(new scenarios
of custom)
By Clara Astiasarán.
“Architecture is repressed by custom,
styles are a lie”.
Le Corbusier
Art history, like science, presumes in it´s beginnings of a path through the most ‘solid’ of it´s manifestations: architecture. Stated as infinity truth, we insist that the history of humanity is contained in each of it´s edifications: cultural, religious, political, social and economic symbols translated to the perdurability of stone, concrete, wood, iron or marble. What Octavio Paz masterfully resumed in ¨architecture is the witness less venal in history.¨ is not more than an empowerment of this to narrate. Seen from a different perspective, art history forks from a set path and architecture stayed with flagrant autonomy in regards to itself. In spite of this, they did not stop sharing responsibilities in the human aesthetic compendium.
Faraway brother style is a project by artist Walterio Iraheta (El Salvador, 1968), where he takes as conceptual reference the authority of architectural speech in the construction of an ideal social-esthetic of El Salvador in the past decades; he (re)takes the path set about by architecture as central language for art routed from a ‘secondary’ formality (no lesser sense of value, but for arriving in a second lap) like photography. In this work, the ironic use of a paraphrase of the tittles of architectural publications are suggested with the term ¨style¨ as safeguard of a typology and/or of a recurring mode, while appealing to ‘faraway brother’ (´hermano lejano´ in Spanish)in reference to a crucial social issue from El Salvador´s contemporary history: the immigration process. El estilo del hermano lejano – an almost literal translation- gathers a series of 10 photographs of Salvadorian homes built with family remittances, which is the primary source of the country’s economy1 and that Iraheta recovers in a work of anthropological cut, understood in it´s most holistic sense.
We would have to return to the social-economical and political context, in which the fragmentation of the Salvadorian society takes place, and not only resume it to the era of the civil war, between 1980-19922, but to see it since 1970 and as it persist to date. A continued migration that happens before, during and after the armed conflict and that turned El Salvador into one of the countries with the higher migration index of the region. A process that not only did it provoke an enormous uprooting in the restoration of the most ancestral practices of the indigenous people, or of colonial customs; but it also forced to forget the modern evolution process and the entering of a postindustrial era without development, postmodern era without the fair foundations of the modern world and into a postwar almost as dark as war itself. 3
¨ The rootless man, torn from his frame, his medium, his country, suffers at first, for it is more pleasant to live amongst your own. However, he can take advantage of his experience. He learns how to stop mistaking the real from the ideal, culture with nature. But if the displaced man manages to overcome the resentment born from despise or from the hostility of his hosts, he discovers curiosity and learns tolerance. His presence amongst the ¨autochthonous¨ forms an uprooted effect: by perturbing his customs, by disconcerting through his behavior and judgment, it may help some of them to enter in this same route of detachment to the convenient, a route of interrogation and amazement.¨ 4
So, as a principle of christian root, this thought presumes the crystallization of desire through sacrifice, but contradictorily the exhibitionism of that desire. Due to this, the sacrifice of the faraway brother has to be equipped with the varnish of success stories, those that feed the pseudo Christianity of the ‘self help’ manuals in accordance to the child prodigy. In the words of the constant apostate that once was Niestsche: ¨in architecture, the pride of man, his triumph over gravitation, his will for power, assumes an invisible form¨: what other monument can explain better the Salvadorian exile than it´s own house? 5
This process of selection and classification that Iraheta uses, is characterized by the displacement, from a sculptural attitude and an object point of view that leads to a hydration point in the rhetorical of (post)filmic; it is precise to remember that the artist has defined his field of obsessions from different angles of the Salvadorian contemporary history and in many occasions by using the domestic territory as an allegory to a false self portrait, in a documentary strategy. He manifests an intense concern for the project and the process, as well as a singular predilection for the theatrical world in regards to representation; so his work conflicts in an idea of truth (given in ‘the documents of what is real’ and an idea of the fatuous given in the scenarios). As a result the definition of ‘new scenarios of custom’ refers to farce as a way of life and to ‘non-style architectural’ (suggested by Le Corbusier) as an inherited practice. The photographs of ‘this sculptures’ may be presented as modular disposition or in remembrance to the context itself; majestic houses built in towns whose names are Citalá, Ilobasco or Intipuca can´t be more than a product of that permanent joke that is the tenacious central american tropic.
