English

The re-inscription of culture

Reconfigurations of culture, art and identity in complex societies

By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Contents

Visual corpus

The footprint as pentagramal architecture of the cosmos

How to be ecological in art

contemporary virgins

Vaniz in memory

The non-Scenography

The image as a literary correlate

The art and the city

The Space of Subjectivity

Terrell James Paintings

Parodies and ironies of postmodern artdeco

Visual isotopies, spectator and culture

Young Anglo Artists

Other Polysemies

The tropes of space

Symbolic barter

Cultural dimensions

The synegdotal impulse

The object as a sign

About interrupted linearity

The informed croche: culture through the points of the seminar

Meaning and diversity

The voice of ceramics: the meaning that becomes

Interfaces

Tellurides

Visual Corpus

©By Abdel Hernández San Juan

Houston, Texas, USA

    At the end of the nineties, diverse wok presented one of the best exhibitions of the decade in Houston, young women artists from New York with volumetric works alluding to an idea and notion of the body that I propose to address in this essay, discussing it in that exhibition at the same time. that extending it to other artists in the United States and from the United States internationally.

In my own terms, this exhibition collected and at the same time made explicit in more elaborate ways, if you will, an issue that I had been discussing in different texts where I tried to analyze an idea of ​​a body that moves beyond the literal body and its representation, where There are no even indirect references to the concrete visuality of the body and yet they presuppose aspectualized readings of the body through semantic relations of meaning through materials and forms that allude to affective resonances of the body in everyday life such as space. domestic through emotional home furniture elements, types of fabrics, inflatable elements such as functional furniture and beach balls, pieces that, like inflatables, are kept in space according to a principle of balance that may well be functional.

  I refer, for example, in my texts on the subject to cultural Bodies where I discuss allusions to traditions and family inheritances of women such as weaving referring to the cultural through the affective nature of certain materials, bodies, maps about Juan Lecuona where it is about bodies formed by the costumes in allusion to fashions and gestures of societies or in a more psychological sense to bodies echoed in the faces of Daniel García.

  The exhibition in diverse work, however, as I said, takes this issue to a more elaborate level, subtleting and refining semantic scope that extends to a more pop dimension that encompasses the domestic in a more mundane sense as well as issues related to the relationship between the affectivity of the domestic space and consumption. Here the notion of body, both in my three texts referring to American and Argentine artists, although it is also perceptible in my discussion of the Chilean Arturo Duclos, is extended beyond its usual uses relative to the body understood anatomically to explore semantic dimensions. that envelop the universe of the body sensorially but that extend towards an idea of ​​cultural or social corpus that these visual forms enact, these are species of forms that are symbolized embodiments of styles, customs, gestures, customs through which it is possible map common places in society

  Starting from this concept of corpus that are like embodiments between bodies and coupures, I propose to extend its possibilities beyond those ways in which its exploration is made more explicit due to the axiological scope that this concept contains to approximate cultural and social dimensions through semantics. of artistic media.

The work, for example, of the Colombian Doris Salcedo articulates a peculiar visual discourse on memory where affective memory and physical memory are combined around usually domestic objects such as shop windows, shelves, chests of drawers, and other types of furniture that seem bathed in sunlight. patina of time through semi-transparent materials that suggest the effect of wax, these volumes usually fused to the walls are somewhat reminiscent of material art due to the impregnation that occurs between superimposed materials and the base material of the everyday objects that it transforms, However, it is not exactly a trace of the object in the material that covers it, as happened in one way in tapies and in another way in Segal's sculptures, since the semi-transparent ones erase and blur their objects in relation to corners, walls and niches, suggests a matter that alludes to another libidinal, volitional, affective, emotional memory, and not properly physical in the sense of inscriptions.

   Unlike a sense of memory understood as inscription, in salcedo the images of memory to use a phrase by Surpik Angelini for his exhibition at key burnet foundation seem to be evanescent memories, there is something in them related to memory but I still remember in which there are also forgetfulness, the repetitive and frequent niches in their installations have in turn the ambivalence of, on the one hand, communicating the ritualistic symbolism of the niche usually related to images sacred for their spiritual or religious values, while the objects Located in them, the related rhetoric reverts at the same time to the niche, instead of religious icons or sacred images, everyday objects are displayed in them, mostly shoes, and the niche tends to be sewn around it through a transparent sheet that suggests a showcase effect. In this sense, there is something in the way the over-impregnation of materials works in his works that is reminiscent of Kieffer, although Kieffer's memories suggest more social, collective or allusive levels of historicities, while in Salcedo, as I said, it alludes to a more space. related to the memories of the individual person

  In the first live work I saw by José Antonio Hernandez, there was an installation consisting of earth on the floor and a screen on which fixed images were projected that moved from the floor to the ceiling as if they came out of the earth but from photographs of Families from Amerindian groups caught my attention above all because of the way the screen was explored. Beyond the first relatively standard reading through which the material and symbolic content of the earth was related to cultural groups that live very in line with it as a favorable theme for the clay biennial, the peculiar thing about this piece was what It happened with the symbolism of the screen. Usually the screen enlarges.

In 1998 in New York, the MoMA presented two exhibitions that were relatively contrasting in their themes and attention, while one focused on a reading of the object throughout the 20th century from the early avant-garde in Europe, a reading mostly focused on a certain affectivity and materiality of the object, in the other there was an exhibition that offered a reading of textualist artists with Bárbara Kruger within the meanings of Pop, and in the external spaces of the museum a large-scale work by Ernesto Neto was exhibited.

   Not so far away the New Museum presented an exhibition of Ligia Pope, in New York that year photographs of Ana Mendieta's land art silhouettes were also exhibited and at the other end of the country to the south and west in Los Angeles at the Moca In 1998, an exhibition curated by Rina Carvajal and Alma Ruiz on the Brazilian avant-garde titled Experimental Exercise of Freedom was presented. It was a surprising exhibition, as Surpik and I discussed on our trip from Houston to visit it, especially because of the originality of its museography and in my opinion. Curatorially the best I have seen in decades, it is Rina about a Venezuelan curator who a few years before, together with the Puerto Rican Álvaro Sotillo, exhibited her exhibition of Venezuelan art in Caracas at the National Art Gallery in Caracas 10, also important, for her part Alma Ruiz curator in Los Angeles, among others, curated an excellent exhibition by Gabriel Orosco whose catalog I had the opportunity to see and read thanks to Alma's generosity during my visit as a guest speaker to the panel of the Los Angeles Art Festival at the House of Culture Japanese in which Surpik Angelini also participated.

Bibliography

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Cultural Bodies, text of the catalogue of the cristina Jadic exhibit cultural Bodies, high quality full colour, Sicardi gallery, Houston, Texas, usa, 1998

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Bodies Echos, text of the catalogue of Daniel Garcia exhibit, high quality full colour, Sicardi gallery, Houston, Texas, usa, 1998

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Bodies Maps, text of the catalogue of Juan Lecuona exhibit, high quality full colour, Sicardi gallery, Houston, Texas, usa, 1999

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Alchemies of the sense, text of the catalogue of Arturo Duclos exhibit armonia chimica, high quality full colour, Houston, Texas, usa, 2000

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Beyond the intertextual, lecture discussed at the Fondren library lectures auditorium as a guest of the faculty of clasical and hispanic studies at rice university, coordinated by Surpic Angelini and hector urrutibeity, Houston, Texas, usa, 1996

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Doris Salcedo, lecture discussed at the rice media center, inside a multimedia course. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan and Surpic Angelini, transart foundation of Houston, rice university, film and tape recorded, Houston, Texas, usa, 1997

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, José Antonio Hernandez Dies, lecture discussed at the rice media center, inside a multimedia course. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan and Surpic Angelini, transart foundation of Houston, rice university, film and tape recorded, Houston, Texas, usa, 1997

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Relations and differences between the arts, lecture discussed at the los angeles art festival panel, the Japanize house of culture, los angeles, California, usa, 2002

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, The Curator as creator, conference offered at the meeting of art curators, Puerto Vairta, coordinated by Vicky, museum sector directorate, references in the newspaper El Universal, date, conferences by Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Maria Luz cardenas, Rina Carvajal, among others

 The footprint as pentagramal architecture of the cosmos

By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

  Abraham brings together, like few artists in young Caribbean art, procedures of early modernism and the historical avant-garde, with living elements of contemporary artistic life, that is, of the post-avant-garde and also, although to a lesser extent, of that trans-avant-garde, naïve zone, of postmodernism, especially European and Italian from the eighties. The tendency to build suggestive atmospheres, to create languages ​​that seek the constellative unity of each part in the whole, to produce sensations of harmony, reminds us of a "pure" spectator, eager to establish a relationship of identity with the work. One remembers modernist literary writers such as Thomas Mann, James Joyce, or Hermann Hesse, who worked on the work of art as an autonomous structure, as a sacred plot in which each element was the fragment or trace of a pentagramal evocation of the cosmos. , who created the work as a "box of meaning" capable of simulating the essential structures of the universe in the internal space of the pieces.

I am thinking of works like The Bead Game whose secrets had to originate in universal mathematics and music. I'm thinking of works like Faust whose structure was based on a symphony. In works whose repertoire was based on the idea that there was a necessary relationship between perception and reality and that works of art captured the highest of that metaphysical synthesis. Abraham's works, from a structural point of view, recall that theme, that fascination with the whole, which returns us to an exclamatory gaze and modern amazement. Once the signifiers in the history of art were discovered, informal painting became "linguistic", conscious of its rhetorical artifice, its environmental stratagems, its capacity for seduction. Abraham's work will also recover this new allusion to the instant, to the transience, to the fragment, reminding us of that painting of gestural time, where signs function as an indication, as the trace of a subjectivity.

  Going through not only what we could call the proxemics of the work, but rather making a genealogy of the psychological rites that construct it, one recognizes certain elements of the transavant-garde of the eighties, of all that revival of post-conceptualist painting. There is in his works a naive touch, a certain ease, a certain withdrawal from painting as a "staging" of signs to return to it as a place of generalized fatigue, of a space in which the canonical signs are in flight and give transition to energies of everyday imagery. We are talking about a certain unprejudiced treatment with the canon of painting of the incorporation of "bad forms" of some parts of the work.

 Abraham's work suggests that a successful work is one that synchronizes every stain, every gesture and every solution, as a response to anthropological problems. His work forms the drawing of a "perfect architecture."

   Without a doubt and I risk saying it with conviction, we are facing one of the best constructed talents of emerging Venezuelan art, someone from whose contradictory paradoxes I am sure that we will extract the contribution of new metaphors to the coming directions of the symbolic imaginary of the arts. Venezuelan plastics.

Abdel Hernandez

Writer and Essayist

Published at the Okyo Gallery, Las Mercedes, Caracas in the Catalog of the Abraham Gustin Exhibition Landscapes of the Soul, Illustrated in color, Caracas, Venezuela, 1992 and subsequently published on its website in English and Spanish

How to be ecological in art
©By Abdel Hernández San Juan

Caracas

  Although the ecological theme is present with increasing force in Venezuelan art, as in all forms of social thought, ecology has also fostered common places, emblematicisms and phraseologies. We are used to hearing the word ecology and immediately thinking about deforestation, the extermination of animal and plant species, the ozone layer and the problems of the biosphere. Like the criticism of poverty and its ideologizations that has ended up nullifying its shocking effect due to its rhetoric, the repertoire of ecological emblematicisms is so easy for everyone to handle that it lends itself to being used by groups, many of which, or are essentially predators of nature, or they do not apply their ecological criticisms to their own nature. And it is this own nature, the nature of man, that is the least socially developed with an ecological approach. What we have learned is that we have to be more ecological with what is outside of us, the plants, the animals, the city, the company, if we do not want to perish, but we do not know anything about how to be ecological with ourselves . It is in these two senses that the exhibition Agua by Ricardo Benaim, Leonor Antoni, Lihie Talmor, Nelson Garrido and other Venezuelan artists is oriented. The Water exhibition consists of a kind of illustrated brochure where the word and the image weave ideas related to the aesthetic, acoustic, morphological and energetic connections of water.
  Water is seen by artists as a site of deep resonances, as a place where languages ​​become more intense, deeper, like that space that in Marcel Duchamp, the author of “The Large Glass”, we find as the philosophical dimension. of crystalline structures. But Agua, an exhibition conceived by Benaim and enriched by other artists with their own works, was an exhibition where the search for ecological languages ​​was oriented towards refinement; a progressive subtlety of echogrammatics. The artists conceived this exhibition from the beginning as a kind of performance, not in the sense of an actor who acts with his body in a performative manner, but because of the nature of works based on play free of associative imagination. As one of the participating artists Leonor Antoni had done, who had gathered in her workshop hundreds of objects that she collected on the beach, collecting and collecting them, for this exhibition the artists began to gather found objects, souvenirs, pieces of images and icons, old objects, etc and they made with it, based on the computer's possibilities of creating sounds for images, a kind of semiotic auditorium between images, words and sounds.
They tried to listen to what each object told them about time and other concepts and then tried to learn the grammar of the gathered elements. First each artist individually and then based on imaginative associations spontaneously created among the various signs until they created languages ​​and legibility. These games, where the artist does not premeditate once and for all what he is going to do, but surrenders to the liveliness of the creative experience in all its intersubjective complexity, recall the musical work of a musician like John Cage, who cut out pieces of musical pieces, natural and environmental sounds and created original symphonies with them. The most interesting thing, without a doubt, is that none of these objects is definitive, it can be used today to make these or those scanned images or serve as an element, but then it can be another because ultimately what this exhibition is about is generate learning, these are learning works. As I said, in the end the creators made a brochure in which they connected the naked eroticism of the word with the images. In future samples, probably more heuristic than this one, the same Venezuelan artists relate music with images of the body, the body with other photographic images and all of this with cybernetics and computer languages. They approach, therefore, parodying the echosonograms that capture the movement of the fetus, to the creation of a type of work that we could call, seen on the monitor, ultrasound scans, while printed on paper we would have to find another name for them.

Abdel Hernandez San Juan
Caracas Venezuela
Article Published in the Diario Economía Hoy
Illustrated with Illustrations by Works by Leonor Antoni, Lihie Talmor, Nelson Garrido, Maria Clara Fernandez and Ricardo Benahim
Friday, May 14, 1993

inirgenes contemporaneas
©By Abdel Hernández San Juan

Caracas

  “Virgins of Contemporaneity” is the title that heads the next exhibition to be promoted by the Astrid Paredes gallery. The Exhibition, made up of singular works that refer, from personal approaches, to the image of the virgin, will open next Sunday and will be made up of artists such as María Eugenia Manrique, Ana Pantin, Diego Barbosa, Antonio Lazo, Juan Félix Sánchez, Ernesto León, Ismael Amundaray and Onofre Frías. The exhibition, unlike the “Magna Mater” exhibition that was exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts a few months ago, aims to explore how contemporary Venezuelan artists, active protagonists of modernism, interpret the icons that occupy a certain place in the imaginary in our complex societies. Far from making a ready-made with virgins taken from churches and sanctuaries, far from taking these original images from the living contexts in which their resonances move popular expectations, what we are dealing with here is a virgin constructed from the inside out, a image of the virgin that is already processed by the creative subjectivity of the individual artist and that is then externalized and communicated to the outside.
  The paradox is that, although we know that we are more responsible for preserving these traditions than we may be indebted to them, the institutions that are in charge of disseminating the traditional faith in this type of images have been open to assimilating changes that they experience as images resulting from sign processes that, although they are different from these individual impressions that artists give us, their works suppose and refer to them. This game of interpreting images that have a precise canonical form in new ways that in a certain way resolves in a new image the ephemerality of certain images in time, is inevitable and necessary for society, but it does not prevent artists from allowing themselves to recreate the tradition, sincerely expressing in its works the subjective character that is typical of every experience of communion.
  Thus, María Eugenia Manrique presents her piece “Madre Mía”, an image of a protective virgin according to the artist “born in communion”, a dual virgin that synthesizes the poles of Catholic imagery with the opposites that, according to María Eugenia, are typical In those “forgotten pre-Hispanic goddesses”, with indigenous features, there is a virgin whose image comes to mean a kind of anthropological meeting in which indications that come from Greek, Mediterranean and Hindu goddesses are reconciled. But the most important thing in María Eugenia's work is that she proposes a deritualization of the more closed images of the virgin and broadens her in a way that draws the strength of her image towards other cultures. This game of everydayizing the reference to universalize it is even insinuated in the works from the moment the artist shows the process of manipulating signs through the obvious use of positive and negative reiteration of the image. Something similar is suggested in the works of Anita Pantin “Passion and Resurrection” alluding to Guadalupe, Cacarena and La Piedad, where the artist exposes sacred prints to the game and playful manipulation of the photo, the slide and the scanner with their articulations. cybernetics inherent to computing.
  Continuing with this idea of ​​a resemanticized virgin, reactualized and reconstructed by the operations of a creative subjectivity, we can allude to Ernesto León's experiments with “The Mystery of Virginity” where we find an expanded idea of ​​the virgin, an investigation into the depersonalization of the virgin and, therefore, of the virginization of what is not precisely the image of the virgin but is related to her. These works eroticize the very idea of ​​the virgin and strive to develop those elements that could be identified as a rhetoric of the sacred. The paths of Amundaray with his “Virgin of Coromoto in Hekuras” or the blackness of Onofre Frías suggest other ways of resolving this process to which I have referred. A very particular case is represented by the photographs of the works of Juan Félix Sánchez made with wood and other materials from the moor.
With “Vírgenes de la Contemporaneidad” we witness an exhibition more than a cataloging in which specific individual discourses, rather than joining together, collaborate in the drawing of an exploratory imaginary, the staging of a plastic dialect, a global grammar. Thinking about this and from this perspective, one wonders to what extent it is healthier to discuss this type of exhibitions and what they explore, their differences from fundamentalism.

Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Caracas Venezuela
Friday, May 14, 1993
Published in the Diario Economia today

Varnish in memory; Luis Kertsh

©By Abdel Hernández San Juan

Caracas
  Luis Kertch constitutes a visual proposal with few references within Venezuelan art. The work of this artist, perhaps due to his knowledge and forays into graphic design, is aware of the processes that painting has gone through from early modernity to the present day. It is a work that knows that art today needs art history itself to contextualize its daring operations. Today's art is, irrevocably, the art of language. An art of language that knows that Duchamp, Magritte, Beuys, Kossuth existed. In Kertch's work you can discover the weight of memory. A work that is like a kind of pastiche painting with elements of a very personal lyrical conceptualism and also elements of Pop Art. His work is like an intelligent game with his own images and images of the painting itself in the history of art.
Perhaps that is why the artist's studio is full of art history books that are constantly looked at. A creator who knows that fascination of the combinatorial traffic of images. For him, as important as making his catharsis is putting question marks to the viewer of the works. His obsession is a continuous challenge to the eye that sees and the act of communication itself. The artist builds the track of a long and extensive pictorial space to put the receiver's codes into plastic action. Your viewer in painting must be, to use an analogon, the type of listeners of experimental music or readers of books like Hopscotch that can be read from anywhere. He is not so interested in the active or passive spectator, nor in contemplation. Kertch's works are made in the manner of a goldsmith, these are works that want to be seen as vignettes, as pamphlets, as scrolls, whose themes are generally intentionally "banal", in many cases common places: a landscape, a kiss, a flower, a chair. '
  There is in his painting a fascination with the circumstantial. This fact, of course, separates it from a conceptual epitome and places it rather alongside irony and postmodernist parody. Here is one of his most enigmatic works: the bridge of six, directly parodying a Rembrandt landscape of the same name made in strong water.
  Pictorially, the bridge of six is ​​a work that draws a daring connection between Bad Painting and plastic action painting. There is a daring game between a metaphor of decadence and a hallucination with the randomness of pigment, where stains touch each other to build suggestive worlds. It is important to distinguish this artist from the heroic poetics that characterized Pop in previous decades; he is not heroic Pop. His contacts with Pop are culinary, the artist is obsessed with the images of screen printing, photomontage, the games of documentation and simulating effects that Pop, recovering the Dadaists, brought to the foreground. However, the taste for documentary images of Pop, rather than praise, is due to the eroticism of composing a plastic alphabet. It is a veneer of nostalgia. Of a joy unleashed with affections from the past. The artist's obsession with the image of the flower does not speak of a romantic vocation, it speaks of a serial parody, of linguistic tenderness. The quote, the concept, the plastic action painting, the obsession with opaque glass, with varnishes, with drying time, with framing, with the flowers of other flowers and the kisses of other kisses, and the horizon of other horizons.

Abdel Hernandez San Juan
Caracas Venezuela
Text published as catalog words for the exhibition by the Venezuelan plastic artist Luis Kertch Three Visions and a Reality, Illustrated in color, La Florida Art Gallery, 1994

 The NON-sculptural scenographies of Gladys Pirela

By Abdel Hernandez San Juan

"The neighborhood friends may disappear, but the dinosaurs are going to disappear"

fito paez

Many cases of attempts to negate sculpture using the sculpture itself as an expressive resource are known in the history of art; However, there are not many examples that have taken this research to its maximum consequences.

On this occasion I return to the topic in light of a recent discovery. I had the opportunity to enjoy the weak sculptures of Gladys Pirela.

Structures up to three meters high, markedly voluminous, composed of "rough" assemblages of geometric shapes, also thick and consistent shapes that, at first glance, give the impression of crossing space against gravity, violating the delicacy of the wind. and the environment.

In this sense, Gladys' sculptural compositions are assimilated. But when a little time passes, all that strength begins to crumble. Those animals made of stone, sand, cement, iron, are defenseless, as defenseless as the most delicate of flowers. Such sculptures weigh less than a child's plastic chair, they are absolutely hollow, the sandy surface capacity does not exceed one centimeter. The unevenness and stony textures are created with aqueous dust and other materials far removed from the original states of the stone.

Later one continues observing and understands that, in effect, these are scenic sculptures, or the scenery of a sculpture. This idea is fabulous. It is assumed that a set design is intended to foster a secondary environment in which some episode, a story, a leading role is going to be unleashed. But making the scenery of a sculpture is like turning the characters of the work into scenery. A sculpture is always an active presence, a way of prominently occupying a space. In this sense we are neither looking at scenery nor sculptures.

And where are we going to get to, the curious viewer wonders. Such sculptural non-scenography is painted as if it were a two-dimensional oil painting.

Painted without respecting the large angles, the vertices where width and height meet, cubes, cylinders and spheres. Painted more than painted, that is, colored. This idea of ​​coloring sculptures with pink, violet and chick yellow tones resorts to that poetics of pastimes where children fill in color with figurines that are already pre-fixed in the magazine.

Of course they are very well painted (in the sense of good painting). Only this comparison with coloring helps to understand how the rough surface work and roughness of a 'great sculpture' is related to the fact that those same pieces are painted from top to bottom.

Honestly when I saw this I thought exactly about the manikies and the makeup. Manikies produce that ambiguous sensation of wanting to resemble the ideal so much that they reproduce a false and even decorative image of their model.

 Sculptures made up, weak sculptures that cannot be anti-sculptures either, there is not enough strength to deny the sculptural language. The works of Gladys Pirela take the criticism of the boundaries between sculpture, painting, etc. far beyond the ordinary. She is not concerned with denying sculpture to oppose a daring idea of ​​sculpture. Gladys laughs at this whole old argument. In the work of Glagys Pirela there is a very subtle and very current laughter, a work that can be linked very well with the Italian trans-avant-garde and with the Spanish trans-avant-garde, I am referring to this whole aesthetic movement that moves around punk aesthetics and recent influence of this on the great stages of art.

 A pastel art that makes one think of the Rococo, that post-baroque movement that led the latter to its own decline, exacerbating its motives to the extreme. Despite seeing in Gladys Pirela one of the most daring and innovative sculptural proposals in the country, I also paradoxically discover in her the intelligence and finesse of making a sculpture of singular strength and expressive charge, a work capable of functioning as a 'sculpture-sculpture'. 'in the same environments in which one of those sculptures that do not question even a detail of their own nature can live.

Perhaps sculpture, due to the rigidity and orthodoxy that has characterized it throughout the century, is not capable of withstanding the changes in perspective that are coming to art. Maybe the sculpture will disappear and not survive, but this dynamic sculpture, this type of soft sculpture will survive, unlike the dinosaurs that ate flowers.

The Image as a Literary Correlate: Robertico Salas

©Por Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Caracas

The question about what one's position should be when analyzing works and samples presented by artists who have their own ways of understanding what they do, has been a recurring topic that those of us who prioritize linguistics and semiotics when discussing works must clear up.
  If the above is something that has found different expressions among artists like Kossuth and Beuys who decided to write about their own works, it has been in the theater where it has been presented with the greatest emphasis.
  Artists such as Bretch, Grotowski and Barba have also written about their art and it has been in the theorizing of theater where the question about the position one should assume in theorizing art in the face of the artist's work has arisen most. However, we find differences between the type of literature that the artist is led to develop when he refers to his own works and those others that we generate, either about art in the abstract, or about the art made by others.
  This fact is given not only by the different position that we experience in writing from the outside making references to the art that others make, but also by the focus that we give to the invariances of language in an essay of systematization, something that becomes peculiar according to the artists in question.
  The theatrical works of Robertico Salas, my first cousin, offer a unique and fascinating modality in this sense.
  What follows is an effort to contribute both to the understanding of Robertico's theater and to his criticism.
  The word systematization can sometimes offer difficulties for those of us who understand writing about art on a level that is both hermeneutical and axiological, because although we do so, systematization in itself is still a partial contribution.
  We think that where science is required in the analysis it is made up of many works per author, as well as many authors, each of whom offer our own perspectives.
  Systematization may also be reticent for those of us who understand the theoretical essay also as a literary and aesthetic piece.
  The theater of Robertico Salas represents several moments, as an informed artist his images represent in the same as a theatreologist, his theater bookseller and his wealth of training, avant-garde theater, where language is the subject, but at another time, because it is a self-managed art that is economically nourished by the voluntary payment that people make as well as an art mostly for outdoor spaces, locations that involve a direct relationship with tourism and people on festive occasions, his art has also been related to culture as This is expressed around tourism, that is, tradition and folklore becoming at the same time an art that is produced and presented, and a laboratory for research on that culture, an ambiguity that requires Robertico to continually move between being the director theater, which produces and stages its different pieces throughout the year, while continually writing essays and texts that, around the plays, become essays on issues related to that tradition and that culture.
  The actors and dance forms, elements and costumes of his theater are nourished at the same time by both repertoires, the repertoire of the avant-garde theater in which Robertico became a theaterologist and the visual repertoire of folklore related to culture, the latter, utensils, elements, shapes and materials, although independent and autonomous with respect to the architectural locations in which the works are presented, the use of stilts and the recreation of forms around children's literature, we can also see them as a visual and aesthetic commentary on those spaces as architecture, the evocation of a material culture that involves furniture, doors, cobblestone streets, architraves, columns, ornate walls and ancient buildings.
  Robertico's theater, which has included staging and presentations in Italy, Ecuador and Mexico, and which usually revolves around cultural entertainment activities such as party occasions.
  The elements chosen by Robertico for his theater are the stilt, as he said, with its minimal and minimalist lines, both understood as wooden forms in themselves, and by the patterns they give to the body movements of the dancer actors, patterns of balance. and dynamism that come with walking, moving and turning on those vertical wooden forms perched.
  The other aspect that becomes part of the visual, aesthetic and recreational commentary of this material culture is the costumes, which in their art acquire a great creative and expressive plastic preponderance, sometimes even being related due to their creative anachronism with the circus, something that It is also expressed in the literary themes that become motifs of the works, usually related to children's literature, its adventurous character of prototypical and adjectival characters, the bold tribilin, the brave prince, and its ambivalent titles, The Incredible and Great History of the adventures of the knight Sir William and his Squire Kimbado against the furious dragon tribilin.
  Without overlooking the moment in which Robertico defines his theater as street, a juxtaposition like the one below which I obtained between the albums and compilations of images that Robertico makes for his art around the stilts, a topic which in itself has become a motive of his essays and writings on culture, exploring and reading different areas of culture around the possibilities offered by an element, here the stilt, can explain the type of impetus of this theater related on the one hand to the cultural ethos, the avant-garde invocation of values ​​of tradition in its cultural aspects as well as the experimentation of theater as a laboratory of a lifestyle or utopian commune from which, as in the traveling circus, its artists live.

Gladiadores (bestiary) with stilts, mosaic
3rd century AD Sousse, Archaeological Museum
Maya Actor on Stilts
Of the different kinds of games
1657, Dutch copper engraving, Leipzig, Heiner Vogel Collection
Harlequin on Stilts, details of an engraving by Recueil Fossard, Stockholm Museum
Men on stilts, ánfora de pitore dell Altalena, 6th century, New Zealand, Centerbury museum
Cuban farmer working in a tobacco plantation with stilts in Pinar del Rio
Actor on stilts, details of a Wei dynasty wall painting, Dunhuan, China

  To be considered from the point of view of avant-garde theater, its images could be understood from the perspective of a plastic theater, plastic theater, criteria, the type of thing that has been proposed for representation in Robert Wilson's theater with its flat image on stage, the plastic two-dimensionalization in the motion of the actors and their bodies as a visual effect even when these involve space and volume, while considering from the point of view of the type of interaction that the artist proposes in the street, that dance character which includes music and body movements, his works could be understood in the sense proposed to stage representation by Eugenio Barba's theater.
  However, in Barba, the bodily and expressive forms through which its actors interact before the spectators are highly elaborate and result from intensive research carried out before closed doors on the training set where these actors and dancers first explore those forms and movements. body movements from different cultures to then recreate them and include them as aspects within the modern lines and forms that they propose in their avant-garde body movements.
  The cultural aspects are thus visually recreated towards the forms of the artistic avant-garde and only then carried and tested in certain spaces through trips or itineraries to certain spaces, towns or festive occasions.
  The way in which in Barba's theater the actor comes into contact with an expressive form coming from a given cultural reference is by taking it into consideration at the very moment of elaborating that experimental form.
  In Robertico, folklore and tourism do not only become the motive that inspires the elaboration of an experimental form, here the experimental is the very character of being Robertico a Theaterologist and artist, but his theater proposes to establish itself as a form of economic life in the spaces of that tradition in order to foster a writing laboratory about that culture, at the same time, it relates two traditions, one, those of the visual, corporal forms and the material culture of its own repertoire recreated around the circus, the stilts and the literary motifs he chooses, and the other that of that cultural tradition in which folklore and tourism are related.
  This bringing into visual and expressive relationship of two traditions, one conveyed by artists who live, as a small community, from that form of theater as a cast in terms of a self-managed economy, and the other, that of that culture in which they are inserted and established as a weekly street theatrical show in interaction with tourism and people, highlights the inventive nature of cultures, generating a continuous dialogue that becomes not only and even at times less, between the experimental forms that it elaborates of avant-garde art and the culture in question, but rather between forms of culture whose only difference is that one is an active form defined as one proposed by a cast of artists in their costumes, artifacts, bodily expressions, etc., and the other a form of passive or given culture in a tradition in which its theatrical forms are presented.
  It is interesting in Robertico the way he prioritizes generic forms from children's literature which can be found in different traditions and cultures, as well as the inclusive reference to a literary or oral heritage, both living and bookish, that ranges from Greek traditions to Cuban traditions.
  This gives it a peculiar visual interest from the perspective of a plastic theater of the image and a dynamic relationship between the writer and researcher who practices a type of theater while it gives him the possibility of writing about these phenomena that I have referred to and the director. of theater who simultaneously ventures into his staging that includes musical instruments that range from Celtic, Anglo-Saxon and Nordic traditions to Caribbean traditions such as the tumbadora, the bomgo and other instruments of Caribbean percussion that are included in his choreographies, dance movements and sounds. .
  It is interesting that it is a type of theater that includes a kind of location where all the materials are gathered, which are collected, accumulated and collected from scrap shops of all kinds, largely fabrics of infinite colors and qualities, paper mache and other means. which usually require painstaking sewing efforts to create elaborate costumes as well as the careful makeup of the actors and dancers who paint their faces and sometimes their entire bodies.
  These materials largely have a recycled character and the place where they are accumulated, which in turn serves for group meetings, has for this reason a clear ecological character in its visuality. The figure of the same person who simultaneously works as a writer. Researcher and theater director, he raises questions about the Benjaminian concept of the unity of the work of art.
  If the work of art is covered by an indivisible uniqueness that closes it on itself as a finite physical totality, size, weight, transfer, transportation, presentation and as duration, fifteen minutes, ten minutes, one hour, also as an aesthetic or literary totality , the style of the author, his authorial and stylistic stamp, etc., in what way can the creator enter into it and leave it, being on one occasion the author who creates it and another one who takes it as an object for a writing that refers to others. aspects of material and visual culture, in addition to artistic ones?
  But the questions about the concept of uniqueness and the diatribes that once developed around it were not always clear-cut. The criticism of the unity of the work, as occurred in the invocation of art and life in the first European avant-garde, was not about denying that the works were provided by a physical uniqueness, their material, factual and phatic indivisibility, to refer to two notions of Jacobson that suppose its coseic tangibility, nor the fact that each work was provided by the specificities of an aesthetic or literary uniqueness specific to the way in which the authorial composition relates in ways specific to that author the parts that make it up with the all aesthetic, it was rather a matter of discussing the fact that in this closure on themselves of their uniqueness, certain works of art understood in an axiological sense could also respond to principles of fetishistic organization or to certain concepts of representation that were sometimes hypostatized, ossified or reified.
  Bretch's work produced interesting results in this sense, specifically his notions of distance and critical estrangement which were developed around the theory of the actor, the so-called change of roles in which Bretch required the actors to put themselves in each other's shoes. others and tried to argue their perspectives according to the role they assumed either as actors in the play during training or as characters in the dramaturgy of that play.
  But in his broader writings on theater, Bretch emancipated these concepts toward a broader scope, moving outside the precepts of mimesis and not being subordinated only to the dramaturgical imperatives of a specific work.
  Critical estrangement thus facilitates the author's distancing from the very concepts of work and spectator, or work and reader, and even the distancing of high art from other forms or visualities of the culture that this art wants to comment on, make inclusive or incorporate.
  Bretch's critical distancing has also been useful for something I have defined as methodological devices. If the defamiliarization of a form is implicit in avant-garde art, it comes along with the need to deroutinize a perception to discuss in the latter a form that has become stereotyped or repetitive in relation to the forms or contents of an ideology.
  In critical distancing there is defamiliarization insofar as to establish another relationship and distancing oneself it is necessary to defamiliarize, however, the defamiliarization does not become paroxysmal, it defamiliarizes what is necessary to re-establish a new relationship with a form or with an idea about which one wants return from another perspective, you want to miss it again and again to see it from all its sides, you analyze it in all possible ways to develop a new response that once again becomes a critical form.
  The defamiliarizing moment is related to the externalization of alternatives. The previous form that has been subject to defamiliarization is taken up by critical estrangement. Although there is undoubtedly ritual, the form is not entirely diluted in the ritual, nor is the rite completely diluted in the form since it is criticism that is ultimately interesting in the exploration of the form. In estrangement one is always thinking of a form that is the object of a thought that thinks of it as it is and how it plans to transform it.
  In a certain way, there were two works in a work, the work that it was and the work that that work wanted to transform into. The therapeutic effects and the ritual levels involved in those therapeutic effects resulted from the way in which defamiliarizations were reunited with the forms of experience, the things experienced or the realities addressed.
  For this reason, when the works were seen by the spectators, they seemed like reality in reality, peculiar images that seen live or through documentation always communicate a relationship between experimentality and reality, experimentality of an image of reality, reality effect of an experimental reality. .
  As in metatheater, it is not about the dissolution of theater in reality, becoming invisible to the eyes of the people, because in Robertico the works as staged are before the eyes of everyone, nothing is taking place that is not a work of art, a theatrical show, everyone is in front of a staging physically gathered.
  It is not, therefore, about realism or its antipodal of showing the devices that the fiction of a work of art provokes to present at the same time the reality of the filming and the illusory reality of the work, as can be the case in cinema or theater. of fellini or Saura, nor of hyperrealism or photorealism that made the aesthetics of reality modes in which the effects of its representation, that is, the effect of production of images of reality, became as if from another reality as real or more real than reality itself.
  It is not, therefore, that hyperreality of the image that is more real than the real, since it is not an effect of reality in the representation, but, quite the opposite, of what in the reality of that work insists as reality above any idea of ​​representation. , that is, in its now and its here in front of the spectators.
  In the theater of Grotowski, Barba and Becker, theatrical representation was questioned to obtain a dissolution, a concept of ritual was sought that was prior to theater in which the latter was either diluted or theater as a rite within theater was diluted. .
  One of the peculiarities that make Robertico's theater suigeneris is, not only what he said before about the way in which his theater is related to tourism, folklore and culture, which in turn becomes a reason for research in his writing, but also the balance that Robertico achieves between the plastic, the visual and the literary in his theater, a way that, although with all the rituality of the costumes, the makeup, the recycling of materials, the fabrics and the incorporation of dynamic forms brought from certain aspects of the circus, its staging is never completely diluted in the ritual, rather they create a balanced result that maintains the estrangement, although in Robertico the dimension of entertainment in culture becomes much more predominant and becomes an aspect decisive of its aesthetics.
  The acrobat, for example, which responds to principles of relationship between a dynamic interactive form and a reiterative structure, between amazement and geometry, not only in the preponderance of children's literature or puppet theater, but also in the incorporation of circus forms. .
  The critical estrangement is still there, between the artistic form and the culture, between the writer and researcher and the theater director, between reality and representation, the group that makes a staging, a tangible physical work, a theatrical spectacle. visible, presented in the reality of tourism and people, but from which it also lives, between the work as a physical reality and the laboratory that it provides for cultural research, something that explains the significance that Bretch had in his creation. theaterologist

Grades

  The motivation to write this essay arose in Caracas in 1994. As a curator at the Alejandro Otero Museum of Visual Arts, at that time I was working on the topic of markets and my cousin came to Caracas for two months, staying in my apartment with Yanisbel, also a theater artist. , in those two months we were able to talk extensively about his theater and view material, including two weeks we spent together in the German colony of Tovar.
  On that occasion, for the first time, Robertico explained to me what his experience consisted of since we had not seen each other since 1990 when his group did not yet exist. I learned about their performances in Italy at the international music and culture festival Ippodromo in Cappanelle, Rome, in Piazza Navona, in Parco Storico Rurale e Environmentale di Basilicata, Grancia, Poetenza, in Tricarico Province of Matera, in Grassano, Brindisi de Montagna, Province of Potenza in Vie de la Fantasie, Festivale internatinale deli artistic i strada, Orvieto, in Peruia Umbria, Italy.
  I also learned about their presentations in Quito Ecuador, their presentations in the Carolina Park, in the Ejido Park, in the Santa Clara Coliseum and in the Puyo Coliseum, in the Amazon region, Plaza Santo Domingo, in Quito, in the historic center of Quito, Balneario del Tingo Tulcán in the high school of the valley, in the valley of the chillos in the city of Otavalo, in the city of emeralds, Tolita I and Nueva Esperanza, in Quito festivals, parades of the fraternity national of the northern and southern zones, at the Ibro nightclub in Quito, at the Kinkenny in Mojandita curuvi, indigenous community of Otavalo, province of Imbabura, at the inauguration of the Mojanda café at Casa Mojanda Otavalo, at the Betti Sach kindergarten , at the Café Arte in the city of Ibarra, at the Castillo de Sabor with Son Cocho, all in Quito, also his explanations about the ways in which his group works in Havana in parks, squares and party occasions, among others, with the social and cultural anthropology workshop of the Casa de África, cigar festival, Torres wines, Los Frailes hostel, dance in urban landscapes, Retazos dance group, World Earth Day, international tourism fair, international poetry festival, artistic groups mountain integrals, la makumba carnival night, Havana carnivals, Dutch embassy, ​​street theater, the Cuban voyeur, meeting of commercial techniques, routes and walks, dream of a San Juan festival, hotels, among other spaces that me I counted working.

