Useless Landscapes
Painted songs, acrylic on canvas, 78x68 inches, 2017.
Living multiple lives, adopting roles with determination and enthusiasm and adhering to different genres and classes, can advance the story of one’s existence in a contradictory way. This wide possibility to develop as humans has transformed the world into a fairly schizophrenic place. It only takes seeing how the left votes to the right to realize that. An artist can be an activist, a sociologist, an objectively subjectivist poet, a writer without boundaries, a digital sculptor, a professor, an editor and proprietor of magazines, an author of books which require field work as a stripper, and obviously a delicate painter and musician.
This is the case of Syd Krochmalny, who over the last few years has developed several professions with a superior grace. Like every true artist, deep down he seems to care more that his ideas are done nicely than doing them technically. Taking off your pants or writing papers for the University, articles for magazines and newspapers, are not just ways of working for him, they are also things that have an aesthetic dimension.
Since Kant philosophy has been responsible for trying to understand and give some meaning to something as incomprehensible to us as art and have written a lot of horrible books that Krochmalny has read carefully. But his influences seem to be further from classics such as The Critique of Judgment or Letters for the Aesthetic Education of Man and closer to a Maradonian inspiration.
In Argentina, there is a great philosopher who made many contributions to aesthetics, he is like Nick Land for us, someone quite controversial who does really beautiful things and is able to get along with kings and punks; although in reality it would be blasphemous to try to compare it with any mortal being. Diego Armando Maradona, for example, is known as "El Diego", "Pelusa" or “D10s”, each one of those names corresponds to one of its mutations or roles.
The Chavist regime, Versace shirts, the tattoos of Che Guevara and post-truth are some of the productions that pay tribute to this Maradonian aesthetic that may need a much more extensive text to be developed. Briefly stating these ideas here, gives the reader enough to understand this multiple existence. By observing these ‘Useless Landscapes’, painted more with the hand of God than with that of a mortal, or the sculptures printed with machines that look like candies of some icons in the history of art of the last century, shows us that order is not the natural law that rules the universe, but the excess rules the universe.
By Mario Scorzelli
Art Postcapitalist
Paintings, acrylic on canvas, 78x68 inches, 2017.
Yellow Stakhanov Will Hit Florida Keys
"We must bear in mind that the struggle is one for an ideal: that of the culture of brotherhood and complete freedom; of victory over the individualism which cripples human beings; and of a communal life based not on compulsion and the need of man to herd together for mere self-preservation, as it was in the past, but on a free and natural merging of personalities into super-personal entities." So said Anatoly Lunacharsky in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, to whose centenarium we assist in the form of a parodic litany about the efforts and decadence of an over-productive, exalted individual who struggles with the ocean of professional opportunity and possibility. Yoga, the Zodiac, malls and art fairs form the moral landscape of this unbalanced figure whose output is a cautionary tale about speed, resolution, anxiety and fear. It has been said that late capitalism resembles Stalinism in everything but common sense. An artist mostly recognized for his collaborations in Buenos Aires' artistic milieu, Krochmalny's recent pieces tell the story of those communal ideals bowing down under a hurricane--of the Lunacharskian super-personal dismantling and giving place to a figure old and new: Stakhanov as a solo artist.
Claudio Iglesias
TTheoretical PaintingsloThe del sitio
Paintings, 78x68 inches, 2016-2017
The Language Of The Stones
12 songs, and painting (acrylic on canvas, 78x68 inches, 2017).
Homenage and Oblivion
8 3D printed sculptures, plastic and resing, diamater: 18-22 inches
The hand and 3D technology are different forms of magic that summon dreams in the form of imagery. This fog consolidates in the plane or in the space, but always offers the illusion of the being, that inevitably is constituted by infinite layers of memory. In this way, the collapsed constructions of post-capitalism, the threats of global destruction, the fantasies about the efficacy of art and the unrecognizable landscapes, appear in fragments in the art of the icons of the last century: the Italian, Amedeo Modigliani, the Argentine, Lino Enea Spilimbergo and in the Americans, like Paul McCarthy, Matthew Barney and Bruce Nauman. The sculptures, presented brilliantly like a fake luxury goods, just as common commodities are produced to attract attention with their color and shine, portray a human quality which demands reflection.