This ‘architectures’ are at the same time allegories of houses that are ‘non-habitable’, but not so much in the modern treason of pragmatism, but due to the sense of usurping with crude and domestic exercises, the sacrum space of contemplation. Those visions (variable) of the houses, of the architecture, of the simulated culture (explicit in the climatic and installation solutions of cold countries and postindustrial cities) become an emblem of a country that tilts between rationalism and game. From Baudrillard´s interpretation, that hyper real arises from the interaction between the real, the social and the symbolic, so the simulation ends replacing the real; assisting a hyperbole of the fateful, where paths of baroque, kitsch, indigenous and necessity intersect: more than displaced architectures, they are architectures of necessity, one that is founded in legitimating as an exercise of visibility and self acknowledgment.
The taste for artificiality, the fragmentary conception of the space of ‘representation’, the constant aesthetic of bricolage (in the anthropological and post-critical sense of the term) they are the main dish in a series of photographs. In the houses you can see the defective tensed in relation with the idea of perfection, the unfinished as a style form. But they also immediately refer to the drive to assemble and immediately disassemble a reality or a scene. In one of the cases it relates to a harsh combat of mannerism, a stroke of luck with overexposure of power in ornaments (scrollwork), in the mixture of an exuberant, tropical and chaotic architectural weave. It is poverty with a concrete an iron spirit.
Kryptonite by Clara Astiazaran.
- My friend Edu … asks me, “Does Superman need to eat?”
- Well, no, not really. His body
feeds off solar energy and that is enough for him.... In the comic book Peace on Earth this is mentioned, since
Clark, studying the problem of hunger on Earth, feels sorry for them and says
that since he doesn’t need to eat hi will never know the pain of hunger.
(Taken from
http://supermanjaviolivares.iespana.es/supermanjaviolivares/CURIOSIDADES.htm)
At the end
of Kill Bill 2 – Quentin Tarantino’s masterpiece – David Carradine (Bill)
performs a long monologue[i]
about the duality of Superman/Clark Kent, inverting the alter ego relationship
between the hero and the man. It is a
commentary that affirms the impossibility of avoiding or changing the destiny
that awaits each person: Beatrix Kiddo[ii]
was born an assassin, just as Superman was born being himself. This monologue, which the most well-read
critics have associated with an old essay by Jules Feiffer[iii],
leads one to a rereading of Salvadoran artist Waterio Iraheta’s Kriptonita (“Kryptonite”), in an
exercise of cultural transvestitism where all imposition – beneficial or not –
constantly acquires a level of fatality.
The
non-western world is bombarded daily – in their interactions with the media –
with visual images that obliterate their esthetic vision. However, art takes this effect and turns it
into counter-discourse when it subverts and appropriates images from the mass
media. It is in this vane that the
Superman character becomes the leitmotiv of Iraheta’s visual essay – the same
hero that was used as an instrument of patriotic propaganda during World War
II.
These
days, after the end of art – as announced with the arrival of Warhol and his
Brillo Box[iv]
– artistic production has begun to displace itself from its accepted spaces of
expression, keeping the taxonomy of the period as its shield, and with the
haste and the dizziness of the times led to the annihilation of the daily[v]. The bizarre terrain of art allows us, on many
occasions, to have intimate dialogues with objects that refer to our everyday
experiences, leading to the reformulation of realism. It is in this way that we are constantly falling
back on the archaeology of modern objects, or a barter and trade economy,
carried out in trades, in juxtaposition, or in costume. These transactions, and their conceptually
elaborated premises, blame the questions “what” and “how” for encroaching upon
the “why” and removing it from artistic discourse, and it is there that the
objet trouvé continues to be the muse for the hazardous. It is in this way that Iraheta’s hand works
to make these things – Superman’s clothes or his classic figures (including the
flying lessons, done in Porter’s[vi]
style) – subjects of transfiguration[vii],
that which introduces us to the sacrosanct cult of the ordinary.
If the
work of Iraheta had accustomed us to more domestic[viii]
and self-referencing exercises, Kriptonita threatens with all the artist’s
range of possibilities – meticulous work in drawing, photography and
installation – staged as a malefic game.
This duality of antonyms is the deceptive doubling back upon which a new
aesthetic has been created: arriving at what belongs to oneself with a sense of
déjà vu, an irremediable association of our false discourse of infinitely
asking for forgiveness. Iraheta does not
need to define himself as apocalyptic[ix]
in order to play with this historic illness that has pushed us to the cynicism
of adopting the aesthetic of populist spontaneity and attributing to it the end
of the ridiculous.
