore, from the moment it usually conservate, detonates or better well correlates aspects of the identity of the pregiven to us, --differently to paintings or drawings—photography must thus be a privilege field to discuss this matter, since on the one hand the photographic sign show to us exteriorized as language, the sign of our gaze or our gaze exteriorized as a subject of visual enunciation to a viewer, while on the another hands, it never lost or lack the clues or indicial codes of something pregiven from which the impressions of the gaze source. 

   Let then just define this as a correlate.

   Moreover, the relation between perception and the object of perception is from my point of view often disatended in all its possibilities under contemporary art criticism usually regarded to mere ocular or optical regards.

   To me one of the more interesting results of cristina mix media installations and photography’s installations must be indeed entailed to this original, rich way she have attained to provide images around this matter. 

   What I consider curious about her more recent exhibit "Into resilience", it is precisely how her exhibit is avoiding her usual ways to explore the paradoxes evoqued above, here she is helping us to distinguish in a more well defined form what she have usually mixed under her former exhibits, perception and the object of perception.

   Why is she doing that?. An exhibit of photography’s from which perception and its object are no longer exactly the same.

   Must we sustain a certain resilience between perception and the object in natural terms?. 

  Is this exhibit devoted to shows and explore the natural principles of a certain mixing of perception and its objects?.

   The idea of resilience suggest a certain natural argue since as recognized within the several photography’s and landscapes integrates the show, resilience must be find in nature itself something she explores and accent by interposing all the time the resilience’s of the river natural elements.

  At "Into resilience", more than any time before, the elements in play, perception on the one hand and its objects on the other, seems to be more aside than often in her art, thus, besides, not necessarily as a way to renounce or exit her usual semantical conjunction of both things at a language surface of sense, sensibility and meanings in which perception and the object often appeared as one and the same thing.

   I have argued before on her exhibits the exploration of a kind of philigrane between light and textures creating something similar to what I have defined as liminality.

  Better well she invites us to accent this time on the distinction itself as it helps to clarify how the elements in play –here mostly the land art elements of her art--must be understanded as originally entailed.

  Often the mixing of installation, povera and land art creates a profusion of elements from which the land art elements often linked to spatiality and more precisely to natural spatiality tends to be lost and lack, from this perspective, I consider "Into resilience", as an exhibit by which recalling the distinction perception/the object, we must have a sense too of the need of spatiality to lands art and its importance regarding the subject in question to this exhibit, the bayou river. 

  What we have here thus must be recognized as an archaeology of the usually misregarded relation between lands art, natural spatiality and landscapes, while not as much to maintain it aside, but besides to be distinguished in between, both, perception and the spatiality of nature and the gaze and its landscapes, exploring how this original entailing of land art and landscapes spatiality must be increase and enlarged semantically to research relations between subjectivity, nature and culture.

  It allow us to know how land art should be considered as a pivotal element of her art not as much this time loosed and or lacked under povera and installation elements, but revoqued, recalled and explored from mix media landscapes, photo print making and photography’s.

  In fact, as much as we have this time pieces letting distinguished the gaze and the river landscapes as much as we also have ways through which the collected matter finded in the river transform the canvas itself or the surface of the frame into  metonyms of the river surfaces. The river matters, fund objects entrace to the canvas or bidimensional surface collected and weaved over it.

  While this is also, paradoxically, a metonym of its own showcasing as signs of her gazing, that semiological inventory of a sense of the "I was there" of all this collected material as inventories of things collected from the river on the canvas surface now in reversal, not only the relisience of the river weaving the canvas but the relisiense of the gaze weaving the river in subjectivity.

   The ambiguity to choice and or to accent one thing over the another, looks to be –according to the exhibit as a whole—intentional, more or less considered as a metonyms of the river surfaces or instead of the art painting showcasing of the river motives inventories, it leads us to a duple simultaneous archaeology.

  It is at the same time both things: a negation of the art piece as an external observer, or as a mere archaeological collector of inventory evidences to instead recodify the frame conventions with the trope of resilience’s arriving from the river natural weaves toward the effacing’s between perception –the piece—and its objects--and in reverse it is also a negation of the object as an exteriorized denoted or pre-given fact to instead let work the tropes of resilience now in reverse arriving from the gaze soul and proving to our image of the river a sense of it through subjectivity and the sensoritality of our bodies to which the river made sense.  

  The accent on spatiality by the way is far to be absent or new within cristina art, on the one hand, even when we are speaking here on spatiality regarding the river, the sites of reality objects to perception evoqued by the landscapes, spatiality as a matter of language defines semantically the main ways she have explored installation art ever while on the other considered as an external issue beyond the spaces of installative language she have being in recent years included at exhibits focusing on it such as for example the exhibit "Places" and she herself seems to be usually attentive to it if we pay attention for example to her choices of exhibits such as "on sites" at her facebook.

   Now, besides the richness that made specific "Into resilience" we must add the comments of its comparative nature so that as much as comparably to another cristina exhibits "into relisience" appears as a seldom one by how the eye and its objects appears as distinguished but it is however yet as ever in her art an issue often disseminated. 