By Roberto Jacoby
New Art Critic
The Museum of Contemporary Art of Buenos Aires (MACBA) and the Center for Artistic Research (CIA) presented its Jornadas de la Nueva Critica, which took place from August 24 to 27 (2017) in the museum.
Directed and curated by Syd Krochmalny and Jimena Ferreiro
General Coordination: Sasha Hrycaniuk and Eliana Zanini
Speakers: Catalina Arzani por Melina Ruiz Natali, Federico Baeza, Osvaldo Baigorria, Florencia Battiti, Catalina Berarducci, Guadalupe Chirotarrab, Adrián Cangi, Cajita, Fernando Davis, Valentín Demarco, Fernando Farina, José Fernández Vega, Daniel Gigena, Andrea Giunta, Verónica Gómez, Horacio González, Carlos Huffmann, Claudio Iglesias, Laura Isola, Roberto Jacoby, Gerardo Jorge, Inés Katzenstein, Silvio Lang, Juan Laxagueborde, Agus Leal, Fabián Lebenglik, Martín Legón, Mariano López Seoane, Guadalupe Maradei, Lara Marmor, Daniel Molina, Leticia Obeid, Lucrecia Palacios, Cecilia Palmeiro, Cecilia Pavón, Mercedes Pérez Bergliaffa, Alejo Ponce de León, Florencia, Qualina, Nancy Rojas, Lucas Rubinch, Ariel Schettini, Mario Scorzelli, Marita Soto y Julia Villaro.
The writing of the present: art magazine exhibition.
Mancilla. Editors: Magdalena Demarco, Carlos Gradín, Juan Laxagueborde, Nicolás Maidana y Florencia Minici. Santiago Villanueva, Fermín Álvarez Ruiz y Cecilia Eraso.
Jennifer. Editors: Claudio Iglesias, Syd Krochmalny. Production: Marucki Novaki.
Revista BOBA. Editors: Alicia Valente, Cecilia Cappannini, Chempes Saurio, Dani Lorenzo, Marina Panfili, Matías David López, Verónica Capasso.
El Flasherito. Editors: Andrés Aizicovich, Liv Schulman y Leopoldo Estol.
Otra Parte. Directors: Graciela Speranza y Marcelo Cohen. Editor: Federico Baeza.
Revista CIA. Editor: Syd Krochmalny. Edition: Carolina Muzi y Kiwi Sainz.
Jaque al arte. Editor: Cristina Civale
The most widespread discourse of the last three decades points to the displacement of the figure of the art critic as arbiter of the scene and its replacement by a new form of cultural intermediation. The eclipse of the critic and his subsequent decline is directly related to the rise of the curator as a new cultural intermediary within the framework of structural transformations in the relationships between works, institutions and public.
Since then the curator became the new gear of the production process of the art system whose structural conditions are characterized by globalization, the development and increase of institutions and the art market that impacted on the division of labor of the different scenes of the arts.
The critic was the most significant link for the artist from both a practical and a symbolic point of view. As an interpreter and judge his role was key to the development of the trajectory of the artists and their legitimation. The critic represented the most powerful segment of cultural intermediaries between the artist, the public, and collecting.
The role of criticism - and its occupations, whether the production of a text and the judgment on art - has been subordinated to that of the curator who, in addition to complying with the organization of exhibitions and awards, the selection of artists, works and the historical and aesthetic foundations of production, is also responsible for the administration of funds and fees, management of private and public collections, patronage, and institutional administration, class diction, publication of catalogs, books, and articles in cultural magazines and the press, among other tasks that make it an elastic and multifunctional professional.
