The Flaneur as Botanist
Raul Zamudio
Miguel Angel Rios’ recent three-channel DVD piece titled, Ni me busques….No me encuentras (Do not search for me….You will not find me) (2002), is located in an interesting juncture in the artist’s trajectory. A protean path that began with painting, sculpture, drawing and works on paper which then morphed into something that seem to bring them all together: maps made from corrugated cardboard, canvas, pigment and occasionally other elements that vacillate between two and three dimensional wall pieces. The DVD piece shares certain formal and conceptual affinities with the maps, yet expand his previous work into a multiplicity of directions.
Rios’ maps were based on Old World geographical representations of the New World. His map pieces are reconfigurations of European cartographies of the continents across the Atlantic that were made in the 16th and 17th centuries. Rios’ commentary on maps as cultural constructs that subsequently expose them as ideologically inscribed, went even farther by implying what a famous philosopher had said about nature: "that nature is everything but natural." One can see the ideology of cartography in the history of geographical representation itself: the Medieval Christian Ebstorf map also known as the navel of the world shows, for instance, the holy city of Jerusalem in the middle and the rest of the known world in relation to it; another example is an 18th century Japanese map that shows Japan in the center while Europe, Africa and the Americas are at the periphery. This impulse, by the way, is not something only found in antiquity. If one juxtaposes the 1950s United Nations map of the world with a more recent version, one is surprised by the geographical revisions of the latter that betray the ideological subtext of the former. This phenomenon where nations and cultures see their cartographic centrality as a given has been named the Omphalos syndrome.
Ni me busques ….No me encuentras continues investigating the culturally constructed nature of space and its representation and a host of other themes as well. The three projections that make up Ni me busques….No me encuentras were all shot in the desert region of San Luis Potosi, Mexico and transform the landscape into an animistic map. Animistic in that everything in the wide, panorama of flora and fauna under a bright, Mexican sun exudes an aura that is concomitantly real as it is artificial. The amorphously constructed narrative concerns the artist’s search for the sacred, indigenous cactus otherwise known as peyote, in the wilds of Mexico. In a whole different spin on the flanuer not as cosmopolitan but as botanist, the artist is confronted by a plethora of epistemological idiosyncrasies of a philosophical nature. A house is split down the middle, a band of folk musicians parade in single file and play what sounds like a funeral march, and the Doppler effect of a train that is heard but never seen are just some the incongruities that poetically appear in the work. Yet these apparitions that Rios presents us hinge on, and explicate the social nature of perception. For the viewer’s relation to the work is exceedingly corporeal; there is an interfacing with the geography via the work’s encompassing quality that subsumes the viewer and shifts her/his experience from the purely optical to the phenomenological. This occurs with the immediacy of the video’s real-time simulation and through the fragmentary and spatially destabilizing effects of multi-channel projection. Its as if we are watching events in the piece that are simultaneously filtered through historical visual apparatuses as well as new forms of visual consumption. These anachronistic influences run the gamut from the camera obscura, the panorama, the stereoscope and the zootrope, to contemporary virtual space. Yet at the sake of sounding contradictory if not at least paradoxical, it is Nature in its pristine state that engenders the feeling of artifice in the DVD piece, subsequently creating a sublime affect. The return of the real? Indeed.
