THE REVOLUTION MUST BE MADE LITTLE BY LITTLE | part 1: Difference and Repetition

05/08/2012 to 06/23/2012

Carlos Zílio
Felix Gmelin
Haris Epaminonda
Héctor Zamora
Lisa Tan
Mabe Bethônico

(An Exhibition in Four Stages)

In his User’s Guide to Détournement, Guy Debord argues that one of the most efficient strategies for social insubordination is the appropriation, or détournement, of extraneous phrases and concepts for revolutionary purposes. Debord identified various types of détournements, among them the minor détournement, in which appropriate words or phrases possess no importance of their own, acquiring it, instead, by virtue of the new context in which they are used, and especially the deceptive détournement, in which the appropriate concept is intrinsically meaningful but takes on a different dimension and a value according to the new context into which it flows. The phrase that lends its name to the exhibition evidently belongs to the latter type: taken from a recent interview with [Brazilian architect] Paulo Mendes da Rocha, in its original context it referred to the need for a revolution in the methodologies of civil construction and, metonymically speaking, in cities and in society as a whole. Within the new context, the phrase retains its fascination while taking on other meanings pointing, first of all, to an art gallery’s constant need for transforming itself, for keeping in touch with the ongoing changes in artistic production and (one might also speak here of metonymy, or even of premonition) of society itself. Evidently, the greater and more prestigious the gallery’s history, the more pressing and arduous such a task becomes…

The architect says that revolution must be made little by little. Initially organized in smaller and more conceptually cohesive groups, then finally rearranged according to other criteria in the final reprise, the works gathered here indeed suggest a prolonged revolution, of the sort that does not make it into the history books, perhaps not even into the art history books, for the simple reason that they do not begin or end – they merely happen. And, in fact, the choice of subject matter for the first three stages of the exhibition responds precisely to the desire to regard a single universe from several distinct albeit complementary perspectives. It is also no accident that the majority of the works might fit perfectly into yet another one of these curatorial landmarks: the revolution is magmatic, fluid, like a river that is never the same and that, nonetheless, never changes. On the other hand, the decision to divide the exhibition into stages responds to a desire to disengage from convention, such as the one that dictates, to a gallery, the need to exhibit only “its” own artists, or of not repeating the same work in two consecutive exhibitions, or even of not attempting to construct a narrative that dares to expand beyond the few weeks’ duration of a conventional show. Finally, to disengage from preconceptions that might prevent the revolution from taking place, the first of which, naturally, is the convention that a revolution must be swift, surprising and violent when, in fact, it ought to happen incrementally, taking whatever time may be necessary time in order to occupy and change the world while no one is looking.

part 1. Difference and Repetition

Before deciding definitely that the title of the first stage of A revolução tem que ser feita pouco a pouco [The Revolution Must Be Made Little by Little] would be Diferença e repetição [Difference and Repetition], a quite extensive albeit relatively simple search was carried out to verify whether, in fact, there had been other exhibitions with the same title in recent years. Naturally, there were, the last of them having been held only a few months ago, when preparations for the present show were already well underway and, to all intents and purposes, the title had already been decided upon. In this particular event the coincidence (which, in other cases, might have been unfortunate), the fact wound up validating the decision to reflect upon the problem and, more specifically, about the manner in which the idea of repetition which is, nevertheless, always different, constitutes a recurring subject and, in spite of this, is always open to new interpretations and readings, within the field of art and, more generally, within that of contemporary culture. Naturally, the most direct reference is to the book by Gilles Deleuze whence the title was (in this and in other cases) détourned, although another, no less important allusion is made to Pierre Menard, a character in a short story by Borges whose most astonishing enterprise was not that of rewriting two chapters (and part of a third) of Don Quijote, but of writing passages of a book utterly different from the one written by Cervantes, in spite of the fact that the two were exactly identical, line by line and word for word. Equally as pertinent, and in a much closer manner to what is stated by Deleuze himself, it might be argued that, in this, Menard gave proof of no particular ability given that, it is quite simply impossible to remake anything. The more alike, the more distinctly different two versions of a given work, a given image or (it may be worth considering) a given idea will be.