At present, the repertoire of action and the signature of the curator turn out to be more important than that of the critic. In turn, those actors who practiced criticism assumed the roles of the curator acquiring the dual professional identity of "curator and critic." The modern system in which the work and the public achieved an understanding thanks to the "vision" and "guide" of the "good art critic" transformed into an opinion leader with enormous weight in the social field - able to illustrate, promoting, disseminating and even creating artistic movements with a personal stamp - entered into crisis at the local level thanks also to a certain mimetic tendency of an "uncritical" criticism that exhausted its strategy towards the end of the 80s. From the mockery of the artists who parodiaron the an international trend in Italian painting of the 1980s, changing the prefix Trans by Juanavanguardia, and pointing out the difficulties of a critical model that almost exactly replicated international developments; or the hyperbole of the critic embodied in the performances of Federico Klemm in his television program the Telematic Banquet, to the programmatic text included in the Leaf of the Rojas with which Gumier Maier inaugurates his management in the Rojas gallery; we could say that the artists, paraphrasing Nietzsche, suffered the alienation between the works that they produced and the texts of the critics that circulated. In this sense, if the criticism of the critics was seen as foolish and absurd, the mockery sometimes took a critical form. It is Nietzsche who saw in his laughter his cathartic power. Thus the laughter of the artists ascended to the highest mountains laughing at all the criticisms, while a glimpse of renewal in the writing of Fabian Lebenglik promoted by Miguel Briante in Page 12 during the first part of the years 90, that looked for together with few other young people who came from the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the UBA, give theoretical support to a very impoverished practice.
The field of art in the 1990s was crossed by a dispute between those who held the posture of art as a reservoir of infinite and uncountable meaning and of those who found possible correspondences between art and reflective language. This system of oppositions between visual sensibility and textual discursiveness formed a polarized scene until the beginning of 2000, debating whether art could be judged by spontaneous taste or reflective argument. The nineteenth-century tenor dilemma produced an anti-intellectual stance in a large number of artists, while criticism was diluted in cultural journalism and the academy remained relatively isolated from the more contemporary production.
With the appearance of the magazine ramona developed a channel of communication between the production and its diffusers. Ramona was a publication for those who considered that it was necessary that the samples of Buenos Aires had some critical feedback and that the artists were who write that speech. Each collaborator was assigned a space of the magazine and chose from an list an exhibition to comment. A multitude of collaborators, mostly artists who, without editorial line, wrote reviews, comments and sample reviews. Ramona was an artist magazine and ended up being a research magazine.
Faced with a state of art that naturalized the value and preeminence of the curator in the art system, we are now aware of the emergence of a new critical discourse that is produced from very dissimilar areas by means of strategies also divergent and that circulates by spaces which escape the institutionalization of criticism in the mass media agenda
.
A detracted criticism of the traditional figure of the critic and his past axiological system, which expresses states of thought that are revealed in writing and that invite us to review the ways in which we read, analyze and write criticism.
The present production that these days of discussion tries to map, happens simultaneously with an increasing interest in the itinerary of the critical thinking of figures like Marta Traba, Juan Acha, Oscar Masotta and Jorge Glusberg, or more back in time with the work of Jorge Romero Brest, Rafael Squirru, among others; which takes shape in academic research, publications and recent exhibitions.
A wave of revision of certain critical legacies that feed the scriptures of the present, while insisting on the search of a form, in the explication of a writing that is relational with the work and work in itself. The intention is not to replace one domain system with another, nor is it to execute the curator and seek his substitute, but rather to reflect productively on what are the conditions that enable critical writing.
Finally, as a footnote, the name of these conferences could be understood as an aggiornado cover of the "International Conference of Criticism" that began in 1978 promoted by the Argentine Association of Art Critics and that since 1988 had the collaboration of CAYC, institution that has appropriated its organization since 1994.