  In a few words, even at "into relisience", an exhibit defined by asking to what point the mixings must indeed be finded in nature, the relation between the gaze –perception, the eyes, etc, and the pregiven in nature motive, topic, issue, theme, etc, is yet mixed, shifted, blowred, disseminated, explored according to its resonances to and through subjectivity and sensibility more than afforded as something objectibly exterior to the internal feelings and multisensorialities of sensibility.

   Thus therefore, what we should really point here as pivotal must be this, that as much as we know that perception and its objects are asides, separated, distinct things as much as we ask to ourselves why instead are we usually endowing it and or seizing it as if an integrated dimension under one and the same thing.

  The answer to this paradoxical question not as easy to be solve is on the side of sense and meaningful, we integrate it because it made sense to us, because it is meaningful to us. 

  So the river as a landscape must be exteriorized as pregiven to us in nature, but we can’t as easy be observers from such a pregiven when we feel the river in our sensibility and when the river made sense through our subjectivity a sense of ourselves and of our city. This is to me what the exhibit is telling US.

   Our sensibility, the soul of our gaze and the river are weaved into a relisience that coming from the river nature explaings the same principles order the relisience of our gaze

   Reality itself in fact phenomenologically speaking complexion to our senses in a similar way, we know that something made presence to us in forms, we know that we have an impression of it as external to our palpable sensoriality—a data of our senses, but we instead tend to integrate what we know is aside, perception and its objects since this objects means and made sense to us so that we can’t as easy set aside the physical optical from the sensible, if the gaze and the soul grow together since childhood, something increase, extend, transform and disseminate perception into sensibility. 

  Liminality explains that.

  Recovering the spalitiaty of both lands art and the objects, we must point out that again like in her usual ways to afford natural issues---the gulf coast and beaches under previous exhibits or simply her constant allusion and inclusions of natural matters such as tries, earth, etc, the way she have afforded the bayou river must be seen as a continuation of her usual research on environmental issues conceptually seen as a research on subjectivity and culture.

  Certainly we have here more than ever before some pieces we may regard even as landscapes in which the river is out there represented, but we also have on the other hand an exploration of the river to subjectivity according to how it might be considered culturally to sensibility and the soul. 

  To those as me, who know by experience the importance of this river in the city –I even was living a few meters from the bayou several years—the river means a lot more than just a natural landscape to a passive gaze, it is as well entailed with our soul of the city and subjectibly weaved into many things

  her exhibit thus can’t be comply without this dimension of the river to subjectivity

  she even remember the issue of human adaptation when natural disasters ocurred somewhen ago so that from near photography’s of the water, of the sky and of the tries, to photography’s of human furniture’s fragmented and or juxtaposed as intimacy memories, the exhibit conjunction  a constant allusion to the relation between a kind of relisience that must be find as something arises and source from nature itself into a relisience to which we need both to adequate and or mix, fusion or add perception and the object –the gaze with its soul beyond just an optical perceptual apparatus—as to be adaptive ourselves to the challenges nature often mean to us.

  In fact, cristina, according to a series of exhibits I experienced the opportunity not only to see in person but to know since the process through which she was conceiving and composing it from her studio, might be defined as the artist who in a more unusual and original way is being developing works around this matter

  Considered from three of her exhibits I know, she have research a kind of effacing or shifting, blowing of the boundaries between perception and the object attempting and attaining a density of matter semantique memory though which the distinction between perceiving and the perceived, perception and the object is mostly relativized toward a surface of sensoritality and sensibility in which semantically perception and the object looks to fusion one into the another.

  It is ever at Cristina works as if something from the object were added and or distributed or disseminated as one in itself with the surface of perception

  This idea of surface of perception must be however clarify here as to attain a better elucidation of the issue in question back to our former considerations around the signs of the gaze. 

  In fact, we must identify the mere optical between an active perceptual observation with the eyes of an external, so to speak, pregiven object  of perception, an ordinary object we can see pregiven as a natural landscapes, a case in which we are representing the pure relation between both things our eye gaze and the object of it, from how perception beyond the physical optical, must be recognized outside us at the level of signs and icons, or at the level of a matter which distributed as a language outside us, as the language surface of a work of art, replace our mere optical perception by signs of it, 

  certainly, it is not the same distinguishing perceiving with our physical eyes than recognizing by clues and or by language visual icons in a work of art perception as a subject of the visual language enunciation, when we see a photography and distinguish the photographer gaze from the object photographed, everything is not already perception and object, but signs of it under a language symbolization, we can’t see the photographer and its objects, but the signs of the gaze with its clues of an omised subject we may infer from how the scene is being distinguished at the photo level, 

  we can say that we are an eye of our body objects, but at the level of an art piece language our body perception is no longer there, instead, a sign replace both the gaze and its objects, substituting it by clues of the as if, certainly, perception and its object appears at the art language level as a subject of a visual discourse and is transformed as such into a semantical code of the visual signs, besides, it is not already perception, but communication and meaning including the ways to mean the gaze itself now considered as a symbolic dimension of the piece

  In this specific sense we need to identify at the art language, an installation using fund object, fund material, textures, light, photography as under her earlier exhibit the sound of silence, or an exhibit mainly defined by photography’s and landscapes as her more recent one into resilience how the relation have evolutioned to be developed and research by cristina 

  and in doing so I think that a turn from the liminal or liminality to into resilience works in her exhibit as a return to a more distinguished distinction between the elements in play, now perception and its object defined as pregiven natural landscapes, are remarkable

  Back to the point during several of her installations we might recognize a conjunction through which usually gave as form of language at the piece level the signs of perceiving collected as inferences from the piece language level, a photography of the sensoriality, sound and effects of waves, the texture of the found objects and the sands layering the light, perception and the object seems to occupy a same dimension in a surface as if integrated one into the other. 