Within the specific field of artistic output during the last few decades, these problems have remained in the order of the day, to the point that they constitute the central subject of the work of several artists, from appropriationists who may already be considered “historical” (such as Elaine Sturtevant and Sherrie Levine) to more recent exponents for whom the decision to repeat – albeit with inevitable differences – becomes a political act (Sandra Gamarra), a near-philosophical method of study and reflection (Roni Horn) or a passionate tribute (Jonathan Monk). On the other hand, to the artists included in this exhibition, the question is not fundamental, and it is precisely this consideration that eventually justifies the bringing together of their works, somehow underscoring how much – by pointing out both difference and repetition – of what we do emphasizes the existence of relationships. This notion is evidently central to the work of Lisa Tan, a series of portraits of book “couples”, fruit of the fusion of the artist’s own library with that of her partner. In some cases, the editions are the same, the pair is identical, in others, small or great disparities suggest that any relationship is born from the sum of differences and resemblances, and with the challenge of surviving both. The search for a relationship is also what moves the O Colecionador [The Collector] project by Mabe Bethônico, in which the artist gives in to a temptation (or mania) for taxonomy, compulsively accumulating newspaper clippings with similar albeit never completely identical images, successively classified according to extremely precise typologies, as though this archival fury might help it – and us – to understand the world. A world from which the images of Haris Epaminonda brings us sparse fragments: in making Polaroid camera reproductions of pictures originally shot in the 1950s, the Cypriot artist composes an elegy to time past even as he conducts to its extreme the debate on the impossibility of reproducing anything in different contexts and periods. Héctor Zamora’s swarm of Zeppelins (which had previously invaded Venice in 2009) explores other implications for the concept of repetition by being not only the result of the serialization of a form but a work that aspired to become an urban legend – that is, to be repeated differently each time, until it completely lost all control over itself and became genuinely public. Analogously, the power of the nails drawn by Carlos Zílio in the late 1970s for a series of silk screens (again, repetition, here in the guise of “technical reproduction”…) lies in serialization – in this instance evidently charged with the political messages and metaphors that marked the country’s best work of that period, in a tacit yet powerful invitation to insurrection. The same invitation that animated Gert Conradt’s 1968 film, in which film school students run through Berlin bearing a red flag. Twenty-five years later, in filming an almost identical sequence on video with his students and projecting the two side by side, Felix Gmelin pays tribute to his father, one of the students/actors in the original video, but also points out the fact that, à la Menard, “my film is about something completely different [from Conradt’s original], in spite of the fact that I repeat the same actions”. In the artist’s words, and in a manner surprisingly pertinent to the scope of this exhibition, Gmelin suggests that the principal difference the present day and the time in which his father and Conradt made the original film is that they “were convinced that revolution was the method that would succeed in changing the world”.

- Jacopo Crivelli Visconti

28 de abril – agosto, 2012

Trienal Poli/grafica de San Juan: América Latina y el Caribe.
Programa de Artes Plasticas del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña

TRASFONDO HISTÓRICO

En el 2004, la Bienal de San Juan del Grabado Latinoamericano y del Caribe (1970-2001), el primer y más antiguo encuentro de las artes gráficas latinoamericanas, se convirtió en la Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan: América Latina y el Caribe. Esta transformación surgió de la necesidad de otorgar un espacio de suma relevancia a las eventualidades de la gráfica contemporánea. La Trienal expande el espectro de la gráfica desde el grabado tradicional a un concepto más amplio de arte poligráfico, que incluye todo tipo de medios y lenguajes artísticos. La Ley Núm. 512 del año 2004 designa a la Trienal como actividad de carácter oficial del Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico, dirigido por el Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, y coordinado por su Programa de Artes Plásticas.

La Trienal es un acontecimiento artístico de carácter internacional mediante el cual se promueven las prácticas experimentales del arte contemporáneo, con énfasis en el grabado y sus múltiples manifestaciones. Este magno evento permite recibir en San Juan el arte experimental más relevante internacionalmente, y proyecta hacia el mundo, desde una plataforma sofisticada, la producción de artistas puertorriqueños de vanguardia. Cada edición de la Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan propone un enfoque único sobre la gráfica y estimula la combinación de la gráfica tradicional y contemporánea, por un lado, y la tecnología en la práctica artística actual, por otro.

Antes de la fundación de la Trienal en el 2004, no existía otra iniciativa de este tipo en el ámbito continental. En el 2005, la Trienal ganó el Gran Premio de la XXVI Bienal de Artes Gráficas de Ljubljana, Eslovenia. Además, el innovador concepto de la Trienal ha contribuido a convertirla en un evento paradigmático para otras bienales. La Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan: América Latina y el Caribe es el evento de las artes en que, desde Puerto Rico, se prestigia, lo latinoamericano, lo caribeño y lo universal.