Journals of Hate
Installation in collaboration with Roberto Jacoby
Fondo Nacional de las Artes (2014), Buenos Aires, Argentina; Centro de Expresiones Contemporáneas (2016), Rosario Argentina; Parque de la Memoria, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2016), Universidad General Sarmiento, Gran Buenos Aires, Argentina (2017), El Gran Vidrio, Córdoba (2017).
‘Journals of Hate’ is based on the reader’s comments in electronic versions of major newspapers in Argentina where they are enabled to express their views without boundaries. Some of these phrases are written on the walls of the exhibition space.
The chosen fragments specifically track those discursive cores where the dehumanization of whole sectors of society occurs. The construction of the other as an object of extreme hatred seeks to define certain people as a social surplus. ‘Shit’, ‘trash’ and ‘waste’ are some of the metaphors that make the other as excrement that social body must expel. This embodied view of society also appears when medical terms such as ‘cancer’, ‘infection’ or ‘gangrene’ that must be removed are used.
However, all haters needs an object as long he defines its identity in relationship with the hated. Thus we see that the commentators perceive themselves as Argentinian by regarding the "bolita", the "paragua", the "perucho", derogatory categories that describe immigrants from nearby countries. They perceive themselves as belonging to the white race by denigrating colored people; they feel more masculine when they humiliate women; they entitle themselves as educated by stigmatizing the uninstructed. They feel themselves as middle classes in relation with the degraded poor. No matter how poor you are it is always possible to imagine someone poorer.
These observations do not say anything new. You may even think that the comments that we selected in the newspapers are just anonymous rants. Nevertheless, it should not be forgotten that many main massacres in history were preceded by dehumanizing discourses, public narratives which went unheeded at the time.
Journals of Hate
Theater based in the Poem Journals of Hate.
Roberto Jacoby and Syd Krochmalny
Directed by Silvio Lang.
Pruduced by ORGIE
Coproduced by: UNGS and CIA
Fábrica Perú, Sala de Máquinas, Espacio Cooperativo Futuro
Universidad General Sarmiento, Centro Cultural Paco Urondo (University of Buenos Aires), Centro Cultural Haroldo Conti (Ex ESMA), Sala Caras y Caretas.
Actors: Marcos Arriola, Marcio Barceló, Eva Calderone, Augusto Chiappe, Tomás Deías Spreng, Juan De Rosa, Julián Dubié, María Jesús González, Ramiro Guggiari, Rodrigo Hache, Julia Hadida, Hugo Martínez, Soledad Marrero, Javier Olivera, Rodolfo Opazo, Valentín Piñeyro, Juan Rausch, Flor Sánchez Elía, Nahuel Vec, Nehuén Zapata y Gianluca Zonzini / Dirección musical: Valentín Piñeyro / Composición musical: Valentín Piñeyro and ORGIE / Coreography: Rodolfo Opazo / Asistent.: Mariana La Torre / Trainer: Pablo Fermani / Diseño de maquillaje y máscaras: Emanuel Nem / Asist.: Jimena Mejuto / Sound and Mix: Marcos Zoppi / Ilumination: Fernando Berreta / Asist.: Estefanía Piotrkowski / Dress: Endi Ruiz / : Pedro Yagüe y Santiago Azzati / Audiovisual Desing: Tomás Deías Spreng / Grafic Desing: Julián Dubié / Coordination: Malena Levy ASIST. Silvina González / Stage Asistent : Ignacio Cerbino
Direction Asistent: Ramiro Guggiari y Braian Alonso / Dramaturgy and direction: Silvio Lang / Writing and Original Idea: Roberto Jacoby and Syd Krochmalny
Soy un párrafo. Haz clic sobre mí para editarme y crear tu propio texto. Soy una oportunidad para que tus clientes sepan más sobre ti.