  This integration, usual in her installations, as discussed above, when we well know that objectibly, perception and the object are two separated things, must be understanded as a matter of sense. If we integrate it as one and the same thing the organ of perception and its perceived object beyond its aside nature, its is because we make sense of that objects or to be more clear, because such object are full of sense to us, its is in a few words according to sense and meaningfulness that we use to integrate both thing one into the another

   Liminality entrance here to explain why perception beyond be identified as just an optical operation must thus be indeed comprehended as something that increase and enlarge sensibility, as soon as the sensibly and the sublime participate through sense and meaningfulness into the signs of perception, the mere physical is turned into a semantical category, from such a moment, at the level of language perception and the object appears a weaves as philigraned, as tamizes of filtered and layered as mutually defined dimensions.

  Most of the amazing installations, mix media, collages and juxtapositions often under cristina Jadick art becomes unique and originals precisely according to how this issue have become a major dimension of her art. I would even say that we can’t comply semantically a plenty understanding of her art without this discussion, a dense surface of cumulated natural matters semantique memory in many of cristina installations must be regarded to this issue about which "Into resilience’s" brings a renewed light.

 La Resiliencia de la mirada: una arqueología duple

Por Abdel Hernández San Juan

   La luz es naturaleza, ello parece fuera de dudas, pero la luz también participa en nuestro sentido de la presencia, algo debe así hacer presencia ante nosotros solo cuando la luz esta allí, por lo tanto, aunque la luz es naturaleza, ella también participa en nuestra certitud fenomenológica que nos hace cerciorarnos de nosotros mismos, con nuestra subjetividad envuelta en ello.

   Un rio es un fenómeno natural afuera de nosotros pero tan pronto como un rio hace presencia para nosotros a través de la luz según nuestra mirada nosotros no podemos tan fácilmente poner a un lado nuestras impresiones subjetivas envueltas en nuestra mirada de la naturaleza predada de ello.

    Recordando a Barthes, la mirada y el alma nacen juntas, el alma nace exactamente cuando nosotros podemos decir que la mirada está formada en él bebe, la mirada no es una percepción pasiva de algo predado tampoco un simple reflejo objetivo de la naturaleza.

   Igual que ocurre entre nuestro sentido subjetivo de la presencia que no podemos reducirlo solo a como la luz hace la presencia posible para nosotros, entre nuestra mirada y los objetos predados a nuestra percepción en la naturaleza, tenemos la formación de algo nuevo.

   Sin embargo, ese algo nuevo no puede ser accedido en sí mismo exteriorizando nuestra percepción de los objetos de esa percepción según nosotros recibimos ello en un sentido meramente físico u óptico, sólo a través de la repetición que un signo implica para nosotros, a través de la formación de un lenguaje nosotros exteriorizamos nuestra mirada y la vemos como un signo de la mirada frente a nosotros, solo así estamos listos para percibir hasta qué punto algo nuevo adquiere forma entre nosotros y lo que vemos.

  Ver no es lo mismo que ver viendo, nosotros podemos ver por supuesto, a otra persona, por ejemplo, lejos de nosotros viendo, un rio por ejemplo, pero en esa forma nosotros no podemos acceder su mirada, nosotros no podemos simplemente ponernos su ojo en nuestro cuerpo, su mirada siempre pertenecerá al ojo de otro cuerpo, para acceder su mirada, incluso para acceder nuestra propia mirada más allá de una mera distinción entre el ojo y sus objetos, nosotros necesitamos exteriorizar ello en un lenguaje, necesitamos ver el ver o ver lo que ve el ver, pero no desde un afuera como un cuerpo ojo, sino accediendo a la interioridad de esa mirada que ve.

   Ello nos conduce a nosotros al lenguaje como un estado interno del sujeto, a su o a nuestra mirada, nada debe entonces ser considerado más interior para la subjetividad que la mirada

   Viendo la mirada exteriorizada en un lenguaje en el cual la mirada es un signo de la mirada, nosotros percibimos que ver un rio, mirarlo, no es lo mismo que ver el signo de una mirada viendo ello, lo que unos minutos antes fue exterior, ver a otro viendo un rio, paso a ser interno de acuerdo con una exteriorización que vuelve signo la mirada en el lenguaje.

   Para mi uno de los resultados más interesantes de las instalaciones y fotografías de Cristina Jadick debe ser verdaderamente vinculado al modo en que ella ha logrado proveer a las imágenes alrededor de este asunto en una forma original y rica.  

   Lo que yo considero curioso acerca de su exposición más reciente “Ïnto resiliense” es precisamente que su exposición elude su propio modo más usual de explorar las paradojas evocadas antes, aquí ella nos ayuda a nosotros a distinguir en un modo más definido lo que usualmente ella mezcla en sus exposiciones previas, la percepción y el objeto de la percepción, porque esta ella haciéndolo?, una exposición de fotografías desde la cual la percepción y sus objetos no son exactamente lo mismo?.