One
question cannot be avoided with this exhibit: What is Kriptonita? In the Superman
saga, you have the response in a strange and diversified mineral, which comes
from Krypton, the superhero’s planet, and which makes his powers
disappear. Tempted by metaphoric
language, this explication derives from a psychoanalytical reading, one which
equates the place from which we come with the mother figure and the loss of
powers with the catastrophic. Thereby
the super-people who share the exhibit with the hero share not only a quota of
solar energy, which is essential for survival, but also two fatal qualities –
their own planet which rejects them, and a suit as false as the emancipating
stories and the modern utopia. Here, all
are left naked and without the crown.
It
shouldn’t surprise us that the artist has chosen local stereotypes to fit with
his historical joke. We must revisit the
taste for the local, for clichés and regional exoticism, in order to borrow
from a discourse that remains on the boundaries between the politically correct
and the rampantly amoral. Each one of
those portrayed – like Beatriz Kiddo, like Superman – shows their fatality, shows
that as much as they may “cross dress,” trying to fully disguise themselves,
they cannot escape their own Kriptonita, the obligation to a life that detests
possibilities.
My feet are my wings
From the land of the symbolic, by Anabella Acevedo.
One comes into contact
with the works of My Feet are My Wings (Mis pies son mis alas) and asks: What
is there behind the obvious, or, what is the artistic work really claiming?
Recognizing the previous work of Walter Iraheta, one knows that besides the
aesthetic pleasure
that is experienced in front of a rigorous
artistic creation, whether be it painting, photograph, installation or another
medium, there is something more that searches to communicate, sometimes through
irony or a sense of humor, other times through nostalgia, and still more
through pure suggestion. Moreover, each work
in the series is part of a larger discussion that the artist has elaborated
upon and can tell us with detail, if he were asked. In fact, in the blog
openned by the artist in relation to this show we read:
"My Feet are my Wings is a collective of
photographs in which exists an analogy between the object and the human being,
the object as live matter, capable of evoking feelings and sensations, capable
of passing on to us a large amount of information left in it, contained by the
energy of the people who participated in its
making and those who will then make use of it. The object is a symbol of power,
a symbol of belonging, of tenacity, of status, of style, of necessity, history,
the beginning and the end. The object gives testimony to space and time."
That is, the work is an allegory, as Heidegger explains it well: "The work
is symbolic. Allegory and symbolism are the frameworks of representation under
which the characterization of a work of art has moved for a long time."
That is, the work goes beyond itself as an object of art and guides our look
toward other realities. A shoe stops from being just an object of use and
relates to us as a human experience, real or fiction.
When one thinks about photography, it is
assumed that this allows the possibility of faithfully copying a fragment
of reality. That is to say, we assign credibility to it as a primary
characteristic. We do not doubt the existence of the shown as our eyes see it.
Submerged in the enchantment of good photography, we don't think in that moment
of light and shadow, compositions or games. Instead, we comfortably accept the
condition as visual truth. This is not to say that it is not really this way.
In My Feet are My Wings, for example, we see shoes of every type, in
photographs and in installations, and the shoe portraits effectively remain to
the world as real and possible. However, the disposition of the shoes, the
composition of the series,
and the combinations and sets change the
dimension of the real character that is presented to us, propelling us to look
beyond to a new alegorical reality, in such a way that the shoes stop being
just more objects whose senses give others their use, and begin to convert
into elements of reflection about reality and
human nature.
On the other hand, photography as a fragment
of reality that remains outside forms part of that chain of meanings already
established by that initial fragment. In "Preludio," for example,
there is a boot placed over a white sheet. We assume that it is a woman's boot
and that the woman has taken it off. We also imagine that the taking off of the
boot has been a prelude to an action that is only suggested to us through the
composition and the title of the work. So, what Walter does to unite the boot,
the white sheet, and the title is provide the objects with new contexts, and by
that, new meanings. It does not matter if the artist has created a simulation
by putting the boot on the bed to photograph it in the end. The thing of
importance here is that not only have we've bitten the fishhook that's been
thrown to us, but with indulgance.
