Michael Lineares

Michael Linares’ recent exhi­bi­tion Found & Lost at Museum of Con­tem­po­rary Art Puerto Rico high­lights the alter­nately polit­i­cal, pro­saic, spir­i­tual, and flam­boy­ant meth­ods by which life is expe­ri­enced and observed. The exhi­bi­tion employs Linares’ own flu­ency in mul­ti­far­i­ous forms of discourse—from sculp­ture, to pho­tog­ra­phy and video.

Suzie Wal­she on Michael Lineares

Michael Linares’ recent exhi­bi­tion Found & Lost at Museum of Con­tem­po­rary Art Puerto Rico high­lights the alter­nately polit­i­cal, pro­saic, spir­i­tual, and flam­boy­ant meth­ods by which life is expe­ri­enced and observed. The exhi­bi­tion employs Linares’ own flu­ency in mul­ti­far­i­ous forms of discourse—from sculp­ture, to pho­tog­ra­phy and video. In his con­cep­tual and poetic works, Linares con­sciously con­ceals the bor­ders between art and life, fic­tion and real­ity, pri­vate and pub­lic. With self-established behav­ioral instruc­tions and rit­u­als, he trans­forms daily life and expe­ri­ences with a series of works that form a basis for his shrewd and pen­e­trat­ing cul­tural assess­ments.
The Puerto Rican artist lives and works in San Juan. His work how­ever, reaches much fur­ther, with numer­ous inter­na­tional exhi­bi­tions includ­ing The Law­rimore Project, Seat­tle; Insti­tute of Con­tem­po­rary Art of Penn­syl­va­nia (ICA); CANADA Gallery, New York; The Peace Tower, a project by Mark di Suvero & Rirkrit Tira­vanija for the Whit­ney Bien­nial, Whit­ney Museum, New York (2006), among oth­ers. Recently Linares has been included in The Gen­er­a­tional: Younger Than Jesus/Artists Direc­tory, a pub­li­ca­tion that will accom­pany the tri­en­nial of the same name in the New Museum, New York. Found and Lost is the first solo show for Linares in Puerto Rico and is pre­sented as part of the New Ten­den­cies program.

For the major­ity of his career Linares has blended the con­cerns and meth­ods of Trans­gres­sive, Con­cep­tual, and appro­pria­tive art with pop­u­lar cul­ture in order to cre­ate his own unique iconog­ra­phy, some­times con­tro­ver­sial and always engag­ing. His work explores con­tem­po­rary obses­sions with every­thing from sex and desire, to race and gen­der, to media, and com­merce. In Found and Lost, as the viewer passes through the exhi­bi­tion space they are led through a col­lec­tion of works that orig­i­nate from exist­ing works of art, which have been mod­i­fied in order to reac­ti­vate and redi­rect their latent meanings—underlining the con­stant process of con­struc­tion, decon­struc­tion and recon­struc­tion of this mean­ing present in each act of read­ing. In the case of both You Lookin’ at Me?, You Lookin’ at Me?, You Lookin’ at Me? and What does it say to you? these actions test not only the valid­ity of the works being ref­er­enced, but also that of his own work, and sug­gests the revi­sion of the posi­tion of the author as much as that of the spec­ta­tor.

In his pre­lim­i­nary years, Linares’ work was con­cerned pri­mar­ily with themes of social sig­nif­i­cance. In both Robo de chicles/ Steal­ing gum, 2005 and Oasis, 2006 the artist dealt with his­tor­i­cally impor­tant soci­o­log­i­cal con­cerns using his idio­syn­cratic cock­tail of humor and wit. The artist’s recent work has evolved from pho­tog­ra­phy to inno­v­a­tive sculp­ture and instal­la­tion that is intended to fly in the face of aes­thetic con­ven­tion, test­ing the emo­tional lim­its of both the artist and the viewer. Linares jux­ta­poses mate­ri­als to reveal tensions—between the nat­ural and the man-made, the city and sub­ur­bia, class and culture—creating a record of our desires, obses­sions, and excesses. Twentieth-century art move­ments such as Assem­blage, Sur­re­al­ism, and Arte Povera are revis­ited and updated by the artist high­light­ing his capac­ity to express humor, poetry, and great­ness through hum­ble means.

The exhi­bi­tion fea­tures an assort­ment of word play and sub­ver­sion. Fre­quently touch­ing on human val­ues and ideal, Linares enter­tains the viewer in both Par­tial Truth, 2009 and The look-a-like art, 2008 using lan­guage and imagery of an all-pervasive con­sumer cul­ture he grew up in, his works dis­tort and mutate the famil­iar into the humor­ous. The place­ment of humor mag­ni­fies the nar­ra­tive aspect of his often-mischievous sub­ject while the use of recy­cled objects and con­cepts brings to the fore, the impor­tance of mak­ing the most of pre­ex­is­tent resources. Linares’ art­works rarely inspire mod­er­ate responses, and this is one sig­nal of the impor­tance of his achievement.
Focus­ing on some of the most unex­pected objects as mod­els for his work, Linares’ eschews typ­i­cal stan­dards of high art, and zeroes in rather pre­cisely on the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties of hier­ar­chies and value sys­tems. Much of his art has a deliri­ous, hal­lu­ci­na­tory air, as if the artist were try­ing to tran­scend both the naïveté of the ready-made and the sophis­ti­ca­tion of the art world. Linares has suc­cess­fully cre­ated his own brand of appro­pri­a­tion and aes­thetic wit, mak­ing him not only an inno­v­a­tive impre­sario of the art object, but also an explorer of clichéd roles and social disguises.

His approach illus­trates the char­ac­ter­is­tic strengths—and, at times, the prin­ci­pal weakness—of arts tra­di­tions. In his work, Linares does some­thing riskier and more para­dox­i­cal, enter­ing the spirit of per­cep­tion as if to know it from the inside. He retains some­thing youth­ful yet know­ing. Cru­cially it is this swirling inner con­tra­dic­tion that visu­ally shows how suc­cess­ful his work is at deal­ing with the human con­di­tion. Con­tra­dic­tion is Linares’ way of show­ing the unavail­abil­ity of cer­tainty about any­thing, specif­i­cally the human rela­tion­ships. The result is an art stripped bare, and with an over­ture so bold and rich, it is hard not to be lured in.