   Debemos nosotros sostener entre la percepción y sus objetos una resiliencia natural?.

   Está esta exposición consagrada a mostrarnos y a explorar el principio natural de una cierta mezcla entre la percepción y sus objetos?.

   Más sobre lo mismo, la relación entre la percepción y los objetos de la percepción ha sido desde mi punto de vista usualmente desatendida en todas sus posibilidades por la crítica de arte contemporáneo remitida a un mero asunto ocular y óptico.

   Para mi uno de los resultados más interesantes de las instalaciones en técnicas mixtas, las instalaciones fotográficas y las fotografías de Cristina debe ser vinculado a la atención que ella ha dado a ello.

   Su idea de resiliencia sugiere de hecho un cierto argumento natural desde que reconocido a través de las varias fotografías y paisajes que integran la muestra, la resiliencia puede ser hallada y encontrada en la naturaleza en si misma algo que ella explora y acentúa interponiendo todo el tiempo la resiliencia de los elementos naturales del rio.

  En “into resilience”, más que en ninguna otra de sus muestras anteriores, los elementos en juego, la percepción por un lado y sus objetos, por el otro, parecen estar puestas a un lado más que usualmente en su arte, entonces, además, no necesariamente como una forma de renunciar o salir de su usual conjugación semántica de ambas cosas en las superficies del lenguaje y sus sentidos, relaciones entre sensibilidad y sentidos en que la percepción y sus objetos han sido usualmente tratados por Cristina Jadick como una y la misma cosa.

  Yo he argumentado antes sobre las muestras de Cristina Jadick su exploración de un tipo de filigrana entre la luz y las texturas creando algo similar a lo que he llamado liminalidad. Mejor aún ella nos invita a nosotros a acentuar esta vez la distinción entre percepción y objeto en la medida en que ello nos ayuda a clarificar como los elementos en juego, aquí sobre todo los elementos de arte tierra en su obra, deben ser comprendidos como originalmente vinculados. 

   De hecho, usualmente la mezcla de instalación, arte povera y land art crea una profusión de elementos a través de lo cual los aspectos del land art usualmente vinculados con la espacialidad y más precisamente con las espacialidades naturales, tienden a perderse, desde esta perspectiva yo considero “into resilience” como una exposición a través de la cual rellamando la distinción entre percepción y objeto, nosotros podemos tener un sentido también de la necesidad de espacialidad en el land art y su importancia respecto al tema en cuestión de esta exposición, el rio bayou.

   Lo que nosotros tenemos aquí con esta muestra “Into resilience” debe ser entonces reconocido como una arqueología de la relación entre land art, espacialidades naturales y paisaje usualmente desatendida, pero no tanto para mantener separados percepción y objeto, sino para distinguirlos entre sí, ambas cosas, la percepción y la espacialidad de la naturaleza por un lado, y la mirada y sus paisajes por el otro, explorando como esta originaria conexión entre arte tierra y espacialidades del paisaje debe ser extendida y enriquecida en sus posibilidades semánticamente para investigar relaciones entre subjetividad, naturaleza y cultura.

     Ello nos permite a nosotros conocer como el land art debe ser considerado un elemento principal en su arte no tanto esta vez perdido bajo los elementos de arte povera e instalación, sino revocado, rellamado y explorado desde las técnicas mixtas del paisaje, el fotograbado y la fotografía.

   De hecho, tanto como nosotros tenemos esta vez piezas que dejan distinguir la mirada y los paisajes del rio tanto como al mismo tiempo también tenemos caminos a través de los cuales la materia encontrada en el rio es colectada transformando la tela o la bidimensionalidad de las superficies de la obra en metonimias de las superficies del rio. La materia del rio, objetos encontrados, etc, entra a la tela o a la superficie bidimensional de la obra colectada, tejiéndose sobre esta.

   Al mismo tiempo esto es paradójicamente también una metonimia de la propia especie de vitrina en que deviene la obra como signos de su mirada, ese inventario semiológico de un “yo estuve allí” en el rio de donde proviene todo ese material colectado, todo este inventario de elementos colectados en la superficie del cuadro ahora visto en reverso, es decir, no sólo como la resiliencia del rio tejiendo la tela, sino también la resiliencia de la mirada tejiendo el rio en la subjetividad.

    La ambigüedad de escoger y o de acentuar una cosa sobre la otra parece ser, si miramos hacia la muestra como un todo, intencional, más o menos consideradas como una metonimia de las superficies del rio o en vez de la obra de arte vitrinizando los motivos del rio inventariados, la muestra en ambas variantes nos remite a una arqueología simultánea, a una duplicidad. 

  La muestra es al mismo tiempo ambas cosas, por un lado es una negación del observador externo entendido como un mero recolector de evidencias arqueológicas inventariadas, para en cambio recodificar las convenciones del marco con el tropo de la resiliencia arribando desde los tejidos naturales del rio hacia la difuminación de la percepción y sus objetos, y al mismo tiempo, la muestra es también una negación del objeto como algo exteriorizado o denotado, como algo simplemente predado para en cambio dejar trabajar el tropo de la resiliencia pero esta vez en reverso, es decir, arribando desde la mirada y su alma y proveyéndole a nuestra imagen del rio un sentido de ello a través de la subjetividad y la sensorialidad de nuestro cuerpo para el cual el rio hace sentido.