La misión de la Trienal es la de ofrecer en San Juan un evento de arte contemporáneo, significativo para la comunidad artística nacional e internacional, que celebre y motive la excelencia, la creatividad, la diversidad, la participación, y el debate, y que realce el perfil de Puerto Rico como centro de turismo cultural. Su visión es convertir a Puerto Rico en un dinámico puente entre artistas y gentes del Caribe, y la comunidad internacional.

MISIÓN

Establecer y mantener en San Juan un evento de arte contemporáneo, significativo para la comunidad artística nacional e internacional, que celebre y motive la excelencia, la creatividad, la diversidad, la participación y el debate y que realce el perfil de Puerto Rico como centro de turismo cultural.

VISIÓN

Convertir a Puerto Rico en un dinámico puente entre artistas y gentes del Caribe, América Latina y los Estados Unidos.

OBJETIVOS

Situar a Puerto Rico dentro de la escena cultural internacional en función de un modelo innovador más amplio de interacción cultural entre las Américas.
Sincronizar esfuerzos de acción y medios interagenciales para incrementar el volumen de asistencia al evento.
Proveer una plataforma de encuentro e intercambio entre la comunidad artística puertorriqueña y sus congéneres latinoamericanos y latino-estadounidenses.
Promover la experimentación artística con los medios gráficos y la imagen reproducible.
Incentivar el debate intelectual en Puerto Rico.
Incorporar a Puerto Rico dentro del circuito de turismo cultural.

DOWNLOADS:Pedro Reyes Rompecabezas

LABOR estrena nueva sede y reabre sus puertas con una exposición individual de Pedro Reyes (1972). Rompecabezas reúne una serie de trabajos en donde la arquitectura de las estructuras narrativas se combinan con metodologías antropológicas de clasificación.

Entre las piezas en exhibición se encuentra Los Mutantes, un políptico que se compone de 170 láminas con imágenes de mitologías antiguas y modernas. A semejanza de una tabla periódica, el origen de los mitos está organizado por un eje en el que los animales y los objetos se combinan con los humanos en personajes antropomórficos (masculinos y femeninos) resultando en una estructura racional para los productos irracionales que surgen del imaginario humano.

Mano-sillas es un nuevo desarrollo dentro de la conjugación de escultura y diseño que Reyes exploró en el pasado. Cada par consiste en una mano izquierda y una derecha con dedos articulados que permite al usuario manipular los gestos para así explorar las configuraciones del lenguaje no verbal.

La presencia del diseño como estructura narrativa la volvemos a encontrar en Museum Of Hypothetical Lifetimes, la maqueta de un museo en cuya planta arquitectónica se incluyen galerías y corredores que corresponden a diversos momentos de la vida de una persona. En esta actividad el participante puede elegir objetos en miniatura con diversos significados los cuales coloca en habitaciones que van desde la cuna hasta la muerte. La escuela, el trabajo, las relaciones se convierten en salas temáticas que serán ilustradas por los objetos elegidos, así el participante curará una exposición, a la vez prospectiva y retrospectiva de su propia existencia.

Dentro de una nueva serie de retratos escultóricos se encuentra la pieza Pico della Mirandola, basada en un pasaje del filósofo italiano renacentista quien en “Oración por la dignidad del hombre” (1486) enuncia el concepto de hombre como “un ser sin función determinada, inconcluso, que debe trabajar en su autorrealización para convertirse en un ángel o en un demonio”. Esta escultura realizada en piedra volcánica consiste en un núcleo de lava con perforaciones en las que se pueden insertar otras piezas de piedra representando ojos, narices, pelo, bocas, etc. La escultura entonces, se convierte en una especie de rompecabezas que continuamente cambia de forma dependiendo de las diversas interacciones con el público.

Por último en una gran repisa fijada a una de las paredes de la galería encontramos una serie de telas titulada “Como perderle el miedo a la Pintura”. Cada una de las veinte imágenes presentadas han sido objeto de distintas operaciones. Reyes ha enfrentado a la pintura con sus propios medios tratando a estas telas como “esculturas planas”. De forma literal, la estatua ha sido desprovista de una de sus dimensiones solo para recobrar su profundidad en las posibles permutaciones de su conjunto bidimensional. Una analogía similar a la frase que Luis Cardoza y Aragón usa en Pintura contemporánea de México (1950) para describir la critica del arte: “La Venus de Milo sosteniendo la cabeza de la Victoria de Samotracia en sus manos”.