Journal of Hate, it is a prayer, it is an old choir but it is completely modernized and has internal sarcasm, the bodies have all the plasticity of the history of the theater, the choreography, therefore we attend an argument, a great juxtaposition of the theatrical text, of the theatrical game (...) Such an incisive work puts a blade in the heart of the Argentine language, the language of hatred, something like a defiant reflection on what happened this afternoon in the City of Buenos Aires. That is to say, also, the march went to think this city, this city with all kinds of obstacles to think, the construction of the obstacles to think about the form of the city ".
Horacio González
‘Blanchot in Buenos Aires (or The Writing to Come)’
Film, 42 minutes
Biblioteca Nacional, Museo de la Lengua y el Libro, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2015.
Blanchot Conference
Just before submitting her doctoral thesis on language and materialism, a Philosophy student comes across "The Blanchot Box" in the National Library: an unpublished project commissioned by the artist, Alberto Greco, in a letter to the poet, Ricardo Carreira. In the hands of the student, this unfinished work will start to take on a life of its own, forging a strange space out of the voices of philosophers and poets as they reflect on the possible resonances of Maurice Blanchot’s thought in Argentine theory and poetry.
The Naked Soul
Video Installation.
Video Essay on the Nude Freedom Activist.
Old Canton Cemetery, Edinburgh, Scotland 2013. In collaboration with the University of Edinburgh and University of Stirling.
The Naked Soul
The repression of nakedness highlights the flickering traces of an image of the body constructed through fear and desire. The pattern of the social world is composed of sedimented layers. Each fragment of the past finds its place in the present. In the birthplace of liberalism, since the advent of the symbolic and rational order of modernity, nudity has unleashed multiple tensions between the origins of justice, the façade of puritanism and the spectre of early social groups.
The origins of justice are found in the Greek myth of the naked souls. After death, the free and just were often punished, while the impious and lost were redeemed. Zeus divined that the problem lay in clothing, a mask of the soul, obscuring hands, tongue, mouth, ears and eyes. The unjust hid their sins under splendid apparel. Peccadilloes and secrets were deposited in clothing, a veil covering the passage of time. But, said Zeus, if we could judge a person naked we would be able to retrace their lives through the marks left on their body. A continuous and rhythmic movement of experience is embodied in the edges and vestiges of the skin, leaving nothing forgotten. Crumpled and scarred, the skin is a zone of unexplored depths in which life is made visible. And it was then that Zeus resolved to strip men of their clothes before judgement, and their judges also, to ensure justice was done. And for this purpose, he summoned three of his sons, judges in hell, to receive all men equally.
In the Enlightenment, citizens also found themselves naked. Individuals renounced the use of force before the courts of law. Although in liberal societies men enjoy the right to dispose of their own bodies, leftovers of the puritan ethic still influence the use they may make of them. Post-industrial society exercises an even greater control; hedonism and self-care penetrate the very surface of the body. The law attaches itself to desire. But the body cannot circulate freely in public space.
Since the start of the 21st century, Stephen Gough has embodied a lost soul of Hades. An English activist, trained in the Royal Navy, he has walked for many miles across the island of Britain, naked, spending over six years in prison for demanding his right not to wear clothes. The most extreme instances of his campaign- refusing to wear clothes in court or visiting his mother naked- have made the contradictions within contemporary society visible. ‘Freedom is something we all want. We tolerate things we don’t like. And often when people say that they have been offended by this or that, if you ask them whether the human body is offensive, they say no’. What has led justice to turn against its origins? Why has a man who walks naked been deprived of his freedom in the cradle of liberalism? Why can an Englishman who does not want to wear clothes not step on Scottish soil? Liberal ideology is further contradicted by the lingering spectre of the early peoples of Scotland.
British civilisation hid the repression of the Picts, a warrior people, that, naked and tattooed, terrorised Roman soldiers in Scotland. With their dances and tactics, they harassed the Romans audaciously. Portrayed as impious, abominable and apostates, they struggled against Christians, Angles and the Ancient British. Later, for a second time, Liberal modernity again tried to bury the ancient force of the Picts, who passed into mythical stories of violence, the body and liberty, as naked and barbarous.