   El acento en la espacialidad está lejos de ser algo ausente o nuevo en el arte de Cristina Jadick, por un lado, incluso aunque hablamos aquí de espacialidad en referencia al rio, los sitios de la realidad que son objetos de nuestra percepción evocados por sus paisajes, la espacialidad como un asunto de lenguaje define semánticamente las formas principales en que Cristina ha explorado la instalación desde siempre, pero por otro lado, considerado como algo externo más allá de las espacialidades de la instalación, ella ha sido en años recientes incluida en exposiciones enfocadas en ello tales como por ejemplo “lugares” y ella usualmente es atenta al tema como también se ve en su Facebook respecto a la muestra “on sites”.

   Ahora, además de la riqueza que hace especifica “into resilience” nosotros debemos agregar comentarios comparativos sobre su naturaleza desde el momento en que tan pronto comparamos esta muestra con otras de Cristina esta aparece como raramente acentuada en torno a la distinción entre el ojo y los objetos de su percepción, sin embargo, aun en esta muestra, ello es diseminado aun como es lo usual a sus obras.

   En pocas palabras, incluso en esta muestra, una exposición definida por preguntar hasta qué punto la mezcla entre la percepción y sus objetos puede ser verdaderamente encontrada en la naturaleza?, --la relación entre la mirada, la percepción, y lo predado a ella--, ello esta aun mezclado, difuminado y diseminado, es decir, explorado de acuerdo a sus resonancias en la subjetividad y la sensibilidad más que abordado como algo exterior u objetivo extraño al sentir interno de la sensibilidad y la multisensorialidad.

   Entonces, por lo tanto, lo que nosotros debemos realmente apuntar aquí como principal debe ser esto, que tan pronto como nosotros conocemos que la percepción y sus objetos son cosas separadas, distintas, tan pronto como al mismo tiempo nos preguntamos porqué nosotros en cambio las integramos?, porqué usualmente nosotros dotamos a los objetos y tenemos un sentido del asirlos como si estuvieran integrados a la percepción como una misma dimensión. Y la respuesta a esta pregunta paradójica no es fácil de ser resuelta, pero se haya del lado de los sentidos y los significados, nosotros integramos la percepción y sus objetos porque estos últimos son significativos para nosotros, ellos nos hacen sentido. 

    De este modo aunque el rio como paisaje puede ser exteriorizado como algo predado a nosotros en la naturaleza, nosotros no podemos tan fácilmente ser observadores cuando sentimos el rio en nuestra sensibilidad y cuando este último nos hace sentido en nuestra subjetividad envolviendo el sentido de nosotros mismos y de nuestra ciudad. Esto es para mí lo que la muestra de Cristina Jadick nos está diciendo. Nuestra sensibilidad, nuestra alma y nuestra mirada están tejidos en una resiliencia que viniendo desde la naturaleza misma del rio explica al mismo tiempo el principio de la resiliencia de nuestra mirada. 

   La realidad ella misma de hecho fenomenológicamente cristaliza para nuestros sentidos de un modo muy similar. 

   Nosotros sabemos que algo hace presencia ante nosotros en las formas, sabemos que tenemos una impresión de ello externa palpable en nuestra sensorialidad, como un data de nuestros sentidos, pero nosotros en vez tendemos a integrar lo que sabemos está separado, la percepción y sus objetos, desde el momento en que estos objetos son significativos para nosotros, desde que nos hacen sentido no podemos tan fácilmente ponerlos a un lado como algo separado de nuestras percepciones, no podemos tratarlos meramente como algo óptico u ocular, no podemos separar lo óptico de lo sensible, si la mirada y el alma nacen juntas desde la niñez algo hace crecer, extiende y transforma, disemina nuestras percepciones en nuestra sensibilidad.  

  La liminalidad explica esto

  Recuperando la espacialidad de ambas cosas el land art y los objetos nosotros debemos puntualizar de nuevo que es la forma en que cristina Jadick usualmente aborda los elementos naturales por ejemplo el mar y las playas en sus muestras previas o simplemente su constante alusión e inclusión de materias naturales tales como troncos de árboles, tierra, etc, materias y objetos encontrados en la naturaleza en varias de sus muestra, el camino a través del cual Cristina ha abordado el bayou river en esta muestra es entonces una continuación de su usual investigación ambiental sobre asuntos que conceptualmente son sobre subjetividad y cultura.

  Ciertamente, nosotros tenemos con esta muestra más que antes algunas piezas que puede ser remitidas incluso como paisajes en los que el rio esta allá afuera representado, pero nosotros también sabemos que es una exploración del rio en la subjetividad de acuerdo a como ello puede ser considerado culturalmente por nuestra sensibilidad y nuestra alma.