The art and the city

©Por Abdel Hernandez San Juan

 Houston, Texas, USA

Addressing the city through art has long been a desire and an effort in recurring contemporary art competitions. The city as an experiential concept and landscape has been the subject of salons and biennials in which it becomes the theme. Paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, environmental installations and exhibitions surprise with the diverse ways in which the artists approach “the city". From figurative expressions that represent it by its typifiable areas, types of buildings, landscapes, those that address it from its maps, paintings and graphic drawings of the streets, its north, its east, its west, its south, to those that They refer to the city through material abstractions, found objects, flagstones, street names, the sensory experience of the city, this, in addition to projects for public spaces such as sculptures in parks, hotels and places of recreation, monumental or environmental.

However, beyond the thematic, there are few efforts to think about the relationships between “art” and “city” in a richer way. The Fotofest International Photography Biennial conceived and directed by the Anglo-Saxon critic Wendy Watries in Houston represents an initiating example in this sense.

Beyond assuming it as a theme—although sometimes also—it is a way of assuming “the city” in relation to the concept of “utopia.” As a space in itself, Fotofest addresses “the city,” becoming a program with its “circuit.” The concept of “circuit” means that, when touring the Biennial, spectators move in a way in which, visiting exhibitions, they enter the city, spaces, conventional galleries, Down Town buildings, old semi-abandoned spaces restored and recovered for the exhibition of “contemporary art”, buildings with a history, pavilions, cafes as gallery spaces, as well as exhibitions in recognized and prestigious museums.

The Biennial itself involves “a look at the city”, a concept about the relationships between “art and spectators”, “art and public” while also contemplating a look at “the city from art” and “to art”. from the city". The above has interesting results. During the preparation period, the urban work at Fotofest contemplates not only the institutions of the art world, but also the city in general, expanding, on the one hand, its universe of references while, on the other, the very ways in which generate and produce the biennials, modern areas, historical areas, areas under restoration, areas where the artists' studios are, opening houses, housing areas and, between one thing and the other, the promotional image of “the Biennial in the City.” ”; specially designed for urban traffic and circulation.

Very well organized, the concept of “design” has been central to its success, just as it has been a formidable example of the “contemporary interactions” between “high art” and “modular”, “dynamic”, “minimalist” and “modular” presentational forms. relatively “standardized”, such as those that can be used in “book fairs”, to cite one case, where different university and other publishers present their titles and published books. The “classical gaze”, the “contemplative gaze”, the “investigative gaze”, the “heuristic gaze”, the “bodily gaze”, the “sensual and sensory gaze”, the “eloquent and synthetic gaze”, the “testimonial gaze”. ”, the “nostalgic and melancholic look”, the “experimentalist look”; All of them have met at Fotofest.

The look from within art has been unique in this sense, promoting a movement that is both “inclusive” and “extensive”, “inward” and “outward”; “inwards” – from “perception” and “the gaze” – brings to art a sensorially lived city, while “outwards”, it extends towards the city in its objective spaces, “sensitive and intensifying glances” of perception of “the city” from art. Photography is thus enriched by “the city” in the creation of aesthetics that reify “perceptual and sensitive material” coming from the relationship to the pre-semiotic space in which things are given in “the city” itself, while “the city” It is enriched by photography, receiving a different and more intensified way of looking, contrasting routinized and stereotyped representations with it.

But it is not simply a question – as it was among the Russian formalists – of becoming familiar in new ways with “extra-everyday perceptions” that defamiliarize our “routinized perceptions”, but rather of fostering – towards “the city in the city” – possibilities that actualize the discourse on these – from the images of “the city lived and experienced”, to the “estranged images” that provoke a “critical estrangement”.

If the concept of “Photography” supposes varied “genres” that range from the most atabic ones such as the “black box” and the principle of light, lenses, filters, the creation of laboratory images, images that suggest places and city ​​spaces, the passage of physical time and memory in these, the photography of “the city as a landscape”, “panoramas”, “the city from itself”, “the city towards nature” or from the latter towards the former, "interior photography", that worked on the computer, the new techniques of pictorial photography that have resulted from it and the different ways in which it is present in photography in the "contemporary installation", the Fotofest Biennials have presented a vast approach “in genres” of “photography towards itself as art”.

In many cases, the exogenous nature of “photography and the city” has been questioned, focusing on their inclusivism. Two years between one biennial and another is often not enough time, but Fotofest “feeds back” not only “from the inside out”—as through the solely propositional effect of its organizers—but also in a multiple way, “from the outside out.” inside", the "conceptual problems" to be focused on in each Biennial come from the conclusions that in the previous Biennial were raised in both directions, which resulted from the "journey of photography towards itself", according to the problems investigated, and for the result before the spectators?

Recently the headquarters of the Biennial have moved to a renovated warehouse in Downtown. This movement from the large wealthy neighborhoods, Riveroaks, the Colquit gallery circuit, Richmont, Montrouse, the Rice University museum, the Museum of Natural Sciences and the surrounding neighborhoods to Downtown, from the first editions to the latest, has to do not only with the revitalization of Downtown, which has been undertaken in the City of Houston in recent years - the encouragement of artistic activities and the city's use of it - but also with that “feedback relationship” to which I referred to before; In fact, they continue to present - and more than before - exhibitions in galleries and museums, even in the Jung Museum one finds Fotofest exhibitions during the biannual program of the Biennale.

Undoubtedly one of the most important photography biennials in the world thanks to its vision and probably “unique of its kind”, its interest and quality has been related to that of other advanced spaces in the field of art today that have been characterized, in a sense or another, to investigate the relationships between “conventional spaces” and “unconventional spaces”, including young Anglo artists, Anglo-Saxons, Western and Eastern Europeans, Cubans, Africans, Asians, a biennial open to surprise and “the motivation heuristics” towards “the learning” resulting from the corroboration of the samples. Several quality Cuban artists traveling from Havana City have presented their works and significant efforts have been dedicated to “Cuban Photography.”

The notion of “circuit” is obviously narrow, since it does not contemplate the elements of spontaneity and chance that have to do with the principle of “circulation” that characterizes large modern cities like Houston; The chances are of receiving in the galleries, both a “spectator” who is guided by the program, and others who come to it initially motivated by an occasional exhibition. Nor does this notion contemplate the orientation and community relationship of Fotofest at an educational level, but it suggests the fact that -- while in a "very conventional space" like the museum rooms --, you have a sample of research photographs on "non-standard spaces." conventional” in the city, in “unconventional spaces, you can have an exhibition about “conventional spaces” in the city.

“Circulating through the galleries” you are “touring the city” according to Fotofest, while “touring the city” you find that there is a constant; Fotofest is taking place. The concept of updating may be relevant to analyze Fotofest. An exhibition of young art is presented in “testimonial genre” that has a relationship to “experience” and one in “documentary genre” where “metonymy” and “metaphor” prevail, while a retrospective exhibition of a photographer in which we have a more typified form in both genres decades before, thereby updating the genres and showing new perspectives. Thus, a view is offered in which different genres become a “counterpoint”, at the same time questioning stereotypes and reopening perspectives.

In a drawing from 1995 in which I expressed worrying intellectuals, I spoke of a “structure that updates itself,” investigating the idea that, beyond the absence of structures, or the end of these, the “updating of a structure” refers us at a level of “plasticity”, which suits us well in the age of cybernetics and information technology.

The concept of a “structure that is updated” questions the “synchrony” (simultaneity)-“diachrony” (linearity) bipartition, according to which, to have the “structure” we must treat the “object of study” as if it were “ dissected” or “lifeless”, outside of the “vital praxis”, something that dominated the imagination of structuralism until Lacan and Bourdieu. In the “structure that is updated” – the progressive movement of Fotofest from fair sheds, towards a single gallery space and then towards the entire city, the way in which perspectives on the city are updated from art and art from the city, the ways in which narratives about photographic genres are updated, to mention three examples of what I call structures that are updated—“diachrony” is no longer that which reaches “synchrony,” surpassing it as if it were impossible, because In the “synchrony” according to cuts that the concept of “structure” supposed, the “structure” could not be updated, the structure was as “symbolically dead” as that which in order to study had to give it symbolic death.

It is not that “structure” that, as if by an effect, could supervene from its underlying condition towards another condition. It is not a “structure” that is sought below, inward towards a “depth” or on the “surface” towards a “latency”, but one that “is updated in the actuality of the present” which is its dynamics and its place of realization. Wendy Watries has done valuable work, her reading of photography through the samples has reunited “sensitivity” and “perception”, “the sensitive” and “the perceptive”, “the contemplative” and “the visual”, the image in his memory. Contemplation as such requires time to contemplate, it is a quiet activity, in which what is contemplated is the object of calm, peaceful contemplation, it requires the meeting of the time of the senses with the inert time of the physical world, which brings it closer. in turn the “time of sensitivity” and that “inert time”.

That is why in contemplation we say that “the perceptual” is put in function of “the sensible”, an “inclusive-extensive” form in which the contemplation of the city and the city contemplated coincide as in the “photographic image”. This differentiates perceptivity from perceptivism that has resulted in much optical art of effects. Given that photography is par excellence an art that requires “optical perceptivism”, not a little photography, more interested in its technicalities, has been reluctant to this conjunction between “the sensitive” and “the perceptual” that has been prioritized by Wendy rather towards a “photography of looks”, what in an essay many years ago called “The Looking of the Look” which refers not only to “what looks” and “to whom it looks”, but to looking from that look making extends the gaze into the sensitive.

The concept of “counterpoint” that I have mentioned elsewhere to refer to forms of art criticism and that comes from Bach's music can be effective and suggestive in this sense; different accents and nuances that contrast and relate, differentiate and complement each other, miss each other and learn from each other. An exhibition of young art is presented in “testimonial genre” that has a relationship to “experience” and one in “documentary genre” where “metonymy” and “metaphor” prevail, thereby expanding beyond the idea that The genres themselves correspond to types of images and rhetorical figures to which certain stereotypes have been related, while a retrospective exhibition of a photographer is inaugurated in which we have a more typified form in both genres decades before.

Thus, a view is offered in which different genres become a “counterpoint”, at the same time questioning stereotypes and reopening perspectives. While I was leaving the exhibitions that I mentioned, I was walking with a book by George Gadamer in my suitcase, “Aesthetics and Hermeneutics,” which I have read several times because I like it and I knew—I remembered it even at that moment—that I would always read that book as a new book, and what good book is not really one that can be read always, over and over again with the same vivacity as an always new book? Even if he understood abstract problems in depth, they could recover new possibilities.

The Space of subjectivity: Art and culture in a dialogic perspective

©By Abdel Hernández San Juan

Houston, Texas, USA

The idea, common in certain conceptions of criticism, of addressing the dynamics of contemporary art in the form of panoramas is complex and not without its setbacks. The concept of panorama presupposes, in fact, that there is something out there, in the real world, in this case culture, or what we could understand as lectures or sociocultural scenes of art, a certain form with respect to which the panorama, as a genre of writing, must adhere to following the form that that reality has in itself as its being in itself or its characterizing essence, the idea of ​​panorama also presupposes, in equally generic terms, on the one hand, the maintain criticism within a certain descriptive principle, that is, that it adheres not only to the form of that sociocultural reality presupposed as provided by a pre-given form, but also to a mode of referentiality that is not, as far as possible, subjectivist. but rather objectivist in the sense that this word should have an intimate relationship with the idea of ​​description, that is, referring to the phenomenon by describing it without coloring the way of that reality as it is in itself, also presupposes a certain idea of ​​chronology or of diachronic sequence, that is, when we say panorama we presuppose that something has a beginning, a development and a certain end in what makes up its content, however, all of the above is undoubtedly debatable and relativizable not for mere desacralizing reasons but given in the fact that in reality to articulate an idea of ​​a panorama it is necessary to take parameters and these parameters are generally subject to subjectivism of all kinds, under what principle do we articulate the panorama, taking as a parameter the idea of ​​a city?, in what sense? the city, seen in purely physical terms, description of places, museums, artists' studios, warehouses, etc., or seen in axiological terms, evaluations, taking as reference the idea of ​​country?, or instead, prioritizing other references, no whether it is a city or a country, but also languages ​​of art, for example, panorama of photography, or drawing, or landscape, etc.

On the other hand, the idea of ​​panorama tends to disconnect from the specific relationships that art presentations have with their auditoriums and their specific spectators. If we stick to specific samples and their spectators, in fact, panoramas become impossible since the detail of The situated modes prevent moving between one thing and another, ignoring what in each one is specific to specific places and conditions of reading. In this sense, the panorama is disconnected from the concrete situation of the reception of art, and tends to be confused with very extrinsic genres, external to the circumstances, establishing parameters that are different from those axiologies that relate from within the relationships of meaning of the exhibition occasions and their viewers, including even their echoes and reflections in the sociocultural scenes given by an infinite number of such circumstances. such as the critics who usually review or comment on the exhibitions, the circumstances of the art market and institutions, among others,

In this sense, there is a relationship between the panorama and figures of language that presuppose the paradoxical disjunctions between the notions of context and decontextualization. A panorama presumably maintains a certain relationship with the contexts it describes but at the same time it is disconnected from the contextualized relationships. specific and utters the audiences, that is, it omits the relationships between art seen from its subjectivity and the extended culture as an extensionalization of the spectators' modes of anticipation for the works and the dynamics that read the culture on the side of interpretation of symbolic and visual facts in culture understood as a hermeneutical framework of interpretive pluralities and polysemies of meaning, moving away from both the in situ context of the works-public relationship, on the one hand, and from culture as a framework of relationships of plural meanings, for the other

The panorama as a genre has something of this iteration of the audiences which contrasts complexly with its supposed character as an objective genre. But despite this, it is true that not as objective as is usually believed, the panorama organizes a certain way of approaching a reality, if we establish once and for all that the parameters, however, are subject to criticism.

A panorama, for example, can start from the parameters of the writer, reflect his interactions and his routes, his itineraries and his meetings, his face-to-face communications and his telecommunications, it can certainly focus on physical entities, such as a city, or a country, but you can also do it according to trips covering multiple cities, routes, round trips, materials picked up and received, etc.

It is in this sense that I would like to discuss below a modality that encompasses several scenes which function as subpanoramas of a broader panorama, starting with the city of Houston and then moving to other cities in the United States, the center of my attention here will be to discuss visual experimentation read or interpreted from the point of view of how in them the processes of cultural identity are not understood as crystallized totalities closed on themselves around the ethnic, the racial or other references that tend to see the cultural identity as essences ontics in an ethnocentric sense in the form of iconography or discourses that start from a preconceived idea of ​​identity but rather discussed in open processes of subjectivity where the latter is extended in culture in the form of processes in formation that do not seek closure from outside but rather remain open as dynamics of feedback, mutuality, enchantment and dialogue.

The above, of course, refers to processes with culture experienced through art in multicultural dynamics in which different acerbs are in continuous relationship within the culture itself, governing in them dynamics of formation of the self, the spaces of subjectivity and a dialogic sense of the relationship between perspectives.

The first artist will be the Venezuelan Ernesto León, based on my references, our meetings in his studios in two cities, Caracas and Houston over approximately eight years, that is, repeated occasions in which we met with the purpose of recording in I tape remembered my criticisms as well as writing first twice in his warehouse in Caracas and then countless times in his studio in Houston.

The reason for discussing Ernesto León is that he is a suigeneris artist due to the way in which in his art he has developed a visual exploration of themes related to cultural identity, first Venezuelan and later tropical and even Mexican-American, this experimentation had a first form focused on motifs relatively stereotyped by the Mass media and common sense such as the painting of birds typical of the Venezuelan fauna and other elements of nature, but later it began to lean towards an exploration of surfaces and materialities related to what I have called colonial imagery in that cultural identity such as paintings made on old boards found based on work with gold leaf, very common in Catholic religious iconography and the Christian church, this beautiful series was also accompanied by several pieces focused on burning those old colonial woods exploring the effect of smoke to create atmospheric sensations on surfaces.

One of the things that peculiarizes this search for lion is given in the fact that he was initially an expressionist artist, like Jacobo Borges in another way, with a certain influence of the Mexican Cuevas in his drawings, haggard human figures related to generally emotional states. , the work in gold leaf on wood and the smoked work on wood, however, begins an important change in his art, this change is given in the same status of the artistic object, while before he worked with a format pre-given by the conventions of the support, fabric, cardboard, etc., the pieces of leaf and smoke acquire, from the object point of view and their physical consistency, a character that brings them closer to altarpieces, that is, they appear like fragments or vestiges of church altarpieces, without However, in his Houston paintings, Ernesto returns to the conventional support while from the point of view of the images he completely reverts to his previous figurative art, the wood altarpieces are eminently abstract, but Houston's pieces return to figuration in a way that He moves away from the expressionism of his drawings of the human figure, essentially faces, or his drawings of birds, focusing on an exploration of tropicalias, that is, of tropical culture. They are pieces that return to the theme of flora, that is, based in their colors and shapes on allusions to the world of plants but in a more allusive and abstract way at the same time that is more focused on subjectivity, that is, in discussing culture while discussing nature and, above all, the theme of the cultural identity that has been a recurrence in his art.

There is something in his Houston pieces that tries to relate the exploration of tropical subjectivity and Mexicanness not so much in the painting but in new objects such as his charro hats.

In line with this accent on explicit Mexicanness in León's work in Houston, there are three Mexican or Mexican-American artists in Texas who are of great interest. On the one hand, Angeles Romero, established in the city of Austin, is a performance artist who developed in market square one of the most moving dance performances I have seen in a long time, it is a piece that was exhibited in the context of an exhibition organized by the German artist and critic Johannes Birringer, I have commented on it before in an essay about Birringer, but it is worth the effort to return to it here because one of the crucial points of the piece focuses precisely on exploring the dialogue of seduction and mutual attraction, the romance if you will, that we have in Texas between elements of the subjectivity of Mexicanness. and elements of the subjectivity of Tejanidad or Tejano cultural identity.

The above in no way means that Tejano culture is reducible to its echoes of Mexicanness; without a doubt, our Tejano culture is itself a culture with its own specificities, but what is peculiar about this piece by Romero is that it eludes all previous stereotypes on the subject, instead of approaching the issue from the point of view of cultural identities prototypically collected as predated forms and typicized in visual iconography or symbols around which identities are separated as ontic essences, that is, In the opposite direction to both Mexican and Chicano ethnocentrism, on the one hand, and Anglo-Saxon ethnocentrism on our Texan side, on the other, the work focuses on the process of mutual seduction of both cultures through a continuous dialogue of souls. , or what I have called in one of my theoretical essays the intangible, something that refers to a spirituality.

The idea of ​​seduction is undoubtedly reductive, it is not simply a seduction or a persuasion, although the theme undoubtedly presupposes this, but rather an enchantment of one culture by the other, a mutual attraction through which In subjectivity, this process is left open instead of fixing it in symbols. It is a piece that makes the paradox of this phenomenon a visual epiphany, like a kind of very simple but moving vignette or cinema, in a very long rectangular space. and narrow Angeles dressed semi-naked tries to move a very heavy and large circle, that is, a kind of wheel but larger than her, which is made of masonry, with many difficulties she moves this heavy wheel from one point to the other of the rectangle very slowly and with great physical effort, while at the other end of the rectangle to where Angeles is supposed to slowly move the heavy wheel, there is sitting on several ice floes, a blonde whose expressions and features are those of a typical Anglo-Saxon American girl, While Angeles strives to get the wheel to her, the ice melts and releases smoke or icy mist that wakes up the blonde, also half-naked. The performance consists of this slow movement by Angeles of the heavy wheel and the process of waking up like the caterpillar from which the butterfly is born, the blonde of the ice while it melts.

In another performance, more eschatological and less profound in its contents, presented this time in diverse Works, Angeles Romero again together with Johannes Birringer, elaborates his own interpretation regarding the theme of cultural identities as it has been previously treated from the point of view of identities understood as ethnocentric ontic essences, this time it is a performance presented in a context in which several Chicana and Mexican artists were presented who addressed these relatively conflicted topics. In light of this, the performance was quite critical since it extrapolated its comment in the opposite direction to his performance in market square this time, instead of highlighting the positive side of the cultural dialogue between cultural sensibilities, he did the opposite, he visually proclaimed the agony and aporias of ethnocentric identities, proposing a performance that was almost an operating room for a convalescent patient, I understand by this, the cultural identity stretched out as a patient without a cure as when it comes to cancer, the performance in fact consisted of her tied to an admission stretcher and transferred into the audience.

In contrast to these two extrapolated readings on one side, the positive reading given in the love implicit in the romance of the mutual enchantment between the warmth of Mexican culture and the coldness of Anglo-Saxon culture or the stretcher of hospitalization for the cancer of ethnocentrism on the other , the point of view of the Mexican-Americans and also Texans Ariel Mason and Gabriela Villegas could be said to elude dichotomies, far from focusing on the issue of cultural identity as León and Romero, they explore a deviation in the case of Mason's pure sensitivity of the soul - which we also have in Terrell James on the Anglo-Saxon Texan side - expressed around generic issues given in femininity, the allusion to a feminine universe that elaborates a reading around more domestic motifs while Villegas for a work that I present In the context of a guest exhibition by Surpik Angelini focused on the theme of motherhood by illuminating her belly with a flashlight inside a dark cubicle while she was pregnant.

Venezuelan artists recur, although this is not the case of Surpik Angelini, who has focused more on memory from his work in the Holocaust Museum to his exhibitions in our curatorship, pyche ethnography reports, in Sicardi and in the key burnet gallery. , are prone to the ecological theme, while we saw in León the preponderance of the world of flora, however approached as an exploration from that path around cultural identity, Jorge Zepezi, a Venezuelan artist also established in Houston, works directly with recycling, his work are large volumes of matter impregnated with recycled waste material, they are somewhat reminiscent of that amalgamated matter in Kieffer's paintings, but unlike him, more focused, like Angelini, on memory, it is not about cultural memory understood as a dense layer of memories or stories, even less of the idea of ​​history itself, but of pure compacted ecological matter in which the viewer can read, however, the immeasurable immensity of design in industrial society and the importance of neo-symbolism. cultural that acquires its transformation into forms of visual culture.

Zepezi's pieces, due to their large dimensions and the way in which they amalgamate the recycled industrial with the natural, suggest to me in semantic and hermeneutical terms something that turns the reading on the relationship of heaviness, difficulty, lightness and coldness in Romero's performance but from another perspective, I am referring to a film called Wally, in which the love story of two robots is presented, one Wally is an old robot with old parts that are hardly produced today because they are discontinued, a robot let's say from the seventies which lives in a large garbage dump where all the scrap metal and industrial waste of the big modern city accumulates.

Eva in her difference is a very modern female robot, a technocapsule of the latest digital technology, Wally falls in love with her and follows her with his beating heart through intricate routes, but she is cold and apparently has no feelings and in her effort to achieve His love Wally finds that there are thousands of other robots identical to Eva while he suffers searching for her among all that homogenized world or universe without cultural identity that does not allow him to locate and find his beloved.

After much insistence in his effort without results, Wally experiences a great depression that leads him to an accident and dies on his way back to the garbage dump where they had met. When Wally is dead for a while, Eva arrives looking for him, longing for Wally's tears and feelings. The film shows that Eva, although she does not express her feelings, needs Wally's feelings to feel alive and fights against his death to revive him and for him to come back to his senses. until she sheds a tear in her form of state-of-the-art digital technology, exhausted from trying to revive him, which wakes Wally up.

The film is undoubtedly from a dramaturgical point of view a typical Hollywood love story, although it is an alternative film and actually made in garbage dumps, but what I am interested in highlighting with it is the theme of the mutual enchantment between the modern and the tribal, between technology and ritual, between pragmatism and love, between sensitivity and distancing that mutually seek and need each other to the point of being ontologically inclusive.

The relatively dance component of Angeles Romero's performance due to the movement it entailed in space is really explored, however, paradoxically, by an Argentine artist also established in Houston who is a painter, but who at the same time directs and conducts dance workshops. at the Jung Museum in Houston Pablo bobio also based in Houston

Analyzing against this the Anglo-Saxon counterpart in Texas, the works of two artists Terrell James stand out who with surprising lucidity and with an impressive capacity to, as we say in English, go over, has focused his art on the one hand on the habitat explored, however in a sense philosophical from an abstract perspective that seeks the connections between the abstractions of the body and the abstractions of the soul, there is in his work a visual investigation that in abstract forms seeks the points of relationship between the organic relative to the sensoriality of the body and the purity of the soul understood in the Texan sense as an investigation of cultural identity that nevertheless moves beyond any ethnocentrism towards parameters of universality, its emphasis on the concept of habitat is central, the relationship of the body with its habits and customs from the point of view of inhabiting spaces and that prioritizes the idea of ​​field research, a field research that moves between a sublime of Americanity and a search for the habitat between the spiritual and the geological, likewise, also results in a Similarly fine and subtle are the pieces by Joseph Havel, who usually exhibits alongside James, Virgil and Wilson at Butter Gallery.

topic on which after my general comments about James and Havel on the Anglo-Saxon side in Texas, would merit some details regarding the work of three artists that we showed on slides in my 1996 conference, I refer on the one hand to the point of view Asian artist of Mel chin, to the Indo-American perspective of Jimmy Durham and to the work of Forrest Prince, a peculiar artist from Texas gathered in the collection of Surpik Angelini and who was in the exhibition Another reality curated by Surpik with berg long in 1989 on the art of Texas.

The peculiarity of Jimmy Durham is that he makes a native Indian-American art made in the contemporary media of installation as a language in Western art that subverts the parameters that via materials related arte povera to a simple media technique showing its true cultural meaning, that is, the fact that the warmth of the materials in povera has a culturalist origin given in contrasts between the modern and the tribal that are within modernity itself and that are part of it, with sophisticated language resources in their signifying articulations. , Durham returns a native-American art in the Indo-American sense that shows the cultural identity sources of plastic media and its non-casual or arbitrary character.

The issue is of importance, putting aside, that is, without considering the ethnic or racial problem of the artist's origin, the question about whether the means of visual art, such as spoken language, are arbitrary or not, that is , could be any others, and which are available, is here relativized in the explanation that the form participates decisively in the senses and meanings and that it forms a large part of the culture, when elements as basic as lines, surfaces, points, which presumably correspond to the abstract universalities of the Western spirit devoid of culture towards the pure mathematization or logarithmitization of codes, as occurs in minimalism, Durham shows how minimalization is also a form of the spirit somewhat which refers us to Derrida's insistence on the Indo-European source of the languages ​​of classical philosophy and its later abstract logarithms—Stephen A Tyler has also insisted on this—thus returning, although from another perspective, to our previous contrasts between the warm and the cold in Romero's performances and the example of Wally and Eva around Zepezi's volumes.

By seeing the usual forms of the logarithmic language of avant-garde art, typical of the discursive articulations of modern visual media such as installation, performed and transformed into discourses that hybridize cultural references, Durham's art performs a fine genealogy of primacy of Indo-Americanness in the understanding of American cultural identity processes, something that, now in the media of minimalism, installationism, arte povera and other resources, the Anglo-American arena cannot avoid

So when we see Durham's art we see aspects of our American and Anglo-American culture as well. This fact completely relativizes the former parameters of anthropology according to which the Indians were treated as others or as alterities, and returns us to a neo-Hegelianization. of the issue of otherness.

In a similar sense, Mel Chin's refined and original installations do the same with respect to themes of colonial and Western Greek and even Victorian antiquity, recycling elements of European and American culture and rearticulating them in works that speak about the soul, about sensitivity. , about the sublime in a way that in Asian American terms does the same as Durham by decentralizing the discussion towards multiculturalism

Similarly, Forrest Prince, with his pieces of wood and boards that remind us of trunks for storing things or an ordinary domestic object, is one of the Texas artists who undertakes this awareness but in reverse, that is, as a search into how the languages ​​themselves are more abstracts of art such as transforming a work of art into a mere everyday object or alluding to it, as occurred in some works in the neo-Dadaism of Robert Raushenberg, is a form of culture in which processes of the cultural identity of a region are involved. something that peluriarizes the type of attention of Long and Angelini with their exhibition Another reality and that in a certain way characterizes Angelini's collection that combines under similar parameters Anglo-Saxon art from Texas, with art of Cuban emigrants in exile and tribal art from Oceania.

Returning to my analyzes on the iteration of the audience, a sample of Anglo-Saxon American art that I visited in Austin cultural dialogues stands out. This sample, paradoxically, focused on the theme of the spectator, which was relativized, put in parentheses and in a certain way criticized.

The main principle of the exhibition is that from each exhibited work a kind of volumetric form emerged in the space in the form of a tube and the spectators did not have access to the visuality of the works shown other than by looking through this orifice. which forced that only one spectator at a time could watch.

While on the one hand it could be seen as an invocation of a ritualized relationship with the work, as occurs for example in Grotowski's pieces in which the spectators also look from the outside as intruders at what the actors are experiencing inside the cubicle, on the other hand it also underlines that this ritualized one-to-one relationship is a kind of psychoanalysis of the moment of the specific spectator because, as a product of the supremacy of the experience in its singular character, that specific spectator is not only uttered and psychoanalyzed, but is also collected by the work in its set as wrapped in its anticipation and to that same extent it is iterated in favor of a broader and more general idea of ​​culture that surrounds them, not in vain called the cultural dialogues exhibition.

The work of the Egyptian artist established in Los Angeles Lita Albuquerque is also worth highlighting, in addition to her relevant forays into the city's environmental art in the form of works for parks, fountains and urban places, her pieces based on her trips to Egypt They are descriptive maps of his itineraries and routes both in Egypt in front of and around the pyramids treated as archaeological ruins and during his travels, maps with which Albuquerque develops a system of museum showcases in which he displays material collected on those trips.

Of interest and archaeological scope, the imposing works of this Egyptian artist can be seen in a context that of the so-called spaces of the Santamonica Highways Performance Space in Los Angeles, where they can also be seen from Susan's paintings of butterflies and caterpillars to the visual dances and Hindu sociocultural works of Erica Rebollar or the most theatrical work of Daniel Brazel based on body expression or the exorbitant multimediality of Cid Pearlman, three artists very different from each other despite using body expression, Rebollar's pieces are synchronized dances with very choreographies. minimalist Hindu dancers, Brazel's are a more dramaturgical monologue based on the narratives of a central actress who wets her face and develops a certain narrative in front of the audience, while Pearlman's are much more acrobatic displays of bodies in space with a much more focused use of multimedialization projecting images on the screens, scenically hanging frames, empty frames of paint, and dropping objects into the space that the actors receive, such as apples.

Almost all of the visual discourses discussed above are developed by people who are either native Americans or immigrants residing in the United States like me, but it would also be worth mentioning some incursions by visiting artists, that is, they came for a certain period of time to show their works and they left, like for example the Argentinean Nicolás, who spent a six-month residency at Glassel School of Art to finally show as her work a fashion show in which the costumes that the models exhibited were all made with a skin that He alluded to human skin and the navel, or Ernesto Neto's large inflatables in moma and mocha.

Bibliography

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Beyond the Intertextual, lecture discussed at the Fondren library lectures auditorium as a guest of the faculty of classical and Hispanic studies, rice university, Houston, Texas, usa, 1996

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Art Pizte: A Perspective from Art critique, paper lecture discussed at the faculty of sociology and anthropology of the lake forest college as a guest of the college, artistic director of transart foundation, coordinated by Quetzil Eugenio, introduced to the audience and translated by Quetzil Eugenio, assistance professor of the faculty, lake forest, Illinois, 1999

Long Bert and Angelini Surpic, another reality, 69 Texans artists, catalogue, Texas, 1989

The paintings of Terrell James

©by Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Houston, Texas

To analyze the work of Terrell James one must locate oneself through orientations that were generated by abstractionism. Some of the artist's pieces suggest forms and worlds that seem to recreate elements of nature, the organic and the world of everyday life, the abstract in her works should not be understood in any sense as that which became abstract due to its contrast. to representation based on a model, but as that abstract in which, as happens with the acoustic sign or the architectural sign, the plastic sign finds its own potential expression in abstract elements such as line, color, surface; atmospheric fields.