Erick Beltrán and Victoria Noorthoorn at Hunter College
Hunter College

Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Visiting Artists and Critics Talk:
The Biennial Reconsidered
Erick Beltrán and Victoria Noorthoorn speak on the 11th Biennale de Lyon
latinamericanartathunter.org

Wednesday March 28, 2012, 6:30pm
695 Park Avenue, 15th floor of Hunter North Building, Hunter College
RSVP at latinam@hunter.cuny.edu

How can a biennial offer artists a remarkably open and compelling field in which to produce? Is it possible for such a highly administered exhibition structure as a biennial to paradoxically present a framework for unhindered innovation? Victoria Noorthoorn, the curator of the 11th Lyon Biennial, and the artist Erick Beltrán will engage with these and other questions as they describe their experiences working together on this past year’s biennial, entitled A Terrible Beauty Is Born.

Erick Beltrán is an artist living and working in Barcelona. He received a BFA from the Universidad Áutonoma de México, Mexico City, in 1997. His work was recently included in SITE Santa Fe’s Seventh International Biennial, in Democracy in America organized by Creative Time, and in Philagrafika: The Graphic Unconscious.

Victoria Noorthoorn is an independent curator based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She received an MA in Art History from the University of Buenos Aires, and an MA in Curatorial Studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in New York. Among other projects, she has co-curated the 41 Salón Nacional de Artistas, in Cali, Colombia, the 7th Bienal do Mercosul, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and a retrospective of Marta Minujín at Malba.

Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Visiting Artists and Critics program brings key figures from Latin American to Hunter College to address topics in contemporary art and scholarship through talks with students and the New York community. In addition to this forum, Cisneros Visiting Artists and Critics conduct studio visits and seminar discussions with Hunter MFA and MA students during their residency.

Campus map
www.hunter.cuny.edu/visitorscenter/68th-street-campus-map

For more information about the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Visiting Artists and Critics Program at Hunter College, please go to: www.latinamericanartathunter.org

The Challenger’s Report
10 February 2012 – 15 April 2012

Opening Times
Wed-Sun 12-6pm or by appointment

The Challenger’s Report is the first UK solo exhibition by Argentinian artist Irene Kopelman, which looks at how relationships to landscape and the natural world are culturally conditioned and subject to change.

Kopelman’s work is rooted in drawing in situ and guided by laboured processes of copying and re-production which reveal a fascination with landscape and the act of looking. Borrowing patterns from nature or techniques of observation and classification from the history of science, her drawing, painting and sculpture is characterised by imperfections that foreground the conditions (cramped, dusty, rainy, etc.) of its making. Inspired by the expeditions of renowned explorers such as Ernest Shackleton, her work is founded upon empirical research carried out in the field or in naturalist archives and collections.

The Challenger’s Report centres on how acts of looking are mediated by culture, invention or circumstance. The title refers to the Challenger expedition of 1872-76, the discoveries of which laid the foundations of modern oceanography. The exhibition includes a newly commissioned series of large-scale paintings of microfossils brought back from the Antarctic plate following Robert Scott’s ill-fated Terra Nova expedition of 1910, and now held at the Natural History Museum in London. These are presented alongside La morfologia del paisaje determina sus vistas (The Morphology of the Landscape Determines its Views, 2011) – an installation composed of drawings and a fired clay bas relief of canyons in Southern Brazil – and a hand-made replica of a graphic telescope, an early 19th century optical instrument. Kopelman has worked with outdated curiosities such as this for a number of years, keen to rediscover how they gave rise to particular conventions of seeing and ways of interpreting the natural world.

The exhibition is accompanied by a series of events and workshops taking place at Gasworks and at the Natural History Museum, London.

Contre-Dépouille (Undercut)
backside view
2012
zebra hide stretched on canvas frame, 135 x 120 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Sies+Höke, Düsseldorf
Photography Achim Kukulies, Düsseldorf

Undercuts
Etienne Chambaud
03.03 – 07.04.2012

The exhibition Undercuts is set up between two prototypes of preservation of the motif, two models of writing “the origin”, two monuments dedicated to the genealogy of the figures, two scenes of classification and taxonomy, two places shaping the observation: the zoo and the museum. In this space, the exhibition inserts two rhetorical figures, two settings dedicated to a certain optical technology: the mask and the portrait.

The series entitled Contre-Dépouilles (Undercuts) consists of a collection of animal skins stretched over portrait format frames, so that the visible side of the picture is the inside of the animal’s hide. The title refers as much to the range of craftsmanship and technical know-how required when exhibiting a hide (the art of hunting, taxidermy, tanning) as it does to the vocabulary of classical sculpture, in which an element in the round is called “undercut” when it requires the assembly of multiple casts, thus concealing a series of cuts in the image of its whole. The series includes a snakeskin inside out on a piece of museum furniture, a rope to keep the public back. The image of the threshold that the inverted snake forms is thus displayed indefinitely for the gaze that will try to understand the motive, that being either instrumental use or decorative function.