  Para esos que conocemos la importancia de este rio, yo de hecho viví varios años a solo unos metros del mismo, el rio significa mucho más que sólo un paisaje natural para una mirada pasiva, él es también vinculado con nuestra alma de la ciudad y esta subjetivamente tejido a ello, su exposición no puede ser entonces accedida y comprendida sin esta dimensión del rio para la subjetividad, ella recuerda de hecho la adaptación humana ante desastres naturales que ocurrieron tiempo atrás de modo que a través de fotografías cercanas del agua, del cielo y los árboles o de muebles y utensilios domésticos  fragmentados o yuxtapuestos como memorias intimas la exposición conjuga una constante alusión a una relación entre la resiliencia que puede ser hallada como algo que nace y es causado por la naturaleza en una resiliencia a través de la cual nosotros nos adecuamos o mezclamos, fusionamos o adherimos la percepción y sus objetos, es la mirada con su alma más allá de un mero aparato óptico a modo de ser adaptativos a los retos que la naturaleza usualmente nos significa.

  De hecho, Cristina a través de una serie de exposiciónes que tuve la oportunidad de experienciar en persona desde que las concibió en su studio puede ser definida como la artista quien en un modo más usual y original está desarrollando obras alrededor de esto.

   Considerándolo desde tres de sus exposiciones previas ella ha explorado un tipo de difuminacion de los bordes entre la percepción y sus objetos ensayando y logrando una densidad semántica de memoria de la materia a través de la cual usualmente la distinción entre la percepción y lo percibido es relativizada hacia una superficie de sensorialidad y sensibilidad que semánticamente une la percepción y sus objetos como si se unificaran uno en el otro.

  Hay algo en el arte de cristina que es como si los objetos estuvieran adheridos a la superficie de la percepción o diseminados en ella, esta idea de una superficie de la percepción debe ser sin embargo discutida a modo de lograr una elucidación en torno al signo de la mirada en su obra.

  Revisitando de nuevo algunas de sus exposiciones previas veíamos el uso de objetos encontrados, texturas y luz junto a la fotografía como por ejemplo en su muestra “el sonido del silencio” y ello nos conduce a pensar que ha explorado con esta muestra una movida que va de la liminalidad característica en aquella muestra y otros suyas hacia la resiliencia, ahora la percepción y sus objetos son más visibles, pero en muchas de sus instalaciones nosotros podemos reconocer como usualmente ella colecta los signos de la mirada y la percepción a través de inferencias dadas por la conjunción entre sensorialidad y sensibilidad, el sonido y los efectos visuales de las olas, la textura de los sacos que filtran la luz, las capas de la luz a través de la textura de materiales hallados o que denotan lo natural, la arena, etc, todo ello tejido en un modo en el que semánticamente percepción y objeto están unidos como en una superficie de memoria semántica, la integración de ambas cosas usual en sus instalaciones está relacionada a lo dicho antes, integramos la percepción y sus objetos porque estos nos hacen sentido y pasan a formar parte en nuestra sensibilidad, lo sensorial y lo sensible, la mirada y el alma están unidas, el mundo de la naturaleza aparece así según la subjetividad y es comprendido culturalmente.

  La liminalidad entra aquí para explicar porque la percepción se mueve más allá de lo óptico perceptivo y se disemina en lo sensible algo que debe ser comprendido verdaderamente como una extensión tan pronto como lo sensible y lo sublime participan a través de los sentidos y de lo que nos resulta significativo.  

  Esta muestra explora la dimensión natural de ello mostrándolo en la resiliencia misma de la naturaleza, la resiliencia de los elementos del rio y la resiliencia de la mirada. 

   Muchas de las impresionantes instalaciones de Cristina Jadick, sus técnicas mixtas, collages y yuxtaposiciones devienen únicas y originales precisamente por el modo como este asunto central es explorado en ellas, yo incluso diría que nosotros no podríamos comprender plenamente su arte sin comprender este asunto, una superficie densa de materia acumulada como una memoria semántica caracteriza sus obras y debe ser remitido aquí como crucial, algo respecto a lo cual “into resilience” nos trae una luz renovada.

Non-Siting the Site: A Summer home

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Havana

Written and composed in English 

by Abdel Hernandez San Juan

  Brian Deutzman a young Anglo-American filmmaker from New York has recently finished his short movie A Summer Home. The film itself is one of the best films I has seen in many years. 

  It suggests certain relations between how the eye worked in the aesthetic of surrealism earlier films and Posmodern figures explored, however, in a form that seems to move beyond such figures, even when probably still some very subtle almost evanescent echoes or clues of remedos, pastiches and parodies may be perceived yet behind, it is not only less than usually in Posmodern works but almost diluted inside a more spiritual and metaphysical artistic whole that suggest to be a previous form to a concept he is actually exploring in his current new film, that one of metafiction.

  In A Summer Home the concept of metafiction is not as focused yet, but the way Brian explored the relation between site and non-site suggest an ambivalent effacing play between fiction and nonfiction grow up from a question about what is it a site and what is it a non-site from the moment a real place basis the film but non-sites it through all the film toward imagination and evocations of the film around. The film itself was made possible thank to a grant Brian winner discussed to be performed and based around an specific site, a real hotel somewhere in Florida Brian choiced to do it. 

  The preminence of the concept and spatial dimension of a site in the basis of a work of art research, major to define the current so-called site specific art installation in plastic and visual art, may be here probably related with a certain motivation to efface boundaries, both aesthetics and visuals, but also institutionals, between film and plastic art through a sense of the visual arts in general, usually institutionally divided. However, beyond such an effacing wishes, the way Brian has explored this relation between site and non-site around his choiced site-hotel contribute a point of view on the matter only possible from a filmmaker perspective. 

