The Hours
Sebasti�n L�pez
"The Hours" is a reading of the Daros-Latinamerica Collection seen from the perspective of time. It enables us to traverse different levels, spaces and times of varying intensity, with the mornings, siestas, afternoons and evenings that we find in the production of contemporary Latin American artists.
Like every kind of thematic organization, this way of grouping works may give the impression of being the only one possible. However, works of art cannot easily be reduced to only one or two readings; they allow us to enter them from different perspectives and to raise other questions. Here we have chosen the temporal perspective because it reveals some of their most significant traits and permits us to isolate them within a historical moment in the production of Latin American art. Many of the works reflect the social and political circumstances of particular countries or regions. Others deal with the past and the way in which it still plays a role in the present. The shift of emphasis from "contemporary art" to "contemporary Latin America" in the subtitle of the exhibition is intended to emphasise this fact.
We have chosen the oeuvre of the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges as a "sound-box" to distinguish different ideas of time. Time, in Borges view, is alteration and disintegration, and it percolates the interstices of whatever object and circumstance it encounters. Borges speaks of uprooting and exile as a dimension of time, an important notion that has not received much attention to date. He has established concepts and models of analysis, which for more than forty years have been fundamental for an understanding of how artistic production constructs itself, defines and demarcates the agents of the artistic fact and pinpoints the most salient aspects of the way in which a work is constructed.
Among the artists of "The Hours" there is a world of affinities with the universe of Borges. Let us take the example of photographer Vik Muniz, whose I Am What I Read #2 establishes that regime of the book by which the image is rethought. But he also chooses as the theme of his works a series of images that have populated books of modern art and the history of photography, only to transform them astutely in order to make them say something new, not about their history, but about their relevance for the present. His Che, based on the famous photograph by the late Alberto Korda, tells us more about Cuba today than many chronicles do and fixes the status of the image of Che Guevara in contemporary society.
Textuality is present in a different way in the work of Gonzalo Díaz, who translates it into an installation to reveal it in its purest essence. Díaz emerges from the exercise having shown us the most profound secrets of the text. And Díaz allows the motions of the body and the forms of the letters in which the text is materialized as a physical object to mark a time, as in Al calor del pensamiento (In the Heat of Thought), in which the rhythms of the appearance and disappearance of the letters of a text by Novalis emphasize the importance of things and the meaning of artistic creation.
Some artists have converted the object into a rich and meaningful source to reveal found times. Liliana Porter has taken it as a source of narratives in the film For You/Para Usted, articulating memory and object in a way that underlines with Borgesian tones the world of everyday objects. Darío Escobar focuses on consumer objects to emphasize their secret connections with religion, power and corporate propaganda. Surprising, ironical and incisive, his objects embody a critical vision of religious tradition in Guatemala. Nadín Ospina concentrates on the pre-Columbian object to elaborate a discourse on how history distinguishes between genuine and fake. His works question the external and internal perception of what is specifically Latin American and propose the idea of the inevitable hybridization of every culture. Nicola Costatino’s dresses, handbags and shoes display a voluntary gender-bending in which the body is absence and presence, caught between the private and the public.
Los Carpinteros have created a new world of objects, crossing them with one another, but their references, the worlds that they inhabit conceptually, go beyond them. An example of this is Downtown, in which the modernist illusions of tropical architecture are translated as an impressive series of building-furniture. María Fernanda Cardoso’s work is of a different kind: after having worked with the world of nature and its real species, Cardoso incorporates in her work the historical memory of the continent, reorganizing it into abject and precious objects.
The works in which the body is disclosed as presence have already led to revealing works in Latin America such as those of Alberto Greco, Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, multiplying the view of the body in which the viewer participates and ends up becoming a part of the work. Ernesto Neto has created a family, his Humanóides (Humanoids). Consisting of the figures of men, women and children, the humanoid family is designed for use on one’s own body. If the work is presented as a game, the sensuality that it reveals through its use transforms the experience into an act of opening and discovery. Lázaro Saavedra sets up this relation right from the title itself: El espectador y la obra (The Spectator and the Work). If the work of art is perceived in a horizontal relation, as in painting, Saavedra hangs a series of menacing knives from the ceiling, directly above the heads of the visitors, and puts pointed nails on the floor. The relation of possible danger introduces an experience in which the vulnerability of the spectators is contrasted with how they have learned to behave in exhibitions of art. In the case of Santiago Sierra, the body is the commoditised body, involved in a relation of buying and selling. He throws this brutal reality that we know in the face of the art world, without metaphors, without ostentation, with the same direct matter-of-factness that capitalism has used.
Various women artists in Central America are carrying out work in which the conditions of women and women’s bodies are brought into relief in a critical way while at the same time making use of the body to mark the changing conditions of the society and culture of the region. Priscilla Monge is undoubtedly one of the most outstanding. Using objects and videos, but without adopting a traditionally feminist stance, she dismantles the latent positions which allow the situation of women in her country to continue to oscillate between the beauty of cosmetics and the ugliness of domestic violence, as in Lección no. 1: Lección de maquillaje (Lesson no. 1: Make-up Lesson).
Visual Arts of Contemporary Latin America, runs October 5th through January 15th, 2006 at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.