The inversion, of which the Contre-Dépouilles (Undercuts) is a product, is not to be distinguished from the skilled craftsmanship that preceded it, but it delimits a reverse to the technique of preserving the motif, which this know-how shows. The “Contre-Dépouilles (Undercuts)”, by revealing what is usually hidden from view, and depriving the eye of the motif of the animal skins (zebra markings, stripes, spots and rosettes) while aligning them to the setting that the museum provides (the genre of portraiture, the rope to keep the public back) implants in the exhibition the issue of the figure. A figure of which nothing allows its existence to be linked to an origin, a figure that has no memory of anything other than that of the succession of craftsmen who distance it from its original appearance, a figure from which any issue of traceability is removed, a figure that ceases to be the combination of its reference points but invents itself at the point of their exclusion. The identity of this figure, which would be a matter of reconstructing if we wanted to draw up its “natural history”, exhausts itself in the multiplicity of its potential identifications, producing a phantom identity. Here a Contre-Dépouille (Undercut) is a challenge to the observation: to retrace the course of the temporary identities, amassed in that of which it consisted, seizing the layers of the deposited transient meanings that have accumulated there. It embeds a spectral figure in the exhibition, a specular image living in an uncertain space, operating alternately by stripping bare, recovery, and processes of exclusion.

Suspended in the centre of the exhibition space, the piece entitled Soleil Inscrit (Inscribed Sun) presents itself in the form of a spherical lamp. Made of terracotta, the lamp, perfectly opaque, is lit but produces no light, so it would be necessary to break it in order to find its function. Coming from the “fire arts”, it pinpoints a panoramic viewpoint in the exhibition space from which to view the landscape of the exhibition, suspending from it an observation that, detached, is focused on the totality of the space. In that, this “sun” is inscribed as they say, in Euclidean geometry, of an angle inscribed in a circle, i.e. integrated into a figure that includes it. From the panoptic observation that this lamp suggests, we could wait for it to come and throw a favourable light on the explanation. But its opacity materialises, however, where the exhibition slips away: not in the sense when revealed, it would be deciphered as a figure covering its genesis, but precisely in the sense when it rejects access to the place from which it would be a matter of looking, but also at the point from which one should interpret and understand. The lamp then becomes the figure of inscription of a blind spot in the exhibition, it visually obliterates the surrounding pictures, it acts as a mask that crosses the panorama of the exhibition by rendering it blind. This mask, like an anti-portrait, faceless, inscribes a deletion in the representation device, so as to panic it by bringing it to its epitome: less by transgressing its limits and rules than by taking them to excess in order to disfigure the exhibition.

The act that the Undercuts exhibition intends to accomplish is the isolation of a lone, ghostly figure, appeared between two “pocket” reversals: that of the animal nature, folded back over the picture (Contre-Dépouilles (Undercuts)), and that of the retroverted gaze on its other monstrous one, the mask (Soleil Inscrit (Inscribed Sun)). We could say that this single figure, this negative representation, is that which similarly haunts the zoo and the museum, and that these two tools of production and preservation of permanency are invented by working to forget this haunting. The spaces defined by the enclosure that are the zoo and the museum, by making two symbolic motifs of exteriority and intentionality out of the animal and the artist, present themselves both as a scene of origins, where the expression of sources is addressed to the public, and a detached place where the spectator can repeat an inaugural movement, to make the experience of a image that is presented as primitive, original. From this interstice that the zoo and the museum work to enclose, the exhibition Undercuts undertakes to impress a clean cut in the game of referential identities that traditionally links the image with its origins, to separate the objects from their identities, to address a lone figure rather than reducing it to a motif shared by all, to empty the interpretive frame in order to make it a fundamentally inscribed place: to be written, that is to say absolutely open.

This exhibition is co-produced with Anna Lena and the Bugada & Cargnel (Paris) and Sies+Höke (Düsseldorf) galleries.

Open Air. The New Pleinairisme
15 March – 25 June 2012

Creating and working out of doors! This method has existed for a very long time, but what does the concept “plein air” mean for artists today? Directly depicting what one sees, working in the midst of nature or revisiting and reinterpreting the concept in a contemporary context? The wide range of strategies found in these drawings, watercolours, collages, paintings, texts, videos, photographs and installations demonstrate the diversity of artistic practices around these ideas today.

Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec
Parc des Champs-de-Batailles
Borough of La Cité-Limoilou / Downtown
Québec, QC