Strategies of Nostalgia in Art Positions

Playfulness, irony, and different kinds of nostalgia may be perceived in practices which sometimes attempt (but more often abandon) reconfigurations of the world in which some artists appear to observe with detachment the signs of the “catastrophe” − a word that is written in one of Emily Sundbland’s works.
The Brazilian artist Rosana Ricaldi (Baró Gallery) made Calvino’s Invisible Cities the point of departure to suggest new maps, mixing the familiar image of the continents with unknown geographic locations, as if art had the power to produce alternative configurations of the world.
Icaro Zorbar (Casas Riegner) combined old communication technologies with nostalgic evocations and interventions on musical compositions by Arvo Part, suggesting both an emotional revisiting of fond inner spaces and awareness of the fleeting nature of historical moments. The presence of the end − like the title of the work Algún día te diremos adios (Some day we will bid you farewell) − is always a counterpoint in a work that poetically touches on collective memories linked to the author’s own biography and returns them to the present through delicate and unusual mechanisms aimed at capturing that which is already gone.
This sort of critical-playful detachment (which functions as the necessary overture for reconfigurations) is also applied to history. The Mexican artist Jorge Satorre (Labor) bases his work on a research by historian Carlo Ginzburg concerning the life of a miller brought before the Inquisition because of his unconventional views. He re-creates by means of drawings, illustrations and documents the testimonies against this man who was tried for fifteen years before he was finally condemned to death. This is nostalgia of opposite sign: it conveys horror concerning the past and the vindication of its victims.
The evocation of the past is also present in the work of Jessica Warboys (Gaudel de Stampa), who gathers together found photographs and the unpublished memoir of a Surrealist, little-known dancer, Hélène Vanel, as a point of departure for the shooting of the performance 'Cyan Sun'. This nostalgia also implies bringing to the foreground the cultural creations connected not only to the past but also to cultures overshadowed by hegemonies. In Theaster Gates (Kavi Gupta), the gaze on that consigned to oblivion involves illuminated glass-lantern slides embedded in the ceiling of two sculptural passageways, featuring images of works by American potters as an undervalued aesthetics which has contributed to American art.
On the other hand, the reactivation of the socially transforming potential of art is evidenced in the work of César Puno (Lucía de la Puente Gallery) and Paulo Nazareth (Mendes Wood), who insert in sophisticated exhibition spaces (such as ABMB) practices and aesthetics belonging to the marginal areas of Latin America. Instead of introducing a urinal or a coyote in the fair, the former inserts fragments of houses in ruins or very poor rooms to display his proposal, PunoMoCa, which suggests re-using them as exhibition spaces. For his part, Nazareth introduced a Volkswagen van of the 1970s stuffed with green bananas which gradually ripened as he offered them barefoot and with dusty feet, dressed as any popular vendor, and with a poster hanging from his neck, announcing his exotic product and the possibility of taking pictures of it. This performance mirrors marginality in the continent and the stereotypes that surround it, and it confronts the collector with the notions of value and sophistication imposed by the art market. Nazareth is, of course, the best-paid fruit vendor in Latin America.
The strategy of travel linked to the traces of a show such as the circus, filled with emotional associations and imbued with a particular way of observing the relationships between the human and animal kingdoms, is present in the works presented by Sven Johne (Klemm's), who traveled thousands of kilometers through Eastern Germany following the traces that the circus leaves behind. Instead of capturing the show itself, he focuses precisely on what remains after its departure, including the descriptions provided by children or by the local newspapers. The work includes films, photographic and text-based material, documentation with a strong emotional power, capturing the feeling left behind by the circus once it is gone. Parallel to this, he featured a touching series of wild animals captured during their sleep, when they are harmless.
Other types of inquiries are the provocations posed to the gaze and its relationship with the works in the exhibition space. Clarissa Rodríguez (Karma International), the New York artist, writer and gallerist who, together with Emily Sundblad and John Kelsey created Reena Spaulings Fine Art, and under this collective artistic personality had a solo show, Courbet Your Enthusiasm, at Galerie Chantal Crousel in 2008, created a spatial strategy for Art Positions: a slab of marble placed in the center of the booth leaves just enough space between the wall and the work for the viewer to circle around it, altering not only the habitual dimensions but also the way in which the viewer relates to it. This uncomfortable position presupposes a challenge for the gaze. Alexandra Bircken’s work, an assemblage of rope, thread or Nylon, suspended or draped over wood, iron and steel, question the boundaries between installation and sculpture.
Several works revisit Modernism: Brazil-based Otavio Schipper (Anita Schwartz Gallery) features an acoustic installation in which various kinds of tuning-forks are suspended in space by steel cables, evoking the kind of relationship that Bruce Nauman established with John Cage’s atonal compositions.
Francesca Minini (Mandla Reuter) mixes architectonic and film references, playing with apocalyptic announcements: the end of high culture and its fusion with the massive. The Argentine artist Analia Saban (Thomas Solomon Gallery) uses pictorial means to create small three-dimensional works that blur the borders between everyday objects and representation, just as in the beginnings of conceptual art. Through a practice that holds a dialogue with the close relationship between constructivism and object books, the Mexican artist Marco Rountree (Travesía Cuatro) folded the pages of the books he presented in such a way that he created cylindrical objects displayed on wooden modules. The function of these works has shifted from the reading of the texts to contemplation and formal aesthetic enjoyment. In the paintings of another of Rena Spaulings’s artists, Emily Sundblad (Algus Greenspon, New York), there are Neo-expressionist traces, but far from the viscerality with which they were imbued in the 1980s, she has based them on the ironic gesture of that mode of mental detachment which consists in knowing that the relationship between art and the world is a tight rope, and that one can only get to the other end with an open conscience of simulacrum.
Cinthia Marcelle (Silvia Cintra + Box4), who addresses environmental impact in some of her works, installed tall grasses and weeds growing on a brick wall, in a piece that evokes Alejo Carpentier’s reflections on the nature of the tropics, where Nature resists being tamed by culture: plants sprout amidst buildings. But the gesture of establishing her Reserva utópica (Utopian reserve) at the fair also echoes that same awareness of simulacrum in which what grows is nostalgia.