  A few of the things I discussed with Brian as soon as seen his film may be developed here. One of these things regarded the experience of the viewer with a film as A Summer Home in terms of physical memory, on how to remember and reconstruct the scenes of a film as such when frame by frame there is not a linear drama mimesis experience as in narrative fictional films in a level the body may look for or call out inside experience to reconstruct it part by part or by analogies?. My accent on this physical concept of memory directly regarded how a viewer, who usually have to memorize from a present one frame a previous already out of presence one, may memorize a previous unpresent from a present frame in a film as such. 

  In contrast I pointed how in plastic arts the viewer can tour the whole canvas with all the elements simultaneously presence and presents to the eye in a same surface or space presence all the time. Another of these things I discussed in a first critique conversation start from the point his films basis in anticipation a site specific located place as the reason and basis to it, even to get the grant choosing here a hotel, and on how from the moment a choiced site prestaablish the work to be done he was obviously in front of questions and under the challenges of deciding about how to represent such a site as a matter, the site itself and his relation as filmmaker to it. 

  Given that obviously Brian decided to commit himself with moving outside any purposiveness for representing it, but instead, to explore other possibilities, the question on such alternatives possibilities comes to the front. I pointed on how the challenge to make references to a site specific reality is being an equal one to art as to anthropology from the moment beyond just meeting or knowing it, something about it should be or need to be also communicated, reference, denoted, described, storytelling, narrated, registered through reproduction medias as photography or film, documented, reported or simply represented in any of the symbolic forms a languages, a writing or any other medias, supposes to inscribe the experience it means as a site. 

  On a first side, to contrast this challenge, in plastic arts the idea of site specific installation presents in the following form: while certainly any art exhibit space sited may be seen as a site specific from the moment it supposes to be placed any were, only when the work of art in question transform such a site in the motive, object, basis and reason of the piece contents issuing it as a site, we can properly speaks about generically a site specific installation. 

 In a few words a conventional exhibit of framed canvases, volume sculptures or even spatially installed objects maybe called site specific but in a form metaphorical because only when the site become the object of the exhibit contents it is generically a site specific installation. Now, certainly to make it happen and speaks the artist has to deal with how to reference the site in any of the forms previously explained, on how to references site located issues and experiences, from a gallery room, or some institutionally recognized exhibit space, to any outside or inside architectural, urban, community or natural readymade space usually not recognized to exhibit but an artist may choice and design to it.

  In fact, since lands art this issue itself become complex because it evolved nor only an exhibit or a work related from reasons, motives and contents with an specific located site space, but also the moving and transportation of it between several well differentiated and usually far sites, so ending to become referenced, performed, presented, transported and documented, a multisited one experience. 

 From moving something happening in nature to the art museum through documentary material to moving things evolved to be community sited to an audience context and to another audience context of the exhibits displays documentary materials to be a multisited issue complex phenomena itself.

 To end this critique after seen his film I suggested to him to think about the concept of memory now considered in terms of the body memories, on how the body itself which experienced it as a located placed maybe a first vehicle to collect things from a site specific instead of reflecting it so considered by the body as experience. However, it seems to be obvious how Brian choiced all his ways the opposite to represent and decided instead to evoque something that’s starts to move effacing the boundaries between site and non-site. 

  Speaking on the issue I pointed Brian argued to be interested about memory front the inside of the art work, meaning his point of view from his creative process, on how memory works inside his own experience as filmmaker to conceive and do his work.

  He also mentions how dreams he experienced during the months he stablished living in the hotel, helps him to solution relations between the textual and the visual level arguing that sometimes a dream may suggest a solution to relate aspects of reason and intuition when a directional method can’t provide a response and explained to be nor only interested but truly motivated and attentive as a dimension of his explorations on the relation between film and psychoanalysis. 

  The conversation then developed around this two aspects of memory, the physical one, I pointed, regarding the viewer, and the creative one he pointed on his attention to the building process. The film as a whole is visually and poetically beautiful from the first scene to the last one with as general prevalent effect the impression of the eye in surrealism films environments and images. 

  It communicates a sense of harmony, with a very good photography frames by frame from the beginning to the end. A significant level of experimentalism with atmospheric and environmental music is also obvious and work along the movie structurally, and the cellular phones electronically effects the sound of a voice of the main character young woman Karin and her mom usually ear in off. The conversation between both stay the whole movie as the only main narrative and dramaturgic textual level of the film. 

  It starts from the very first image of the film as a conversation between both taking place at the same time when the film run but in off so with sometimes an effect of tape recording late hear and sometimes an effect of real time happening. 

  The relation between this text level and the visual frames one is not a didactic, anecdotic or directional one, the image some time run free while the text free too out of frame, but the general conversation provide all the film need to stablish common sense readings and it maintain certain order of chronology with the frames. 

  In a synthesis whole the young girl is being curious to visit a hotel she knows by family references, but she has never visited. She then realizes to finally visit that hotel. 

  The film begins with a first image in front of the hotel and with a first question of the young girl to her mom through the cellular phone.

  Are they bombing here too?, she ask?