So, even through the semiotics of the pictorial plane, plastic abstraction in James is more related to the notion of the abstract in music, poetry and literature than to the abstract understood in the sense of something more or less realistic due to the way in which whether or not it reflects reality. In this sense, his work must be understood as a generative painting. This can be seen by the way the lines outline melodic shapes and make indirect allusions to calligraphy. In fact, the creative process itself in James's work involves grammar. Without moving beyond the limits of the metaphysics of the pictorial frame, his paintings suggest Benjamin's concept of the uniqueness of the work of art and are paintings that most directly allude to Twombly—in his relationship with music, literature and everyday life, paintings that speak of a continium of life, the constant continuity of life. In his paintings we find elements such as synthesis, accentuation, stylizations that relate his works with a classical impulse for the way of relating the figure with the background, the form with the environment, something that can be seen as a personal informalist reinterpretation of informalism. in the history of art.

However, we must analyze James' paintings on fabric understanding the functioning of the fabric as an interface, fabrics on which she illicit a game typical of experimentation with paint and the changing effects of pigment on the fabric creating subtle and evocative images. . In this sense, what we find in his paintings are instances in which lines, planes and colors function as traces of the creative process but exploring harmony in the whole of the pieces, which should be read as a type of orchestrated painting that seems over the fabric as if suspended in time. These layers of different instances of pigment clarify the gravitational form of the way light is worked, something that brings us to an awareness of the duration of time in the terms in which Bergson's referred to the concept of time.

This type of movement in abstractionism has been related as a reaction against the canon of representation as well as a reaction of painting against the emergence of photography. However, more pertinently, abstractionism is related to an impulse that we have called in the plastic arts self-consciousness of art. Even through the metaphysics and phenomenology of the pictorial plane, we can find that abstractionism and conceptualism are related in various epistemological moments of the concept and abstraction. In her metal paintings from 1996, the artist exposed the material to intentional erosion so that it received the effects of natural light as well as artificial effects, making its consistency more rustic. Thus, while the exploration of such effects is the result of his personal questions, it also gives his paintings a metatextual level. A dimension of play is visible in these pieces which refer us to a creative process in which the artist is learning with each piece, understanding each painting as a learning process.

In her paintings “field studies” from 1997, several paintings on paper were brought together by the artist and brought together as a single work. Here the artist proposed different perspectives and points of view on the same process, expressing the way light and color are perceived, something that the artist called color notations. These pieces echo aspects of others among her paintings because in these she recycled elements derived and even waste from the painting process itself in her studio. Taking these spontaneous elements and then composing with them, the piece led to inventive ways of painting born from what he had initially ignored in his studio. For example, in his paintings called Habitad from 1999, a number of medium-format monotypes were not exposed to either natural or artificial effects, nor were there references to a specific context, but rather an art that turned the work process and daily life in a type of pictorial inscription on the fabrics.

These types of characteristics that brought his paintings close to writing do not refer to calligraphy in the literal sense, but they are works that require a grammatological analysis, to understand, for example, why, although we do not find direct references to nature. In representational form, these are actually works that talk about nature. Terrell James' explorations refer us to certain aspects of a spirit of play that Humberto Eco spoke about when he defined the "open work", a concept that implies the idea of ​​a work of art that is open to multiple interpretations. However, this plurisemic and polysemic character acquires a peculiar form in his paintings since the levels of significance and evocation are related to the process rather than meanings, something that refers us to the fact that the viewer's anticipation at an experiential level in the creation The painting itself is central.

With this said, we must clarify that we are not talking about an artist whose works are conceived to be seen for the first time in the space and time in which they are presented in the gallery space. But what is peculiar is how once the viewer goes to the gallery and contemplates his paintings, kinesthetic and communication levels have been explored, meaning that in this case the concept of an open work works in a similar way to how in literary criticism in the sense that the images in James's paintings seem related to certain personal narratives and points of view. Critical issues related to the relationships between plastic image and narrative could be pertinent in an analysis of the artist's paintings if we consider the suggestive relationships of her abstractions with music and poetry.

Of course, we can speak of narratives in his paintings only in a very general sense, a syntagmatic sense, notations, points of view, etc., as moments in which elements, shapes and lines are developed in his compositions, as well as by a certain character. scripture of his way of painting on canvas. Even though there is no writing per se in James's paintings, nor references in the form of images to calligraphy or alphabetic writing, his way of painting functions phenomenologically as a type of inscriptural and scriptural painting. His work is a type of plastic prose that is like plastic in prose.

Parodies and ironies of postmodern Artdeco

©Por Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Caracas, Houston, New York

  This essay in which I propose to discuss Alejandro López and his art is only the embodiment of an intention that has been with me for many years. On the one hand, it covers the art that I saw in New York during a trip from Houston in 2000, works that I began to make during my experience as an immigrant in the United States, but it also includes the works that Alejandro developed in Caracas during the years before we lived the experience of being emigrants in Venezuela, from the beginning to the end of the nineties, cannot however exclude, on the one hand, the discussion of two works that I had the opportunity to curate and present at Rice University in Houston, 1997, as well as The memories I have of the art made by Alejandro before in Cuba.
Between these three moments there are of course differences, but also points of relationship.
  Alejandro is one of those artists who, despite the changes that we emigrants experience in our cultural makeup as individuals, has maintained a unity of style throughout his work. His visual and plastic work presents complex characteristics both from the point of view of its form, aesthetics and style, as well as in the sense of its contents and concepts. This complexity, however, refuses to be addressed in a merely descriptive way, just as it would be incomprehensible from a single perspective, requiring multi-aspectualized analysis.
  On the one hand, this complexity has a physical expression given in its dimensions and in the nomenclature of its elements.
  These are generally large works, in many cases covering three-dimensional spaces, at the same time composed of a multiplicity of independent physical elements related to each other that tend to disseminate in the viewer's perceptions and impressions a sense of what He closes them on themselves as a whole that is both physical and authorial, something that comes from the influence that his experiences in the world of theater had on his art.
  On the one hand, the graphic design in which the text and the iconographic visual image are related is predominant, but on the other hand, photographs of him often come into play, usually dressed in unusual or theatrical clothing, or his physical presence. direct in a way that, based on the body and its movements, could be understood as performance.
  Given, however, that this is frequently accompanied by projections on screens and the use of visual and sound technologies, there is a tendency to dilute the image of the body in the performance in a broader sense, on the one hand, multimedia and, on the other, even concert taking into account the explicit use of musical compositions.
However, it would be useful for a reader who has not seen them live to differentiate three modalities, first, two-dimensional graphic works in which their image appears only in photographs, second, works in which the performance component based on what performs his body is more preponderant than that multimedia based on projections, and finally the latter where the screen predominates to which is added music composed by himself, generally random that is somewhat reminiscent of electroacoustic music or composition with mere sounds as in “ art of noise”.
Moving away from the physical towards the stylistic and visual, this complexity is expressed in a certain variegation or eclecticism that at times suggests a baroque style in his art. When it is two-dimensional, the entire surface of the support is usually filled with typographic texts in which the design of the typography is stylized and recreated in shapes and colors, as well as visual and iconographic images, and when it comes to works that include space usually governed by the simultaneity of several superimposed planes in which different things are happening synchronously, body movements and oral text, image projections on screens, acoustic sound, etc.
  It is not, however, eclecticism or baroque as a mere style.
  Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish or separate to what extent your own creative personality carries with it this tendency towards variegatedness and to what extent it is a conscious intentionality. But the truth is that, without a doubt, if any resource is used by Alejandro to communicate the level of content and concept in his works, it is precisely the intentional commentary on the stylistic which requires a certain implicit distance towards the stylistic where it is not It merely wants to express a style or find in it a means of expression, but rather to comment on styles through style.
This fact, which from the point of view of art, could suggest the type of distance that has already been attributed to visual postmodernism compared to styles, for example, the recurrence in architecture to juxtapose or superimpose references to styles typified as different even from different periods superimposed within the same building, or in music, when a piece that belongs to one genre makes comments to other musical genres as fragments that are called, it acquires in its art, however, a dimension in which We want not only to comment on art from art but also to comment on or call out issues related to the culture that these styles at play presuppose or evoke.
Seen from this perspective, his art could be discussed in the sense of figures of language that have been recurrent in postmodernism such as pastiche, imitation and mending, where a stylistic form is made from traffic with other stylistic forms recognizable in the culture. visual with respect to which the work maintains an ironic and parodic equidistance, or one wants to comment on some gesture or cultural custom associated with that form that the work puts in parentheses or simply assimilates in a way in which the work itself is seduced by the style he comments on making it his own. This is in general one of the characteristics of pastiche.
  This double game of simultaneously criticizing and praising, distancing and rubbing shoulders, has been common, for example, in the forms of postmodernism that have been interested in so-called popular visual culture, such as Jeff Kuns and in general in the so-called kitsch. regarding which the postmodern work of high art wants to quote, ironize or open questions, while on the other hand identifying with certain values ​​that are attributed to that visual form in the culture which is admired, exalted or highlighted by certain values ​​to which No other way could have been achieved but only through visual reifications and non-artistic cultural inventiveness typical of popular taste and aesthetics.
  In this sense, some of Alejandro's works can be read on the one hand as fascinated by the multimedia technology of the synthesizer, the electronic sound editing machine, the digital overhead projector of images on the screen, by the screen and its illusions, while on the other hand , exacerbate the fact of being made in technological media to such an extent that one cannot fail to perceive in them a distanced comment towards the same culture that is implicit in the fascination with the technological world, sometimes moving in a very subtle thread between multimedia -performance in the manner of, for example, Laury Anderson, and an art that in reality at the same time parodies all of this as kitsch paraphernalia, as staged apparatus, as theater of a fetishistic illusion
  In this way, Alejandro presents himself at the same time as the seduced and fascinated actor-author, but also as Jiminy Cricket who is taking a distance from it, accentuating in such a way the things that technological spectacularity can ironically recall the world of kitsch, the use of flowery costumes, for example, as an allusion to the stereotypes and clichés of the Caribbean or the ironic Caribbean, the use of outlandish glasses sometimes with decorative motifs taken to an extravagance that distances itself from punk rock and other genres that at the same time At the same time, it incorporates, to actually comment on the whole world of cheesiness and chewing gum, something done however, as I said, not from the perspective of an ideological critique of frivolity, but from the intentionally ambivalent perspective of a work of high art. that on the one hand comments on these cultural forms with irony and parody, but on the other hand wants to recover their values ​​or exalt them and to that extent identifies with that culture that serves as a motive for presenting itself as, in quotes, part of it or at least partially its expression. in a broader cultural sense.
Now, when I talked about complexity, I alluded in advance that it is not possible to cover all aspects from a single angle. It is necessary, focusing on other levels of the same works, not to forget that moving away now from the mere form and the stylistic, at the same time these are works that generally include text both orally pronounced and graphically written and these texts in their content are very far from to refer to the senses and meanings that are deducible from the indexical analysis of forms.
In fact, looking at it from the texts, a significant number of Alejandro's works, both the two-dimensional graphics, the corporal performatics and the multimedia ones, are almost all comments on or deployments around certain books or concepts.
For example, the two samples of his that I included in my small curatorship of contemporary Venezuelan art and present at Rice University, on which occasion we invited three Cubans, one focused on a book by Talcon Parson, American sociologist, founder of functionalism in sociology, and the other in the text concept.
The first was titled The Grand Theory and throughout the development of the scene he appeared reading several pages of a book by Parson in a repetitive and monotonous manner, possibly Parson's Theory of Social Action. This was then heard in the audience read by this kind of theatrical character that Alexander tends to use in his own acting persona, which appears sitting in the shape of a lotus like religious Brahmins or Buddhists, on top of a disproportionately high chair in a vertical mode capable of of making whoever sits in it touch the lighting system of the auditorium on the ceiling but made with decorative motifs alluding to Hindu cultural forms while sitting on that chair reading Parson's book, leaving both of them surrounded by a cloud of smoke. several spectacular colors like those that are usually used with lighting in large concerts.
In this work we therefore have an extension of the parodic and ironic game beyond the plane of a simple commentary on style with respect to styles via form, towards all the apparatus behind the idea of ​​being a consumer of a great theory as a reader or to create it, however, again as with respect to kitsch or popular culture in the style, also in an ambivalent way in which on the one hand a critical distance is taken towards it, something that reminds me of the distance that postmodernism in theory has taken to itself, the relativization for example of philosophy as literature, or the social sciences seen as good to read in the sense of the narcissism of the text as merely enjoyable, while on the other hand it is done in a way in which that there seems to be a fascination on the part of Alejandro towards values ​​that he considers redeemable in this.
The truth is that there is at the same time a critical distance via irony and parody in conjunction with an identification or exaltation with respect to its thematized or alluded motifs, as I have otherwise discussed something similar although different in my criticism of the work of the Chilean Arturo Duclos.
In this sense, there is a stunning exaltation in his work, using this word with the same sense of apparatus, that is, ironically emphasizing that it is stunning or spectacular, but at the same time delivering his senses as an author as much as eliciting an exacerbation from the spectators. of the narcissistic enjoyment or pleasure that there may be towards the values ​​of it itself, thus turning out to be intentionally impressive and ostentatious as a mere revocation of a sense of enjoyment or lust for the pleasure of something that is fun and attractive to the senses.
However, this characteristic, visible in his piece The Great Theory, which we presented in the Hamman Hall of Rice University, is expressed in another way in his work The Text: Indestructible Unit, which we presented in the same auditorium where something similar was It is not about an author and his book, but about a concept, in this case the concept of text itself or the text as a concept, but where the emphasis falls on the projection on a screen located on the stage of hundreds of visual images juxtaposed as a random collage or cinema, while he is located inside a fortress or castle walled by the phrase that titles the piece, the text: indestructible unit, while addressing the audience orally with his usual clothing.
  Complexity takes on diverse forms in many of his other works.
  On the one hand, the works carried out in New York seem to take what was explored at Rice University further, moving away from the thematization of books or concepts. They are types of ambivalent parodies but now exacerbated towards the universe of machines, robots and the illusionism of special effects as can be read discussed in the culture of the Hollywood cinematographic spectacle as well as the musical. I do focus on his new pieces that I saw in New York in 2000 as well as on preliminary projects of works that I have seen on CD-ROM later digitized.
On the other hand, the works made in Caracas lead us to one of the aspects discussed, which is purely formal and stylistic, and yet essential to understand the whole of his art. In them, the ruling preponderance that the purely decorative has in his art but understood in a sense that undoubtedly refers to the ardeco where there is a fascination for the voluptuousness of the decorative, works that recall, for example, the stylistics of Lautrec and artdeco design in general both in design and architecture, the interest in super-stylized arabesques. We could thus speak, interpreting the whole of his art from these pieces focused on the formal in itself -mostly paintings on two-dimensional formats--, of an Electronic Artdeco: parodies and ironies in a postmodern Lautrec
Finally, in contrast to the works from Caracas where the purely formal aspect of that style came to the foreground as an aesthetic pleasure, memorizing those made before in Cuba, those bring us closer to other aspects of that complexity required of a multiaspectual approach to which I was referring, aspects which are also of interest for the reading and interpretation of his art.
On the one hand, the two-dimensional graphic focused on the relationship between the text understood as typography and the iconographic visual where, as I said, his image appears but through photography, I am referring to his works The Book of Descartes and The Symbolic Production, both also developed as comments. around books, the first to a book by Descartes, the second to one by Néstor García Canclini of the same title. In these works the graphics, not without a certain eclectic baroque style, are somewhat reminiscent of graphics in the Russian avant-garde, especially in the way the text is used as an image as well as the preponderance that design acquires in them. This element, however, is not continued later either in Caracas or in Houston or in New York, with the exception of the fact that an image conceived almost as a design logo in his art never fails to continue to be present, which consists well via self-photographs of himself or via ways of presenting himself on scene by wearing a builder's helmet.
The image of the builder, however, is exposed to the same ambivalence previously analyzed, something with respect to which a critical, parodic or ironic distance is maintained but with respect to which certain values ​​are wanted to be exalted since this helmet in turn has a bizarre light. at the top and is accompanied by the glasses and the flowery costumes that I was referring to, a kind of character like in the theater which by the way was born in his first works around certain readings that Alejandro made about fetishism in psychoanalysis.
In fact, there is in all of Alejandro's work a certain criticism, although subtle and non-ideological, of fetishism and we could say that if something peculiarizes his art with respect to other forms that pastiche, imitation and mending have acquired with respect to culture as much as towards styles in visual postmodernism is precisely that its attention is not only focused on the idea of ​​imitating cultural texts or creating pastiches with them, but also making explicit with this ambivalence to which I refer how implicit fetishism is to art in any of its forms, something from which no artist can escape.
Alejandro's art in this sense is a discussion about art as a form of fetishism and brings with it a certain disillusionment in the sense pointed out by Boudrillard when he said that contemporary art is extremely boring and generates more and more indifference. This disillusionment that Boudrillard discusses in Transaestetica and then brings to culture in culture and simulacrum could be understood as an exacerbation of the fact that art presupposes a fetishism in which the very concept of art is locked up with no possible way out of the dilemma.
I was referring at the beginning to the fact that it is a complexity in which, both in the sense of form and content, many of his works seem difficult to be closed from the outside in terms of the concept of the uniqueness of the work of art in benjamín, something that I have also referred to with respect to Tania Brugueras, but that in Alejandro he finds a more focused complexion perhaps due to the fact, as I said before, that his experiences in the theater both with the Buendía group and in the field of scenography, where he held A feedback with Leandro Soto made him more aware of that kind of suspicion towards the work as a whole closed on itself that is implicit, for example, in Brecht's theater but also in a type of theater that fascinated Alejandro in his first works. , I am referring to the so-called meta theater, theater of the theater or about the theater, a type of theater that tries to merge or dilute itself into scenes in the everyday spaces of the city or society.
Examples of this interest of Alejandro are, on the one hand, a work that I presented during one of my projects from those years, precisely called meta theater and exhibited in the context of a carnival in Holguín, which consisted of the concept of meta theater written about a support located on the same boulevard of the carnival carrying with it a meta theater book, on the other, a work which, in a way that I consider original, relates the meanings of the suffix “meta” in theater with its meanings In conceptualism in the visual arts, I am referring to his exhibition Meta Cero, in which the word goal zero was written with cold light bulbs repeated many times occupying all the walls of the gallery, while the person sitting in a chair in the middle of The gallery illustrated with the movements of his body this relationship between theater and the visual, it was an allegorical image consisting of a performance through which Alejandro had a voice recorded on a recorder that he wore hanging around his neck and this voice told him what What he had to do, I told him, now walk forward, and he got up and walked, then I told him, turn left and he turned, all in front of the spectators.
As Alejandro explained to me, it is about something that in the theater is called a golem, a kind of primordial figure that is born from the mud or the earth and which, like a child, is taught everything from the beginning and which represents the first form of the actor. in the relationship between the text that he interprets for the performance and the relationship of his body movements with that text.
In fact, implicit in the idea of ​​a libretto, it is true that what distinguishes what constitutes the bodily movements that an actor makes on stage in contrast to or with respect to the movements that anyone makes with their body in ordinary life, is that In the theater those movements are not those that the body would perform by itself, but those that the text of the script indicates to follow.
  Thus, actor-wise understood, the golem symbolizes the primordial or basic principle itself through which one passes from the pattern-movement, pattern-action, pattern-performance relationship in the ordinary reality of any non-theatrical individual, to the text-movement relationship. of the body in theater fiction, in acting within that or within a symbolic world in which the patterns of body movement are given by the text that functions as a script, that is, where the movements of the body are not the usual ones. in life or reality, but those guided by its script or pre-established representation.
On the other hand, however, this interest in the golem is still present in his later work, on the one hand in the idea of ​​a body that is moved like machines by an instruction it receives from another place where its movements tend to be automatic, --this is made explicit, for example, in the interest in the robotic in the works of New York where Alejandro appears wrapped in clothing or costumes that look like a robotic costume --and on the other hand, in the interest that Alejandro gave to psychology in the years after goal zero, not only in the sense that I was referring to of an interest in readings on fetishism in psychoanalysis, but also in therapies such as hypnosis.
In fact, Alejandro presented his character at that time as a supposed parapsychologist of art, an idea that he later quickly abandoned to replace it with a more logotype idea calling his character simply Doctor A.
  However, the idea that prevails in theater is that its works always include this type of character, as in graphic work, for example in Descartes' book, it merges with the idea of ​​performance as photographic documentation or performance as photography, as In another way we can see in artists who portray themselves creating a kind of set or scenic setting such as Marta Maria or Cirenaica
  This notion of set or scenic setting is also relevant in Alejandro's art not only in the sense of creating a photograph of himself on a set prepared for her as documentation, but also because of the preponderance of the artifact and visuality in his way of working. of the three-dimensional in a way that is more scenographic than sculptural and where the installation in many of his works reveals elements of scenography.
References

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Alejandro Lopez, series of lectures discussed at the rice media center lectures auditorium, A multimedia course, produced by transart foundation of Houston and rice university, film and tape recorded, transart foundation of Houston sounds collection, Houston, Texas, usa, 1997

Visual isotopies, spectator and culture

©Por Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Houston, Texas

The visual work of Rubén Torres Llorca anticipates the viewer, that is, the viewer that she elaborates in her discourse, which is not the one who will be in front of the work objectively, but rather the one who as the horizon towards which the work is directed. work is returned by it in its discourse, then dialogues with the interpretative heritage of the real spectators for whom the effective concretion of the act of reception without ceasing to function within democratic parameters open in interpretation to a certain exponential interpretive randomness, He never ceases to produce in his works a critical relationship unique to his art that arises between what is anticipated by the discourse, the type of spectator that the work projects and the real and effective spectator who is in front of it.
  It is as if between both, the one who, with respect to the literary eco, defined as a reader in fabula, projected as anticipated in the fable of the work, and the actual reader who reads it, in the case of Rubén between the anticipated recipient and the concrete one, A dialogue will be created around which the main dramaturgical climaxes will be articulated, the keys, to put it another way, of the knots of sense and meaning, something that does not cease to be, since the first is projected by the author as an enunciative element in the work, a triadic dialogue between the real spectator who is in front of the work, that anticipated other who is fictionalized in the work is like a kind of mirror dimension of the discourse, and between the first, through the second and the author.
  A logical triad is established in Rubén's art that is reminiscent not a little in a sense of course post-Lacanian, that is, distant from Freud and situated in a perspective that focuses on language, the ways of proceeding of psychoanalysis in regard to relationship between the unmanifest and the manifest, between the latent and the ungraspable, or between, to use a dyad of Barthes, between the obvious and the obtuse is obtained.
This is an idea of ​​spectator different from that of Arturo Cuenca's conceptualism where the spectator is rather a concept that the work calls upon its contents to be metatextually thematized, as for example in his work spectator or in his exhibition on concepts such as air where What the viewer sees from one point of the exhibition space towards the background is the same as a photograph repeats in front of him, the exact shot of what he sees on the other side and conversely from the opposite side he sees the photograph that remains in the background of the exhibition space. reverse side.
  In Rubén the spectator is not a concept thematized by the work in the sense of calling its content as what it is about, but rather, as in literature, cinema and even theater, the spectator is fabled by The work, as the one to whom the work is directed, takes part in the dramaturgical articulation of the relationships of sense and meaning that the work itself anticipates.
  In this sense, in Rubén's work there is an appeal to what eco calls interpretive cooperation where the viewer is expected to complete the relationships of meaning through semantic explanations or what in literature is called congruent paths, also called isotopies, with respect to the reader. .
  These are ways through which the model reader anticipated in the writing in how it is written – in Rubén we would talk about the model spectator versus the real one – is left to the horizon of the possible interpretive trajectories to be later completed by the real spectator.
  This is an artist in whose works literature and cinema, more than the visual arts, seem to be the parameters with which he articulates dramaturgy in conceptual terms and it would have to be said that in itself this concept of dramaturgy, coming from theater, has rarely been experienced in the plastic and visual arts, Rubén brings to completion this exploration between the arts, a dramaturgical concept of meanings in fact presupposes a certain plot and undoubtedly in the visual it is made semantically explicit through how the artist relates the visual iconographic with the written textual, both with the literary written text, to which Rubén continually resorts in most of his works, texts written literally inside the pieces, as well as what we could understand about the narrative substrate of the images, it is That is, the narratives that an iconic image implies even if it is not written down.
  Despite this, not in all of his works interpretive cooperation is expected from the viewer. There are also works in which Rubén makes this anticipation a reason for a more less open and more interpellation relationship towards the viewer considered as an exponent of a culture or society. to whose codes Rubén appeals with a critical sense, sometimes treating the viewer in an ironic, parodic and even sarcastic way, in this sense it would be necessary to differentiate between different types of works by Rubén according to how the anticipated or fabled viewer is worked on them. in the declarative speech itself
On the one hand, there is a part of Rubén's visual work, which from a still epidermal point of view, could refer in some of its aspects to what we have iconographically typified as pop art due to the reference to visual iconography that has been massified. by television and cinema, images that are highly iconographic in their emblematism – sometimes recognizable icons in mass culture, or captured only in their typicality but without literal references – treated as silhouettes in some cases drawn by the same person, in others transposed from photographs or directly intervening photographs through the use of formal resources that tend to make use of what is relatively standardized such as the template
  Those pieces, which move from his Home Cinema series to his work I Take You Under My Skin, go, however, far beyond the usual parameters of pop art with regard to the way in which pop as an art is relates to non-artistic culture.
  As I have said other times, pop goes out in search of and brings to art icons and visual images that it takes from mass culture, it makes an imitation with them, it imitates them in the plastic language of art, calling attention to the retinal and about the extra-artistic plasticity of those with which it creates a kind of super-object or super-image that, as a ready-made or selection of that in culture, seems more like a super-image than what that image itself is in non-artistic culture.
Attention is drawn to elements that are not perceptible at first glance in their direct urban or media expression, while certain elements are exaggerated to draw attention to them in a largely culinary sense, the way, for example, in which arts techniques Plastic images are loaded through the pop image with unusual procedures previously applied to their media, adapting to these latest codes of printing, reproduction, design and treatment of the image typical of advertising techniques and other modes of the mass image, such as printing on ceda, fabric and materials such as vinyl or different types of polyethylene, photo printing in its different possibilities and other techniques, etc., but pop, barely turned its attention towards culture with a sense of investigation of the processes that are of interest in that.
  Rubén's works from home cinema and his entire series developed in that inclination, go beyond transposing images from cinema and television to painting to move more from an interest towards the cultural in them that he carries out a research in their respect that In some works, not in all due to what has been said about a certain preponderance at times of an ironic discourse that invokes more immediate themes, it becomes a true investigation, specifically in the most elaborate ones that sometimes take months and even a year or more. of realization
  Due to the way in which the artist treats these images in his pieces accompanied by different forms of decoration that even involve faces and bodies, ways of capturing the image and its being colored and shown, we can say that they no longer refer to the live icon taken from mass culture, a Hollywood actor, for example, just as he appears on television, but this image in his pieces is presented surrounded by an entire aesthetic, ways of adorning and ways of designing. through which Rubén recreates, comments and evokes aesthetics of domestic interiors, which refer directly to forms such as popular culture, in this case the domestic culture and the Cuban home, conceives or expresses his sense of aesthetics and taste around of these images
In contrast to pop, which brings the technicalities of the mass and advertising to the plastic, Rubén brings techniques from non-mass popular culture, usually related to certain traditions of darning, embroidery, weaving, thereby suggesting that they are part of a whole popular cultural logic that assimilates them to their own domestic and home codes, above all, femininity, masculinity, relationships, love, ideas of good and evil, happy endings and melodramas generating all of them. a sentimentality and a whole social cosmetology around the imagery that runs through the Hollywood imagination but how they are reassimilated and reinvented by a culture that Rubén on the one hand studies but that on the other hand also satirizes from his own springs of common sense, sometimes the Characters appear not only or not always surrounded by these modes of decoration that suggest the kitsch paraphernalia of the corny aesthetic, but with little jars like imps, or with accentuated circles under their eyes, or with pointed figurations that can suggest strident decoration motifs in the popular taste, but also rock masks like those of Kiss
  That is to say, Rubén sometimes treated these images as they would be treated by a housewife who exposed them to her traditions of sewing, embroidery, decoration, interior decoration, or by adolescents who incorporated them into their senses of good and bad, the strident and the banal, or simply stylizing them in an exaggerated way that could well suggest something rococo, neoclassical or ultra-baroque, intervening in their eyes with kitschy decorations, sometimes as if putting on makeup, thereby communicating not only what the images are in themselves. , but also and above all the new culture that arises as a result of social inventiveness and the socio-aesthetic slang of popular culture.
  However, it is not an irony or a parody of those aesthetics of popular culture as occurs in a certain type of assimilation of kitsch in postmodernism where in a certain way there is an exacerbation of the superfluous or banal as mere superficiality or as forms of taste. not sensitized in the high aesthetics of the arts, but of an exploration that is recognized as more imbued by that culture, maintaining with it a relationship of distance but also of sympathy and belonging - in this sense I carry you under my skin is almost an emotional confession towards these parameters of popular culture, explaining how they are in his own family--, thus focused from the home and the domestic, referring to values, many of which are not disposable but redeemable, his works moved within that intentional ambivalence, they were at the same time ironic but also affective in an existential sense of the family since there is something of this in the aesthetics of grandparents or parents who were not trained in art
  It is not strange in the United States, in fact, that this type of recreation of mass visual culture also takes shape in inventiveness of all kinds that reculturalize mass culture from new suburban and urban reifications, such as, for example, the entire African-American aesthetic. around cars in Texas that are painted with strident colors and decorative motifs, something that is made explicit in the saideco culture where even dances from rock and blue have been reculturalized by an African-American country rural reading that reinvents them.
  What comes from mass culture is therefore not taken as it is chosen in the manner of a simple transposition that mimics the visual text of culture on television or cinema, but rather attention is paid to and investigated as such. culture is being reculturalized, and while it is true that there is some of this implicit in kitsch when it is assimilated into postmodern visual discourse or in neoplasticism in general, I am not aware of previous research that focuses specifically on the iconography of cinema and especially television. , specifically its thematic and figurative attention is on the face and body of actors in the films, strives to find those cultural constructions that are often unconscious - brought to the explicitation of language by the artist - but which are consistent. Somehow implicitly dormant, in the aesthetics, in the ways of decorating, these are pieces in which famous television icons, transposed to fabric or paper, or drawn by Rubén, are intervened with decorative figurations in their costumes, their eyes, in their atmospheres creating a kind of visual symbolic set that alludes to how these images are integrated into the domestic culture of the home of which in fact they are part of the weekly television programming itself.
  I will return to that series not only because of the peculiarity of the research achieved in it but also because with respect to the problematic with which we have opened this essay, it raises and presupposes very different questions from the subsequent turn that his art took towards the end of the eighties, a turn that Up to the present in the United States we could consider it predominant in the whole of his art, and that it is characterized first of all because, unlike that more pop search in which the viewer was dissolved or annulled in a general idea of ​​culture, resulting in being omitted in the level of the discourse of the work, what we have referred to above as an anticipated spectator in the discourse of the work, on the one hand fabulated as a formal model for the syntagmatic form of the visual discourse and on the other presupposed as an effective spectator, comes to the foreground .
  But this new turn predominant until today not only brings the concept of the spectator as experienced in discourse and as a real spectator, to the foreground, it also and even more than that, presupposes a different relationship with regard to the way in which work as a visual and iconographic discourse, is related to what beyond the plastic-formal, that is, art as a form with respect to art itself, we could define as culture or the cultural.
  The self-referential components also become different, that is, referring to himself and his experience, just as from an aesthetic and formal point of view he moves away from pop and immerses himself in a less massive and more affective dimension towards what we could understand as popular culture, this concept that, regarding Rubén, requires specific clarifications to the way in which his art discusses it
With this new turn Rubén pays attention to other aspects of culture understood from the point of view of visual material culture, including religion.
This turn, understood in a very specific sense to Rubén, ruins three searches within the new general investigation, on the one hand works that shift all attention towards the viewer, here there are large installations like a labyrinth exhibited at the Sao Biennial. Paulo, this is your work and the trap, but they have, especially the last two, all their emphasis on visual material culture or what we call today visual culture, as well as on implicit dimensions to the relationships between the narrative and the iconic, where a culture such as this is not simply studied but also a critical reflection is raised whose center is to open questions, situate paradoxes, invoke awareness about the issues in question, although in a way that in Rubén never leaves of being existential in the sense of the individual.
Finally, something very peculiar distinguishes this turn—although Rubén seems to have returned to the questions at the beginning from a new perspective in the United States—in that one it was about the relationship between American culture and Cuban culture syncretized in a new resulting domestic culture. of this, in the new turn it not only moves away from the massive still present in I carry you under my skin through the selection of industrial fabrics of mass reproduction with their prints and arabesques to the taste of the people, but it also moves its attention to these relationships from the point of view of how they occur between Christianity and the non-Christian, on the one hand, between the religious and what is incorporated into the religion not initially coming from it, as well as towards inventions that are not already, as in home cinema, of the relationship between aesthetics of Cuban taste and aesthetics of American cinema, but of inventiveness resulting from social circumstances very specific to the Cuban situation at that time,
  This fact, which in any case was present in home cinema, let us not forget that in those pieces Rubén exhibited, along with the Hollywood icons, the toothbrushes with which he made the special effects of minidriping, the razor blades with which he cut his stencils, the colored pencils with which he colored the figures reused as decorative elements, among other things typical of the precariousness and economic poverty in Cuba, something that reaches its most relevant moment in I carry you under my skin due to the importance it acquires in This is the reflection on what he said before identifying with the values ​​of that popular culture.
Rubén mentions as a precedent to his vision Mario García Joya whose photographs of Cuban barbecues – a kind of unique invention to create two floors with wood inside houses, and of furniture, ways of decorating and other popular inventiveness were a type of attention towards people's inventive bricollage in non-artistic material culture that certainly focused the attention of his new turn.
It is true that at one point Rubén began to color his photographs as, for example, photographers of quinceanera parties do, something that, although in a different way from the characteristics of his art discussed above, Mario and Katia had ventured into. , but what we must say is that this turn towards bricollage in the way in which Rubén explores it anticipates a type of preponderant attention later in many Cuban artists of the new generation towards bricollage in culture, I am referring to the furniture in the carpenters, but also the formwork of Umberto planas, to cite two examples of an attention towards bricollage in culture although not from the point of view of religion.
  It could be said in this sense that despite the interest that non-artistic visual material culture acquires in other artists of his generation such as Bedia or Brey, in none like Rubén - although he and Flavio share an interest in kitsch since two very different points of view—this fact acquires a more explicit visual elaboration, works such as the trap or this is your work, for example, among many others, are true studies on the altarpiece, altars, niches and other forms of shelving religious and syncretic as they occur in Cuban popular culture.
  When Rubén began this turn, he had just returned from his first trip to Mexico and something that notably influenced the change was the impact that the Mexican churches and all the iconography and visuality of Mexican aesthetics had on him in the sense of how colonial culture is. recreated by Mexican culture as an expression of its own culture in other terms. And it is true that, although I do not doubt that he probably denied it, the way in which his own image or characters worked in paper mache with beards that suggest his own physiognomy, some exposed to images of sacrifice, catharsis or exorcisms, reminds in some way, the the way fridda did it
  In this sense, in its new turn, there is an interest in syncretism, but in a sense that is not strictly ethnic or racial, but rather focused on what we could understand, if we cut material culture from the exclusive point of view of the visual imagery, such as the expression of the syncretic in terms of imagery and its effects on the symbolic imaginary.
  Now, in Rubén we have a reading exclusively focused on the artifactual, on the visual of a material culture such as, for example, all the imagery of the altarpieces, the altars and the niches that we mentioned before, of certain procedures in the way of treating the images perceptible in visual culture in plastic terms.
  It is not about something documentary, as in García Joya, regarding that culture but rather about creating works that themselves have, from the point of view of the relationship between the visual and the written, a dramaturgy and that generally not only They do not comment on this culture but rather they propose some type of interpretation towards the matter and that they are composed in a way that in terms of senses and meanings makes great use of that spectator's anticipation that we referred to before, something explicit in the written texts and in the way of conceiving the work as exposed presentationality
No work as a labyrinth makes more explicit this new dialogue that Rubén's new turn proposes between his fabled spectator, anticipated in the very discourse of the work, and his real spectator in situ, or this triad, between the author, his fabled spectator. and its real viewer, because it is a work with entry and exit through which the viewer must follow a sequential route in which part by part, piece by piece, relationships are established, but it is something that certainly mode becomes an implicit generality that takes on very specific forms in less complex pieces focused on certain themes in which, in a sense that is both dramaturgical and psychological, is made explicit.
  The above is something that in general we could identify with the primacy that the use of alphabetic written texts acquires within works written in a variety of calligraphies and graphic modes of words and letters according not only to the content of what is said. in those texts, but also to the way in which it is said, that is, to what, by the way in which it is written in terms of the image of the letter, is meant not only in what is explicitly said by the text, but also by the way in which this is inscribed within the codes that we have in culture regarding the reading and visuality of certain types of texts, so for example, some texts, in addition to their literal content, due to the way in which they are written, suggest epitaphs, others suggest a didactics of the objects as in a museum, others suggest the type of writings that are used to accompany religious images with a certain didacticism, such as, for example, the headband and the allegorical text in medieval iconography that were allegorical. to the narratives of the literary passages of religion, while others may seem the same as the type of text that people use to ask for something in alters or the opposite, the type of text that accompanies an image when it is highly cut by the cinema in the cinema, for example, the function of the text between scenes in silent cinema, or in ancient theater.
  These contents therefore do not refer to what the text says but to how it is said by the visual image of the writing and the way in which it evokes a genre or inscription on forms of the text in culture. Now, the relationship is not always direct, Rubén tends to exchange the meanings of what is said in the text with the way in which it is written visually in order to achieve dramaturgical effects that accentuate or reinforce the content of the text in its relationship with the images. For example, something very psychological referring to subjectivity can be written as if it were a museographic text that presents an object in the museum, a religious way of presenting writing, to say something very conceptual, or a cinematic way, to say something very conceptual. say something more cultural. It is therefore something that requires an empirical investigation around the specific works and their themes.
For example, in this is your work, a title that in itself addresses the viewer directly, as if telling him at a first explicit level of reading, you do it, your interpretation completes it, or here are the elements that you must relate, the viewer You can walk through the work on all its sides as well as around it, contemplating things, objects, signs, symbols, that have been arranged in a way in which they are there on one side to be seen, that is, shown, but on the other hand. On the other hand, how they would be placed as images and objects not by an artistic intention that presupposes them, as in the usual sense of the expressively motivated sign, to communicate something, but in the way in which they are placed and placed when they cover other functions that are not strictly expressive, but either aesthetic as in decoration or ritual and religious as in altars and religious receptacles, creating a kind of symbiosis between these two functions that in conjunction with the written discourse and the fabled elements proper to be a work of art, they communicate a literary and cinematic meaning, as I said, about that culture, as happens to an author or director who deals with these themes but from the cinema.
  The elements, however, these icons, symbols, images, are related in being arranged through taste to popular values ​​and common places, porcelain panthers, for example, common on tables or sideboards as decorative elements within the rooms. houses, appear walking as they are used as decorative motifs in Cuban houses but on altar surfaces that in turn make a symmetrical and dynamic game with other symbols that allude to religion and rituals, that is, instead of on tables, on shelves on which they have more ritual elements such as religious icons in the niches such as little virgins or the image of Saint Lazarus or the image of a female angel, the typical North American Indian with plumes in two forms, treated directly as decorative plaster forms inside the houses and how his image is received in the cinema, mounted on his horse, elements such as vessels and necklaces that suggest offerings that are made or placed for the orichas in the Afro-Cuban religion, all organized around two busts that fuse formal procedures of visual imagery of religion with originally non-religious iconography such as Martí, but incorporated into the latter. This treatment of apparently non-religious images incorporated into the discourse on religion and as part of its internal logic, I consider it a strong reflection on how certain images in culture are treated and function religiously without coming directly from that, religion.
On the other hand, the dramaturgical component, but now not as it is elaborated in a more textualist way and woven by a plot that weaves together what is read with the narrative substrate of the iconographic and the properly visual way in which the work is made, but rather more well in the sense of a more direct, immediate, synesthetic and psychological relationship with the viewer that was visible in some of his less complex works from the late eighties, he acquires in his current searches results that are in my opinion more explicit and broad, I mean. to works that do not presuppose the spectator in that synesthetic mode, such as loneliness being the worst torment of that period, but rather to works that externalize the image of the spectator, making him part of the work in the sense of dramatizing it in tension with elements that are coded as the work and that are seen face to face with that spectator now brought to the cinema of the piece, such as one in which a young woman looks in front of a rabbit that is on some books and on a table, the latter suggesting the work with the inclusion of text, and the young girl, made in three dimensions suggesting the viewer, or one that represents a child also in three dimensions in front of a little pig that on a pedestal seems to be the work.
References

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Rubén Torres Llorca, lecture discussed at the rice media center, transart foundation of Houston sound collection, tape recorders and film collection, rice university, Houston, Texas, usa, 1997

Young Anglo artists

©by Abdel Hernandez San Juan

 Houston, Texas, USA

The gallery and the art museum consider, for the presentation of samples, spaces that have sufficient neutrality so that the works presented can be shown for what they are, white walls that help them shine, lighting modes that accentuate aspects that environmentally they want to emphasize. The white walls and the methods of assembly and lighting are still an element of language that participates in the readings that the spectators make of the works, they present them. In the same way that the “ready made” drew attention to the “naming of art” as an “institutional moment of art,” the neutral white walls illuminated by lamps—suppose ways in which the institution of art is present in an inclusive way in the institutionalization of the “modes of reception and assignment of “meaning” to the “objects” and “works” that are presented there.

