THE PRODUCTIVITY OF EMPTINESS

Dolores is widely recognized for her public art. While her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries, the bulk of it has been seen in the urban space, which provides greater visibility and deeper interrogation. Her projects are the result of studying a context, circumstance, or place. Texts materialized in neon and created as works in and of themselves or for use in interventions, her projects are based on the denotative power of the word, of the action taking place, and of other resources of the work in progress. After experimenting with a number of different forms of expression, she began doing urban interventions as a means of “challenging traditional media”1 in order to “deploy their logic for a public critique.”2 The artist’s site-specific work would earn her invitations to participate in art biennials in Buenos Aires, Havana, Curitiba, Ushuaia, and in the Mercosur Biennial. A recurring strategy in her work, one that she uses to articulate its meaning and to structure her method, is the interplay of opposites in texts and titles. She has considerable talent at conveying meaning in few words and the current issues she addresses, as well as the tactics she uses to make them resonate, are no less impressive. The importance she places on the reception of her work is particularly patent in her public projects because their readings, which intensify the place (the impact of her work), show the dimensions of the issues she overtly tackles and other related issues, arousing interest on the part of many. When the format is an exhibition, she deploys other strategies to attract attention. 

She has considerable talent at conveying meaning in few words and the current issues she addresses, as well as the tactics she uses to make them resonate, are no less impressive 

Influenced by Didi-Huberman, who in his lecture “Exhibition as War Machine”3 argues that “an exhibition… must provide resources that heighten the potential of thought… An idea is what is exhibited”, Dolores decided to use the museum’s architecture and the infrastructure that allows it to operate   in a staging that shakes up viewers, filling them with doubt and a sense of unease. The exhibition she presented consisted of repairing and whitening the ceilings and 125 meters of wall in Museo Caraffa’s galleries 5, 6, and 7; coating the floor with white vinyl and the metal benches with white enamel; replacing forty light fixtures; and eliminating partitions so that the galleries were restored to their original state. A perfect white cube within another white cube (the museum) brought to mind the work of Yves Klein, Martin Creed, and John Cage, all of whom have worked with emptiness. A bold endorsement of Conceptualism, of the disruptive way it incited reflection in opposition to the Modern convention of works in frames and on pedestals. Treating the galleries as site of intervention, about which   to produce speech and in which to reveal what is not commonly perceptible, means looking at the art institution as object of reflection. And the artist herself, as part of    that institution, could potentially be assessed as well.

Its emptiness was the move that triggered the onslaught of reactions, many of them against the artist’s action due to a failure to understand that that was precisely her intention: to provoke, to activate the public through dialogue, to make viewers think and take a stance

Was the exhibition the white intervention? Its emptiness was the move that triggered the onslaught of reactions, many of them against the artist’s action due to a failure to understand that that was precisely her intention: to provoke, to activate the public through dialogue, to make viewers think and take a stance. It matters little that art has made use of emptiness before, but rather how, on this occasion, it served to show what art can be, what is thought about its institutions, about the role of the artist and the behavior of the viewer. “An empty space… that is full of questions,” the artist said to EFE. And it proved an effective move: the work was one of the most widely discussed around the country. The use of the hashtag symbol before the work’s title in plain black typography that contrasts with the color white4 indicated that the show expanded into virtual space, the binary resource of the declarations that circulated through the “limitless” online space of social networks and websites. Dolores emptied the galleries of works and, in so doing, she did away with herself to give the viewer voice. “Artists don’t have to work with objects to convey an idea. I pass responsibility on to the viewer.”5 The public provided the written word and, in that, made the work as well. The statements included references to how the whiteness underscored the affinity between the museum and a house of worship and its power to consecrate; others saw the emptiness as an invitation to take a break and reassess, as an opportunity for the institution to update its languages and artistic discourses. Many felt ripped off by the absence of works, but wasn’t that a call to viewers, for them to reconsider their preferences for conventional works and exhibition formats? The art press played center stage in the debate. It was not for nothing that La Nación newspaper called #SinLimite567 one of the ten outstanding cultural events in Argentina in 2015.

She made the work within the institution she managed to take it beyond its confines, to the polemic in the mass media, the web and the street, the on and off that today gives shape to the public sphere from which subjectivities are projected

Dolores once again showed her ability to mobilize. She opened a debate on contemporary artistic practices and their institutions; she urged venturing beyond a restricted concept of art by means of a transitive work that bound together the physical spaces of art, the immaterial spaces of the web, and the spaces of society. And she did so without betraying herself, without foregoing the use of impact, intervention, written word, antinomy, performance (one in which she read from the hashtag), work in progress, and repercussion that characterizes her art. And, what’s more, though she made the work within the institution she managed to take it beyond its confines, to the polemic in the mass media, the web and the street, the on and off that today gives shape to the public sphere from which subjectivities are projected.