Dialogues on the historical space in Zona Maco Sur 2012
Retaining the concept introduced by Adriano Pedrosa of a south that comprises the entire hemisphere and of practices that involve forms of resistance, the curator of Zona Maco Sur 2012, Patrick Charpenel, broke the linearity in the distribution and reformed the architecture of the area jointly with Luis Aldrete, who adapted the design of the spaces to the works.
A field of vision in that sort of oblique dialogue between the two generations of artists invited to Zona Maco Sur – 11 under the age of 36 and 11 over the age of 54 − constituted the revalidation of pioneering artistic practices which were either not incorporated in contemporary art or established friction on its borders.
Such is the case of Antonio Caballero (Galería López Quiroga) as a photographer of Mexican soap operas which, as Jesús Martín Barbero asserts, “constitute the media genre that presents the densest interweaving between popular cultural matrices and industrial formats.” The recovery for contemporary art of those popular Latin American images which became globalized, reflected in their drama of forms of identity inscribed in the cultural imaginary, relates his narrative to the construction of Cindy Sherman-style fictitious characters. Is it nonsensical to associate both fictions given their provenance from such different matrices? The mental fascination they currently produce restates − once again − the Duchampian possibility of an art that repositions the question regarding its own place on the aesthetic border.
Likewise, behind the apparent documentary recording found in Los viajes de Carlos Ginzburg, similar to what could have been filmed by any tourist in Mexico in the late 1970s, there is a subversion of the gaze which, turning away from that “exoticization” of others and of their past which characterizes that of the foreigner, as Edward Said could glimpse, renders a recording from the stance of the artist-observer who plays the part of the tourist. The three sections of these series exhibited for the first time by Henrique Faria –“Mercado”, “Turismo” and “Mirada” − thus presuppose a kind of performance by the Argentine artist, who succumbs to the seduction of that which he pretends to observe from a distance while he enjoys the forms of popular aesthetics − advertisements − or the residues of a grandiose past. The journey reveals that which Homi Bhabha has understood: that the space in a modern nation is never simply horizontal, and that it assumes the “fold” that is necessary to record its metaphorical movement: multiplicity. What he registers, in that precise space-time of the long journey that took him, over the course of a decade, from Argentina to Nepal, reaches the point which Bhabha himself proposes: “The nonsequential energy of lived historical memory and subjectivity.”
Quite different is the insurrection of one of the pioneers of conceptualism in Colombia, Antonio Caro (Casas Riegner). In his case, the maximization of the possibilities of mechanical reproduction which he has applied since the 1970s by reutilizing logos, slogans, the heritage of Pop art, resulted in a scathing oeuvre which produced political irritability and represented the possibility of activating the critique of historical time. The choice of using minimal graphic resources − often implying an intense appropriation of advertising semiotics − in a country with such a wealth of pictorial talent, as his gallery rightly admits, could have led to his work being considered then “a minor craft” with an “insignificant” result. And still, forty years later, we are witnesses to the long-standing validity of works − like the logo of Colombia executed with the typography of Coca-Cola − which synthesized in a sharp “black graphic art” conflicts in the social structure which has the political charge of its amorphous duration.
In the 1970s, in the Czechoslovakia of the days that followed the invasion of Prague, Julius Koeller (Galerie Martin Janda) invaded his own time inundating the graphic media with an omnipresent question mark − representing the country’s old coat-of-arms − or photographically documenting the groups of accomplices who gave shape to the interrogation sign with their bodies in the open, perhaps dissolving through the use of this kind of ambiguity the harshness of the time. A sign parallel to that of piling up little sand mounds in golf course holes: forms of playful subversion from which we currently revisit that past through an imperfect past tense.
Another generation of young artists is recovering historical spaces with the same feeling of having sand in one’s eyes that is produced by the undetermined duration of the unresolved. Juan Capistrán (Curro&Poncho) goes back to the outbreak of the riots in Los Angeles in the 1990s, evoking the atmosphere of the neighborhoods where he grew up by appropriating iconic aesthetics, but in a way that is more related to “bootlegging”, which gave rise to the practice of DJs’ “botleg” and to their “pillaging” and free mix of pre-existing works, as a form of non-iconoclastic deconstruction and creation. In this way, instead of the daily passage of time which On Kawara records obsessively, he adopts the former’s format but paints crucial dates − like March 1991, the date of the savage beating of Rodney King by the police − using materials that reveal a strong content related to the social body: blood (pig blood), sweat, tears, or ashes. The paper photocopies do not allow the spectator to carry away vast expanses of sky or sea in the style of Félix González Torres, but rather portable weapons.
Cynthia Gutiérrez (Plataforma Arte Contemporáneo) featured a re-creation of the history of a “migrant obelisk” recently returned by Italy to Ethiopia, after having been carried to Rome by the fascist army that found it during the invasion of Abyssinia and moved it as a reflection of the fascination of totalitarian governments with monumental aesthetics. From the poetic recreation of the project for a Gobelin-like tapestry via a work by Henry Salt showing a funerary stela and the banalization of its representation as a souvenir, each object − historical photographs or sculptures inspired by Mussolini or Haile Selassie − fulfills the function of an essay on the subject that gives its title to the project of which the installation forms part: “The failure of memory”. What is documented is historical uncertainty/confusion. The delay in time necessary for the required restoration to be implemented becomes a mirror reflecting the current imbalance between subjugating and subjugated nations. But we are very distant from the committed art of the previous century and its utopias: as Paulo Gutiérrez notes, the artist’s wish is not to document but to save us from horror vacui through the immersion in archives and the establishment of an art marked by absurdity. This is similar to what occurs with Fritzia Irizar’s installation, inspired by the fall of two meteorites in the Sierra de Sinaloa. What appears to be an alluring abstract structure − a sort of scientific model, a physical study of the object with unknown results − represents the impossibility of actually knowing the facts. The cause of the information void is not only the nature of media such as the printed press, which she used leaving only the white frames without any letters, but also historical circumstances in spaces so elusive as the impenetrable territory controlled by drug lords, where the second meteorite fell in 2012.
A similar choice of formal beauty to represent, with black humor, the issues that afflict the social universe but observed at a certain distance, are present in Cristina Piffer’s (Ignacio Liprandi Arte Contemporáneo) pieces, which feature the rules, narrative, iconography, objects and subjects associated to the slaughter-house − the setting of the first Argentine short story on State repression − to create impeccable works with an almost ornamental or deceitfully minimalistic appearance, which masterfully capture the political violence exerted upon the social body.