The walls and gallery codes mentioned, in the end, are not entirely neutral. Its occasional neutrality depends on the type of “works” and “meanings” according to which these “presentational modes” and lighting function. The literature on the concept of “art institution” does not contemplate the “axiologies” that explain the ways in which the “art institution”, in addition to something comprehensible in its external objectivity—such an institution, such another—is present—as “inclusive forms”—in the “rhetorical forms” of “presentation” and “representation of art”; ways in which the institution, in a way similar to when we say that language is an institution due to the fact that it is learned and spoken, is subject to change only, however, after several generations, the institution of art is also inscribed as an institution in the shapes; when we still do not refer to it as an institution in the literal sense. The ways of arranging the spaces to present the works are examples of the institution in form.

All rhetoric involves a practice of language and, therefore, not only what one wants and desires to express, but also the ways in which the “ways of meaning” are inscribed in “rhetorical forms” which themselves tend to “speak.” by the subjects" and "make their languages ​​speak", to move their languages ​​towards modes of meaning in which the "individual subject", "the person" or "the expressional intention" do not speak, but rather what those forms "have spoken". ”, the ways in which “they have been spoken”, ways that tend to “speak for the subjects”.

What happens then when artists bring new proposals which in themselves represent ways of presenting space with their works. When I say that the art gallery, the art museum or the exhibition room become an object of attention for the works that the artists present, I am not referring to aesthetic proposals in which this becomes a content in the works, a literalization through texts or an art that goes to the streets, but to the ways in which the works themselves raise these issues. If the spaces for showing art have become the object of attention, it has been precisely in this sense and this has ruined a multiplicity of new, versatile and renewing artistic forms.

The visual arts shows presented by Kimberly Davenport in recent years at the Rice University gallery have offered varied and rich forms of what I have discussed above. The Rice University Art Gallery, a fabulous space between square and rectangular approximately 15 meters wide and a strut that rises to more than 7 meters, whose main entrance draws one of the most beautiful frontal images of Rice University in Houston, located in Sewall Hall between the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences Building and the Department of Art History at the University, has been the recipient of a series of exhibitions that are among the most original and innovative in recent years in United States.

In the artists presented, the gallery as a space becomes the object of the heuristic search in the works. In this impetus, several exhibitions can be understood as modalities in which artists have assumed that “space”, from artists who temporarily reinscribe the “gallery space”, transforming it with another superimposed language, to others who make their works experiments to stimulate another type. relationship to the less passive spectator than usual. There is no shortage of those who assume space in a conventional way simply designing in it with languages ​​between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional or, as I said before, proposing designs from the computerized computer, works in which they understand the space in a virtual sense, then presenting their virtualized designs in real space. The exhibitions presented have been characterized by providing the conditions for the invited artists to present works that take on, not only the gallery space, but the gallery as a space, their main challenge.

In the exhibition presented by Mahattan Anglo artist Phoebe Washburn True, False, and Slightly Better, Rice University Art Gallery, January 24 - March 24, 2003, she created a world or universe which viewers had to navigate beyond simply modifying the works with their bodies, entering a universe that invites heuristic curiosity, the idea that the viewer really has something to investigate if he enters the recesses of this and even, as the artist says, “get up and walk in the different levels of the work. The exhibition consisted of an almost total transformation of the space with cardboard that the artist gathers in her workshop and paints, deconstructing, in some way, the neutral references to it and inscribing in their place, as a transitory exhibition, a metaphor and a poetic about the creative process. He included—as part of the piece—signals that indicated the process, both creative and assembling the exhibition, where one day's work culminated, he left his mark, while where he left the next day's work he left another mark; successively until the piece is finished.

The artist directed her work to the viewer by exploring an initially two-dimensional form from the walls towards a three-dimensional form in space. A move from the two-dimensional to the three-dimensional, this consisted of covering the walls and the space with cardboard, adhering the cardboard to the wall. The piece was developed as a plastic discourse by series of layers superimposed on each other, leaving in each one, reminiscences of the previous one, as a number of levels that functioned both at a material and textural level – from the walls to the space and from this towards those—as in the sense of a three-dimensional form in space—semantically alluding to an “ecological world” of accumulation of remnants turned into art—a material usually discarded—and recovered as raw material for art, as well as a landscape.

While walking through the gallery, the viewer could find moments in which this cumulative form extended before him at the height and below his eyes like a landscape of diverse capacities, while at times he walked underneath – such as its ceiling, another roof of the gallery--in this great way, observing the system of scaffolding on which it was mounted, scaffolding that in other parts was inscribed within the large amounts of cardboard. As a mountable and dismountable exhibition, its photographs have a meaning that goes beyond simple documentation, becoming important. In these, at times, we can see the artist surrounded by the environment of the piece during the process in which she assembled it, the cardboard as a world around her in the same way that it is around her in her artist studio; their living environment. At other moments the cardboard becomes a dense layer of gestures and inscriptions from the process of having been made as a work of art; We can see the artist standing on scaffolding or on the roof.

I consider that “True, False and Slightly Better”—younger Anglo artist—is one of the most relevant piece of our time, a piece created by a younger Anglo artist which is a piece of conceptual and procedural art and which represents a powerful conceptual and emotional metaphor about the possibilities of conceptual art among the younger generation inviting to reflection and ethically engaging the spectator in the here and now of the piece presentation. A very different example was represented by California artist Stephen Hendee's exhibition SuperThrive January 20 - February 27, 2000--who literally covered floors and ceilings in transparent plastic sheets toned in a light illuminated green between the wall and the plastic, creating in the space illuminated irregular shapes. The peculiar thing about this piece, which had a rather apparently cold atmosphere due to the simplicity of the forms, is that it developed essentially as a language attached to the walls and ceiling, rather than as forms that formed any development towards the space. itself, that is, it was the work that most directly created a new universe in the gallery, giving the gallery itself as a space new meanings and meanings.

While Phoebe's work seemed to deconstruct the idea of ​​a closed work in favor of suggesting new senses and meanings related to the creative process—and while Jesse Bercowetz and Matt's exhibition temporarily reinscribed the gallery space according to a type of relationship to and with the most typical of play and the senses of adventure, Stephen Hendee's exhibition seemed to suggest the senses and meanings of the gallery itself as a space according to other types of spaces. In Phoebe's exhibition the creative process itself was turned into a plastic language of the work in space, the different types of texture and materiality were metaphors of the time and space of the creative process, physical-literal time and space usual in the gallery in the art gallery, were -in their becoming a tangible, material and landscape form in space--approached in the sense of that time and space typical of the creative process.

Many things were suggested in Stephen's sample. The same goes for the lighting effects of the city at night, the sensation of illuminated plasticity of the city space worked in an abstract and allusive form, which, through the effect of an abstract-green and internally illuminated circuit, could suggest those virtual game spaces. that children play today on their computers, or in certain entertainment spaces where everything seems provided with a rather imaginative plasticity. According to the artist, the exhibition was consistent with his searches for the problems and paradoxes posed by technology in a globalized world, the fact that they affect evolution and progress, as well as tending to dehumanization.

His criticism could be related in his creative imagination to the fact that he worked on these green-illuminated plastics with black lines that could well suggest in the form of imaginative analogies to different things at the same time, the circulatory system of the human body, the circuits that are typical of computerized technologies, the atary, the nintendo, a kind of science fiction universe, the shape of a tree between its trunk and its development, the shape of a leaf with its central line and its various lines, the causes of a river or, simply, the lighting system itself that made it possible to illuminate the work in the gallery. These imaginative analogies serve the artist to metaphorize the idea of ​​the relationships between technology and ecology, as well as certain allusions to the biological that such imagination supposed in what was the ideology of the branches, an old conception of the sciences in which These, bringing questions from the exact sciences, imagined that the separations, specializations or disciplines between the sciences occurred as if by branches.

In another sense, the exhibition presented by Jesse Bercowetz and Matt The Re-creation of Fort Discomfort also meant the almost total transformation of the space with various materials, making it as if it were a living space or workshop for the artists. They represent different modalities through which the ways of approaching the space were also directly or indirectly ways of assuming the space of the gallery itself, erasing with a new material the conventional physical references to the space and inscribing as a transitory exhibition a new way, either in terms of material, in functional terms or in terms of space as an environment. While Phoebe's show, like that of many other artists, could be seen from the outside in its entirety--, the front wall of the Rice University gallery facing the hall of Sewal Hall is a large full-width glass through which you can see the entire gallery and the way the presented samples are seen in it-- Jesse Bercowetz and Matt intentionally painted the glass black, leaving only small slots in the glass so as to emphasize that from the first view Externally, spectators approach the exhibition in an attitude of curiosity. This idea of ​​a curious spectator who is called to delve into the work more than simply contemplate it is consistent with a certain impetus of adventure that can be perceived in the artists' work in its entirety and the way in which the spectators, already walking through it, experience it and they perceive.

The work was created as a series of unknown worlds similar to what children invent when they create houses and living spaces with any furniture or object they find in their homes. With materials such as wood and paper mache, in addition to all the tasks they could find, the kind that are sometimes found in the spare rooms of houses, the artists completely modified the space, creating a kind of new creative structure with real elements. The universe created by the artists, made up of several subspaces or worlds independent of each other, could be perceived from the outside or from the inside, as it included spaces for spectators to move around, a kind of irregular paths or corridors, and inside the which ones should enter. Thus, for example, to access one of the spaces they had to climb a ladder and enter an individualized place that only spectator by spectator could enter, which resembled something—made with any material from everyday life—those scientific laboratories. Renaissance in which new things were created.

In another part, the spectators had to enter hunching their bodies due to the low height of the ceiling so as not to find anything other than an internally illuminated world from which through some slots it was possible to look towards the rest of the work, a bit like what happens when the children look through a hole at something they discover. In this space, spectators could look at other spectators and at the work. The other two spaces that made up the work were one, a covered hall built in the way that galleries generally are like a hallway with walls and ceiling, but in which on its own walls, the spaces where the works usually go were small. overtures in which they placed slides of the work itself both in the process in which they were making it and after the finished work. The final space of the exhibition was actually a white gallery on whose walls the artists presented drawings and paintings on paper.

Made with any object from everyday life, from discarded plastic water bottles recovered as raw materials, to pieces of broken furniture and structured as a language in general through various materials where wood, paper mache and structures mounted on thin metal and wood slats, the work as a whole had an appearance that seemed as if the disorganized universe typical of residual spaces such as attics and other spaces where furniture that is not in use in the house accumulates, had been transformed in art from a creative attitude, I already said, similar to that which we see in children when playing house they transform any element, use armchairs as houses, etc. The exhibition was, in several senses, a genealogy of the game principle based on which certain inventions can match elements in a way in which they appear anachronistic according to the new function, and not its sense usually understood as surrealist. The artists truly transformed the gallery space as if they were in their homes.

The problem of ensuring that the work of plastic arts stimulates a less passive type of reception in viewers has been a reason for many forms of plastic experimentation for a long time. It is something, however, that has taken different forms. In arts such as dance, cinema, theater, among others, the entire work is formed from images that appear and are no longer there, images that have to be remembered by the spectator in whom an idea of ​​totality is formed that never exists. It is completely present before your sight. In works of plastic arts such as those discussed above, on the contrary, the piece as such is fixed before the eyes of the spectator who can explore the same stopped form with his gaze and his body as many times as he wishes.

The totality of these works of plastic arts is thus consistent, both in a physical and aesthetic sense, with its physical nature, its being physically present there. So it is the viewer's time—even in the case of three-dimensional works that require the viewer to walk around them—and not the sequence time of the images, which defines the type of reception of the work. The above is a truth of language, but it differentiates the ways in which the plastic arts have explored the issue of stimulating another type of reception in viewers, unlike other arts, as we can see in all the works discussed. While the criticism of the passive spectator was related to a way of seeing contemplativism as a consenting attitude towards images that were often uncritical, certain ways of bringing the two-dimensional work into space were related to the idea that viewers related to the work. The idea that viewers relate to the work, however, had different developments in the plastic arts since the origin of the avant-garde.

Not infrequently, whether in the form of adding movement to two-dimensional works—as was the case with some optical artists—or bringing the work into space in a way in which the bodies of the spectators activated them by adding movement, the concept of Spectator participation was not such, it implied more the conceptual awareness of participating, but not a more critical relationship with the work. He touched and was touched by the work, but he knew that this was more the idea that the “spectator participates” than true participation.

In an era in which the speeches of previous generations, particularly those that characterized the countercultural movements of the sixties in Europe and the United States, their ideals of peace, love, freedom and against war, have ended up being spoken by "rhetorics" in which their subjects no longer speak, but the ways in which such discourses have been inscribed and have been inscribed by rhetorical forms that have made an institution in the forms without an updated critical consciousness about it, the critical consciousness towards representation, towards genres and rhetoric, the free spirit and the simultaneously deconstructive impetus, creator of new meanings, positive and updated of the art of these young people, seems not only to illuminate the ethical and imaginative paths that the new generations of Anglo artists represent, but also show the backward ways of understanding the world in which we live, -- ways that are often paradoxically reactionary today -- into which their confrontational ways have derived

Other Polysemies

©Por Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Houston, Texas, USA

Young Anglo art is experiencing—according to visits I made to exhibitions—some apogee of proliferation with new values ​​and talents of creators with their own artistic languages. On this occasion I analyze original pieces created by young Anglo artists from New York, Manhattan, Phoebe Wasbum and Stephanie Martz. When I say young artists to refer to Phoebe and Stephanie, I am talking about artists who began their careers in the 1990s with recent studies completed at New York University – Phoebe – and the California Institute of Art – presenting their most significant pieces into the new century. In March 2003 Phoebe presented her largest installation “True, False and Lightly Better” at the Rice University gallery working with recycled catton as a material for high art, a relevant piece due to the innovative way through which the artist He assumed the artistic material and the gallery as a space.

That same year Stephanie presented a series of relevant drawings and three-dimensional pieces at the Glassel School of art. Both artists have contributed original ways of relating the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional from their own perspectives, but while Phoebe comes from painting towards the three-dimensional by painting on a recycled material that was originally three-dimensional, Stephanie comes from drawing on paper towards a three-dimensional form in wood.

As a two-dimensional painting on a cardboard surface, Phoebe presents on the gallery walls a painting in layers that form three-dimensional volumes. Phoebe lets the immediacy of the surface speak, emphasizing the materiality and texture on the planes, Stephanie works with a sensitive line on the drawing and letting the two-dimensional speak through the three-dimensional. Coming from the two-dimensional towards space, Phoebe's forms suggest to the viewer at certain moments landscapes of accumulated material and, at certain moments, a universe that invites the viewer to walk and contemplate heuristically. a universe which invites the viewer to walk and contemplate within the piece heuristically.

His piece suggests an attitude as an emotional gesture of a large amount of material in the form of an ecological metaphor, drawing attention to the relationships between his piece and the gallery space, including explicit references to the process in which the piece was created, making statements of the creative process in everyday life through small flags like strokes that remain day after day during the process of creating the work. While the three-dimensional in Phoebe suggests a relationship between her artistic forms and the gallery understood as space, Stephanie's three-dimensional forms consist of small pieces on the floor through which the viewer can walk around to be seen as three-dimensional objects. in the space. Both artists create pieces that can be installed as well as uninstalled. Stephanie's pieces maintain a relationship to the two-dimensional without depending on space, her three-dimensional works endure as artifacts as they are presented while Phoebe Piece's pieces endure as photography, something that relates her installations to performance.

A poetic reminiscence can be perceived in Phoebe's pieces from the moment she lets the forms speak as a powerful language that semantically suggests time and process. Folding and unfolding a two-dimensional form seems to be, conceptually, the way in which Stephanie brings her approachable objects into language insofar as these are species of openwork two-dimensional form assemblages.

Taking into account the simplicity and complexity at the same time that characterizes these pieces, different planes of allusion become synthesized within each other in a way in which, their pieces evoke cyberspace in allusion to a type of relationship between ethics and cybernetics, as an inspired metaphor about our current sensitivity towards the relationships between the sensible, ethics, cybernetics and ecology, rather than that type of minimalism based on logarithmic allusions to geometric shapes and the imagination of this plus this, a number of chairs spontaneously unity with each other after a lecture?, a series of symmetrically well-defined shapes suggesting a rhombus?. A rhombus is a shape that suggests a dynamic shape that changes around as easily as one can move the entire shape through simple movement on the central axis, something that is common in children when they move these rhomboid shapes for times. of festivities. These forms are, however, at rest. These forms are, however, at rest, as if they had been placed together after a conference or a children's party.

A similar tendency to make inclusive through abstraction multi-layered allusions to possible forms and images—the fact that the pieces allude to different possibilities without being able to be referred to one or another of their allusions, seems to be a dominant characteristic in the pieces as well. Phoebe's abstracts. His abstract installations, as well as Stephanie's pieces, can suggest a number of possibilities, leaving the work open for the viewer's experience and without being impoverished by the reductionisms, stereotypes and clichés of symbolism. Through a perfect balance between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional, both artists represent an original movement from the sensitive to the tangible, from the spiritual to the physical, from the immaterial to the material, from the rational to the natural, obtaining as a result something that is more than painting, more than drawing, more than sculpture, more than installation, more than design, more than architecture, although it may include aspects that refer to these manifestations of plastic arts. His works investigate new alternatives.

Phoebe has obtained a very suigeneris type of material art through the relationships between body, text, materiality and voice, these are more present for her environmental works than in Stephanie's, since her pieces are more than simply a form in the gallery . With Wasbum we have a plastic movement from the abstract to the semantics of the material. As a young artist, her work “True, False and Slightly Better” is one of the most relevant and important pieces of processual and conceptual art of our time, a work that proposes an ethical experience for viewers. As Phoebe says, “for me the viewer has to actually come to the piece and spend as much time as possible in it to explore and even go inward and enter the forms and even get on. I mean, from the outside the spectators can see that large amount of raw material as a kind of structure of a house, but when he dedicates more time to the work then he begins to receive many more things from the work, he begins to feel other possibilities. The more viewers interact with the work, the more things the work suggests. I would like viewers to enter the work and walk around it to explore, even go up to the platform. The creative process is the most important thing for me in this work.”

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

Space Tropes

©Por Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Houston, Texas, Caracas and havana

    We discuss the tropes of space here from a perspective different from that of Bachelard, focused on distinguishing the poetics and phenomenologies of dimensions such as the closet, instead, although not entirely removed from the principle of the episteme, according to Derrida and Bourdieu, initially proposed by Bachelard, we are interested in presenting and discussing different approaches to space read around and around architecture but accentuated other issues of interest either for cultural analyzes or on other aspects related to sensoriality.
During my stay as a curator at the Mavao I discussed and proposed in a curatorial essay-project my concept of unwriting and rewriting of the museum in its spatiality, understanding the latter as staging, that is, in the mode of inscription and re-inscription of spaces. based on a series of questions that involved looking from the museum towards the market and vice versa from the latter towards the former, focusing on the question about what new light we would shed on the theory of the spatialities of the museum by looking at it Alreves, that is, as from an exteriority that is not theirs, the markets
  While we usually look at the rest of culture from the museum and its logic, here, since we were asking ourselves about something different from itself, it was a wholesale market that had, being an ultra-modern museum of fine arts, in its same community perimeter to a few blocks, to look at the museum according to the market to explore in terms of the scriptura-writing relationship, re-inscribe it and transform it in terms of its spatialities in a staging.
Based on this notion that also involved the staging in the museum spaces of spatialities and signs from the market, one of the derived consequences explored not only within that museum but in successive proposals that I continued curating derived from that project is what which I define as tropes of space. This concept does not cover or refer, of course, to the set of visual practices that I have developed under my curatorial aegis, rather it covers only some aspects of them, in some cases we can speak of artists in which a complete sample is defined within its parameters but in the majority it is almost always either a work or parts and aspects or fragments of a sample or a work, despite this from an aspectualized point of view it is one of the most frequent regularized elements,
  This essay aims to discuss the results of this aspect of my curatorial research, analyzing its different forms, in some cases discussing works or parts of works exhibited in exhibitions that result from my direct curatorship, in others under my curatorial aegis and in others in presentations that others did but I have chosen to discuss.
  I will therefore begin by analyzing this phenomenon where it is present among some of the samples of my small curatorship that I produced in Caracas and exhibited at Rice University in 1997. There are two samples in which we can specifically discuss this phenomenon, the Surpic Angelini sample in the rice media center titled Syche Ethnography reports and the exhibition by Ernesto Leal and Juan José Olavarría at Farish gallery titled arguing with Betara desa.
In Surpic Angelini we have a relationship between imagination and space that understands the latter by its potential to become a symbolic form in itself relatively isolable from its functionality or ultimately capable of transforming the latter into pure relationships of meaning, something that comes from a kind of minimalist rereading of surrealism or vice versa, it is a genealogy that seeks the relationship between sensible space and tangible space, space, like time, is after all, an incomprehensible dimension in its complexity, irreducible to an observation that can envelop or encompass it in all its objectivity, its contemplation like that of time, always refers to a transcendental plane that is a sensitive plane, from this it follows that the eye and space are woven into planes of subjectivity where sensations of the body mix with the sensations of the imagination and what is supposed to be pregnant and concrete, becomes weightless and emotional. Surpic's works make this exploration through a reading of De Chirico, who painted architecture and explore conjunctions between collage and spaces, something that has evolved in some of the works towards what I have defined as self-ethnography since Exploration of these relationships leads through subjectivity to the theme of the transformation of cultural identity around biography.
  In his exhibition, what I define as tropes of space stands out as specific to the new syntax that the gallery acquired when it was completely transformed with a suede or dark sienna velvet fabric that covered all the walls of the gallery from the floor to the ceiling.
  When analyzing this transformation of the space, the first thing that comes into consideration is the explicit fact that since these are the same walls on which the art pieces are supposed to usually be mounted and displayed, the artist, in accordance with my curatorial approach of describing the space to reinscribe it as mise-en-scène, explores a suigeneris modality of desincripcion-descritura-reinscription, that is, if the exhibition space in terms of inscriptions is inscribed by a scripturality that is that which assigns its usual senses and meanings, exposing works and To show them in them as the neutral code that characterizes the exhibition spaces, modifying those walls with a dark and sensorial material close to velvet is, on the one hand, deconstructing their usual meanings and on the other hand, filling them with new meanings, transforming them into part of the work. at the same time extending them to a discourse based on objects.
The spatial trope that works here is metonymy since that suede or velvety fabric, although it alludes to clothing or certain types of social occasions in which it is used, such as, for example, winter occasions or in certain types of social circumstances, The material itself is only a fragment and since it is used in this way as upholstering the walls, it refers to its social and cultural meanings as a material only in the form of sensory allusions, therefore it cannot be reconstructed with precision to which everything the part belongs to. , in this case the velvet or suede fabric, that everything can only be referred to in terms of sensoriality
metonymy suggests a purely sensory and tactile plane if we take into account that for the spectator's purposes it is his specific space of sensoryity through which he moves and which is close to him in bodily terms, he experiences it not as he does in any space but through a type of space that, according to conventions, one usually enters to see and decode things shown aimed at interpretation and that for this exhibition has been transformed into the same space that usually presents the works.
  When I say sensoriality I mean not only that the fabric refers directly to the sensoriality of the clothing - although the upholstery code refers to other senses such as the chairs, armchairs and sofas in the living rooms, living rooms, dining rooms and many bedrooms. of which, by the way, are upholstered with velvet and suede, especially those that suggest codes of what I have defined in other essays as colonial visual imagery, since the costumes are not upholstered--and therefore the sensations of the body, sit, relax, get dressed in the case of winter changing rooms and certain social occasions, but also to the fact that this type of velvety fabrics have the peculiarity and this defines them as their own, that when someone passes by it their fingers or hands are immediately inscribed and well differentiated in two markedly different tones between the place where the hand is passed and the rest, even assuming that the spectators, keeping the distances usually assumed in exhibition spaces, do not touch the walls, these indications or clues in any way can be read on the fabric that covers the walls since during its assembly it had to be touched and first moved and all of this is collected in its visual memory that the spectators see.
  The upholstery code refers more than to velvet or suede in winter wardrobe, to movie theaters, for example, and sometimes theaters are usually characterized by this type of covering of velvet walls, too. This can be observed in certain types of hotel lobbies and palaces but obviously it is unusual so that the relationship between part and whole works on an allusive plane which, if we see it from the point of view of the viewer on site, is metonymic, however. developed at the pure syntactic level – by which we understand a merely formal surface structure, that is, architectural surfaces covered with cloth –, this is articulated in semantic terms in its possible meanings in relation to the rest of the objects and images that make up the exhibition. .
  From the moment in which we are dealing with the very walls of the upholstered gallery, I consider that this merely syntactic sensoriality already has certain semantic meanings that communicate deinscribe-reinscribe the character usually devoid of meaning that the walls have, deconstruct their apparent neutrality of simple displays, dismantle their usual coldness and transform them into a code of sensoriality ready at the level of rewriting, that is, in the terms specific to my curatorial text of a staging, to function with an affective sense, that is, as if all of that, instead of being shown uncovered or naked on the exhibition or exhibitionist walls of the exhibition space, returned to an interior and intimate space more appropriate to subjectivity than to the supposed objectivity implicit in the usual meaning assigned to them, it is undoubtedly an objective space to which which viewers go one day of their week and walk around, in which they see works and an exhibition on display, but from the semantic and meaning point of view, this space has been reinscribed under the principle of precisely erasing those codes of objectivity, so that the viewer enters it as if entering a subjective and not objective space, that is, as if he entered an intimate space, finding objects and pieces on display there, but what he finds will be in the way of his as yes, that is, of its visual logic, as if it were the intimate or subjective world of the artist into which they suddenly enter as if they were intruders, the latter of course is relative, as it is exhibited it has been made so that the spectators can see it. They walk through, but in terms of what is wanted from the viewer, the exhibition communicates that they have entered a subjective and intimate world, as if they had suddenly entered the place where someone lives or where they have their most personal objects.
On the other hand, it is debatable that it is also something contrary to what has usually been done with respect to walls.
The latter, as was usual in experimentalism, were treated in the same terms in which the blank page was treated as a conceptual code in literature, that is, modalities in which, a conceptual writing - as explored in my book an expedition to the Threshold—leaves empty lines, spaces or pages so that the empty content becomes part of the semantic meaning with the rest of the written pages, far from, as happened in conceptualism, leaving the empty white cube without works as a draw conceptual attention to the fact that the latter is what ultimately transforms anything that is exhibited in it into art, here the exact opposite is done, that space is filled instead of leaving it empty, it is written as a way of describing its previous meanings and as a way to recode its semantics with contents that dissolve the relationship showing and shown, exhibitor-exhibited, presentation-presented, exhibition space-work, when this distinction is relativized the spatial trope lies in transforming the walls into work describing in They have their usual institutional content, but again not in the way of leaving them white as a way of alluding to the concept that space is what makes the work and that not exhibiting works other than blank space is the pure idea of ​​art as idea, the opposite is done here, it is not about saying art is an idea and what makes this idea art is the institutional exhibition space, but on the contrary, it is said this is not art, this is ethnography, but developed in the exhibition space of art, which I deinscribe and re-inscribe, in the end, is of course art, insofar as it has been developed in the media of art, objects, installation, etc., but they are filled as a way of incorporating them into the subjectivity of a experimentation that is discussed in the entire sample.
It is worth highlighting that this spatial trope is related to what has been said before to relevant aspects of what was the art and anthropology workshop that I directed as curator with each of the artists since one of the reasons for doing this lies in the fact that it is of an experimentation on the possibility of exploring the relationship between creative process, self-ethnography and work, the center of attention was neither the objects or elements to be exhibited nor the walls on which they would be displayed, but rather the subjectivity of the artist herself. and the way in which the narratives of experience about herself and her cultural experience relate to the objects, since both things, objects and space were part of an experimentation focused on her own subjectivity.
  With even more reason, unwriting-rewriting the spaces to bring them into a staging functioned here as the spatial trope that despatialized the objectivity of the space and threw it onto the plane of subjectivity on which the experimentation of the work was centered.
  Metonymy is the figure or trope that develops this possibility here since it is through it that this new syntacsis of the walls upholstered in sienna brought its senses to a whole alluded to on the side of a sensoriality that is turned part of processes that They are linked to the relationships between self-narratives of experience, cultural identity processes and objects. At the same time, the erasing of the limits between displaying and displaying works as a dissolution of the architectural space and its transformation into an installation space and vice versa.
The second way in which we have spatial tropes works in a different way but in the same way that it occurs in Surpic it also follows my curatorial proposal presented in my main text as a curator, looking towards the institution instead of looking from it, discussing as our theories about that one are illuminated instead of looking from that one, this is the way in which the exhibition arguing with Betara desa is immersed in my curatorship. In the same way that in Surpic not everything in the exhibition is spatial tropes, we will ignore here all those works that are not.
The three pieces that most directly explore spatial tropes in this exhibition are a piece with metal legs conceived as one of those shapes used in the circus to jump, that is, where acrobats and circus actors jump, which They have springs that give impetus to the jump, raising the body to great distances. They made that fabric of the trampoline by drawing on it the cartography of two cities mixed with each other as if it were one or the same city, that is, the cartography of the city of Valencia in which they made the exhibition and that other of the city of Houston in which they would exhibit it, given that it is impossible to unite these two cartographies and given that by joining them and combining them like the fabric of a trampoline circus in which usually nothing is drawn or painted, the trope that works in this work is directly a metaphor which has a certain anachronism more typical of surrealism,
  In surrealism the metaphorical image can approach a dream or something impossible but the exhilaration to which it reaches can unravel a sense of freedom, uniting the two cartographies is doing the impossible, but at the same time it is creating a figure of the combined imagination. with the idea of ​​jumping in the circus evoking an acrobatics with the idea of ​​spaces. The other work in the exhibition in which we can talk about spatial tropes is a piece in which they directly exposed the letters they sent to the architecture faculty when they were in Caracas in which they asked about the characteristics of the space in which they would exhibit the exhibition. that they wanted to take it into account to conceive the work, as well as the letters they received in response, when in reality what they did with the work was to expose those same letters sent and received, all referring to the exhibition space.
  It is worth noting the way in which they installed this work in the space since it not only included the letters sent and received regarding the characteristics of the same space in which it was exhibited, but they also made an intervention of a fragment of the gallery wall and painted on that fragment a lattice of those that are common in old buildings like the one in which, for example, they exhibited together three years before since in 1994 they had exhibited an exhibition titled double: 17 exercises in the Center for the development of visual arts in Havana.
  Although the allusion is indirect and subtle, it cannot necessarily be stated that it is a direct allusion to that space in which they exhibited, therefore being more information that I have as a curator and not necessarily what the most common spectators interpret when seeing That fragment, even if we consider this last sense, it is obvious that it is a type of borders or motifs from architectural painting corresponding to a space that is not the same as the space in which the exhibition is located. Here we have a space trope in any variant
  Finally, there is a third work in this show that alludes to space in terms of tropes, the large parachute that they placed hanging from the ceiling.
  So far as far as spatial tropes are concerned in my small curatorship from 1997 at rice university, none of the other shows work with spatial tropes, the market from here; Mise in scene and experimental ethnography, my project with calzadilla focused on evocation, which as Stephen A Tyler defines is not a trope, but moving beyond that presentation at rice university and returning to my first curatorial text at the museum of arts visuals alejandro otero inspired by reading the distribution of my text, especially in the part in which I talk about rewriting the museum as mise-en-scène and in views towards the museum that bring new light to our understanding and theory of the museum, there is a work exhibited by the Dutch artist Alfred Venemozer, which is also a type of spatial trope, in my opinion an extraordinarily interesting and original proposal that we can define as a synecdoche.
  Venemozer proposed to transform an entire part of the museum's architecture, that is, to build a church bell tower with the same architectural materials as that in one of its corners. The construction was so reliable and well done that any new viewer who did not know the museum might think that it was always like this, from the point of view of architecture it seemed like a postmodernist construction given in the eclepticism of the codes, combining a modern museum with a church, but from the point of view of the spatiality of the museum and the fact The fact that it was a temporary work was certainly a dewriting of it and its reinscription in scriptural terms, that is, a staging that signegdotically proposed the reading of the museum as a church, the image was seen from inside the museum through the glass walls both from the outside and also from the stairs through which spectators traveled from the ground floor to the first floor, which also intervened by carving the wood of the railing with countless motifs in low relief.
It is not about metonymy here, as in Surpic, because in Surpic, as is usually the case with metonymy, there is only a part-whole or fragment-whole relationship where the trope is just the internal connection of that part with the whole that it suggests but where it does not. A third figurative meaning is produced or created, nor a metaphor as in Leal and Juan José, where the proper meaning of two images, maps of different cities when joined together do not create a plausible meaning about an existing reality – the relationship starts everything in metonymy. nor a third figurative but congruent and possible sense from the point of view of its symbolism as in Venemozer, the museum is not a church, but it functions as a church for the purposes of authority and modes of belief in its values ​​and collections, as well as in terms of how he is seen by the community, but a figure of the imagination, or surreal anachronism.
The synecdoche here lies in the fact that the part of a whole is related to another whole as one of its parts and conversely in the manner of the part-whole relationship to which its own sense of expression belongs but as the part of a new whole. to which it has been transcribed, the bell tower in the museum, however, like the previous ones, Venemozer also involves a discussion of the art and cultural institution.
The next example of spatial tropes is Tamara Arroyo, a Spanish artist, specifically a recent work of hers titled trompe l'oeil 2019, which is a signegdotic modality, it is a large piece made of voile with architectural photographs of popular neighborhoods printed in the form of photomontages, the voile looks like a large canvas but Tamara explains that this type of large canvas with photographs of architecture is like the one used in front of buildings when they are going to be restored, arguing that her piece has this meaning at the same time that, from the point of view of the assembly, deploying it through positional and distributive synonymies with respect to the architecture of the exhibition space since the work is displayed in front of a large door that occupies the entire side that would correspond to one of the walls. which opens and closes on a circular rail, that is, a sliding or sliding door, on wheels, Tamara exposes her piece in front of this door but in a way that alludes according to the same logic as that to something that opens and closes. closes, slides and slides, thus giving it the shape of a curtain, the relationship between photographs of the architecture of the neighborhoods like a building under restoration and the assembly of its piece with respect to the exhibition spatiality functions here as a synegdotic spatial trope, although of a unique and original type different from that in Venemozer.
At the same time, the piece establishes an architextual relationship with the exhibition space in the sense of peritexts that, like footnotes, annotations and subtitles in literature, surround the central text, in a similar way your piece limits, quotes, etc. ., the exhibition space as peritextually wandering around it.
  If in a recent email from colleagues my co-curator at the transart foundation of Houston and at rice university told me that Tamara was too conceptual for a commercial gallery, I would add or say specifically in the sense that it is an art of research rather than orthodox conceptualism defined by the use of texts and or subordinations that turned the forms into illustrations of the concept. This conceptuality, more semantic and complex than instrumentalist towards the form, is made explicit as research in objective and subjective culture beyond illustrating a concept in his most recent project Mas Relax and in his exhibition Pure Street, but it explains in a certain way the because of that other side of his more contextualist and situated art in which the form, unlike his more classic works, tends to follow and acquire the form that the field of conceptuality requires. If Surpik Angelini tells me that he sees above all a trend among young Spaniards and Bea Mirror has said of Tamara that she is without a doubt one of the best Spanish artists of her generation, I have made an effort to make it notable that it is still my own partner. Of which I am proud, his art clearly also be one of the most interesting visual explorations within his own generation in international and global art.