The reasons that lead a man to walk naked through the streets and along the byways of Scotland are not important. What is significant are the consequences of this act. Such acts and their repercussions weave a tapestry that transcends historical boundaries and illuminates the theatre of the present. The drama and its actors place a naked soul who defends the right to display his body, and the criminalisation of this act of freedom, centre stage. Behind the scenes are the imaginary and affective foundations of rational conscious subjectivity and the logic of puritanism that exert a radical pressure on liberal modernity impeding the return of the primitive force and autonomy of man in relation to his body.
El norte no va a estar arriba, va a ser todo sur
In collaboration with Judi Werthein, University of Oslo, Norway, October, 2011.
The walls of the University of Buenos Aires are covered with political propaganda of the students’ associations. These handmade posters constitute a political and aesthetic fact that builds after each election period. The posters materialize the power dispute over space among political parties with their messages, signs and colors. At the end of the vote count, each political group destroys their own propaganda like a potlatch. The next day and during the weekend, the cleaning staff is responsible for removing the remaining posters. During that time, I collected the posters. The next Monday, the Faculty of Social Sciences started a cycle of poster production which covered the entire walls. Finally, I exported these posters as theatrical material to Norway and with the artist, Judi Werthein, we made a wallpaper in the showroom at the University of Oslo to celebrate its 200 years. It is worthy to note the contrast between this spontaneous baroque of Argentinian graphic and the ascetic space of the Scandinavian universities.
Baño Revolution
In collaboration with Nacho Marciano
Performance, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, April 2009
In 2009 I tried to drive attention on some very common ways of discrimination in everyday life that remain invisible, even in institutions that are conscious and opposed to gender inequity. I worked specifically on the problem of public restrooms in the University of Buenos Aires. As everywhere, they are only two options: man and women. But, which one would be adequate for transgender or transvestite people? They remain with no place in binary gender classification.
With this idea in mind I produced an artistic operation called Baño Revolution (Toilet revolution) at the Department of Social Science at the University of Buenos Aires.
So I designed stickers with many gender options: women, men, lesbians, gay and transvestite persons. Then I stuck them in all the toilet doors of the Department turning them in genderless restrooms. As a way to make it work I invited some 50 people to use the restrooms independently of their gender option.
The event produced a wide and open discussions among students and professors. It was so polemic that the Department Director, the Academic Chair and professors wrote several articles which they published in a local newspaper. Aside from that, a research group on gender studies published a paper in the Social Sciences Review.
Later on, Argentina became the first country in Latin America and the second in the Americas to allow same-sex marriage nationwide.
I turned the video recordings of Baño Revolution action into a mass media event through a video clip based on a song specially composed on the subject by a well known pop singer.
Politics of Friendship and Confrontation
A video and photographies are the results of experiment in social aesthetics between artists and student activists conducted in the University of Buenos Aires Social Sciences Faculty (2009-2012)
At the end of 2008, activists from the student centre (CECSO) decided to take over the three campuses
of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires. The students decided to extend the student centre’s dining area into the car park, on university property. Nevertheless, the rector interpreted the activists’ actions as a “usurpation”. In 2009, the student centre received a letter that notified it of the existence of an open legal case involving the activists, and specifically naming Germán Feldman,
former president of the student centre. The rector’s resort to the legal system was not only a setback to the activists, but also to the history of the university and its tradition of democracy. Together with sociologist Lucas Rubinich, we decided to intervene in the conflict. We resolved to call on a group of artists to operate and generate artistic and social productions in the car park/ dining room space.
Chastity
Americas Society, New York City, United States 2007.
Fundación Telefónica, Buenos Aires Argentina, 2007.
MAC Niteroi, 2007
Barocruz, San Pablo, 2008.
Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2011.
El gran vidrio, Córdoba Argentina, 2017.
Guiñadas Gráciles: Looking Out for the Queer in Latin American Video Art, organized by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard (October 23, 2017 to April 10, 2018) and curated by Joaquin Terrones, Preceptor in Expository Writing at the Harvard College Writing Program and Lecturer in Literature and Women's and Gender Studies at MIT.
‘La Castidad (Chastity)’ is a video installation that can only be viewed by two people at the same time. According to the artists Syd Krochmalny and Roberto Jacoby, their video installation is "a fictional version of a realistic micro-political experiment that covers our entire life”. We explore a basic social bond different from sexual partnership and other than common friendship". They research on the "technologies of Friendship" which has taken as its object of study the distance between generations, and between two men, like Philia and Eros, Socrates and Alcibiades, Gilgamesh and Enkiddu, David and Jonathan, Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, Bouvard and Pécuchet, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, Komar and Melamid, Deleuze and Guattari and, of course, Laurel and Hardy. In these exemplary friendships, sexuality was an undertone that was a perhaps never consumed. La Castidad has to be experienced in an intimate way, between only two persons, like " a conversation by two for two or like a loop binding art to life.
The Origin of The World
Performance, drawings and video animation.
2005-2013.
Belleza y Felicidad, 2005
The Origin of the World at The School of Arts and Humanities, University of Stirling, Scotland, May 2013.
Well before Courbet, Leonardo suggested in his ‘Treatise on Painting’ that women should always be depicted ‘in modest poses, their legs close together, their arms closely olded, their heads inclined and somewhat on one side’
Syd Krochmalny has put the female sex back centre stage, legs well apart. But these are not women, but vaginas. One is not a woman because one has a vagina. Here women are reduced to their sex organ but have the strength of its symbolic value. There is a double displacement here; the artist cedes his charcoal to other –male- artists- for this ‘Sexionary’, a saucier version of ‘Pictionary’- a game of drawing words.
In the beginning was the word. For this is what it is about, playing with words, which are ideas. Thought is structured through language.
This, the vagina emerges in the foreground of these representations. Beyond, before the beginning, there was something, a chain of reactions, relationships of power:
A man giving instructions to a woman, asking her to open her legs. A man ceding his pencil to another man, an invitation to take charge. Each person has their part, and no one loses their power. Not the vagina itself which takes centre stage, as if on the front of those men’s magazines, which today are covered with arse. The vagina is under the gaze, submissive, but is, for once –finally- the focus of all.
Here the centre is not the erect dick of porn, but the vagina in its productive and reproductive function. A vagina in which the economy of desire is divested of the economy of the market, moving forward on parallel paths. Although submissive, from this central position it seems to say ‘I do
what I like’. And it becomes a threat. The central and sovereign vagina needs to be lightly subjugated to accentuate the
dispositve, and to configure desire. But it remains a threat.
It is the origin of the world or the end of the universe, a black octopussy in which to get lost in a dark, endless tunnel. First wave feminism wanted to remove women’s bodies from the patriarchal gaze, but this would not be the first time that a naked body has served as touchpaper for a revolution. This
series of vaginas reflects a system of repeated patterns moulded by social
myths. In this work, and these diverse ways of representing a vagina, the multiple
personalities possessed by each vagina are opened up.
We need to look at them and get to know them, chuck out the flowers and wrest the beetroot from within. Get us out from under, wonder woman, wonder man. The vagina shifts from being a bite in a lump of meat into
an idea, an allegorical triangle that resembles God, a black hole from which
no material particle, not even light, may escape.
Post Neoclassicism
Watercolors, 2017
No More Victoria Secret
Watercolors and lipsticks, 2017
In Collaboration with Claudio Iglesias
White trash paintings and quotes of Steve Bannon
Social Portraits
In collaboration with Tomás Espina
Drawings and video installation.