Even in photodocumentary, photography has
those both sides, that of the actual copied reality and the other filled with a
multitude of significances. This unites the fact that the selection of the
fragment of reality photographed has put the look of the artist, of the
documentary
photographer, or of the innocent picture
taker that only wants to record what's been lived or seen, in an impossible act
of retaining an ephemeral moment. Therefore, the artist elects the object of
his or her gaze (and in doing so has already designed a new being) and already
knows how it appears in his eyes or recomposed according to a prior idea. In
other words, the artist adjusts the reality to his lens. Walter Iraheta does
both things by photographing shoes and feet
and applying new significance to them.
On the other side, photography places us in a
precise moment that, nevertheless, opens us to the world and history,
creating a narrative that starts from associations. But in the instant this has
been fixed and the artist has captured it, such existing is gone, and its
existence begins to take forms of discourse that the artist has iniciated--even
before taking the photo--and what we see of the work we can continue or not,
adding elements that come from our own history, from our particular experience
in this world. Photography in its originality belongs to the artist, but it is
also ours, like the shoes photographed by Walter that belong to someone else
and that he makes his own through the camera, through their free disposition,
and the act of transforming them into works of art.
On one hand, we have photographs whose
origins come from exhumations done by the artist in Rabinal, Guatemala.
Beautiful, elegant and sober, despite the profound sadness they hold and the
terrible reality that alludes it. Next, we have installations like Mandala or
Jardin, en which Walter has decided the character of the shoes, the grand part
of them old and used, rescuing them from abandonment and giving them a new
sense of dignity. There are also that photographic installations that establish
a dialogue with artists like Magrite and Duchamp, and
with the ironic weight that they possess,
seem to give the work the necessary balance that takes us away from the
nostalgic horror and contemplation of beauty to the reflection over objects
that define us--in this case, shoes.
One of the symbolic values of the wings is
that of the "regeneration", which is precisely what Walter Iraheta
finishes with in this work. By photographing portraits of the shoes, we are
told about the feet, and doing so uncovers or grows the stories of life.
Happy Meal, by Darién Montañez.
It is a well established fact that our contemporary
globalized culture is a culture of consumption; it also happens to be a culture
that consumes with its eyes. The image, which is worth a thousand words, reigns
supreme over a world where looking, desiring, and devouring are almost
synonymous. Our consumerist compulsion feeds off an exaggerated production of
consumables: an overwhelming deluge of images and objects, ever more abundant
and desirable and disposable and forgettable. In the middle of this turmoil
dwells Happy Meal.
Happy Meal documents the dregs that the centers of
production push towards the peripheries, focusing on the destinies of the junk
toys of junk food restaurants after they inevitably become obsolete. Happy Meal
is also a study on the image and the object, and on the image of the object,
that ends up questioning the ultimate object of the image. But above all, Happy
Meal is a process of transmutation that picks up products from the lowest
depths of mass culture and elevates them into the highest spheres of
contemporary art. These trinkets are rescued from the dollar bins of
second-hand american clothing stores and, after being touched by the hand of
the artist, are placed in the vitrines of the most prestigious art galleries,
collections and publications of the world.
However, this transformation is not a simple Midas touch,
but an elaborate process that effectively accomplishes the divorcement of image
and object. A dousing of shiny gray cancels out all the toy’s colors, which
have been carefully calibrated for young eyes, as well as all of its graphic
attributes, producing a minimal spectrum that reveals unsuspected sculptural
values in these everyday objects. Liberated from all pop distractions,
cultivated minds can invest the pieces with connections to noble precedents:
from the chiaroscuro drawings of the Renaissance to greco-roman marble
sculpture, which is better known (and easier to revere) now that time has
eroded its original polychromy. And the fact that the gray coat that
obliterates the image is precisely powdered graphite—the most primeval of
materials, essential for the production of images—adds a whole new poetic
dimension to the exercise. The image has not been erased, but overdrawn. In
Happy Meal, the image is what eats the image.
Happy meal confronts the nature of the object and of the
image, and ends up producing precisely new objects and new images. The coating
of graphite transforms the toy into a pure object: an anti-image. Later, these
anti-images are reproduced in photographs and paintings, which become images of
anti-images. Ant the results are so powerful that each exhibition of the work
spawns a plethora of new images of these anti-images (as well as of the images
of anti-images), this time on Instagram and Facebook. Therefore, an exercise
that starts from the absolute undoing of the image culminates in a barrage of
new images; which is nothing more than a reminder that, in the end,
contemporary visual arts are yet another manifestation—if not the apotheosis—
of the voracity of our culture of consumption.