Grades

My small curatorship to which I refer consisted of seven exhibitions, each exhibited in different spaces within the university campus of Rice University and inaugurated on different dates between the course of the spring between February 13 and April 16, and the present one, I exhibited it and We museum on campus with the co-curatorship of Surpic Angelini, in Houston, Texas, 1997
We exhibited the Surpic exhibition at Rice media Center Art Gallery, Rice University, in Houston, February 13, 1997
The work of Venemozer to which I refer was exhibited at the Alejandro Otero Museum of Visual Arts the same year in which I wrote the project that I anticipated the small curatorship later exhibited at Rice University, that is, less than a year later, in 1994, Caracas , Venezuela
The Stephen Hendee exhibition was curated by Kimberly Davenport at Rice University Art Gallery in Houston in 2000
Unlike the other exhibitions that I discuss, all of which the first two I presented and exhibited in person in Houston and the second two I witnessed in person in both places, the Alejandro Otero Visual Arts Museum in Caracas 1994 and Rice University Art Gallery in the 2000 in Houston, the work of Tamara Arroyo that I am referring to, I did not see it directly in person, I met it on Tamara's computer in pdf images in Havana, the work was exhibited in an exhibition titled poscrisis in Madrid that brought together eight artists Spaniards to work on the theme of brick for which they took a seminar on the brick construction process and were in a factory observing that process, the artists exhibited their individual works in independent and separate places in the city and then all together, curated by Cati Bestard, Marta Sesé and Louis-Charles Tiar in collaboration with the Faculty of Architecture of the Polytechnic University of Madrid and the support of the Madrid City Council

Symbolic Barter

©Por Abdel Hernandez San Juan

  The market, as I have said elsewhere, is defined above all by a barter scene, the seller offers something for which the buyer offers something in exchange, but to complete that barter they have to communicate, the seller asks, the buyer answers. and between them a transaction develops resulting from that communication between what one gives and the other receives, the situation in which they exchange, both spatially, visually and in what I have called the intersubjective give and take, forms it. itself a barter setting.
  Exchanging something as a pattern of intercultural communication was used by Eugenio Barba, who, after visiting a community and observing their body expressions, on his return, prepared his actors in extensive body training based on those observations and then made a new trip or journey moving towards those remote towns and communities in which they tested these bodily trainings in front of the people, instead of displaying in front of the community body movements and dances brought a priori from extraverbal acerbs of their own cultures, Barba's actors showed the residents developed elaborate body expressions which were based on learning that they had acquired about body expression and dance in that community.
  The aforementioned refers to theater inasmuch as what I will discuss below is the work of a visual artist, but the allusion refers to the fact that in this artist a principle taken from the markets has been used not to study or do research. about the markets themselves or working within them as the scene of field work, but to transpose it to a different purpose that is far from those and without referring or dealing with the markets as a topic, it uses their logic.
  Although Barba did not carry out his exchanges with the purpose of writing an anthropology that theorizes or studies those cultures, in the theorizing about theater, the challenge has been raised that writing about Barba theorizing it inevitably presupposes writing that anthropology of the cultures that he himself Barba does not write content with his works being in themselves a form of anthropological theater or theatrical anthropology.
  The projects of the Spanish artist established in Germany Elena Alonso are not about extracting barter from the markets to test it in community spaces outside of those, nor about studying the markets or taking over their spaces to develop work in them and above all. them, but rather before placing a stall in the market, like those that the sellers have, as a way of entering into a relationship with a community or human group at the time when they go shopping and move to the markets, an experience carried out in a community in which Elena established her workshop to carry out her Bernau project--the oldest house in the city, das Kantorhaus.
  Instead of reaching the community in the spatial dynamics in which its daily life takes place in the manner of an exogenous element that, unexpectedly, to the relevance of the situations, a cafeteria, a family in a house, people in a park, wants More than just doing what everyone usually does in these situations, taking photographs, making a film, asking questions, conducting an interview, explaining that you want to know the culture for research, etc., choosing the exchange scene in the market means choose a relevant situation – and possibly one of the few that exist – in which the people of that community or town, when going to the market, are exposed to the circumstance of communicating to exchange with someone.
  The question that arises, however, is given by the fact that when exchanging with this peculiar seller of the market stall, the buyers, although relaxed and relaxed, enter into a relationship and communicate as is usual in the situation of bartering in the market. , in any case they stumble upon something unusual, this seller does not offer them fruits, vegetables, fabrics or baskets to feed them or decorate their houses, but rather she offers them to make them a painting.
  Market painters, in fact, exist, quite a few painters go to the markets as the ideal place for their own way of selling, and offer as a product to paint portraits of people, asking for payment for it in exchange, however, here What is offered is not a realistic portrait of their faces, their bodies or images, which makes it unusual, but rather they are proposed to participate, as Elena says, in the creation of a collective portrait of their community, offering them to freely choose. a motif for the painting that she would paint, translating that motif into the image with the only requirement that it be an important motif for them and that it have some type of relationship with the city.
  Instead of vegetables or fruits for money, the result is a symbolic barter through which Elena not only brings the motifs chosen by each participant to her paintings, that is, she paints as the motif of her pieces what those people tell her or ask of her. approach considered important for them and chosen knowing that they are summoned to participate in what, according to Elena, will be a collective portrait of their community, but that they share with each one the authorship of their paintings, ultimately being an exhibition that is both individual and collective because 47 participants have shared with her the authorship of their works.
  The market and its principle of barter, which it uses at the beginning, is then referred to a means for another objective, ceasing to be present in the resulting sample and recalled alone, as well as the process derived from it - its subsequent exchanges with the people of the community around their motifs, their lives and Elena's paintings--, through the documentation of a previous process, to in turn, put the emphasis on the portrait of the community resulting from it, exhibiting together with the works texts that include narratives of the personal lives of these people.
  This resource and result, exposing the co-authored paintings with the narratives of their lives, has different meanings if we discuss it from the theory of visual arts and if we do so from the social sciences.
  Regarding the former, the reference is the postmodernist discussion on the aesthetics of imitation, mending and pastiche.
  When the artist chooses as a motif for his works, a theme or issue that exists outside the social text of visual culture, as has already happened since pop, canned goods, consumer foods, labels, recognizable icons of mass culture such as comix or serial genres, emblematic signs of visual culture, did not work, as was usual with the expressionist precepts on the work of art, externalizing or socializing in his images, motifs from his personal and interior world or universe, but, as in semiotics, he chose a form as given to him or a sequence and relationship of forms, in order, in knowledge of the meanings or meanings implicit in them in the cultural understandings, to propose his work as a rearticulation or way of relating them, the resulting work , itself forming a visual text, was in turn then an imitation of the cultural form mentioned, in pastiche it was about assuming in its own form of work something of that form in culture as if the form of the work of art were He exhausted what seemed to be his own motives of style and originality, to assume the gestures, manners, customs and styles of that cultural form.
  However, although in the imitation in which the resulting work works with a visual text of the culture with respect to which it is imitated, and although in the pastiche the resulting form of the work, faced with the exhaustion of the assumptions of originality, authorial seal and stylistic innovation, is proposed as a meager and exhausted assimilation of gestures, manners and styles that he receives from the motives of that mass culture, the artist leaves, in an attitude against the decadence of the autotelic parameters of art for art's sake, towards the culture in search of other motives that become their own, in those figures of speech the exit towards culture understood the latter in a sociocultural sense impregnated by highly saturated and overcoded references in that socioculturality.
  What Elena does is different in this sense.
  It is not directed towards the highly codified and oversaturated areas of a culture made up of media, consumption and other standardized forms of visual culture, but beyond the sociocultural it is directed towards synchronous community enclaves in the now and here of the community. in which cultural values ​​related to traditions, customs, idiosyncrasies and experiences maintain their authenticity and at the same time the exclusivity not only of not having been saturated, but of even being still unknown, often remaining within the space of intimacy of the people in what refers to individuals, phenomena such as their memories, their collections, their desires and passions, their experiences and experiences, as well as in the spaces of what we could understand as a cultural ethos in terms of the portrait of the community. refers.
  Sharing authorship with these people then comes to mean, in the postmodernist sense described above, less an allusion to the exhaustion of the idea of ​​the author as an exnihilo creator endowed with an aura of original authenticity, and more the result of going out in search of values ​​in unsaturated culture, although some of that criticism of the haloed author is preserved, it is done in a different sense aimed at restoring another way of approaching a culture and its community.
  On the other hand, there is something in Elena that recalls the fact that originally painting, before its avenues towards abstraction, was related from its beginnings to the representation of reality and the fact that, ultimately, far from following the parameter of the model taken from reality understood as the representational reflection on the support of something visible outside, when painting was limited to offering an illusory reproduction of the representation of a reality, --the Renaissance perspective and the academy of painting of the natural--, there are other different ways of approaching the universe of a reality, in this case a community or culture which is not only represented as its motifs painted on the pieces but also becomes it with its reality in part of the very reality of the work, sharing authorship with the artist.
  From the point of view of social sciences, let's refresh the matter to return to the details. Especially from sociology and anthropology based on field work, the question about how to approach a human group by entering into its dynamics is always presented as a question, given that there is the purpose of knowing, at first level, and then study or create a text or research that results in some type of representation of aspects of the social or cultural aspects of it, the implicit and explicit intentions end up superimposed as something exogenous to the reality of that social, human group or community.
  As in relativistic physics neither one nor the other has been able to get rid of the fact that the position of observer, with everything that makes it exogenous, relativizes its objectivity, usually being more a projection of its own situation than a true knowledge of the culture in question, given that, if something more is intended than to know a culture through bookish motifs, or things that others have written or filmed about it, research is compelled to enter into a direct relationship in some way with those people as From the moment in which entering into a relationship is posed, the question arises of how, in what way, resorting to what means and methods.
  Whether it is in some way a group or community in which in one way or another the person asking the question lives in it or is part of it, being their own community or culture—which does not make it a little strange—people usually You live your life without focusing your attention on it, or it is a project through which you establish yourself to live for a time, immerse yourself or do field work, in the reality of a social group in which you do not live in any variant social science, sociology or anthropology, each author has to deliberate how to resolve this issue.
  It is in this sense that we can discuss the same question from the social sciences, not only assuming the position in the market as a way of assimilating the relationship dynamics implicit in bartering in the market, as a way of entering into communication, or the convene them under the idea of ​​making a collective portrait of the community destined for which each one chooses their personal motifs that are important to them related in some way to the city, but now also to paint for each one a piece whose theme will be, physically made for Elena, the reason for that person explained along with the narrative of her personal life.
  There is in this something that turns the piece itself, not only into one that communicates and conveys what the person wants, which would be its most obvious reading, but also something that makes the piece an interface to the previous process of communication with the person and complexion in a visual expository way, a modality that will subsequently provide ways of knowing the culture that could not otherwise be obtained.
  In replacement of methods such as the interview that can never avoid producing itself, conditioned by the exogenous situation that reflects the interviewer's own parameters, his non-immersive situation and what this conditions or predisposes, modulates and often distorts, in the responses. of the interviewee, the subject of culture has become here the one who, together with Elena, will make that portrait of the culture, the one who ultimately participates with his personal contribution, in the formation of a portrait of the community, far from saying, I I will offer a vision of culture, you are motivated to think, you yourself have a vision of your reality and this project consists of extending your vision and creating a way of seeing your community that assimilates what you yourself, who are part of she, you have to say, a relationship that between several will make the exhibition as a whole, a portrait of your own reality together.
The playful component of this gesture of Elena stimulates here a healthy competitiveness among the participants because each one feels that with the contribution of their personal perspective a more or less interesting image of their own reality will be achieved, at the same time this occurs under the compulsion of the project to the idea of ​​collaboration since ultimately the portrait will be the coalition between the perspective of 47 participants.
This fact, related in a sense to what Elena calls participatory projects and which, in response to my questions, she told me, is also about democratizing how and what people can say about it, in turn opens the horizon for criticism of two things that, from the point of view of the social sciences, sociology and anthropology, have a posteriori effects in the same criticism on the one hand of painting as a symbolic and visual fact, and on the other, of the criticism of how understand in Elena's project the recurrence to what I have called the supplementary narratives and with the same criterion to all the visual material not included in the works and in the exhibition to which, however, her project needs to continually resort.
  On the one hand, moving away from that first way of understanding in terms of the visual arts, his paintings as forms of imitation and pastiche, imitation with the visual text that the work forms, the visual text of the culture from which his own text comes. and which imitates, an anthropological critique like the one I did before, leads us to the understanding of these works of Elena as cultural clutches.
  The understanding of the clutch becomes richer and richer in elements, of course, to the extent that we relate its symbolic visuality with the supplementary narratives, the latter involving several levels, a level that we could call correlated, which is that related to the relationship between the visual and the narrative about the personal history of the individual to which each piece corresponds, without even explaining that the painted motif has necessarily been the one chosen by the person in question, another plane, which we could call reconstructive, that of Elena when she provides not only a personal narrative of the individual who shares the piece with her, but goes into detail providing a broader supplementary text about things about the person who during the process has known both things said and visually documented, as well as the textual supplement through which he explains the project.

These are two participatory painting projects that I carried out in the twin cities of Bernau (Germany) and Skwierzyna (Poland). In both, I proposed to their inhabitants to participate in the creation of a collective portrait of their community, with each of the participants (in total 47) becoming co-author of the project.
  I started in Bernau, where I set up my workshop in the oldest house in the city, das Kantorhaus. historical monument normally closed to the public. To find my participants, I set up a weekly stall at the city center market, where I invited any interested resident to take part in the project. Participants had the opportunity to freely choose a motif for a painting, which I would then translate into my pictorial language. The only requirement was that it was an important reason for them and that it had some type of relationship with the city. personal. elena alonso

  And a third plane that we could call documentary is the one that, maintaining a relationship with the previous two, opens on the visual side, to explain documentaryly, in a reconstructive and correlated way-- the settings and the occasions in which Elena has developed her process with the participants from his stall in the market, the days when he moves with the lecterns from the market to his workshop, his life in his workshop in an old house in the city, the small and tiny settings with each person themselves in that Elena exchanges with them in their private lives - a moment that evokes in her visuality that correlational personal narrative exposed next to the painting or is nourished by it when seeing the images -, until finally the photographs that show or make explicit the consciousness of which is about participation in a collective portrait project, images in which the participants appear together with Elena in different communication and work situations, each showing their painting together or during the opening of the exhibition.
  Understanding these paintings and samples of Elena as cultural clutches presupposes or requires objectifying the way in which the aforementioned supplementary texts overlap with each other in explaining what they are and how to understand these paintings.
  Starting from a first uninformed ideal-type reading, we imagine the viewer visualizing and reading it without even having any narrative, supplementary text and information, we keep in front of us the visual referent in question, suppose it is any of those paintings or a sequence of them that We are watching, and we then progressively and slowly begin to add the narrative supplements, the first thing we add, obviously, is that what our viewer is seeing and has recently interpreted without supplementary texts, are not express creations arising from Elena's expressive motivations, but things that people in a community have chosen as their motives for her to paint, the same images that we previously saw in one way, then begin to appear as interdictions, that is, as interdicted to Elena by her interlocutors.
  It has been, however, Elena who has painted them, which is why although the motifs are those requested by the people, the manner, the coloring, the accent, the expressive resources that Elena has used to express in her style are made explicit. what your counterpart or interlocutor prohibits, the clutch begins.
  What we previously saw as an image without a narrative supplement begins to be shaped in the reading by its supplementary narrative, but the clutch is not yet ready, for it to be a clutch it is necessary that many planes of supplementary narratives overlap with each other and Above all, once they are intertwined with each other, they also grasp the understanding of what we have said before about the market stall - whose reference can only be visually documentary, the photograph or film of it -, the narratives of people's life stories, the details that Elena provides more extensive about these people including photographs about the cultural sphere of each one, their collections, objects, interests, motivations, personal stories, the images in which she sees herself sharing with the same, the portrait project of the community, the community in short and even the questions and inquiries both on art theory regarding painting, as well as anthropology and sociology, which my own essay has placed since, although what I am writing is not in itself part of the supplementary texts in what was exposed by Elena, if it supposes, as it criticizes, adjacent textual information that offers a reading and interpretation of Elena's samples and their interlocking planes.
  For example, I am going to place here the question of how, from what moment and in consideration of what images and references we have or achieve the complexion turned representational fact in the previously discussed of what Elena herself offered from the market stall to its participants, to obtain a collective portrait of the community, and I am going to go ahead and be the first to answer my own question by saying that I consider that this portrait or representation of the community is not tangible or visible in any way visually and textually explicit in any other way other than through this clutch between the visual and the supplementary narratives,
  In the same way that we previously turned to the concept of clutch to understand how and in what ways Elena's samples move away from a simple imitation or other recurring figures of language such as pastiche, mending, intertextuality or quotation, to suppose another way of relating the visual and the narrative to the synchronous space here and now of the community and culture, also only through the clutch we manage to explain and find how in their samples what we could assume as a portrait of the community takes shape.
  On the one hand, in one of her projects Bernau (Germany) the artist is working in a community within the country in which she has lived and led her own life for seven years but carried out in a town far from where she lives, that is, very distant. of Berlin, the capital, which in itself forms a culture with its own cohesion and characteristics different from the city in which she lives and of which it is a part, on the other hand, in another of her projects Elena works with a community this somewhat further away, now being not only a remote town in the same country, but also another country, Skwierzyna (Poland), although according to her it is twinned with Bernau due to its geographical proximity, finally the third project in question involves long geographical distances and For this reason, greater cultural contrasts focusing this time on the relationship between Cubans in the diaspora in Berlin and Cubans in Cuba.
  At no point in the projects are we provided with information that deviates from the properly textual level that the clutch forms by appearing the supplementary visual and narrative planes. We are not told that Bernau is a town with so many inhabitants located in this or that geographical place, characterized by these or those traditions, whose typical costumes, typical dances and most outstanding images are these or those, which in the century that had these or those characteristics and that such or that relevant events occurred in it, we are taken directly inside a community from an internal proximity to its course of life, that is, through its approach by someone who lives in the same country, from a market stall, and everything that we learn about that community as its portrait is obtained only through the same textual clutch that overlaps and pairs one within the other the same planes that make up that clutch as a mixture of elements that include visual images with their symbolism, narratives of people, supplementary texts by Elena and documentary material.
  The clutch is not a form of intertextuality or intratextuality, in those the relationship between one text and another requires that both one and the other be previously established as autonomous textual forms, one of which establishes a relationship to the other, in which intertextuality, these texts tend not to be by the same author, but rather references that some authors make to others within their texts, or between the text of one author and another text in the culture, which, however, to be of the intertextual relationship, it has to be a textual form codified in the culture and therefore citable, alludable or called in some way by the author's text, in intratextuality the text of the same author refers to it within its own composition or to other texts by the same author, it is not about transtextuality or merely Architexts and peritexts.
  Unlike those, the clutch does not refer to the autonomy of one or more textual forms that enter into a relationship, but rather refers to textual forms that cannot do without one another that must form an imbrication between them, the clutch is thus more typical of visual and textual forms that certainly take shape at an anthropological level in the very intertwined relationships between a visual and narrative experience, and an experience of culture or community to which the clutch is related in a way, at least for the conformation of that textual set, in the specific projects to which we make references, which is the same inseparable from those cultural forms.
  It is not that the latter, as occurs in every text, cannot be circulated and presented outside of that original context to which the clutch emerged related, although, as made explicit in elena, the relationship to specific contexts is prioritized in their works, but that in whatever way the text that the clutch forms makes it known, it presupposes the relationship to additional narrative substrates that, no matter how autonomous one wants to see them in their physical conformation, maintain an inseparable interwoven relationship. to the subjects, lives and experiences that make up its cultural and social dimensions.
  The textual dimension, moreover, is never completely autonomous in the clutch.
  Unlike the icon, even the sign, and unlike the text as a reality that is formed in its own autonomy, the clutch supposes a relationship between the life experience of the subject, the culture or the community that makes the narrative substrates of the vital fabric inseparable. of culture.
  We speak of the textual dimension in the clutch because certainly in the same way that we can understand a living culture as a text and read it in that sense, the clutch is a cultural form that itself forms a textual dimension, the peculiarity of this textual dimension, however , is that their visual and narrative planes cannot be separated from each other nor from the individual, the group, the community or the culture in general since they have formed a sensitive interweaving among themselves in which different levels of relationship between visuality and narratives of experience have mated.
  Her three projects are obviously with Elena and they are their own projects and works perse and independently of the communities and social groups to which they were related, but in that autonomy of the textual mode the clutch is brought with it, interwoven within each other, forms visual and symbolic, narratives of life and experience, dimensions related to the memory of culture.
  There is, however, a dimension that should not be overlooked although the entire portrait that we obtain of the community is accessible to us only through that cultural clutch that forms the relationship between their paintings, the texts about the lives of the people, their explanatory supplements and all the documentary material, Elena's projects manage, at least explicitly Bernau's, to communicate an experience that escapes any risk of exogenism to in turn demonstrate the ethical, spiritual and moral values ​​of a restorative experience of a principle of communion in the community's own values, this fact, although also communicated through the clutch that the paintings form as visual facts, with the narratives and the documentary material, photographs, makes us think of an implicit plane to the projects of Elena before not discussed.
  For me it is a therapeutic dimension, but according to Elena it is not the therapy that is in her attention or interest, in this sense we could perhaps speak of a facilitator's work, the humble or simple position that Elena assumes of sharing the authorship of Her paintings, given also in the fact of dedicating them to the motifs chosen by others, are now also transposed to the work she does there directly in that community as a facilitator of processes of the same people.
  There is also in his projects a criticism of the selfishness and egoism to which the art world is prone, in which everything is usually either reduced to an ostentation of distinction, exacerbated by a pretension of legitimation or self-centered in the ego of the artist. , its three projects are directed in the opposite direction to other areas of culture and social work.
There is also something above all in her Bernau project related to a search in which Elena explores or experiments, although she does so not precisely with her immediate community of life but with another in the same country at a certain distance, the very culture that in Her condition as a Spanish emigrant relates her to a culture that, as always happens in the experience of those of us who are emigrants, something that has also happened to me in Texas, United States and before in Venezuela after almost twenty years of emigration, has become hers. and she has become in a certain way an exponent of it, although Elena does not stop being Spanish due to this fact, at an ethnic level, the perception of her own heritage, subjectivity and cultural self-conformation as a person has come to integrate an infinite number of heritages, experiences and resources. of the culture in which he lives, in which he has been permeated and in which his processes of self-assessment, socialization, self-esteem, community life and career have taken shape for seven years, this process, which has consequences not only on his subjectivity and experience but which also in a certain way inscribes her own cultural situation with respect to other Spaniards could be considered in a certain way explored as a search within herself in Bernau's project.
  There is, however, something in Poland's project that gives its project a certain nuance of interest towards the phenomenon of the consequences that the phenomenon of dissolution has had on ex-socialist subjectivities, both at the level of memory and cultural processes. of socialism in Europe, something that seen from the Polish project recalls the fact that Germany also experiences echoes of it in ex-socialist subjectivities and in the rest of the culture due to the division that this caused within the culture itself, the reintegration of Germany.
  This subtle attention to the topic of ex-socialist subjectivities, their memories, memories and adaptation processes, is perhaps related to what was alluded to before a search that Elena carries out towards the springs of her own cultural self-translation processes since although Spain never experienced the socialist society of the absolute state governed by the abolition of the free market, the abolition of the multi-party system and democracy and the conjugation of the bureaucracy of the absolute state under the dictatorship of a single party and its military apparatus, to the rest of society, if it has been In all of Europe, the only country that has managed to ensure that socialist tendencies govern the state for long periods of democracy and multi-party system.
  The aforementioned seems then to govern the type of attention that defines her project on Cuba, as before with respect to herself in Bernau's project, perhaps it means for her to ask herself about her own situation as an emigrant with respect to those Spaniards who never emigrated from Spain. His project on Cuba therefore focuses on the migratory phenomenon, that is, on the Cuban diaspora in Germany and on the question of how to culturally translate Cubans in the diaspora with those who have lived their lives in Cuba.
Discussed Works and illustrations

Fig 1- Elena Alonso, Market stall, Bernau, Germany
Fig 2- Elena Alonso, Market stall lecterns, back home, Bernau, Germany
Fig 3- Elena Alonso, Bernau, Opening of the exhibition, Bernau, Germany
Fig 4- Elena Alonso, Bernau, paintings, Bernau, Germany
Fig 5- Elena Alonso, Bernau, paintings, Bernau, Germany
Fig 6- Elena Alonso, Bernau, paintings, Bernau, Germany
Fig 7- Elena Alonso, Bernau, paintings, Bernau, Germany
Fig 8- Elena Alonso, Exchanging and dialoguing with each person with whom she makes her works, Bernau, Germany
Fig 9- Elena Alonso, Exchanging and dialoguing with each person with whom she makes her works, Bernau, Germany
Fig 10- Elena Alonso, Exchanging and dialoguing with each person with whom she makes her works, Bernau, Germany
Fig 11- Elena Alonso, Exchanging and dialoguing with each person with whom she makes her works, Bernau, Germany
Fig 12- Elena Alonso, Bernau, In the community in front of her workshop showing the paintings together, Bernau, Germany
Fig 14- Elena Alonso, Skwierzyna, Polonia
Fig 15- Elena Alonso, Skwierzyna, Polonia
Fig 16- Elena Alonso, Skwierzyna, Polonia
Fig 17- Elena Alonso, Skwierzyna, Polonia
Fig 17- Oh mija, it's not easy!, El Hongo, art house residence, Havana
Fig 17- Oh mija, it's not easy!, The Ketchup Bottle, art hous residence, havana

Grades

I wrote this essay thanks to a cultural production by Grisel Antelo and Elena Molina in their arthous space consisting of an exhibition by Elena Alonso coordinated by them at arthous to which they invited me and in connection with which I visualized with Elena the entire set of her art that the essay discusses

