Marusela Granell A LA LUNA DE VALENCIA
Jamey Hecht
TO BE LEFT INTHE
LURCH (A LA LUNA DE VALENCIA)
Many years ago my city was walled, at nights the ones that arrived late
used to find the wall closed and they should spend the night out of the city,
just protected by the moon. With this project I propose to spend six hours left
in the lurch. Recording the moon from an observatory, we would install the image
in the cupola of S. Pio V Museum, with a vision of our very special moon. –M.G.
“To Be Left In the Lurch: Six Hours
with the Moon of Valencia” is Marusela Granell’s quietly charismatic
fantasy project. It’s a weird piece, less conservative than it looks, and
the beginning of its profundity is the string of temporal markers in its expository
caption: “many years ago,” “six hours,” “spend the night.”
They’re coordinated with spatial markers: Valencia, the wall, the Moon,
and the observatory. Together it all constitutes a small narrative, too brief
to be a novel and too a-textual to be a poem. This isn’t performance art
either, since nobody’s watching; it isn’t conceptual art, because it’s
quite visual and a written description on the wall won’t do; and it’s
not fine art because there’s no single, hand-worked object that constitutes
the piece. “Six Hours with the Moon of Valencia” seems like its beauty
may not even be that of art at all: it seems like life.
The one left in the lurch is the artist,
who remains outside, both ahead of the age and far behind it. The abstract drawing
has the childlike quality that Picasso praised, but the general plan is sophisticated
and would never be recognized as a coherent artwork outside of high cultural
circles. One such high-cultural circle is the hemispherical cupola of Valencia’s
tiny observatory dedicated to Saint Pious the Fifth. Museo de Pio V is Romanesque,
so it’s got the outward style of the ancient Empire, “born again”
in a Renaissance whose nostalgia can no more return to the pre-Christian object
of cultural desire than the post-curfew exile can scale the wall after the sun
is gone and the moon is already out. Compounded of a hundred forms of ambivalence,
this is an artwork of midlife, in which one side of the moon is dark in the shadow
of the Earth and the other side is bright in the shining of the Sun. Six hours
is not twelve; it’s half the night. It’s an urban artwork that requires
a city to be locked out of, but it happens outside the city (“just protected
by the Moon”). It’s the deliberate enactment of the most accidental
mistake: With this project I propose to spend six hours left in the lurch.
I think it’s safe to say that such
a choice is a defense against being left in the lurch. You get shut out of the
community, so you try to enjoy the moon, something even excluded latecomers can
do. Granell’s word “install” is a compensation: the woman
is placed outside the city, but the moon is placed inside the cupola. Her illustration
shows a photo of Luna connected to the equally round dome of the Museo by a straight
line. It’s the line of sight from the invisible woman in the window, who
meets with the moon in a kind of mutual sheltering; the line points in both directions
and establishes solidarity between two outsiders, one human, the other a radiant
stone, both female. “Install” obliges us to include the museum’s
Romanesque architecture in our approach to the project, and our perception is
suffused with the mood evoked by the experience of being left out. So: the Renaissance
is a compensation for the loss of Antiquity, and Modernity is a compensation
for the loss of the Renaissance. Gazing at the moon is a placebo for all
these exclusions; it’s the same moon for those inside the city as it is
for those beyond the wall; the same for the ancients and the moderns. Granell
is very good on issues of distance. If the moon is spectacularly present but
entirely unreachable, so is the artist inside the parameters of the artwork where
the spectator can look but not touch.
LOOKING AT THE SEA
The Project “ Looking at the sea”
was made recording the sea for 36 hours:
12 hours recording with a still camera in Tarifa Beach, Cádiz / 12 hours
recording in Pedruscada Beach, Mallorca / 12 hours in Mundaka, Bilbao.
“Looking at the sea” began in Cádiz.
I decided to go to the beach at dawn and I stood there looking at the Sea until
the nightfall. And I did so, but I also recorded the Sea for 12 hours.
I did the same thing in other Seas.
The Installation: Room of water. When we install it in an expositive space,
we can visualize the three Seas at the same time. We will inaugurate at 08:00
a.m., when the sun is about to appear and the installation will finish with the
nightfall observing the triple sunset.
Here is Granell once more treating a tableau
of permanence and change, this time the ocean. Like the phasing moon in the Valencia
piece, the sea at which the artist looks is continually in flux yet always the
same; it’s always oscillating with the wind and the tides, but it’s
a transhistorical, archetypal monolith that every generation confronts at the
limits of the social world. The woman of “Left in the Lurch” was stationed
at the border of the city for six hours. This time she passes a twelve-hour day
at the border of the whole country. As if to establish the irrelevance of place,
she repeats the experience, filming the water from three different cities; the
result is a film of “three seas” that are actually just the same enormous
and primordial ocean. You can watch the three films on as many screens in her
gallery installation, but you can’t be in three places at once, living three
different days simultaneously. You can steel yourself for a full day’s vigil
in front of the screens, but to do so is to subtract that day from the flux of
human circumstances and social interactions, and substitute the non-signifying
flux of the waves. She gets the lovely, lonely experience of three full days;
you get the distilled trace of it for thirty minutes. There’s no place for
a signature here. It’s a lonely art, public insofar as each of us can stand
alone in it, but ultimately as private and anonymous as the self.