  No, bombing is bad to tourism, in America they dismantle everything brick by brick and no one notice.

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

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

  The conversation stay running all the film, sometimes it reference very objective things, sometimes its frees in a form letting open that evoques without knowing if it happens as an effect of the film director sound editions, or as a dimension of the communication this two persons have in between. 

  The common sense conversation of the film takes places and decurse around the site which supposes to be builded by her grandfather something reinforced in the movie with two sequences images one about a shopping show case exhibiting the architectural draws of the hotel in the same hotel, external drawings and photos of it.

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

  But also with a series of photography’s exhibited at one of the hotel halls about a day a country club of the hotel was created. The site and non-site relation with the hotel Brian choiced as a place in Florida stay through all the film as a dimension to be visually explored. 

  In several of the scenes, additionally to a few inside living rooms scene of the girl alone, the viewer may have a certain objective image of the hotel according to which the hotel looks to be under rebuilding, a presentation of the site become experimental itself through the movie including various images. 

 A first nearly external façade one already discussed shows a door from outside with an inside lovy full of bricks suggesting to be a corrosive and or under construction site something confirmed late in the movie when such a place lobby repit now with an small cart man moving construction materials. 

 A second one general external image seen from the streets shows a whole building under construction in an street area undersigned to side walkers and cars. Finally, there is also the hotel halls image, the living rooms scenes and a landscape view seen through a hotel internal window that shows the girl main character far away in the sea coast so suggesting to be a hotel near to a beach.

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

  The subjective position of the camera through the film is a major point here to be discussed, it resolves around as a free independent eye showing everything the hotel sites, halls, rooms, places, windows, landscapes and the girl main character scenes, but it is far to be just or simply a panoramic objective point of view showing a reality. 

 From the visual point of view the camera eye seems to move also looking for something else or to be a part in the main character curiosity between the know and the unknow relates her situation visiting something she knows from the family and her grandfather builded.

  An image scene I consider one of the best if not the best one scene of the movie references the hotel surround construction situation when the woman character stay strait long time creating a symbolic body metaphor. In such an scene she is in front of a background natural landscapes with all her face extremely turned up looking to the sky for long time and in the background between the sky and her, the viewer may see an imponent image of several cranes, while her mom voice in off say something like a poetry:

Sky Machinery of the Death

The spirit of the damnes

They congregate in places like this

Let them to be in peace

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

Distant points of Light......

Who’s Awake this night?......

Buzzing far lights …………

Is shelling to begin? or are just the stars?........OR …….

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

A few scenes before Karin mom cell voice said: 

Karin, Karin

Did you hear me?

Is everything Ok?

I need to give you instructions, 

We have to pick up the pieces

  With such a mom phrase the film transition from Karin objective situation to Karin extremely subjective situation (accent with a near image of her face in a film dissolvenses with sounds), moving from her room to such a long static first subjective state and body position. 

 The three main internal rooms hotel images shows Karin in three different forms. 

 The first one shows the moment when she first time entrance to her hotel living room after walking from the hall with her handsbacks and open the door to be surprised when she see the television on with an screen visual and a sound effect but with nothing to be washed. 

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

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

Karin: Shady Place, Shady people, Karin expresses.

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

Karin: But is not alive, said Karin, 

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

Karin: Not a soul in this place

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

Dear granddaughter, 

Karin grandfather voice entrance in off

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

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

Grandfather voice: 

You has come to late, 

This place now just a memory

Just a picture laid flat without perspective

I tried to build something here but found the land was follow and cursed

I too had come too late, 

you looked at me and saw yourself reflected 

Notes

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

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

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

Bibliography

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

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

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

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Written and composed in English 

by Abdel Hernandez San Juan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

Bibliography

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

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

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

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

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Written and composed in English 

by Abdel Hernandez San Juan

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

  Let develop how can we theorize and discuss this. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

Bibliography

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

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

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

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

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Written and composed in English 

by Abdel Hernandez San Juan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

   Notas

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

A Sense of Communion: Cindy Sherman

©By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Theoretician, Ethnographer and art critic

Free Lance

 Written, conceived, composed in English 

by Abdel Hernandez San Juan 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

Bibliography

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

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

 General Bibliography

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

Eco umberto, la estructura ausente, lumen

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

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

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, 1998- Cultural Bodies. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, published catalogue, english, translated by Cristina jadick, Sicardi Gallery, Houston, Texas, USA

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, 1998- Bodies Echoes. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, published catalogue, Sicardi Gallery, english, translated by Lourdes, Houston, Texas, USA

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

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

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, 1999- Bodies Maps. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, published catalogue, english, translated by Lourdes, Sicardi Gallery, Houston, Texas, USA

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

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

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

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

Todorov Tzvetan, Simbolismo e interpretación Todorov, monte avila editores

Todorov Tzvetan. "Los géneros del discurso" (Waldhuter editores, 2012) 

Todorov Tzvetan. Teorías del símbolo, monteavila editores

Todorov.Tzvetan Géneros del Discurso, Gedisa

Todorov Tzvetan. Critica de la Crítica, Editorial Paidós

Tyler Stephen A, context of discourse, semantique analysis, A POINT OF ORDER, Pp 133-135, Rice University studies, 1973-1974, USA 

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