Cultural dimensions

©Por Abdel Hernandez San Juan

This essay aims to discuss some aspects of Tamara Arroyo's work, specifically I am motivated to address springs that in some way could be said to have been present in her previous works such as attention to objects and signs related to consumption, mass culture and both domestic and urban iconography of serial elements of industrial reference.
  Although it is only one of the aspects of a much richer art that, as I have discussed in other essays, contemplates more complex phenomena related to the relationships between the optical and the sensible, the internal and the external, the material and the immaterial, space and time, the body and the soul, this acquires a much more accentuated and complete elaboration in his recent works, reaching, in my opinion, a whole rearticulation of meanings that rethinks and brings renewed light to the hermeneutics of the once called pop.
  Specifically, I am referring to two recent investigations, one that takes us to the field of architecture and the other to the field of ceramics.
  Although the first is still the project resulting from a study that Tamara began and that is in the preliminary draft for a scholarship aimed at video works and volumes to be made, while the second refers to works that have been complexed and exhibited in their individual exhibition pure street, consumer and other exhibitions, between both searches a perspective is configured that consolidates the peculiarity of the way in which his art rethinks previous parameters on the subject.
  On the one hand, the project based on his studies of relaxation architecture is a sharp and investigative reading of architecture which addresses questions of cultural identity around the styles of architecture as these have been stabilized and regularized. in the logic of forms.
However, far from studying a form of the style for the way it has been previously typified in the culture around or as a reference to a prototypical cultural identity, Tamara pays attention and chooses a motif and a relationship of motifs that centers the paradoxes of cultural reinventions.
Placing outside, in the objective world of precise architectural works, the adventures of a preconceived idea of ​​“Mediterranean style” and “Andalusian” originating or related to cultural roots, she discusses what she calls “Architecture of relaxation” established and generalized as a architectural and urban framework around tourism on the Costa del Sol, discusses how it is an expression of the images created of “the Spanish” by the cinematic unconscious of Hollywood and a certain idea of ​​Andalusian architecture reimagined from California,
The project investigates how the relaxation architecture of tourism spread and became generalized back in the region from which it was supposed to come but as a result of an outside eye, that is, as a reinscription of the inventive and sublimated model of Hollywood and California reinscribed in the region, transforming the Costa del Sol in inventive towns that have nothing to do with Mediterranean architecture, but rather with the images produced on those by consumption and tourism where modernity and kitsch are combined with an architecture that calls sweet, based on This, also addressing native Mediterranean and Andalusian architecture and urban planning projects, many of which were discarded in the tourist conglomerates of the Costa del Sol, Tamara develops works of video projection and sculpture in volumes that situate these paradoxes and reflect on them by investigating their relationships with the theme of the vernacular, cultural identity and its reinventions, as well as around his own biography and experience since it is the area where his father lives related to different moments of his experiences.
On the other hand, as I said, within the new neoplasticist sensibilities towards the materialities and immaterialities of the habitat and the domestic understood in an urban sense that does not disdain and rather pays attention to what I have called the cultural reinventions of consumption Tamara is transfiguring, reconfiguring and transmigrating the perceptual parameters regarding visual culture and image as we knew them in what was once called pop.
Far from the visual icon understood as a preponderant emblem in the once pop art that, in the face of the supremacy of the absolute commodity object, treats the image as what we have called the superobject, that is, the visual icon of the referential object exacerbated in the hyperreality of its image and thus devoid of subjective, sensory and sensitive dimensions with the dissemination and fragmentation of the subject that this implied in pop, from Andy Warhol, (serial canned goods, Hollywood icons, etc.) through Claes Oldenburg (hamburgers) to Roy Lichtenstein ( comics) or Richard Hamilton, this turn reassimilates some signs and images from the former visual repertoire of the so-called mass and consumer culture that pop echoed but returning it, on the one hand, to the relationship between subjectivity and everyday life and, on the other, re-affecting its referents from a positive reading occupied in the semantic memory of the body that investigates new relationships between our subjectivity and the exchange of dimensions between our internal spaces, -the home, the habitat, the soul-, and the external spaces. -the city, mass culture and consumption, etc.
The above is made explicit in his samples Pura Calle, De Consumo, and in works from recent years in which it can even be perceived that less or nothing has been taken from the former pop to rethink it, but rather from the direct domestic and urban experience of a new generation whose questions about the same reference in visual culture have been raised again or asked again as for the first time.
  In fact, the attention does not seem entirely, and in reality even less, to fall on a phenomenon of visual culture or properly correlative to the image, but rather above all around the proxemic, synesthetic and synesthetic universe that takes shape between the affective memory of the body understood as semantic memory and objects understood as indications of that sensory and affective universe in the home and other affective spaces.
  It is not, however, as occurred, on the one hand, in the post-pop postmodernist turn of feminism, or in certain expressions of the postmodernist kitsch turn, nor a critique of the fragmentation of the subject assumed in that super-object image of early pop. , (Kruger), nor from turning attention to the exhilarations of social cosmetology or the hyper-cheesiness that derives from the massive discourses of popular culture as in the hyper-stuffed animals of Jeff Koons.
Even beyond simply returning these images and icons to a sensory space that returns them to subjectivity and sensitivity, it is also and more about the fact, semiotic in itself, that far from the superobject into which those images became pop, they are not approached as icons, not even as symbols but from a perspective that we will call indexical in allusion to this concept as it was discussed from the first semiotics of Peirce, a concept which presupposes from the very way of considering the image a perspective entirely different from that of the once iconic pop and even visual textualist of her posts
  These are complex and rich forms of the indexical sign or signified indexicality in contemporary visual and plastic arts.
Unlike the iconic sign that is characterized by the high level of emblematism of the image, where the visual sign is highly codified by a standardized visual memory that memorizes its meanings, and usually referred to symbols of mass culture whose codification is generalized or to Binary practical sign systems such as yes or no, pass or stop, the indication or indexicality is a less conventionalized form of sign where the aspects that refer to the referential object of that sign have not been collected by the representatement or the ground of the sign, remaining in turn suggested or evoked by some aspect of itself.
The indexical images thus range from the effects of impregnation of one form into another, such as the indications of the memory of walls, fragments of streets and other objects in the material art of Tapies or of the face, the body and the objects in the casts. by George Segal. The example of the indexical sign in its first meanings as discussed by Peirce is well illustrated with the image of the gai that is on the roof of a house in a town and as the wind blows the metallic gai moves in one direction or another with the objective of knowing what the direction of the first is.
Indexicality, however, has acquired much more elaborate forms in Tamara's recent art beyond the simple trace, the emptying or the clues, these are works that are interested in the everyday object, whether domestic or industrial, related to the habitation, the environment, the city, the urban or consumption, but far from being retained due to the form it has as a reference, it is in turn explored through indexical languages ​​in order to make explicit dimensions that usually go unnoticed and that are related to the affective memory between the body and the object, Tamara chooses objects made of usually industrial or standardized materials and referring in terms of visual culture to those references such as a pizza box, an ice cream counter, a hamburger wrapper , a tool box, some socks and makes them in a material that refers to affective memory, giving them a proxemic, kinesic, synaesthetic and tactile sense, making them in enameled ceramics and clay while staging them alongside abstract geometries based on ornamental traditions such such as those of bars in architecture as well as with other ductile and relational forms but that maintain an abstract sender such as hinges, rings or pure material elements also made in ceramics.
While in tapies the indexical consisted of the visual memory that was impregnated in the material of the object, the surface or the element fixed by that material and covered by it in the manner of clues and while in Segal the indexicality refers to how the material of plaster receives into its impregnated form vestiges of the human body, the objects or the forms on which the casting was carried out, here the indexicality is not a repetition in the new matter of an image impregnated with the referent, but rather that sensory, affective universe, proxemic, synesthetic, synesthetic and tactile to which we have referred before given in the fact that objects and signifying elements usually coded as referring to consumption, pizza box, hamburger wrapper, tool box, ice cream counter, etc., are made in a material that refers on the one hand to the earth, on the other hand, to usually domestic artisanal and utilitarian utensils such as vessels for eating and storing, for growing plants or other aesthetic, atmospheric and environmental functions to which ceramics and enamel This is additionally related to the fact that they are molded forms as well as distributed within broader relational compositions given in their metal pieces that refer to the environment and ornamentation in the home and architecture.
  We also know well that ceramics, as an expression in art, refers, on one side, to the concept of usefulness or functionality, which has had consequences on the ideologies of art with respect to it, usually considering it, like crafts, as a minor art, that is, excluded from fine arts, however, in the same sense, also the general references to visual culture implicit in Tamara's choices, Pizza boxes, hamburger wrappers, ice cream counters or socks, such as expression of design in mass, popular and consumer culture, experiments, like advertising and fashion, being, with respect to fine high arts, forms of visual culture excluded from the crypticity of high culture.
  In this sense, making such objects in ceramics could be read and interpreted as a move to which more meanings are added; it could be discussed as a new way of relativizing those ideological parameters, on the one hand, reincorporating ceramics into the high visual culture of fine arts. via the non-artistic neo-Dadaist acceptance of those codes of general visual culture while reincorporating those visual codes considered non-artistic to the artisticity of ceramics, this reading, however, with regard to ceramics would neglect the fact that In Tamara's recent installations, especially in her pure street exhibition, a reading of the relationship between installationism and ceramics is visually deliberated, making a very interesting genealogy about the dependence of the first, installationalism, on the contiguous and positional distributionalism of the second, finding thus significant springs of the second for the fine arts with regard to contemporary art of recent decades.
  In his pure street exhibition, in fact, in addition to the contiguous and positional shelfism of the object, positionalism is semiotically relevant in the deliberation of meanings and semantic meanings, I mean how the exhibition is articulated as a whole around the ways of locating and positioning objects in space, small groups of objects in the corners of metal structures on the ground, solitary objects on the ground, constellative iron elements on the walls such as the balcony or the vase, among others.
  The ascendancy of the applied arts over the fine high arts is otherwise not entirely new beginning from the bauhaus and the Moscow school of arts and crafts in the Russian avant-garde from the tableware, furniture and architectural blueprints of Malevish. And although Tamara's explorations do not seem to take that path, despite the echoes of Mondrian in some of her windows, design remains central to her installation compositions.
By way of closing, we would like to introduce some questions about intertextuality regarding the way in which some allusions could be induced in Tamara's art to other aesthetics and, above all, authors.
  Given that these are almost always very subtle allusions, I consider that it would be necessary to extend my analysis of indexicality to the territory of intertextual allusions; rather, the allusions, for example, to certain pop motifs, do not seem so much related to a reference of art to the art in the way of attention towards it in the sense of art history but rather in the sense in which we have discussed it, but despite this in two of his most recent projects we can speak more directly of a certain intertextualism although of peculiar appearances.
In more relaxation, her recent preliminary project for the scholarship aimed at deepening and developing her study on the architecture of the Costa del Sol that we mentioned before, Tamara directly explores her inferential and deductive references of the reflection on style and form in both architects and critics. of architecture clearing its perspectives of intertextuality with respect to those, it would be necessary to see how this is expressed in the videos, volumes and installations that it plans to make based on it as a visual discourse from the moment in which, at least, the visual preliminary project that it deploys as a proposal and anticipation of what it will do is clearly original to me in its formal and aesthetic discourse, and this originality moves away from the exhaustion and saturation of codes to which intertextualism generally tends, at least in aesthetics.
  That not infrequently led to the validation of impurities and mannerism in architecture in Ventury's sense, while although a certain eclecticism can still be perceived in his project, it manages to at least suggest territories that visually approximate what he had before. discussed as a beyond of the intertextual referring to artists who work around studies and investigations of text-visual and cultural forms to find their own among them.
  It is true that beyond the purely iconographic aspects related to the image and the superobject that it became, there was in pop, perhaps for the first time in art, although it is also perceptible in neo-Dadaism, a departure of the artist towards areas of visual culture that moved him away from the autotelism of art towards art to explore his motives in non-artistic culture, that is, popular and mass culture, finding in that values ​​and resources that did not refer to the visual arsenal of the artistic avant-garde that since then she perceived herself as exhausted in her self-referentiality. In those conditions the artist seemed to work with visual texts that exist in the culture and in the social text which he rearticulates and relates to make his proposals.
However, while in pop that trick of working with a different visual text, the distinction between what were the authorial operations and those texts of culture manipulated in contrast to the previous parameters of style and originality, my attention towards a moved beyond the intertextual -on the basis of intertextuality understood as the work of an author between his text and other texts in the culture or the text of other authors--refers to artists who do not simply manipulate texts which they take as They are given to them in visual culture with respect to which their authorial operations are distinguished by gestures, but rather from artists who immerse themselves in a more extensive and profound research on their cultural references, which seems closer to what he proposes in his preliminary draft more relaxation.
  Nor is it a matter, as in fluxus and processual art, of simply making the process the photogenic reference of a reconstructive self-representation of what has been experienced or of a simple process understood as a river that flows into the sea of ​​the work, rather of a process that transforms into a permanent research on these cultural references and where the works become edited visual conclusions of that continuous research that is drawn again and again according to the projects.
  To the above, there are some references to the relationship between fabrics and culture that we have discussed before about other female artists such as Cristina Jadic and more specifically between fabrics and tradition that I have also discussed before in Tamara, approaching it this time in the eminently relative sense of relationship between plots and culture, specifically in how the persistence and relevance of weaving in the family and domestic feminine tradition is expressed in the visual, sensory and plastic imagination, and above all the way in which dimensions can be read and understood in her works. cultural aspects that otherwise do not go unnoticed but rather focus the intentionality of some of their searches.
  In this sense, a visual investigation that Tamara has started in Havana stands out, which already consists of two immersions and which continues her previous forays based on a research into the warp and wefts of the ways in which metal is used in windows, doors and facades.
This search proposes a novel and unprecedented reading of Havana that he makes through photography and video spontaneously related to the course of his own immersion in the city, it is a genealogy, that is, an interpretation neither diachronic nor historical, of a current memory read as if they were fabrics – or where Tamara is the one who reads them like this with her eye and gaze – warps in metal that express a sensitivity that has persisted as a living tradition from inventive ornamentation to collage in contrast to the homogenization that is typical in this type of ornamentation when it becomes the reason for standardized corporations.
  The result is an immersive investigation that proposes a reading that would not have otherwise been obtained, bringing new light to these relationships in Havana.

References

Tamara Arroyo, Mas Relax, Proposal for the Multiverso BBVA scholarships, 2019

The Synegdotal Impulse: Situated Discourses
©By abdel Hernández san juan

I would like to address here a series of works by Tamara which move beyond the classical scope of her art on which I have focused before towards more situated visual discourses. When I say classical scope I try to locate those aspects that, as an artist of a new generation, could weave or trace relations of descent, on the one hand, and epistemic relations, on the other, to artists of previous generations, Spanish or from other places, considered under a loose use of the term classics such as tapies, for example, I also mean in the sense of those aspects that in a more stable and relatively invariant way are constant and from which the basic principles around which it is organized emerge and return. the genesis of his entire art
  Tamara's art, however, also includes incursions that have a more propositionalist character towards the outside, that is, towards the sociocultural environment and are defined by the fact that they are more situated in contexts. The concept of incursion specifies that these are proposals through which he makes inroads into certain propositions that, for the purposes of his work as a whole, function as modes of “going” and “coming,” that is, forms through which he proposes. and returns to itself, in this process the matrix elements function according to adequative principles that are made explicit in its logic within what it itself calls "relations."
  We therefore have, on the one hand, “structures,” which correspond to the matrices of his art, and on the other, “relations,” his more situated works thus seem to be modalities of this relationality more referred to contexts.
Two works that I recently saw in January 2020 surprised me by their high elaboration, their beauty and their dimensions, considering them to be the most significant within the incursionism to which I refer because they lead to the complexion and synthesis of this other aspect of his art in two very different but paradigmatic ways. to the logic in which he does it, the functionality, on the one hand, and the relationship to the art institution or cultural institutions, on the other, I am referring to his works LIGHT ON LIGHT OFF 2018 piece made for the Hotel Generator, created from a collage of railing ornaments from popular neighborhoods and TRAMPANTOJO 2019, digital printing on voilé exhibited in the context of an exhibition titled Postcrisis.
The first reminds me of “White on White” by Malevish due to its tautological title, “light on light” but it also evokes the sensation that the dematerialization of light in James Turrell produced in me when passing through his passages and places of transit that are systems. geometric lighting environments where light is reified and claimed in its techno-sensical dematerialization treated as a code for the re-spiritualization of modern life.
He also suggested to me the use of lighting in entertainment culture, such as in the works of Jennifer Steicamp that communicate something about the world of lighting in large cities like Las Vegas.
Paradigmatic example of propositionalism located to a function, in this case the functions of setting on the landing of a hotel, the piece explores, however, an intermediate point or balance between these three things, through a design that combines rational geometry with visual motifs of shapes taken from popular neighborhoods alluding to how lighting has been re-culturalized by popular culture more than its spectacular exacerbation in Steikamp, ​​its almost religious content in Turrell or the asceticism of Malevish.
Trompe l'oeil, on the other hand, suggests to me something that we could call the synegdotic impulse in contemporary art such as the work of the Dutch artist Alfred Venemozer who intervened in the architecture of the museum by transforming one of its parts into a church bell tower and the wood of the railings. of the museum's stairs in countless carved motifs.
If we analyze these two pieces, both of large dimensions and overwhelming due to their fine workmanship, we find that one supposes a certain function and the other the relationship of the work with the art institution, that is, the way it is, far from only being presented in and by the institution looks towards it.
The synegdotic impulse to which I refer, at least in the artists within it whose proposals have convinced me, Venemozer and Tamara, seems related to the latter, however, not in the usual way in which the institution has previously become a motif in art. contemporary.
Far from paying attention to the art institution in the form of a thematization of its disquisitions and dilemmas or parodies around it, the synegdotic impulse seems focused on the exploration of what we could understand as “spatial tropes”, that is, where The focus is on architecture and spaces.
In the case of Venemozer it was about the question about the paradoxes of a very modern museum of high art that had a wholesale supply market in front of it, posing the two diatribes, how the museum looks towards the market and how it looks at its time the museum is looked at and understood from the market
Venemozer chose to transform a part of the museum, which had to be dewritten and re-inscribed by the questions of the occasion, into the bell tower of a church in the form of a synecdoche that communicated with the “church-bell tower” fragment the idea of ​​the museum as a whole. like a church in front of the community or according to the gaze of the viewer who moves holding on to the railings and who looks towards the architecture of the building where he sees the bell tower through glass walls, the idea of ​​the museum is created. as church through spatial tropes.
  Very close to metonymy in communicating the whole with the part or, conversely, the part with the whole, synecdoche exchanges the proper meaning of an expression in the phrase, in Venemozer the visual phrase “church steeple” in its literal proper sense and the figurative sense, here “the museum as a church”
  But my attention here focuses on the way that synecdoche acquires when working as a trope that is neither literary nor visual but rather spatial, that is, working with the senses that the viewer has in a visual field that is poorly codified and highly situated or contextualized as it passes through. through concrete spaces, here those of the cultural institution, where synecdoche puts different spaces in conjunctive and disjunctive relationships, as in the semantics of the word
In this sense, Trompe l'oeil is an original exploration unique to Tamara's own way of relating synecdoche in the articulation of spatial tropes that produce semantic meanings at the level of ideas.
While the gaze of the market community that looks towards the museum as towards a church is omitted in Venemozer, Tamara does the opposite, bringing in the images of the community by relating two spatial tropes through synecdoche, in this case the relationship between two architectures, one in the proper sense of the phrase “the popular neighborhoods” focused on images of their exterior facades and windows, and the other, “the architecture of the exhibition space”, in order to create relationships of meanings in the relationship between both. new ones in which the figurative and the conceptual are exchanged
In short, it is a large piece that looks like a large canvas but is a print of digital photographs on voile located in front of a sliding door – “door with a circular rail” – of the exhibition space which slides opening and closing and At the same time, it forms the wall on that side – or the only thing on that side in the exhibition space which is a wall, but which opens to the street like a door, this sliding and sliding function of wall-door with its implicit symbolism, is like this synegdotically resemantized from the moment he gives his piece the same sliding and sliding shape, exposing in front of that door-wall/non-wall the fabric like a curtain that, like that one and according to its same logic, opens and closes being in a way that also works as a virtual door-wall that separates one side from the other and that, like the door of architecture, opens and closes.
The images, however, of this contiguous curtain repetition in front of the same sliding door-wall, are not those of the latter, --the exhibition space--but rather that of the popular neighborhoods and more specifically of architectures in those in which the brick is used in various ways, which becomes the topic in question situated and contextualized by the thematic nature of the call.
Imposing for its dimensions, its beauty and the strength of the digital photographs explored in the mode of photomontages, the above is combined with the fact that voile and especially this type of large fabrics around architecture also suggest, As Tamara explained to me, showing me a similar building under restoration, the large canvases with photographs of the building that are used to cover the outside when it is under restoration.
And he says about it in a published article that, upon knowing the space, he decided to adapt to it, because he was interested in what his door with a “circular rail” generated.

"It gave me the idea of ​​doing a trompe l'oeil," Tamara explains in a published article, winking at those tarps that they put on the facades of large buildings when they are going to be restored, which has a photo of the building itself, but this Maybe it would be a large curtain with images of different facades with the different ways of laying bricks, of places that I see during my daily tours, mainly in popular neighborhoods.

And in his dossier “On my daily tours I saw the multiple ways of placing bricks in the buildings of the neighborhoods. From this everyday experience I created Trampantojo, a piece that speaks about the hapticity of the gaze, through architectural material. The idea combined with the specificity of the Nigredo space, for the POSTCRISIS project, in which there was a sliding door that moved throughout the premises, materialized with a digitally printed curtain in which these different accumulated modalities can be seen. The effect was a kind of pantojo, which in turn was reminiscent of the tarps placed on buildings when they are being restored, referring to the rhythm that architecture has in popular neighborhoods.

In this last sense, its synecdoche could be read as a spatial trope that alludes, by juxtaposing photos of the neighborhood buildings on the exhibition spatiality, to the restoration of the latter as if it were the building of one of those popular neighborhoods.
Despite its similarities, unlike metonymy where the trope results only from the fact that a fragment, being the only thing we have of a whole of which it is a part but which is absent or not visible, refers to it, synecdoche can create more complex relationships between the part and the whole where the first is not always a simple fragment of the second to which it belongs, but can relate the part of a whole with another whole of which it is not a part, doing it in the way of its relationship with the whole of which it is a part, thus creating richer and more complex indirect and figurative meanings
  While in metonymy there is no properly figurative language other than only the effect produced by imagining an absent whole from a fragment, synecdoche allows more complex translations between part and whole, less internal between the elements, since it is more of a trope than that of hence relations such as curtain-door, work-exhibition space, photography of neighborhoods-restoration, etc., can exchange finer meanings at the semantic level of ideas than a simple fragment-assembly relationship, which is nevertheless a synecdoche and not a metaphor.
The allusion to the restoration, moreover, makes the signegdotic relationships of meaning even richer and more complex since it also connects in some way the synecdoche with what I have called architexts in allusion to spatial textual forms that are always a commentary on other textual forms in the way of wandering around them or being with respect to them as an annex that delimits them, puts them in quotation marks or runs through them in peritextual modes, that is, it moves around that text as its periphery, as happens to the literary architextual peritext, which are all those textual modes. that surround the main text of which, however, it cannot do without, such as, for example, footnotes, subtitles and notes.
Like the architexts that surround the text, your piece suggests being a pertitext of the text it comments on, delimiting or placing meanings in quotation marks with respect to the exhibition spatiality of the cultural institution, sliding curtain-sliding door/work-exhibition space, photographs of architecture/literal architecture in situ, photographic montages/the work as a montage with respect to the exhibition space, this in addition to the very occasion for which it is called with the theme of the brick--which by the way also communicates something of the decentralist impetus that the call had since none of the Artists from this post-crisis exhibition in Spain exhibited in the same exhibition place but in different spaces in the city.
Due to its shape and dimensions, the work also adds a richer semantic content regarding the brick since it is not this in a literal sense but in the ways in which it is used in the architecture of popular neighborhoods and not in a direct way but through architectural photographs.
  By creating the spatial trope of restoring the work, it suggests or underlines the mutual need of both - cultural institution and popular neighborhoods - while reversing the usual relationships between the two, decentering one with the other, which restores the buildings of the neighborhoods. popular with the artistic project of the institution?, or conversely, the latter with those?, perhaps both things, the synecdoche at this point leaves the question open in a certain way because although in a certain way the piece will have its life as a work in itself perse to the situated occasion, the question about the mission of art with respect to publics in culture understood beyond the specialized public of art does not itself cease to have that double meaning, on the one hand art goes out into culture in search of values ​​in the former, as occurred in pop and other forms of incorporation of popular and mass culture into the high visual culture of fine arts, but on the other hand it seeks to sensitize that culture to the values ​​of art.
  Through the pure exchange of semantic meanings through spatial tropes, architectural photographs and semantic contiguous relationships between work and exhibition place, sliding door, sliding work, etc., Tamara makes subtle dimensions of these spatial tropes, location of the work in the space, synonymies between the work and the exhibition space, dimensions of the piece and form of its elaboration, relationally communicate conceptual resonances
While in Venemozer it was a project about the relationship between the museum and the market and how they look at each other or how to look at one according to the other, in Tamara it was a collective exhibition that asked about cultural production and of knowledge in the face of the financial issue that in itself focuses questions on the conditions of possibility of the inventive way in which increasingly contingent samples take shape that makes them possible and, on the other, that centered the image of the brick as a financial symbol calling on eight contemporary Spanish artists to make their works based on it after taking them to the brick factory where they observed the complete process of its production and in memory of the preponderant place of that in the call from a current post-crisis perspective the once financial crisis of 2008.
Thus, the directions that these two pieces highlight symbolize and paradigmatize the main modes that structure the ways in which Tamara generally ventures into her more situated discourses. From both of them we can go back and forth revisiting other more contextualist works in her art.
Just to mention a few, compare the formal differences between a work like “Mientras Tanto” which consists of a group of resting chairs located on a terrace in front of a glass in an architectural space, with respect to another like “Music Box” which consists of an object, a work like “Juegos Populares” which consists of documentary photographs of children playing with strings with another like “Habitar un Espacio” which consists of a little frame with a drawing mounted on a wallpapered wall, a work like “Legaspolis” which consists in store advertisements and advertising with another such as “Screen saver old school” which consists of two rhombuses as digital images on the exposed laptop screen refresher, or works such as “Playgrounds” and “The Wrong Project” which consist of illuminated posters others like “Holiday In” which consists of a drawing on top of a mail envelope, or works like “Tales in the Forest” which consists of a wooden shack perched on a tree with a ladder with others like “De Casa Encendida a Casa of Empeños" based on a more technical and architectural drawing, "Sunset" consisting of a DVD with others such as "The amazing possibilities of the spirit" or "Sketch II" consisting of very different artist books.
Four previous pieces are grouped two by two around “Light on Light” and “Trompe l'oeil” despite their differences, “Meanwhile” and “Legaspolis” around trompe l'oeil because in them he had previously explored in very different broad ways. discourses around space, the first is a large distributive piece alluding to rest and half-time between one activity and another but which seems in its appearance almost a complete portion of the world of reality itself, that is, in which people can really rest, the second is almost a ready-made of store advertisements and publicity as if an entire portion of the reality of the street of the neighborhood through which one passes on a daily basis had been brought to the exhibition space.
“Playgrounds” and “The Wrong Project” in turn are works in which he had previously explored light in the mode of the light poster or light as an urban discourse in those literally texts, although one cannot be overlooked here. piece that I consider is a precedent of the two in a single “Indoor/Outdoor” Rome 2013
But despite being pieces more situated in precise sociocultural dynamics such as those of contemporary Spanish art and culture, there is something in all of them that continues to develop aspects and matrices of Tamara's art. It is true that “inhabiting a space” and “box of music" are formally very different pieces, one is a wallpapered environment with a framed drawing, the other an object of music, but in both there is an intimate dimension that alludes to the habitat of the domestic space, the first to houses in which it itself has lived, the second is that record player or music system that you usually have at home and on which you choose the music you want to listen to, “popular games” and “forest stories” are very different pieces from each other, one is photographs of children's hands playing braided games with a thread between their fingers just like it in reality before the photo, the other a wooden hut on a tree, but both allude to the playful sense and above all to the tenderness of the children's world of stories or the creative inventiveness of games, the game of weaving a thread with the hands in as many ways as the imagination allows and telling forest stories are not so different things after all, they are actually very related in terms of imagination, as well as in the sense of an affectivity that I have discussed in my recent essay on the affective in the semantic memories of the body in “pure street”, one is a photograph of children playing, the other a three-dimensional volume of wood perched on a tree , but both are sublime constructs around the same spirituality
“Screen saber old school” is a simple demo on the refresher screen of a laptop, but the rhombuses that float weightlessly on the monitor are symbolic figures of the carnival, which is a popular festival that Tamara continually refers to throughout her work. They also have both the symbolism of the rhombuses as the screen refresher, a central recreational component also in the entire relationalist and ludricist impetus of "popular games" and "forest tales", thus allude to a sublime celebration of the everyday world and the cultural values ​​in it.
“Holliday in” is a drawing on a mail letter that refers to the latter, mail art, “De Casa Encendida a Casa de Empeños” is a more technical and architectural drawing and “The amazing possibilities of the spirit” or “Sketch II "They are very different artist books from each other but they all deal in different ways with culture and art from a spiritual point of view in the sense pointed out by Hegel both in his aesthetics and in his prolegomena on the dissolution of art in reality." of the spirit, something that by the way was the center that structured Still's abstractionism and his texts in which Mondrian was the main exponent, from the spirit of the letter as Barthes called it to the messages sent here drawn with a cake, through emigration , even the book as an object
In all these works, as in general in Tamara's art, we could talk about the relationship between form and concept from a perspective that understands the first not as a simple instrument of the objectives of the second or, conversely, the second as a simple derivation of the first. , but rather explores a more intrinsic relationship between one and the other as pairs that are once the same and once complement in a Hegelian sense where the relationship between form and idea can occur in ductile, permeable and relational forms that do not have to be instrumental. or manipulative.
  Our emphasis here must therefore be the passage and the forms of the coming and going from form to concept and vice versa, as well as above all, forms through which the level of senses and meanings transforms conceptuality into a semantic field. of more open and complex explorations, something in which Tamara symbolizes an original modality in international and global art not only in Spain.
The above refers us to an extended notion of conceptuality where the concept is disseminated towards a broader semantic field.
  The theme goes beyond the mere fact of being works related to highly situated social and cultural circumstances typical of the socio-cultural life of contemporary art in Spain, to open up to the relationship between technique and concept, distinctions between techniques and means, on the one hand, and between cognition and concept, on the other
In order to be more graphic and explicit, I am also alluding to something recurrent in contemporary art not only in Spain but in general international and global when it comes to highly situated or contextualized visual discourses at a sociocultural level, the fact that increasingly Artists are often not defined by the regularization of their own style or by subordinating their art to a certain technicality, but rather the latter, technique and form, tend to be transformed into something that is available in an instrumentalized way, thus subordinating the form that the works have to what is proposed with them in terms of idea, that is, to their themes, issues treated or concepts, the result lies in an irreducible heterogenization through which in the same artist we can perceive works as different from each other that it becomes impossible to establish that they define their search in universal terms rather than by what they have resulted in.
This propensity resulting from making art to order or when the proposed works have to be subordinated to summoned themes refers to the fact that principles that once belonged to specific trends in art such as Dadaism defined by the use of decontextualized objects brought from the sphere of everyday life to The institution of art, and conceptualism, the primacy of the idea and the subordination of the form to being only the linguistic vehicle that communicates that idea, have become the generalized modus operandi that many artists have to respond to highly situated sociocultural issues. or contextualized.
When saying modus operandis, however, we do not consider that it is only something related only to the artist's decisions but also to the fact that from the sociological point of view imitation as a way of working with the texts and images of culture Non-artistic visual has gone from being a mere technique of pastiche of an author's style or procedures, to become a condition of objective possibility of the operations that any author has to articulate speeches or visual enunciations when working manipulating texts and signs. that takes or collects in the general visual culture or in the more or less contextualized social text that the commissioned occasion, the thematic invitation or the situated character supposes, that is, where the artist's work as a visual text itself imitates the text visual of the culture that manipulates
There are currently a countless number of contemporary artists for whom it is no longer possible to return to the idea of ​​a research or matrix search in their works, but rather these remain as a whole scattered by this situation that transforms their pieces into situated multiplicities that cannot be establish which are its main springs and which are its contextualized propositions.
The above is also related to the contingency imposed by the sociocultural speeds of the art world in terms of opportunities for visual careers, a continuous succession of events that have their objective conditions of possibility of continuous inventiveness to become possible both from the point of financial view in the free market as in the relations between cultural institutions and what we could call the market of ideas and fashions
Although a part of Tamara's art has been, like that of any contemporary artist, urged by this type of contingencies that recall Rorty's emphasis in his book "contingency, irony and solidarity", she has not, however, been limited or reduced to this phenomenon, something largely related to the importance that academic training and sensitivity to fine arts have in her after her studies at the Complutense University of Madrid. What has been said, however, does not stand to the detriment of the aforementioned contextualism, also in relation to the fact that interesting results are often developed in art; rather, it aims to facilitate distinctions that foster axiological and hermeneutical precision in the understanding of the different aspects that make up the work of an artist
The optionalism of technique and form, the fact that the artist is not conveyed in the whole of his art by the tradition of a continuous technique and identified as a constant by it, but rather the latter, the techniques and with them the forms , are optional to the horizon of propositionality, resulting in great differences between some works and others, it is something that was initiated by conceptualism, but at the same time some distinctions between cognition and concept are necessary since the cognitive procedure also enables this optionalistic alternation that disposes of the technique without necessarily being an instrumentalized subordination of the form to the concept where the first is manipulated by the second or used to illustrate it, rather it presupposes that the artist making his own troubling questions, themes and motives that escogeo are called upon in the sociocultural field, you can explore a field of propositionality located for certain pieces that does not always imply the relationship between a predefined a priori concept where its form is only the linguistic vehicle of an idea.
As a contemporary artist Tamara has discerned her own way of deliberating through relationships and adaptations how and in what way to venture into this socioculturalist propositionalism and these two pieces explain relevant aspects of that way.
Although not everything is premeditated and not a little is permeated by these contingencies, something that is also expressed in his art as edges within the set of works to which we refer here which do not fail to also give that effect of irreducible heterogenization of which few artists contemporaries escape.
The topic in question has not been completely neglected in contemporary art due to its sociocultural primacy, it is enough to mention in the United States an October issue at the end of the nineties Kant after Duchamp that focused on the modes that universal cognitive aprioris acquire, that is That is to say, the matrices to which we have referred, after Duchamp, on the one hand, and art as response, which centered the inverse to which we have referred, on the other, the way in which the sociocultural contingencies of situated propositionalism tend to pluralize to such an extent both the techniques and forms, on the one hand, and the themes or issues that focus an artist on the other, to the point of sometimes not being able to discern their matrices, although despite this it is a question hardly discussed due to its nature as a relatively recent phenomenon, that is, it consists of only a few decades in the experience of the field of art.

Grades.

For other examples of spatial tropes that are not properly synegdotic but equally attractive, see my essay The Tropes of Space where I elaborate on the subject in many more artists among whom is Tamara and I refer to the upholstering of the gallery with sienna suede fabric from the floor to the ground. ceiling by Surpic Angelini in my small curatorship of seven exhibitions at Rice University, Houston 1997, or the elastic circus jumping fabric that unites the cartography of two different cities, the one in which they made the work and the one in which they exhibited it in Juan José Olavarría and Ernesto Leal at Farish Gallery in my same curatorship.
  Although they are not synecdoches because in the case of Surpic a third figurative meaning is not produced but rather metonymies where the trope remains allusive to a purely sensory and tactile universe, and in that of Juan José y Leal it seems a surreal anachronism, if They are spatial tropes and above all they agree that they are around or around the art institution, the first to the exhibition space in the literal sense, --the sensory synesthesia of the specific spectator in the room--, the second to the cities in which it was elaborated and in which the exhibition was exhibited, the latter in a percent referring to the topic by exposing the institutional letters of the assembly process.

The references to Venemozer refer to a project of relationship between scriptura-writing in which I defined undescribing and rewriting, (or reinscribing) the museum in spatial terms as “staging” in a text that I wrote and distributed during my stay as curator in the Alejandro Otero Museum of Visual Arts regarding which Venemozer articulated one of the most original proposals, choosing to address the aspect related to views towards the museum or way of reilluminating our understandings of it, in 1994.

The references that light on light has evoked in me are to pieces that move between the old and modern buildings of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts that communicate something of that techno-sense of the current tecnomusic nightclubs where the most ultra-modern technological sounds are transformed through reiterative principles in rituals. The references that Steinkamp suggests to me are more to the catalog than to the show at Rice University Art Gallery in 2001.

The post-crisis exhibiting artists developed their works based on brick in independent spaces in Madrid, Tamara Arroyo in nigredo Conde Vistahermosa, Marlon de Azambuja in Alimentación 30, Iñaki Domingo in D11, Mario Espliego and Clara Montoya in Casa Banchel, Esther Mañas and Arash Moori in Nobody Never Nothing No, Rafa Munárriz in Hiato Agnés Pe in El Cuarto de Invitados, all attended a technical seminar on brick and visited the Palautec brick factory, where they learned about the production process. Curated by Cati Bestard, Marta Sesé and Louis-Charles Tiar in collaboration with the Faculty of Architecture of the Polytechnic University of Madrid and the support of the Madrid City Council, it was presented in the Intermediae space of the Matadero center in Madrid.

Regarding the relationship between part and whole, the phrase seven springs is used to say seven years, omitting winters, autumns and summers, as an example of synecdoche, but it is clear in literary theory that synecdoche is much more complex than a simple part-whole relationship. A metonymy is a fragment that gives the meaning of a whole that is not visually present, being a part of that absent whole, a synecdoche, on the other hand, can refer to a part-whole relationship where the whole, if visually present, can also exchange the meaning. typical of a relationship between part and whole through the figurative meaning of another part-whole relationship that is not the same, it can exchange, for example, meanings of some spaces or forms for that of others, through conjunctions and disjunctions between the conceptual and the allusive or metaphorical, some say that metonymy and metaphor are in a way double synecdoches

The title trompe l'oeil also has something of the words invented in the spirit of children's games or the names of plays in children's theater.

The peritext as an architextual form that hovers around a main text, as occurs between the footnotes in the essay, is not exactly a text about another text in the way that this occurs in the relationship, for example, between an essay and its topic, but it is It supposes a relationship between both texts since the peritext is defined with respect to the text that wanders or around which it makes archipelagos around it, this could refer to the notion of pre-text in the sense that the wandering text becomes the pre-text. text of the peritext that comments on it, but at the same time the relationships that trompe l'oeil maintains such as curtain-voile-image of neighborhoods-allusion to restoration, etc. Regarding the exhibition space, it is not exactly a pretextual relationship since there is no thematization indicative of it, to be pre-textual the piece would have to somehow make references to the exhibition space and the latter are nothing more than very subtle visual synonyms such as contiguity and similarity that the piece as a curtain opens and closes just like the sliding door of the site.
  The architextural logic of exploring the work as a kind of peritext with respect to the exhibition space such as the text is more explicit, frequent in literature and not so in the visual arts, I have however observed it in different ways in visual artists although It acquires in Tamara an original and unique form.