Spilimbergo Museum, 2009.
Proa Fundation, Buenos Aires, 2010.
The act of drawing was thus a technique and an instrument of action research and wove a network of social relations, interaction scenarios and ways of being together. The drawings, suddenly performative, motorized relationships in the normal sequence of their lives were unusual for the portraits. With perhaps the most primitive of drawing materials, soot, and exercising the bourgeois genre par excellence, the very rapid freehand Espina treat that flowed from the moment of execution until the wettest opening you can expect an arsonist artist.
At the same time, a video projection denounced the game of Chinese boxes: it was, without any possibility of confusion, a contemporary art space, almost a flash biennial. From the screen, the artist recounted at length Unquillo oral history and the museum itself. Also the process of the work was included there, so that drifts dipsómanas portraitist and photographed, the epiphanies of similarity and drawing, were linked with the party itself which was the time of receipt. Each and every one anxiously awaiting the moment they would be absolute star rating Unquillo.
In the room the drawings were randomly arranged irregularly, hung with paper tape in sight. The walls were covered almost entirely. In these images the audience staring look looked situations in which he was portrayed: the assembly of the sample itself was an overlapping multiplication of spatiotemporal coordinates. The crowd that had been gestated became participant and co-author of the social network. The sample was microsituations and portraits of the stage an "ethnography observed" by the public who surfed his cinder Facebook
So that the look was not on the portrait or the portrait, but in the framework of looks that generated the diagram and the participating public. The interest was not the portrait as an object but the concepts and processes that break from situations created by him.
This is what makes social Portraits a branch of contemporary art, at least since the last twenty years is characterized by operating on the social, weaving social relations. But what makes it unique is the use of the portrait as its historical undersides.
We know that the portrait brings into play the whole philosophy of the subject from Descartes to Heidegger. We may think that the classic definition of the portrait is a representation of a person, a subject absolute detachment of all exteriority. Thus the picture is a picture that is organized around a figure that is itself the end of the representation, excluding any other relationship or scene, value or evocation. Jean-Luc Nancy argues that the portrait is organized around his eyes and that even in the plural portraits there is always a circumvention of the eyes, do not cross or are sought: the characters are not related. For this reason, this project, working on the act of portraying and the act of looking at the portrait. The public, as if closing this philosophical loop, photographing portraits and sent the images he took with the camera on their cell phones to boxes and mails from your contacts or logbooks posteaban in social networks. They entered by the archaic way of cinder what John Thompson defined as the society of self-disclosure, ie: a "society of self-revelation."
Sangre de Laguna
In collaboration with Roberto Jacoby
Performers: Fernanda Laguna and Ramón Laguna
Closed circuit videoperformance, 5 minutes.
Residencia Internacional de Artistas en Argentina, Ostende, 2007.
Hidden behind bushed in the edenic garden, the Laughing Virgin could only be seen on the TV screen of a third-floor room of the Hotel, captured by a camera set at the room’s window.
Spectators hoarded that dark, closed room to see what was happened very close to them, albeit in a fantasy world. The sensation was that everything happened in a dreamlike wood, very far away. A naked mother (Fernanda Laguna) nursed her son (Ramón, the baby), danced, lay down, got dressed and undressed with eight authentic parangolés by Helio Oiticica intervened with bright colored anilines. Textures of water, insects and plants, picked up during the stay in Ostende and elaborated as concrete music, contributed to that “artistified” reality.
Conjunction of the désoeuvrement of the parangolés
and the Pre-Raphaelite inhabited landscape, Sangre de Laguna was a moment of love that really existed and was at the same time ideal, aestheticized. Distant and close. Classic and contemporary. Sexual and chaste. Sangre de Laguna frolicked in the fusion of periods and styles, which would reflect both the paintings of the Quattrocento and the Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Maestá. It was five in the afternoon and already a bit cold. Fernanda coughedand Ramón laughed. Soon (too soon) it was over.