The Object as a Sign

©Por Abdel Hernandez San Juan

   The problem of how to approach the issue of markets understood as spatial locations in which the dynamics of barter and transaction between sellers and buyers occur, as well as where the establishments in which food and other goods are displayed and circulated, provide , according to my experience as a curator of this topic in Venezuela in 1994, a very wide variety of responses, from artists who thought of making installations that brought the signs, icons and images of the market to the art museum, to those who In very different ways they propose to venture their pieces directly into the market spaces. In this sense, the project developed in the Bilbao market in Spain has peculiar characteristics, since conditions were created so that the exhibition could be carried out spatially speaking within the same market.
In this sense, I would like to refer to the work developed by Tamara, which is what I know about what was developed in that experience through its documentation.
  It is an environmental installation made with recycled plastic market boxes which occupies an entire area in relation to architecture, establishing itself in the space as a kind of cubicle with its interior as if it were a room, this space created by tamara, Because the boxes are openwork boxes that have a pattern or grid, they can be seen from both sides, that is, from the inside of that space looking through the openwork spaces towards the market or vice versa, the buyer, the sellers. or the viewer walking through the market spaces can look through these holes inward, the interior space, however, establishes a distinction that opens the question of to what extent that created space can or cannot be considered part of the spatialities. of the market or must be considered from its limits inwards a work of art whose spatiality transforms any visitor ipsofacto into art spectators, the transition of a condition of itinerary for the one who travels places the limit between being a spectator as a consumer of the consumer goods that are presented in the market whose spatialities usually lie in walkable passages but also in cubbyholes where one can enter, or be a spectator of something that from that moment begins as an art intervention, the space by the way, It is empty, it does not contain merchandise like in the rest of the market, but it does accentuate the idea of ​​looking, that is, in markets where looking is usually a continuous activity, it is highlighted by the work as something in itself. same.
  But the interesting thing about Tamara's intervention lies not only in the creation of this space where the boxes themselves are the walls of the cubicle created, but subsequently, with the elements of the boxes themselves, Tamara began an exploration based on the deconstruction of those boxes as they are but unfolding them open like two-dimensional art. This search, which ranges from boxes that preserve their original motifs as they are, to others in which Tamara intervenes by deconstructing them and taking them to the maximum synthesis as minimalist drawings, is somewhat reminiscent of Picasso's deconstructions that moved from the realistic representation of a representational model. , specifically his well-known example of the realistic drawing of the ox, until later the way in which, through the understanding of the main synthetic elements of its lines and shapes, that initial figure is transformed into very simple lines that reach abstraction, a bit through a similar procedure, but originally obtained not from the representational drawing of the model, but from the deconstruction of an element as it is in itself in the markets, the plastic boxes for packaging and transporting merchandise, towards its deconstructive decomposition into simple lines , recalls in a way that is still ironic with respect to the traditional representation-abstraction pair, those deconstructions of Picasso.
  The interesting thing, however, as I said, implicit in this irony is that the realism-abstraction pair is not deliberated or elucidated between the illusory representation of the market understood as a reflex motive and its subsequent deconstruction, but rather the relationship between an element coming from from that market taken exactly as it is, towards its subsequent deconstruction, without the representational element intervening in terms of reflexes from the way in which the artist approaches the market in a visual sense.
  There are several interesting paradoxes in this search, on the one hand, something that I have referred to before in my essay cubism and deconstruction, the relationships between analysis and synthesis understood by what makes them capable of working around a reference without the need to represent it in terms reflections, here the concept of referent or referentiality, replaces the usual principles of denotation and reflex representation, instead of taking the market as the referent of a reflex representation of the gaze according to which the resulting symbolic work would have to be distinguished between its signs and the objects denoted by them, here the object, usually understood as a referent, is itself transformed into a sign, so that a sign is created with the object or a sign object which taken from the market, the plastic boxes themselves used In the former, it becomes from the work of art a sign-object of itself but there in the market, this non-denotative and non-referential distinction is nevertheless cognitive, that same object taken from what should be the referent and transformed into a sign. It then paradoxically refers to the gaze, which is the one according to which the reflective representation would be carried out.
So Tamara's work on this topic must be distinguished between two different explorations, one that refers to deconstruction in the sense of transforming into a reticular exploration on the gaze of the referent, the object itself taken from that world or universe that should be represented, the boxes of the market transformed within it into a cubicle or room from which one can look towards the market and look from it towards its interior, meanwhile, the experiments with the boxes taken from the market but not already exhibited in That leads us to the analysis-synthesis-deconstruction relationship that I was referring to before, regarding which a minimalist piece exhibited by Tamara at the artist-by-artist residency in Havana stands out, one of whose most overwhelming and attractive characteristics, in addition to its beauty, It is the simple way in which the piece, which when displayed impresses with its richness, beauty and visual complexity, is collected by removing these already minimal elements of plastic box material from the walls, the piece is transformed into a group of small and light plastic parts.
  This notion of the object-sign where the first supposed to be the referent itself becomes the sign, in a certain way putting in quotation marks the traditional principle in semiotics that the sign replaces the object as a substitute for it, is explored here in the opposite sense, The object acquires the place of the sign by replacing the latter or by transforming itself into a sign of itself and of something else, where the denotation and reflex representation are annulled as the connotation comes to the foreground. This, however, refers us to the at the same time, and from another perspective that is still symbolic to understand the way in which we must understand its two exploratory forms, the cubicle or room installed in the same market whose main element lies in transforming this reticular installation into an exploration of the gaze. itself, and the deconstructive boxes exhibited outside the market, paradoxically refer to another concept in semiotics, arising above all from the semiotics of art, the concept of object language, which refers to the fact that works of art when they are objects of semiotic criticism are themselves a language that in turn has its objects as a language, that is, unlike the usual representation, an object is the same language and therefore a subject and at the same time it also has its objects.
  Although it is not the same thing since the market boxes are not in themselves works of art that were themselves signs created with an expressive or communicative intention, his exploration of the market, both that in Bilbao like then the boxes as drawings, if you remember some basic principles that define the object language such as the fact, for example, that the object that was supposed to be the referent replaces the sign, becoming itself a sign, which happens with the work of art, a sign itself with respect to it. to some reality of meaning or representation. From this point of view, its exploration refers to the fact, which I have discussed elsewhere, that object languages ​​as a problem in general can be discussed in culture in a broader sense than that which only refers them to works of art.

References

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, Cubism and Deconstruction

About interrupted linearity

©By Abdel Hernández San Juan

  The artist-by-artist residency, an apartment in which the artists live and lead their lives while making works and exhibiting an exhibition in the living room spaces that lasts the duration of the residency, currently displays a beautiful and simple, minimalist exhibition by the artists Tamara Arroyo and Jimena Kato, the first Spanish, the second Japanese-Peruvian, both artists from Madrid. Entitled as a whole, The Interrupted Line, the exhibition seems like a dialogue between the aesthetics of both young creators who, although very different, seem to coincide on one point, working with matter in a warm way.
  While Tamara's pieces are elegant two-dimensional based on the openwork lattices of her intervention in the Bilbao market, working with the patterns of recycled plastic market boxes, fine abstract drawings that suggest a conglomerate in architecture, or what she calls links, and a simple minimalist installation of warm reddish bricks on the floor, Jimena's, seem focused on the ductility of the material, referring, on its small shelf, to the idea of ​​molding a material, these are small molded pieces that look like works in plasticine made with different colors, a Swiss on the wall from which an orange fabric hangs and some mineral stones on the floor from which a balloon emanates.
  The simple and elegant exhibition somewhat recalls a theme known in sculpture from the first forms of minimalism, when sculptors showed the coexistence in high contrast of apparently contrary materials, market plastic, clay bricks, drawing, synthetic material, fabric, etc
  The dialogue between both aesthetics seems well captured in the title of the exhibition La Línea Interrupida.
  On the one hand, from an aesthetic point of view, a good number of Tamara's works, not precisely those exhibited in this residence, refer to what I have defined as the exploration of a new space between the sensitive and the perceptive, which implies in the artist, who works with relationships, structures and processes, a beyond opticalism and kineticism, exploring new abstract and neo-minimalist perspectives against those, something that made me think, both of Mondrian in early abstractionism, and of the Venezuelan kineticists Alejandro otero, soto and cruz ten, especially the first and with respect to those, the work of Gego with its reticular constellations.
  A piece by Jimena, not exactly the ones exhibited in the residence, reminded me somewhat of the works of Eva Hesse.
  Art and aesthetics can help with samples like this to a hopeful coexistence of diverse subjectivities and experiences in globalization.

Use

The Artist by Artist Residency is a project by Carlos Garaicoa, Cuban plastic artist of the nineties, special thanks to me and Tamara

Informed crochet: The seed as a stitch in the cultural fabric/a first approach to the Nara paintings

©By Abdel Hernández San Juan

theorist and writer

   When I saw a painting by Nara for the first time I couldn't believe it, there were two of them, the first two, they were on the solitary wall brightening up a room, they were however dull, not necessarily sad, but there was so much in them that just as I supposed they should be extraordinary and extraordinary to the most ordinary common sense, the ice cream seller, for example, were no less so to me, but that was, I believe, for different reasons.
  For the ice cream seller it would be something extra-daily because for the purposes of his visual culture such things are only seen, either in sleeping dreams or I suppose in fantasy films, on the other hand they seemed extra-daily to me not because of analogies with dreams or films. on Sunday, but because clearly it was not something that could be explained simply according to the logic that while asleep we float in the atmosphere or in the Sunday film the girl's horse has wings and flies over the bridge, so many other things seemed to me involved in what that he saw and it is necessary to grasp them to understand the art of Nara.
  This essay is a first effort in that direction. Of all of them, the things that have caught my attention the most, now, when several years later I have been surprised again by the immense number of pieces that make up his plastic language, are on the one hand the range, the color in his art, and on the other hand the other, a certain relationship, in my opinion crucial, of his way of painting with language elements typical of craftsmanship, to expressive modes usually considered "non-art" or "minor art."
  It is not, however, that Nara is strictly an artisan, although her pieces for shoes, lamps and other utilitarian objects on the body or home are not insignificant, as if she were we would have Nara fabrics for tablecloths, Nara diving suits. , Nara scarves, Nara mats, Nara handbags, Nara tapestries, Nara blankets, Nara rugs and who knows maybe even Nara decorative garments, will we ever have them?, but it is not about either, as would be the case seen from the tradition of the beautiful highlands arts, from a simple foray into the applied arts in the way that the Moscow School of Arts and Crafts, the Russian avant-garde, the Bauhaus did, or the way in which, for example, Amelia ventured into ceramics.
  Rather, it is that in his way of painting his artistic paintings, Nara resorts to a series of serial motifs that are approached in the same way that certain signs and symbols are treated in artisanal ways whose pictographic logic can only be explained by recourse to cultural traditions.
Thus, for example, the geometric figures in the fabrics of Indo-American Hopi art in the United States, the masauwu, in Mexico, the yaaxche or acabé, and in Venezuela, the Wayue fabrics or Andean ceramics do not respond to logical-geometric abstractionist principles where the forms are understood as autonomous formations disconnected from the mere logic of the individual subject with respect to culture, but their arabesques and decorative forms have been transmitted in the same way from generation to generation just as, for example, in the scope of our Western and Christian families, it is transmitted among women from generation to generation crochet or certain embroidery and knitting techniques.
  The latter, which we have in some contemporary female artists in the United States and South America, would perhaps be more conducive to understanding how the elements play and relate in the art of Nara since it is certainly not treated like in the crafts of the Wayues in Venezuela, of a ancestral cultural tradition such as the Arawak language linked in various ways to beliefs or worldviews, but rather references to artisanal ways in some way disconnected from language and religion if we understand the latter in its literal theological sense.
  In no sense could Nara's art be referred to certain worldviews, much less to given religions, rather, a type of motifs chosen by herself are recurrent in her, that is, she does not obtain them as they are in a certain tradition. , but it is itself the one who decides them, such as, for example, the continuous recurrence to the symbol of the seed, sometimes the grain, but used not as an autonomous symbolism for its mere tropological meanings or figurative language, but in the manner of the weaving or sewing embroidery as if the seed were the point of a crochet, the pattern of a leitmotiv that weaves not only in the sense of embroidering or sewing something but also in the sense of decorating by filling with it all the spaces on the surface of the painting almost like a tapestry, at times, some of his paintings actually look like tapestries or things a woman might wear, a blanket for example, because of the way the seed covers everything around the shapes, encompassing the entire scope of the figure and the background.
  Many times in fact his images, mostly female human figures, women, sometimes trees, birds and other elements of nature, seem to be born or emerge from the same crochet that treats the entire surface of the painting as if it were embroidered, there is therefore no literal embroidery. , but the relationship between the repetitive symbolic elements becomes decorative in the way of crochet that weaves the surface as if it were a craft and then sees its figures emerge from that general warp of embroidered seeds, giving the impression that one has when seeing a tapestry. traditional Asian but rather within the European tradition.
  In fact, to a large extent, due to its range, and its atmospheres that are sometimes sentimentally dull despite its color harmonies, her art has something for the way in which the sentimental shines through in the forms that remember and evoke female artists from the East. of Europe.
  It is therefore "in the manner of craftsmanship" if we see it in the sense of how craftsmanship repeats the motifs of a cultural tradition, but at the same time it is not about "in the manner" but rather a true craftsmanship. but inventive -- creative we could say -- from the moment in which, although it is a tradition invented by it, the elements are semiotically related exactly with the same logic of a cultural tradition.
  The range at the same time in Nara's paintings, the color, also responds to a similar principle, his pieces harmonize with each other as a whole and with the environment in which they are displayed in a way that is reminiscent in many ways of the interior decoration governing that which explains the why and reasons of color in crafts.
  But the seed that is the reason for this crochet is itself the paradox of that symbolism, on the one hand it is the genesis, from it as in all poiesis, everything arises as for the first time, germinates, while at the same time through it everything is reproduced, fertility, that is, it is transmitted just as culture is transmitted, it is therefore at the same time engendering, genesis, and also tradition but in the sugeneris mode of what it invents or engenders and less so of what it she repeats.
  Nara is in fact a suigeneris case in Cuban art, although she could be seen, given one of the main aspects of her art, as part of a boom that occurred in the nineties of eminently dreamlike Cuban artists such as Sandra Ramos or Ibrahim Miranda. , among others.
  She is not either, and this is something that makes her unique, a naive or naive artist in the sense that this concept acquired in its relationship to culture in cases like Moya's, she is not a naive artist in the manner of the Venezuelan Juan Feliz Sánchez or the Cuban Moya among other things because Nara emerged as an artist from the very center of the avant-garde, she took my workshop to do in the nineties through which she experienced from within the most sophisticated and experimentalist performance and avant-garde interdisciplinarity , then she continued her experience in subsequent contact with street art and other exponents of more experimentalist art.
  Her work is a conjunction of unusual factors, on the one hand, she is an artist who emerged from within the questions of the experimental avant-garde but at the same time she evokes cultural tradition through procedures that are semiotically the same as craftsmanship, doing so with any informed intention, this is the result of the interest that she experienced from my workshops towards cultural theorization and cultural anthropological understanding of the urban and social groups, in a certain way it is the result of her own way of having reacted to that attention towards culture, but on the other hand it is something that in his experience as an artist becomes of autobiographical interest since with an avant-garde experimental consciousness he has recognized himself from very early on as being related to other art manifestations such as trova, the development of which his life and career artistic have been closely linked.
  Like no other female or even male artist in Cuban art, Nara has immersed herself in trova from within. She is even known much more as a painter on the side of music than on the side of plastic arts, despite her knowing almost all of the artists. exponents of the avant-garde of the eighties.
  Nara is, however, it becomes naturally obvious just by seeing some of her paintings, a visual artist and a painter dedicated to her art in an authentic and careful way. Without a doubt, she has found her own, original and personal exploration that underlines and highlights her as an indisputable individuality that in no way can be ignored or forgotten within Cuban visual art.
  His original and beautiful visual work is found in collections that have recognized his exclusivity, his unique seal and his talent in the United States.
  However, although Nara paints as if she embroidered and this understanding can in no way be separated from the informed nature of her search, it is no less true that at the same time the sentimental component of her art is relevant, her works, although they focus on figures which, as I said, due to the art of its making, seem to emerge as in the embroidery of the general fabric of a painting treated as a tapestry that evokes cultural tradition. On the other hand, these forms and figures, especially the female images that center its figurations, are not explained by a simply generic reason related to tradition, there is also a development in his art around the relationship between women and nature, the stars, the continuous reference to eyes, trees, etc., very European, countless There are plenty of examples of notable kinship that relate Nara's art to the type of visual, sentimental and even ethological imaginary of cinema, literature and the plastic arts in Eastern Europe, the same ways of relating women to nature, the same ethos. between the individual existential and the traditional cultural.
  The ice cream seller walks away and gets lost in the horizon, perhaps in his common sense Nara's paintings are dreams or Sunday fantasies as I said at the beginning, but in the exegesis of this my first approach to his art the horizon is an informed crochet: It is the seed as a point in the cultural fabric

Meaning and diversity

by Abdel Hernandez San Juan

A certain idea of ​​therapy has always been associated with expressionism and especially abstract expressionism, although it is something paradoxically often ignored by specialized discourses on art.

On the one hand, the idea of ​​defamiliarization wrapped in abstract-expressionist procedures-- itself contains therapeutic components.

  Usually our representations as dependent on patterns and schemes of mimesis, repetition and imitation given in the relationship between our formal, syntax and lexical apparatus - substances of expression - and the objects or forms in the world that our languages ​​refer and denote, They are impregnated with clichés, stereotypes and common places in which perceptual, nociological and rhetorical routines nest and sleep, which impoverish and limit their ability to see and perceive beyond. of what these overcoded patterns standardize, understood in this way, defamiliarizing us from a habitual mode of representation, liberating -- as is usual with abstract expressionism -- the relationship between the matter of language understood as a substance of expression and reference helps to deroutinize the modes in that certain representations have become ossified in their patterns, intensifying our ability to perceive ourselves and perceive in other ways.

  For example, isolating onomatopellic sounds understood as mere phonic substances that usually accompany our vowels and consonants, disconnecting pure phonesis -- that labial and respiratory way of creating sound, that way of dragging the tongue and distributing the exhalation of the air wrapped in the Pronunciative expiration, but onomatopelically separating it as a mere sonority from the vowels and consonants with which they are associated, intensifies our capacity to perceive ourselves, resulting in therapeutic results since, upon returning to perceive what was experimentally separated, our capacity to produce new meanings intensifies, where we did not before. We saw them.

  On the other hand, a certain idea of ​​therapy is associated with abstract expressionism not through its disruptive estrangement from representation but now because seen from the desire to say implicit to the relationship between being and its saying, accentuating our attention to the expression is to release the subjection to a pragmatic and informational imperative that by constraining language to an external utilitarian or functional imperative inhibits in it our pure expressive relationship to language, the sphere of noesis and eidesis to which Derrida refers or expressive to which Habermas refers to.

Notions such as catharsis and therapy come along with abstract expression both in art and in music-- genres such as jazz and rock or improvisation in general, or the literature of psychic automatism that the surrealists practiced, writing without points and commas or alter the ruled blocks of paragraphs, freeing the scriptural path as occurs with the calligraphic expressionism of tombly, free calligraphies that enter and exit from any side of the format without being subject to margins.

  This crucial dimension of abstract expressionism seems to have been forgotten by many. Lacho's visual work wants to recall in us this primal sense of the relationship between expression and therapy. Let us also not forget that many times what we seek when revoking it is nothing other than the infantile way that the relationship has even in early life, invoking as adults that child who may still be alive in us, the capacity for wonder, the exacerbated curiosity implicit in a doodle

  But catharsis alone, separating the rhetorical modes from the ideologies to which they are usually subject, is not always a guarantee of a complete therapy, but usually a partial one, without a subsequent integration that reunites what was separated by the expressive inhibition in a new synthesis, usually not It is guaranteed that in the return to the repetitiveness of the rituals and their routines these forms will not return to the same place they had before being defamiliarized, thus not infrequently the neo-expressionist therapeutic effect does not go beyond supplying an accessory function, necessary in a moment of therapy but limited and without handles.

   For example, the habitual body movements through which the muscles and joints are loaded with stories and inscriptions can be disinhibited by the temporary defamiliarizing effects of a massage so called in a sense even of superficial therapeutic massage, achieved relaxation the body experiences. a temporary disinhibition that comforts but after three days or a week it returns to being the same body with the same movements and becomes stagnant again after the same stories and inscriptions that inhibit the muscles, therapeutic massage is thus only a momentary incentive, as they would say Some regarding the symbolic only provide a temporary imaginary solution for real unresolved contradictions, for the therapy to be complete there must be a new synthesis and the latter is not achievable without an emotional and affective reintegration of the person through reasoning and this reasoning to be able to operate the new synthesis can no longer be abstract expressionist.

  You can undoubtedly spend your entire life giving yourself weekly massages and this will undoubtedly establish a continuous therapy in your life, but a surface therapy through which your problems, all those that led you to resort to it, will remain the same, unsolved. but evaded.

  With this argument, the ideologies of realism question the ultimate meaning of abstract expression, however, it is about showing these ideologies of realism that the new synthesis is not achieved through representation but through non-representational abstract reasoning.

 Now, this non-representational abstract reasoning in order to operate the new synthesis, neither abstract expressionism nor representational realism, can either be a reasoning separated from the analysis and compression of affect and emotion, since without the latter the reintegration of the subject into a new reality is not possible. synthesis, since in this way abstract reason is itself an evasive neurosis.

  Complete therapy is therefore only achieved through abstract reasoning that must move between the theoretical and the empirical, through non-representational abstract theoretical reasoning the subject is able to understand the logical problems in which the dilemma has been located but these alone are not enough, the subject must also understand empirically how, according to his own experience, affect and emotion have been symbolically woven within these logical forms.

 Once understood in its abstracted logical form--theoretical--and in its lived empirical form--experience--the therapy is not yet concluded but the subject is ready to undertake the path of a complete therapy, without this double understanding. therapy is impossible.

 The subject must be able to clearly see the logical problem abstracted to the point of being universal as a problem of his or any other subject and must then be able to understand how it is symbolically woven into his own experience.

  But understanding alone is not the whole therapy, because emotion and affect are symbolically stratified like ferns to wood, and the subject does not have access to those stratifications with mere understanding; he can see it one day through analysis and see himself -- it helps him -- but it does not unravel the stratified skein through which the symbolisms of affection and emotion have been woven; to unravel that skein, the subject has to see it in abstract reason and understand it throughout his life. emotional.

  In this way, abstract reason guides the direction of therapy but the empirical reason of therapy is obliged to be experimental and this experimentalism once again restores the place of expression, only through expressions does the subject come into contact with emotions and affects. In this way, abstract expressionism is nothing more than a moment of empirical therapy, an undoubtedly important moment because without it there is no access to affect, feelings and emotions, however, as we saw, a moment that is both limited and insufficient.

   Usually the new synthesis is not achieved without the subject managing not only to internalize the abstracted logical forms but also to find the way in which affect and emotion have to be reorganized and for the latter, at the empirical level, expression is only a vehicle. Usually no therapy is successful if it is not resolved in the emotional life of the person, it is the latter, in love, that has the last word.

  Friend Lacho persuades us to restore the therapeutic dimension of abstract expression, undoubtedly usually forgotten and empirically significant in the experimental, but he does not explain to us the meaning he attributes to the transference.

   The concept of transference usually linked to the first psychoanalysis and yet to that which has least survived criticism, although it is true that transferences participate in the ways in which subjects attribute meanings to things according to the least manifest symbolism and therefore The same latent meaning that other symbols more associated with their attachments or dependencies mean has also been shown to be, as Eco said, with respect to certain notions, a word bag in which it means anything you put in the bag, anything could be seen as a transfer there where even It will be about something else, leading to very easy, or to what led Sontag to deny the interpretation, if the interpretation transfers it is better not to interpret.

  So, for example, I have an authorial abstract theoretical essay about being and I have 10 artists with each of whom I speak individually without them communicating with each other. Each artist, when reading the essay, thinks that it is what a text could be about. that he feels but it turns out that the days believe the same, each one believes that it is about him or her and it turns out that ten doctors, ten engineers and ten philosophers also each believe that it is about him or her, but it is not about any of them.

 Is this transference? The question would be here? Given that we are each one one but at the same time we are multiple many ones, we could say that each one is both a singular one and a universal one, but the universal one is no longer is about that singular one but about what refers to the logical one of any one, thus the universal abstract logic refers to the one of any one therefore to the plural but that plural is abstract logical it is no longer even the one that each one feels that one is not even the many ones that together form so that the essay is not a collectivity of ones because it is neither about any one nor about each one nor about all.

  The above refers to the relationship between transference and interpretation, the one who interprets what another has said, a novel or a work of art, for example, the same work of art projects its own collections of cultural references on the text that it sees or reads, considering that its interpretation is the meaning of the work, while faced with the fact that fifteen other subjects have a different interpretation, we ask ourselves what then is the meaning of the text viewed or read and we even wonder if the meaning can be attributed to the text. or ever be something other than always transference, if the meaning is always transferential then we approve that nothing like the meaning itself can be affirmed and therefore we are denying the very existence of meanings, these would be nothing other than always transfers and For the same reason, they would not exist, but if there were only signifiers - which in itself is implicit in the abstractionist, material and abstract expressionist statement, no subject could become explicit in the communication, which is impossible because without explanation the subjects could not become understand and therefore the cognitive coordination of language with experience in a pragmatic sense would not be possible, if the subjects did not make themselves explicit, social life would be a succession of continuous accidents, elucidation would not be possible either, explanation and elucidation are pragmatic cognitive contingencies of the language and symbols without which it would not be possible to orient yourself both in the monologic soliloquy and in dialogic intersubjectivity, therefore neither everything is significant nor everything is transference.

  In both pragmatism and cognitivism we demonstrate that explanation and elucidation are contingent, just as it is in semiotic theory that there are codes, interpretations can be very varied and diverse, sometimes entropic but not crazy, how then to reconcile these two truths? , if the interpretations are multiple and the meaning is unfixable in the text, transference being given as adjudication or attribution of the interpretation by the meaning giving the first by the second ---transference--when 15 different interpretations of the same thing deny it, but at the same time without explanation and elucidation it is not possible to coordinate language and world, language and reality, language and act, it becomes explicit that beyond meaning and transfer, as well as beyond signifier and form, things have to make sense to us. .

  Contingent are thus the senses, not the meanings, in fact we not only have codes and pragmatic adaptations of contingent interpretive arrangements for the meaning in its two dimensions, material of our physical senses -- orienting ourselves in the world -- and immaterial of the significant senses -- the meaning that things, languages ​​and experiences make to us--, but even without meaning we could not integrate our perceptions with the objects of our perceptions, our very sense of what is real and of reality would not crystallize, we know that our perception is not the perceived image that both things are separated but only the meaning that objects and images make to us ensures that we integrate perception and what is perceived as a synthetic unit that phenomenologically crystallizes the real. Only then do we understand to what extent the very idea of ​​reality and of the world depend on meaning.

  So, for example, one wonders if Lacho invites us to the meaning that transfer has in engraving and photography where what is transferred is the image through mimesis as in monotype, a sense that is somewhat paradoxical with respect to the identical, since if images are a undifferentiated sameness in its own identity, an ontos that coincides with itself, then it should not be able to repeat itself, thus what is repeated at the same time affirms the identical in the repetition -- its series, its seal, its copy, its trace, but for that very reason also denies that its identity is one for itself because if it were it could not be repeated as Hegel said, identity is identity eliminating itself as identity in difference and difference eliminating itself as difference in identity, the first is broken into difference, the last is broken into identity and therefore eliminate each other, breaking both into diversity.

  Another idea of ​​transference could be linked to a certain instinctivism that is perceived in Lacho's type of abstract expressionism, an abstract but impulsive expressionism that has no equivalences even in an abstract contemplative expression of a philosophical or ludicrous type related to the self and spirituality as in Kandinsky or Klee, not in a heuristic exploration around lyrical states of the soul as in the informalism of Tombly, not in a culturalist philosophical investigation around the gestural in language as in the interest in ideograms in the non-alphabetic calligraphy of the Asia or the Middle East or the interest in the aural nature of the gesture in Klein or the material experimentalism of dripping, but rather an instinctive temperamental expressionism that is reminiscent of German expressionism despite not being figurative like that due to its reference to the soul in its relationship with adrenaline closer to the idea of ​​catharsis, if so this would then refer to the notion of transference in psychoanalysis, but the latter required the relationship between psychoanalyst and psychoanalyzed, a relationship that disappears in art or becomes omitted and Thus, it does not explain, for example, how it happens in certain cinema, it is assumed that the work psychoanalyzes the viewer, but the opposite also happens that the artist, presenting himself as a victim of society, places himself in the position of the patient in a way of inverting the psychoanalysis, producing in the society a sense of guilt for their heartbreaks where the patient psychoanalyzes the psychoanalyst omitted in the guilty authoritarianism of society as occurs with Fridda therapy or with the different modalities of art as today's torture through which homosexuals and bisexuals express their I am heterophobic because of our heterosexuality and with it my affection towards our most beautiful ethical and moral values ​​such as the harmony and sublime of cultural reproduction and social transmission wrapped in our beloved principle of male and female, masculinity and femininity, male and female. , sublime spiritual principles of our stability that the new art as heterophobic torture transforms into inverted punishment with the intention of inhibiting, inhibiting, repressing and castrating our expressions, our happiness and our heterosexual enjoyment of life and in it of sex.

   Game over. Here again, transference is a dirty word. If after reading and studying Lacan we reach a conclusion that saves him, then not only does Lacan surpass Freud but he is then surpassed by the same dissemination of psychoanalysis that his work presupposes, a dissemination that is both the beginning and the end of his death and his inheritance already dispersed, is that the unconscious is not deep and inaccessible in whose search we must invest long, winding and difficult journeys but rather it is superficial and it is visible that it has been distributed and dispersed on the surface of the language woven as the fern to the rock in the skin of the signs.

   The therapy would then consist in differentiating a language in whose visible skin of the sign the subject has not recognized the unconscious language that has not existed or lack of language where it has not existed and a language that has existed, which would presuppose the end of the unconscious and with it the therapy success.

  But having a language or having the language is something that we can never stop doing because successively we will always need to have a language or the language again and only then is therapy sustainable as something permanent.

  Lacho's paintings, however, include a dimension, at least in the pieces that I have seen, that is unavoidable and that I consider in that harbour, language is so far its most interesting result, the relationship with light, in some of them the clear ones that can also Being opaque they emanate light.

  Could this light be the indication for a criticism aimed at language? Hegel says that light is presence and that reason gropes like light in darkness, perhaps his debt to Enlightenment, but the light in Lacho does not seem like a light called to language although we see it only as language, but rather a light left as one who leaves a previous plane visible in a subsequent one.

  Why does Lacho leave the light? He doesn't leave it aside because it passes and remains like a memory on the next level sometimes, just sometimes, it is all there is between the forms.

  Wouldn't it be a matter of calling it to language? So that those spaces from which it now speaks like the voice of the mute from the margins have its language? What would the language of a mute who recovers his voice be like? Perhaps at first only onomatopoeia What would happen if that relationship with light moved to the center? And it became what spins, what links, what gives the shape and the pauses, what weaves and relates, what speaks in the pieces?

  I mean M46H7lf.

  In HR21Y8AD, different previous planes of matter become translucent as memories in the successive ones. The idea is to evoke an idea of ​​memory? Of what memory? Obviously, memory is not an active remembering that calls through associations to a previous experience but Nor does an accumulated passive memory such as the inventory, the archive or the collection seem more like a memory of objective things, not of the imagination, such as that which remains when we see traces of the previous paint on a wall after the deterioration of its subsequent paint. Would you be trying here to discuss what memory you are referring to in order to have your language in it?

  In these two pieces, a certain aesthetic of the forms treated as cachibaches or tarecos is not perceived even as in the rest, where the painted looks like the tarequera that results from everything erased as if the pieces were the erasure of previous pieces where at times they are perceived translucent certain figurations later erased, in the former they can even be water or organic and inorganic universes of nature or of a certain living universe, in the latter what we see seem like junk like when tasks are piled up but here from different planes erased and remade, this deauratizes and mundanizes the signs, the planes or areas of supposed spontaneity are corrected again and again, even patched as shapes by areas of color that constrain and localize a previous spontaneity.

  Is it about following this mending like what their language would say? Like a pair of pants with all the patches visible? If so, would it be a matter of accentuating it? Painting as mending, the work as something mended, Like something full of patches? This does not seem to be called to the foreground, it is not entirely explicit, nor obvious, I had to call it to language and yet once called we see that it is there although overlapping.

   What path to follow here is what to call to the foreground, what to make a language or the language, and as such also answer what therapy it is or is going to be about since Lacho has persuaded us to talk about therapy. I have referred here to the large-format paintings, there are others, however, that can remind us of something in dubuffet as well as seem like desacralizations of the work treated as a mere palette.

The Voice of Ceramics: The meaning that becomes

Fear of Abdel Hernandez San Juan

  The 2020 edition of the Amelia Pelaez Ceramic Biennial was recently presented at the Casa de Mexico Museum on Bella Calle de Mercaderes in Old Havana.

   For several years now, since at least its edition in the San Srancisco de Asis convent, this biennial has been establishing in the plastic arena a suigeneris visual discourse that deserves not only praise but also reflections and analysis. In my opinion, this discourse has already become notable. originality with the recent edition

   It remains to be seen what the implications of this originality are for contemporary Cuban art, but with respect to the general situation of earth, clay and ceramics at a continental and transcontinental level in art, this originality becomes undoubted.

   It is no less true that Amelia in and of herself is an original artist, as is Alfredo Sosa Bravo, but the hermeneutical and critical coordinates that motivate me to think in this way are situated with respect to current parameters of global contemporary art. The last decades. Since at least 1992 I have been following the topic with special interest and attention through the Barro de America biennial of a Pan-American nature, held in Caracas biannually, coordinated by the sectorial directorate of CONAC museums by Vicky (Rosalia Victoria Galarraga) and Roberto Guevara Venezuelan curators as well as paying attention to it through the incursion of individual artists both in South America and in the United States.

     The Cuban biennial confirms to me that something is happening in ceramics, but that's it. If we ask ourselves the questions from the perspective of ceramics itself, we border on axiological ones that move between function or utility versus artisticity and the aesthetic that also crosses the documentary-artistic relationships in photography, functional-aesthetic in photography. architecture and utilitarian-expressive in crafts.

   Like the latter, ceramics, due to its relationship to the idea of ​​a domestic or environmental utensil or furniture and the decorative, tend to be considered by some a minor art, --or ultimately sneakily underestimated--as well as due to its relationship to functionality and utility like architecture, an applied art, that is, an application of art - considered beautiful or high - to something that is beyond art or outside its domain.

   None of these pairs, however, has been expressed more as something specific to the situation of ceramics, than that which we paradoxically have in film and cinema between narrativity and fragmentation, between dramatic or argumentative plot and experimentation.

   For some reason not so easy to elucidate, but no less interesting, ceramics has acted like no other form of the visual arts, the diatribes of this paradoxically cinematic pair - narrative versus anti-narrative - between something that we can consider anecdotal, didactic or provided with a content narrative in which generally some kind of epitaph, chronicle or story is anecdotized at the iconic level of images, and something that moves away from it.

   I think as a paradigm of this anecdotism, in medieval religious painting when visual images, for example Giotto, were almost visual illustrations of literary and narrative passages of the gospel. Whoever does not master the biblical narratives cannot decode the visual scene, but at the iconographic level everything visible is minutely referable almost as an iconic narrative—in the same way that happens, for example, to the visual icon when it is accompanied by balloons with texts in the comix or the comic strip—of a text whose content level is outside the visual in some kind of narrative external to the iconic or where the visual illustrates the narrative in its own media.

   The question about why ceramics has this propensity for diatribes between the narrative and the non-narrative as much or more than for diatribes between the aesthetic and the functional, the artistic and the utilitarian, possibly has an archaeological relationship at a contemporary level with its cultural past.

   In fact, ceramics was not only a utilitarian art, a notion around which the constellation of its values ​​continues and will continue to revolve for a long time, but it was also before the process of secularization that separated art from religion, a profoundly immersed in the symbolism of culture, a concept of culture related to the traditions, ideosyncracies and customs of the people like few other manifestations of art. In few cultures has pottery not been central both to food and to daily rituals and religious symbolism.

   Through it, not only is food tanned, cooked, stored and transported, rituals are also articulated and the ritual tradition of ceramics in this sense is the deposit of countless inscriptions of cultural memory given in its decoration, in art. of its production, its size, the type of its clay, etc.

   It is enough to take a visual review on the one hand of the importance that ceramic remains have in the archeology imaginary of the cultural past in ruins - memory through inscriptions - and on the other, of their place in visual culture and explicit material of museographed civilizations.

   It is perhaps this atavistic and primal past of inseparable relationship between ceramics and culture that makes the former always seek its voice among itself as art—that is, now a contemporary art focused on language, expression and communication as something in itself, and a part of it that has in the narrative the way of separating itself between its being in itself as art and that relationship that never completely separates it from culture.

   But ceramics also have a strong base in nature that is brought to the culture referred to it, hence its other contemporary diatribe no less decisive than the previous two, that of the relationship between earth or clay as its base material. as it is in its pure natural state, earth, fire, baked, cooked, turned, etc., and the expressive component, of language and communication that more or less takes it out of that natural condition towards another that we could call semiotics, semantics or contentist in some of its senses.

    In fact, if we could talk about poles in ceramics, in an axiological sense, between which they oscillate more inclined to one or the other in percentages or nuanced averages, we would say that they are deducible from these three axes.

    According to this critical hypothesis, almost all contemporary ceramics, now against the background of its contemporary events, moves between, on the one hand, the archeology pole of its subject, the third point that we have seen of the nature-culture relationship, oscillating the nuances of the searches between the earth as a pure material used in ways that range from installation to body art, here we have a type of telluric ceramic installationism usually confined to the internal exhibition space with hanging elements and the use of the ground , referring to philosophical and cosmological themes, and earth art itself, here we have some fascinating intersections between ceramics and earth art, between ceramics and installation, different modes of inventory, work with remains and ruins, work with inscriptions about the matter and the latter.

    On the other hand, the pole of its utilitarian extreme is the pottery vessel and the exploration of possibilities that take ceramics from itself and what is proper to it beyond utility towards the aesthetic, the artistic and the expressive, oscillating between modalities of search around that utility, a propensial inclination towards sculpture, making the latter in ceramic media, and minimalism.

    Finally, the pole that supposes the narrative versus non-narrative relationship that has figuration at its center at a semiotic level, that is, the iconographic expression of the relationship between figurative representation of reality understood as a visual sign, symbol or trope, human figures, models , still lifes, landscapes, various themes, and the abstract, that is, the relationship between the figurative versus the abstract that in ceramics oscillates between anecdotal narrative content of an iconographic-dramaturgic type—references generally to narratives that either there is in culture outside of the visual and that the iconic domain refers, suggests or illustrates and the narrative itself to the expressiveness of the figurative, and telluric abstractionism on the other side to which all the most abstract discourse tends in itself, not figurative or less figurative of terracotta.

   Now, these three axes that cross the axiology of ceramics, utility versus artisticity, narrativity versus experimental fragmentation as in cinema, and nature versus culture through its material base in the earth and other primal natural procedures, do not cease to be exposed, as I said before, to the diatribe itself from where we ask the question or to put it in terms more appropriate to the visual discourse from where the gaze looks. But I'll leave the implications of this where from for later.

   When placing these axes and poles, I do so not only because when I say that the recent biennial at the Casa de México under the curatorship of Surisday Reyes Martines, director of the ceramics museum, is original, I say it because of how it achieves a suigeris interstice in the way of diluting or deliberate the balance or equilibrium between these oscillations but also because it is the route between whose paths the variety of diverse matrices that are perceived in their contemporary continental and transcontinental situation are crossed, intersected, bifurcated, adjoined, deviated and reunited. .

      There is no lack in this biennial, on the one hand, two pieces that place the tangent of ceramics related to the earth as a material within an installationism, as I said, philosophical and cosmological, such as Myths and spheres by Guillermina Columbine or Conciencia de mi metamorfosis from the series genesis of Yordanka Aguilar, they have the usually telluric content that the allusions to contents of earth art acquire when seen from ceramics, but they are deployed as installations in space both through the use of hanging elements which are technically ceramics in one pure spheres but with inscriptions on their surfaces in the other remains or fragments of enameled ceramic pieces giving both an archaeological sense that suggests in the second the idea of ​​ruins due to the allusion to pieces of which we have only fragments that must have lived at some time. erosion, suggesting an incomplete memory or a metamorphosis that could be that of the ceramic itself, and in the first the deciphering of those inscriptions woven into the geometric figure sphere that the artist sees related to the myth, something that could be understood from the philosophy of geometry

   This type of installationism moves within the nature-culture pole that refers to a primal and pure sense of the earth as a material due to its symbolic content and telluric resonances and has been very common in the continental scene, such as in the work of Celeida Toste. Passage from 1979 presented at the Barro de America biennial in 1992 is even directly a reference to the pottery vessel in its most primitive philosophical and telluric content in the culture.

   It is a piece that initially consisted simply of an apparently ordinary utilitarian piece of clay ceramic in large dimensions but from which at a given moment the artist emerges naked smeared in clay on a mat as a discourse on the primordial birth or genesis , a reflection that, in line with that of Conciencia de mi metamorphosis, from the Genesis series, returns through the drama of performance an important symbolic place to the mere pottery utensil.

  Or his work amassandinhos consisting directly of ceramic remains beech and inventoried as pieces of archeology, 1991, or in his spiral piece with ceramics and earth where the pieces are distributed as in Smithson's spiral but on the floor covered with land within the exhibition space in 1992

    There is no doubt that Celedia Toste explores the intersection of this archaeological side to which I was referring, reconciling the ceramic pottery utensil, with the archaeological inventory, ceramics as a privileged indication in the excavation, collection, inventory, memory, where we underline in the ceramic sign that that connects it through indications and inscriptions to the culture, and the philosophical dimension of the pure land as it occurs in earth art but around ceramic pieces

   It is also something present in the more spatial ceramic installations of artists like Aida Iris and is somewhat reminiscent of the Cuban art of Juan Francisco Elso's Earth, Corn and Life where what was truly ceramic was the serial casting in the form of mosaics of the image. of the ears of corn actually used as terracotta ceramic molds and unfolded as a new ceramic surface on the surface between the floor and the corners of the walls suggesting with the ceramic mosaics a pyramidal shape formed by three triangles found on the point of the corners and the repetition of that same triangular pyramidal structure with tree branches that hold with ties a giant ear of corn made of jute fabric.

   The use of geometric elements to discuss philosophical, cosmological or worldview issues, the use of spatial elements that are supported or hanging, the use of the floor in the two installations with earth in this exhibition in the house of Mexico, are more abstract in their allusions. of meaning unlike the more culturalist content of Elso's use of ceramics, such as in his ceramic installation Mayan Calendar.

    There is in this exhibition in the house of Mexico, however, a kind of tautology or look from art towards art, that is, a rendering of the technical diatribes of ceramics in their own dilemmas between sculpture, installation, shelf , etc., the theme or allusion of many of the works is more than a use of the ceramic medium to rehearse on other topics, such as, for example, to mention two the work of Umberto Diaz, which consists of covering the entire surface or court with small glazed colored tiles. of two tree trunks, one crossed like organic inlays forgotten in time by a chair with decorative arabesque motifs and the other supported on a wicker woven magazine rack.

   It is something that is also notable in Lateral Thought by Lasaro Navarrete, which is a bisque red clay that has been set on fire during the exhibition but is even visible in the pieces that received mentions from the jury, especially in Movimiento en Colores, organica , i, ii, iii iv by Yenni Hernandez Carllo for the way in which he makes explicit the exploration between ceramics and sculpture as its own content, or the content of the forms.

    However, Umberto's piece whose work itself, from his first large installations around brick for gardens in external spaces, his large minimalist plates or surfaces, his cylinder illuminated internally with weightless brick, his installations with tiles clay, such as his sunami, are already reflections on the intersections between terracotta, earth art and ceramics, between installation, ceramics and sculpture, have other implications in the anthropological discussion on bricollage, a matter that brings up the functional but from another perspective that diverts or evades dichotomies, one according to which that which is non-artistic cultural inventiveness, that is, coming from either popular or mass culture, and which is embedded within precise spatial, environmental and cultural functions such as They can be the habit or the aesthetics, now understood as a visual text, they have conceptual dimensions about culture.

    It is not a question here in the sense in which Elso did of visually rehearsing a theme taken in advance as a pre-text but rather a procedure that is between imitating things that are achieved in non-artistic culture and creating pastiches with them where The artist works with visual material and material culture that he either chooses as it occurs in the culture and or creates in his own style and inventiveness but inspired by those forms observed in popular or mass culture.

    The artist's piece here accentuates, opens questions, suggests interrelations that are an imitation but at the same time a comment on something of interest - due to its values ​​or its aesthetics - out there as a mere expression of visual and material culture, or here in the inventiveness and creativity of the work that based on that in culture suggests new semantic possibilities for meaning and possible meanings

    Frequently the artist can create new forms that do not exist in the pre-existing material and visual culture such as popular or mass culture, but based on the observation of those, they find new possibilities for the articulation of bricollage discourses and although it is true that This piece does so around the relationship between ceramics and earth art by referring to the tree trunk, while in the form of a tile mural on the surface of the bark of the trunk we cannot avoid the fact that the tile chosen being industrial, it is, however, very exclusive, something that I have only seen before on the tables of a paladar, as well as the fact that it is not only about covering the trunks with small tiles but at the same time exploring inlays that can be at the same time organic, natural, but also social, as occurs in the Venezuelan Leonor Antoni.

    However, this type of exploration between earth art and bricollage is not absent in the continental scene of ceramic, clay and earth art. Lihia Reinach, an artist like Celeida, also a Brazilian, presented at the American Clay Biennial in 1995, has fascinating works of this type, such as her large ceramic bead necklaces hung between trees around large areas of land where what What is at the foreground is the observation of a form of bricollage, in this case artisanal in culture and related to the body like the necklace, also decorative by the way, but intertwined in aesthetics, beauty and ritual, an artist who

By the way, he has ventured into a peculiar type of ceramic mural on the walls like murmurios nineteen ninety-two, something that from a contemporary and current expression is reminiscent of Alfredo Sosa Bravo and who, as for example in the terracotta installations for gardens by Umberto Días, has works conceived environmentally for spaces such as fountains

   The piece by Umberto Díaz, awarded by Alfredo Sosa Bravo, however, differs significantly from his piece exhibited at the biennial in the convent of San Frasco de Asis in 2004, a piece to which I make references due to my consideration of its relevance.

   From the Art for the Masses series it was also no longer allusive through its own creative inventiveness as an author to procedures typical of bricolages in the inventiveness of popular culture but directly exhibited oriental ceramics on a small table, according to Axel Ali, typical of shopping in the style more typical of the slab and decorative tableware, in this case porcelain.

   The peculiar thing about that work is that it established a new evaluative parameter in the discussion about kitsch and kitsch.

   On the one hand, it showed in a context of artistic ceramics, ordinary ultra-decorative figurines produced in a standardized way for the massive beautification of interior design which, however, due to the sophistication of good designers to which the modern design market is trending today, although they communicate Due to their high standardization and the way they were placed as mere decorations on glass tables, some of the same logic of reifications of consumption by popular culture that defined kitsh, on the other hand, exacerbated the fact that kitsh culture itself can reach to be elegant, sophisticated and beautiful herself, thus relativizing the idea of ​​bad taste or kitsch from a more aristocratic or fine perspective in the sense of fine arts, the idea of ​​porcelain.

   However, as in kitsch, although from the informed sensibility of well-refined designers, these are signs emptied of any authentic reference to the idea of ​​an original or a direct copy.

    In these interior designs, everything is done in the style of oriental tableware in fine porcelain, although it would be good to find out if the designers are Japanese, Thai or Chinese, among those who today work as designers in standardized corporations.

    These are actually pieces made in a homogeneous way in the oriental way but for mass consumption, not exactly authentic traditional ceramics but whose design contemporaneity suggests new intersections between frivolity, glamor and mass tastes where the massive sense of a The oriental, Japanese, Thai or Chinese way is paired with the postmodernist interest in archaic cultures such as those traditional in the East. The pieces also placed this other, more industrial side in which, paradoxically, ceramics now rule in the most standard, homogeneous way. The use of small tiles in his piece in the house of Mexico 2020 once again refers to the industrial with results that arouse the viewer's curiosity because, as I said, these are tiles of unusual production or greater exclusivity.

   Now, if we analyze these two works in the context of ceramics and not within the general scope of visual art and culture, they acquire important axiological conotations in the discussion of ceramics itself, the one from 2004 invites the possibility of looking again, again, to look again or to look from a new perspective at the utilitarian, apparently disdained or underestimated in ceramics and the most recent highlights the fact that in certain conditions ceramics itself is itself in culture a form of bricollage -which is indisputable--and that this opens an axiological field of possibilities for the anthropological scope of the same

   However, returning to the two installations that use land, what is striking is the fact that they are paradoxically one of the least focused on ceramics as an intra-artistic theme in the entire recent biennial at the Casa de México.

   Due to the rather abstract and philosophical nature of both and the direct use of the earth, I do not remember installations with those characteristics in the edition of the convent of San Francisco de Asis where rather clay or baked earth on the floor was used and where this It was combined with a type of dramaturgical narrativism to which I referred before, for example in the piece of baked clay on the ground from which a fist, a head and an open hand emerged.

     But it is precisely in its most figurative and narrative dimension where in my opinion this biennial advances the most with respect to its previous editions, the possibility of the figurative sign and the narrative being freed from certain common places, stereotypes and chiches that in my opinion have predominated in it until not long ago and it is in this sense that the award-winning piece by Alejadro Cordovez Rodriguez from left to right is accurate. Without a doubt, it is a work that takes a step with few precedents regarding the figurative in the tradition of ceramics. Even in the 2004 edition, which in my opinion gave progress and began a new dimension for ceramics in contemporary art in Cuba, the most figurative works brought with them the burden of a type of anecdotism in which the figurative is still submerged. in a mimetic dramatization with no way out towards a more semiotized understanding of the sign and the icon.

  Perhaps this is the greatest virtue of Alejandro's piece. It recalls some tricks and resources typical of visual commentary that works with sociocultural assumptions, something very common in Cuban figurative art both in the nineties and even in some in the eighties. However, there is something in his search for mechanical fables that initiated this figurative step forward that suggested a different direction than the one it takes in this piece.

   In this one, something of the image is abandoned that has not yet been objectified as a sign and that lies subdued or hidden by a dramaturgical narrativity that submerges it in an extravisual anecdote, but in that one, with the exception of some still literal thematic icons, in some pieces As for example in the small plane, there were possibilities for what I have previously called the voice of ceramics, I am referring to the fact that ceramics make explicit the scope of their contemporaneity from what is its own and less supplanted by codes that matter or assimilates from other domains. I also refer here to what Suri says in his catalog text.

  Returning to where we ask ourselves the question

   This essay proposes an axiological reading that as a theme covers three independent areas or domains each, but at the same time they tend to progressively get closer, exchange their domains and merge in peculiar ways, on the one hand, if we ask from what we can understand as art land whose matrices are conceptualism, matter in art and an understanding of the spaces and sites that has at its center, on the one hand, the relationship between the map and the territory, between representation and the world or reality, and On the other hand, the relationship between reality, nature and landscape, with an implicit ecological meaning, earth art exchanges domains between conceptualism, installationism and sculpture but has at its center, as in other ways clay and ceramics, the earth as a material that which recalls in an archaeological and genealogical sense, the tradition of matter in art that dates back to material art and results in ways of exploring ceramics that can be differentiated from the inverse, that is, the way in which ceramic artists, or becoming the question from this, they explore in reverse, wondering or looking at the same issue from ceramics.

   On the other hand, the domain of clay, which in itself is the earth susceptible to being molded, transformed into volumes and spaces susceptible to composition and expression, to which many ceramic artists tend paradoxically today - for example the aforementioned artists - and finally ceramics, which of the three domains is the one that, in addition to everything previously discussed, also most significantly immerses itself in the relationship with the social world, the city, architecture and different forms of utility, although it experiences a gradual process of expansion. and transformation of its limits in terms of what is called artistic ceramics.

    But the motivation to write the essay comes this time from my analyzes of the latter, ceramics, so as a whole I am dealing with a discussion that keeps at its center questions that are of interest to ceramics in its contemporary situation.

    On the one hand, the Barro de America Biennial in Caracas has been, in my experience, the most explicit setting for these interrelationships, specifically in its editions from the nineties, 1992 and 1995, where the two types of artists who tend to venture have met. ceramics, on the one hand those who, being ceramists, extend from the edges of ceramics beyond its possibilities and on the other those who are not ceramists for different reasons, either personal motivation or their own incursion into the calls. decide to venture into it, such as the Colombian Maria Fernanda Caldozo, her vertical garden of ceramic flowers or Maria Tereza emphasise, in short, depending on whether you look at it or ask the question from one side or the other, the axiological field is different.

   Elso is an example of a non-ceramist who dabbled in ceramics for the purposes of his art.

   Umberto Días is an intermediate example between the two extremes and I would say that he is a unique case due to the way in which terracotta, brick and tile have predominated in his work.

   Personally, I am especially interested in what I call the voice of ceramics, that is, those searches that require us to do an archeology of what is unique to ceramics, offering something peculiar to it on the one hand over the rest of the genres and languages ​​of art and on the other in its relationship with culture.

   This refers me to an interesting discussion that we had with Anton Arrufat and the Lezamian poets in the Reina Maria space regarding a colloquium about Octavio Paz, the Lezamian poets claimed and objected that in peace the word is empty, it lacks an original connection with culture, I told them that unlike Lezama in peace, the word is recalled from cinema, that is, it presupposes that cinema and television happened to both culture and language and that that undifferentiated relationship between word and culture is no longer possible in our contemporaneity.

   But contemporaneity also disposes us to archaeologize our sources, to return to them repositioned, we may not be an undifferentiated expression of culture, but our languages ​​nevertheless bring with them inscriptions that must be studied. Ceramics is not just any type of language, but a very special unique type of language. And if we have today an atavistic language that once maintained a truly ritual relationship with culture even more than bodily expression, face painting, theater, dance or music, that is ceramics. Through it it is possible to read cultures, both visible cultures in their material and visual expression and those submerged in archaeological remains and indications, and through them or in the speaking of their voice they take shape in unique ways, both formally and aesthetically as well as in the to give meaning, to plot meanings and to explore the semantic field.

   Jacques Derrida invoked ceramics at the end of his life after long decades exalting hearing, the spoken word and music, he paid special attention to what he called the torna and what it becomes as a form of language, expression and as a way of giving the sense. The lathe, what is turned or turned, the lathe and the environment, the turning of something, the turning and turning of something.

   There is something unique between the giving of form and spaces in ceramics, which belongs neither to sculpture nor to installation and which in some way refers to the idea that all these other forms of art have rather taken advantage of ceramics and have made things their own whose origin is in it, the installation in fact when we do its genealogy is either an orphan or a daughter of ceramics, and finding that voice that is at the same time contemporary is the greatest challenge for ceramists.

  At the same time, however, many times a language delves into itself by wandering around its neighboring languages, knowing what it is not delves into what it is, it is thought by difference, in this sense the searches in mixed techniques are sometimes prolific in the harbour. that voice of ceramics.

   In this exhibition, for example, I found interesting the pieces Mutaciones o escafandras en el tiempo by Alder Calzadilla as well as Travecia a blinda by Beatriz Salas Santa Cana.

  I also found it interesting that an artist asked himself the reason for this relationship to the theater that I have previously alluded to in Pedro Cantero Rodriguez's The Theater of Every Day and returning with him to the figurative aspects of both his pieces, those of Alejandro's prize and even Guillermo Ramirez Malberti's Angelic Retozo seems to me to give the biennial a balance in favor of a new turn in figuration that I find more productive than that of Brazilians such as Florian Raiss, Vicente de Melo and Romulo Fialdini

  Amelia and sosa bravo are two cases of that haggard voice.

   But if, as Suri said, the immense effort that had to be made to make this biennial in the precise year of covid is to be appreciated, and I believe that the results are original, I was fascinated with my peculiarity not only by the countless ceramic biennials that haye in Mexico, Brazil and Spain but because searching in ceramics is a journey in cultures so it transports me from Amerindian and indigenous ceramics in Mexico and South America, to restorations of Arab mosques in Spain, from ceramic events that prioritize new creativity and inventiveness around of utilitarian ceramics returning to it as an applied art bauhaus and Russian avant-garde after postmodernism, this in addition to the concert of ceramic events that accompany this biennial in Cuba

Inter-phases

©Por Abdel Hernandez San Juan

Art critic and ethnographer

The notion of interaction, which I knew and studied as a concept in classical sociology in Venezuela around 1993, not in Cuba, the so-called symbolic interactionism, heir to the work of Alfred Shutz and Mead in the sociology of Harold Garfinkel, has received in recent years and decades new meanings within anthropology and ethnography, especially of a postmodernist inclination, but it does not, however, have equally well-known developments in art.

On the other hand, despite being a concept in the social sciences, the word interaction also has a rainbow of meanings in the common sense of language use, both in English, interactions, and in Spanish, interactions, as in any language.

And it is this use of common sense as a word in the language that seems to be in the attention and imbue with motive and reason for its call by Aida Iris.

My ceramist friend has recently become interested in interaction and has come to base her new project that she calls “communicative senses” on that word. It distances and differentiates itself in many ways from her previous project called “Sania” about which she made an exhibition. individual of his ceramic and installation work in the La Lisa art gallery about which I wrote my essay Telurias.

Aida, who usually works as an individual artist, shows alone, as well as as a family with her husband Gilberto and Cintia, or who includes literary artists in different ways, differs from those in that she involves a much larger number of artists and people summoned. while this time it is about people, many of whom are not in the same physical space but who calls them by email and through the use of their digital mobile.

Using the sometimes fragmented way in which communications usually occur through mobile phones, something typical of technological communication speeds, Aida focuses the interaction as the word that, for its reason for being, best captures what is happening between her and the people with whom he communicates at the same time that he notices it as something in itself directing it towards creative ends, he strives, on the one hand, for those people to also perceive it, that is, to distance themselves from the way that communication acquires at the same time that they are motivated to participate in a project that she defines around the event and which she follows up person by person.

The exhibition that Aida Iris presents this time at Espacio Abierto is itself the first result of that project that comes to light in the form of an exhibition in which she exhibits with several people, each of whom she says she had had this experience. type of interaction.

Given that more recently I am still one of those people, in my experience it is made explicit that she is extending or expanding what she defines by interaction based on the type of communications she has through the mobile, to others in which the communication has not properly mediated. digital technology but rather the telephone and face-to-face relationships.

From a visual point of view—since it is ultimately about their resumed interactions somehow acquiring visual expression—the result is ecleptic. On the one hand, from the point of view of the images - that is, reading their indications in them - it becomes imperceptible to distinguish whether they are processes or something more than processes according to which what she presents As a visual result, they would rather be interfaces of processes, but one can also perceive in the images their clear a posteriori intervention of the material obtained from these processes for purposes or objectives more resulting from their intentionality and will, than from entirely random dynamics.

The concept of interaction, in fact, understood in the plain sense of a word, often acquires an ambiguous meaning; on the one hand, it seems to refer to the purely physical or biological aspect of bodies interacting as they do, for example, In animal communication, the dog in front of the master's gestures or in front of another dog, is understood, for example, as interactive.

It is true that in proxemics, studies of spatial and intergestural communication, we continually study usually highly spontaneous intercorporeal relationships in which people mostly interact in one way or another, in free markets, for example, the seller and the buyer interact, both at the time of barter, as before, during the process of seeing what to buy on the part of the buyer who is traveling or the one who is only transiting, as well as on the part of the seller who wants to attract the latter in competition with other sellers to be chosen, But in these spontaneous or unpredictable interactions, such as those that can occur in the way people decide which chairs to sit in when entering an auditorium, the interaction is diluted in synesthetic processes that are phenomenologically and hermeneutically much more complex than a simple interaction.

The concept of interaction in this sense sometimes seems to be limited by a stimulus-response relationship, for example, assuming that choosing one chair and not another is caused by the prevention of the person who placed it, or that the buyer chooses a seller because It was interactively conditioned and since both things are impossible once the choice is not what was expected, the idea of ​​interaction is diluted in a much more complex relationality and phenomenologically irreducible to its usual precepts. The caricatured example of interaction is thus that of Pavlov with the mouse, which reacts by interaction to food.

In this sense, when an interaction moves away from a stimulus-response relationship, the interaction tends to be diluted into something else, and it cannot be precisely established in what sense it is an interaction. If I respond to an email I undoubtedly interact and if I receive a counter-response the interaction continues, but as soon as we begin to try to make explicit what we want to tell each other the interaction begins to dissolve into something else, thus beginning the world of understanding and bodies in relationship are no longer seen from the outside as by an external observer who describes them interacting.

The concept of interaction generally has an implicit relationship with the idea of ​​a third observer who sees the interaction, although it is true that this third observer can occur in the form of a relationship of alterity through which one of the interactants perceives himself. interacting as if it were an external observer, but since it is not, alterity dilutes the hexotopia and the interaction dissolves into relationship. In sociology, symbolic interactionism attempts a conciliation between the alter of the social actor and the distant objectivity of the sociological question, trying to ensure that the latter can also be in some way that actor, from which the influence of Shutz and Mead comes from in Garfinkel, which which results in a type of symbolism from the moment in which the actor-sociologist alterity, unable to be diluted in pure social performance, remains in the equidistance according to which in simply interactive terms we can only find out how people symbolize that with respect to to which it is never fully imbued or endogenously related, so the concept of interaction is exogenous to the situation both in the sense of Popper - situationalism - and in the sense of Shutz, relevance - common sense structure, as well as in that of Habermas, explanation and understanding.

That is why the idea of ​​interaction maintains some of the determinism, the external manipulation of some organisms by others, and the relationship of this with behaviorism and behaviorism in psychology, but it is true that it also has relevance in more spontaneous and less controlled dynamics, although This does not mean that you are alien to certain rules such as those found in games, for example. However, it is necessary not to forget that when, beyond its candid or healthy expression in a simple game, the analysis of the interaction in the logic of the game becomes the object of a science, Gestalt emerges, which in a more moderate way does not Stop relying on testing people to see how they react.

The children's universe, for example, is eminently playful and based on games and in such a way interactive in a sense, let's call it candid, naive or healthy of the concept, less manipulated by an external observer not to say that in children the game is almost unintervened. by external observers developing in entirely spontaneous processes of children among themselves which we could say are certainly interactive but rescuing this meaning for the word interaction seems actually naive to me in a social world largely controlled by determinists, with the exception, of course, of the moment in which that the adult demands a completion time for the game or an appropriate place and manner for it.

Let us therefore hope that the sense that Aida wants to redeem in the concept of interaction achieves its objectives in her project, assuming that these are internally motivated by an ethic that privileges love in the game and not its uses by those who see it as a means to win. or lose or to lead the players to places that are not those chosen by themselves from their self-determination, that is, without external determination.

Knowing Aida's creative and usually inspired world, which refers me to the philosophy of the universe and in it to the cosmogonies, I tend to think that her meanings of interaction want to have something of the naivety or the healthy candid sense of children's play, although played by adults, this is reminiscent of artists who, such as Miro, Dubuffet, Klee or Basquiat, visually focused on that universe, which by the way cannot fail to be perceived on a visual level in some pictorial motifs of their ceramics and their two-dimensions.

I am therefore inclined to understand or analyze your project more based on the process-interface pair than on the interaction, in the process-interface relationship the center of attention should be on time and temporality where the questions lie in how to relate what was a process to what is the a posteriori presentation of its results.

In closing, the concept of interface is also presented here in a critical way. On the one hand, we call interfaces the same functions that technological media perform for communication; they are, in fact, interfaces that perform the work of translating the electrical impulses and visual signals through which communication, which is in itself an immaterial and ethereal process, is inscribed in the medium in which we see and read it, the latter functioning as an interface to the intangibility of that process, but given that the The visual result of this is presented by Aida outside of that media in the form of an exhibition of objects and visual artifacts exhibited in the gallery, the latter are also, in a sense no longer related to the technological media - the mobile or the computer - also interfaces of those processes to which Aida refers with her expression of communicative meanings.

Tellurides

By Abdel Hernández San Juan

Painting on slab with enamel is not an easy job. Seeing the finished slab in colors and the shiny effect that the final work gives it, one could think of a generous support that easily receives the softness of the fine hairs of the brush and, together with its elasticity, the different degrees of liquefiedness, creaminess and thickness that flow again and again as desired on a docile and accessible surface. However, painting on slab is painted on a sandy and arid support that is highly absorbent, tending to dull the brightness and contrast between colors, and what is being seen at the time it is painted is also far from the result. What has been said might lead one to think that, as in other techniques where the final results have to wait for long processes, in painting on slabs the artist has time to define his motives and elements, forms and morphologies, images and strokes, gestures. and expressions. Paradoxically, while as in ceramics and engraving this is a process that takes time, painting on the surface has to be quick, with little time to change decisions. They are the very limits of the support, which are imposed.

Since painting quickly, knowing that you have time and doing it voluntarily, is not the same as depending on the requirements of the support, enamel paint on slab offers that resistance. From what has been said, artists stand out who achieve versatility, morphological prolixity, expressive richness and expressions of a keen search in color, values, shapes, motifs, while at the same time what the medium itself poses to the artist is still interesting. The slab as such, by its very nature, is a serial industrial element; it also imposes the imprint of its functionality. The paintings of the Cuban plastic artist Aida Iris in enamels on slab are in this sense precious, rich in shapes and densities in lines as well as in colors, the artist decides to use clay to cover the ends; a way to draw attention to the uniqueness of each piece. Rich in motifs that she defines as tropical, voluptuous and creative shapes give her enamels a very peculiar aesthetic unity.

But Aida Iris's plastic works do not consist only of these slabs, in my opinion the most beautiful, but also of poetry--, whether writing on the wall, on top of the material directly, or through printouts that she distributes in her exhibitions— . It also consists of installation works, some leaning towards ceramics in the traditional sense—the direct or suggested presence of wells, vessels and other entire ceramic utensils, integrated into installations or scattered in fragments, sometimes as preponderant elements, and other times as telluric allusions, more installations than ceramics. Although living his environment as a ceramist—seems more present in his work—than his own incursion into ceramics as an orientation in his plastic career—technical solutions, ways of placing elements and materialities from the ceramic world, are obviously included in forms sometimes overlapping and other times as intertechnical translations within the same work; from the simple glazed ceramic piece composed as an installation (three ceramic plates on metals and three rectangular pieces in glazed ceramic mounted on it), to works like “Ademan”, where polychrome terracotta, self-setting paste and poxic clay outline an abstract form and irregularly on the wall, a shelf with a book, and his written poems. “Buena Suerte” is a simpler case where two spoons of different sizes are held to the wall, while in his piece “Gota a Gota” the self-setting paste, the fresh clay and the majolica ceramic vessel are spatially interrelated (circumference of clay on the floor, glazed ceramic pots hanging from the ceiling and drops of water that moisten the clay).

It is not exactly a cosmovision art that suggests worldviews in allusion to ideas of knowledge coming from discourses on civilizations, or a literature interested in astronomy, but rather a type of telluric originism interested in the resonances of materials. The concept of the telluric, which in its meaning in the language refers to the earth, has found in some artists a rather poetic and originist development. Given that the earth is not the object of religious forms or iconography, tellurism in contemporary art has become more the result of a type of search into its origins, and the word as such has acquired – given its combination of physical and technical senders to clay utensils – as well as the values ​​related to work, food, harvest and fertility, a resonance – at a semantic level – narrative, poetic and literary, spiritual.

Iris's exhibitions, widely spaced - breathing in space - as well as rich in technical diversity, suggest a world in which biodiversity, the interweaving between technicalities, the meeting of the poetic and acoustic dimension of materials with a certain device that I would define, thinking about his samples—although also about other recently presented Cuban artists—as a type of harmonic acousticism where, without the need for direct references to sounds, the materials are sought to communicate to the viewer something of their qualities – the acoustics. understood as a dimension suggested to the ceramic universe itself with its dominance in clay and mud, as well as denoted by environmental effects such as temperature and smell. Just as working the land has been a value in the Cuban experience—the new society began with the agrarian reforms—, originism has also been prevalent in Cuban universalist poets since early modernism, the magazine “Orígenes” is a reference in this sense, especially Lezama Lima, who has been an epitome for the imaginative orientation in island poetry and art.

Tellurism thus appears as the expression of that introspection towards the being and the environment, the values ​​that are related to certain materials such as the earth and the purely physical. Unlike minimalism that seeks the philosophical and mathematical abstraction of forms in their abstract universals, tellurism is oriented towards forms whose simplicity and simplicity is given by the reference to basic principles of life such as the organization according to simple circles, triangles. , squares, etc., and the use of virgin materials. In Iris it is not about an originism as a search towards the origins in going out to meet those original forms from which everything would come, but rather about what is originary in the present itself, an inward, introspective originism , towards the spiritual world and the body, of man and the earth, more than towards the ancestors. All this is observed in his work “Journey in the View of the Universe”, clay, terracotta and glass, terracotta bricks placed on top of each other forming a triangular shape in the corners of the wall and a glass sphere hanging from the ceiling.

It is also something notable in its piece consisting of ceramic fragments scattered on the floor in the shape of a circumference and a ball of clay, made up of self-setting paste, vegetable fiber and paper, hanging from the ceiling. Moved towards the resonances of earth materials, such as clay and clay, or ceramics, these baked, glazed and crystallized materials, as well as countless other materials, vegetable fiber, glazed slab, paper, self-setting clay, polychrome, wood and oxidized metal , among others, its installations seek a balance between the natural and the industrial, although references to the latter are attenuated and almost ignored in favor of the singularization of the uniqueness of the elements in contrast to their serial nature. One of the characteristics of tellurism is given because it originates as a metaphysics from the living environment in the relationships between man, his interiority and his environment, sometimes in analogical, sometimes imaginative forms. In these introspections, tellurism is given because the materials used already have, in themselves, a meaning that refers to that internal and external living environment. As in the earth in which processes of germination, cycles, fertilization and growth take place, the artist also finds these principles present in his anthropological nature. In the same way that the most basic processes of life, reproduction, creation, germination coincide between man and the earth, it is also only through the work of that earth that man can obtain its fruits, its food and its habitation. It is these analogies that awaken in the telluries of Aida Iris, as in general in the tellurism alluded to in the plastic arts, the type of poetry and plastic allusions.

There has been an interesting recurrence in Cuban art—in some cases coming directly from ceramists and in others from painters who have been interested in ceramics to explore both ceramics as a material in installation, such as ceramic installation and installation ceramics. An initiator in this sense was the work of the plastic artist Juan Francisco Elso, in particular his installation “Land, Maíz y Vida”, presented in the Art Gallery of the Plaza House of Culture, but it has generally been a characteristic among ceramists. Cubans and among others who, from their specialties, painting, designs, sculpture, have been interested in ceramics. Ceramics, in fact, carry in their very nature a high installation component resulting from the very process that the ceramic work entails, usually arranged in an environment in which the climax is important, distributed as pieces according to the continuity of the space and exposed to processes. in which they intervene, from the hands in the molding and modeling work, to the brush and paint; molding and drying processes according to which the pieces are sewn, satin, polychrome and in some cases enamelled.

A very clear expression of this type of mutual inclusivism, of ceramism in installationism and of the latter in the former, are the pieces that become more properly conceptual in these artists, as is the case in Aida Iris from her work “Punto y Coma” consisting of a wooden strip on the wall that suggests an imaginary prayer, enameled plates that suggest the dots, and at the end of the strip a rusty metal cutout that suggests the image of the sickle, as on the Russian flag. Another characteristic of Aida Iris is that in her samples there is an unusual balance between tropical colorism—which we could define as recurring in Cuban ceramics denoted by artists such as Amelia Peláez—directly alluding to the natural climax and the environment in eclecticist architecture. of Cuban urbanism, the portal, the arabesques, etc.—especially in the enameled slabs—and another inclination that I have discussed somewhere as interested in allegory, or where allegory as a form of figurative and tropological language is the figure that best suits your analysis.

The allegorism is a result in some cases precisely of the telluric inclination. One way in which we can analyze allegory as a tropical figure is by highlighting its sometimes figurative character, as was the case in Greek and medieval paintings where, in large part, the allegorical allusions were to narrative passages, sometimes literary expressions, sometimes oral in a and another culture, Christian and Greek. Other ways in which we can analyze allegory is when it is presented in abstract senders in the form of allegorical visual passages such as telluries to motifs such as earth or fertility.

One of the characteristics of allegory as a trope is that, while it refers to some narrative element - oral, literary and poetic - underlying the image or simply susceptible to the ways of reading the image itself, its images also refer in some way to orality. and living memory. The allegorical tropes are related to the fact that both narrative and oral traditions can no longer refer to one or several origins that would be the truly original ones, but rather the literary or oral references that the plastic images suggest have been in a certain way recreated. for those same literary works and oral expressions. Allegorical images in plastic art then usually allude to passages about living experiences that are alluded to at the referential level. Iris' samples have something of this bias and this impetus, both in the type of poetic writing and in their plastic images; tellurias.

Abdel Hernández San Juan, Havana City, 2004

General Bibliography

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

Eco umberto, the absent structure, lumen

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

Hernandez San Juan Abdel, 1996- Beyond the Intertextual. By Abdel Hernandez San Juan, Conference Lectured at the Fondren Library Lectures Auditorium as a guest of the faculty of classical and Hispanic studies in his area of research of semiotic, theory of art, anthropology, curator at the alejandro otero museum of visual art, coordinated by Surpik 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, also pyblished at https://www.mariacristinajadick.com

Houston, Texas, USA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Todorov Tzvetan, Symbolism and interpretation Todorov, monte avila editors

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

Todorov Tzvetan. Theories of the symbol, monteavila editors

Todorov.Tzvetan Genres of Discourse, Gedisa

Todorov Tzvetan. Criticism of Criticism, Editorial Paidós

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