ART 115 USC

Works by some of my students

2009-07-09T07:34:00.001-07:00

Lecturas Art 115 Noviembre 20-Dic 3

2008-11-24T16:33:00.000-08:00

Vladimir Tatlin, Model for the 3rd International Tower, 1919-1920

1. Ejemplos en la página de Northwestern University sobre el Constructivismo Ruso.

2. La escuela Bauhaus 1919-1933

Libros, ensayos y novelas que deben conseguir fácilmente en Borders...a leer:

1.Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Grey, 1891

2.Walter Benjamin
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm

3.Susan Sontag
Notes on Camp, 1964
On Photography, 1977

4. Dave Hickey
Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy, 1997

5. Octavio Paz
Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare

6.Robert Hughes
Nothing if Not Critical

7. Peter Schjeldahl
The Hydrogen Jukebox

8. Clement Greenberg
Avant-Garde and Kitsch

9. Hunter Thompson

The Rum Diary

10. Rosalind Krauss

Passages in Modern Sculpture

Repaso Exámen Final Arte 102 Sagrado

2008-11-24T15:48:00.000-08:00

Kara Walker

Ingres

Damien Hirst

Maurizio Cattelan

Eva Hesse

Vladimir Tatlin

Monument to the Third International

1929-20

Michelangelo Buonarroti

Goya

Roy Lichtenstein

Jacques Louis David

Robert Raushemberg

Victor Vazquez

Neo Rauch

Van Gogh

Cuarto de Arles, 1889

Paul Gauguin

Jim Lambie

Chris Burden

Yoko Ono & John Lenon

Michael Linares

Lucio Fontana

Repaso exámen 1 Arte 102

2008-10-10T14:51:00.000-07:00

Duchamp

Ramón Frade

Tracy Emin

Tufiño

Francisco Oller

Bubu Negron

Boticelli

Paul Cezanne

Francisco Oller

Carlos Irizarry

Giotto

Francisco Oller

Paul Cezanne

Gustave Courbet

Arnaldo Roche

José Campeche

Andy Warhol

Pablo Picasso

Goya

Takashi Murakami

Cindy Sherman

Tracy Emin

Donald Judd

Jan Van Eyck

Pepón Osorio

Jean-Honoré Fragonard

Flaming June by Frederic Lord Leighton

Lecturas Arte 115

2008-10-06T05:36:00.000-07:00

Resident Evil

Takashi Murakami

publicado en originalmente en :
artstechnica

1. Roger Ebert says games will never be as worthy as movies
By Jeremy Reimer | Published: November 30, 2005 - 04:30PM CT

Roger Ebert, the movie critic for the Chicago Sun-Times and co-host of the syndicated TV show "Ebert and Roper at the Movies" has thrown down the gauntlet on his web site by stating that video games will never be as artistically worthy as movies and literature. Ebert does not believe that this quality gap can ever be crossed, as he feels it is a fundamental limitation of the medium itself:

There is a structural reason for that: Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.

Whether or not interactive art can still be art is an interesting question. Modern artists such as Chin Chih Yang, who design interactive multimedia projects as well as creating "traditional" art, would probably tell you that whether something is "art" depends on only the artist and the audience, and not the medium itself. However, there are undoubtedly more conservative artists who would dismiss "interactive multimedia projects" as not being worthy of the term art. Of course this debate is not a new one, nor has it been confined to video games. Movies and comic books both struggled (and still struggle) to receive the same level of respect as traditional media, such as literature and dramatic plays.

But is it really the "interactive" part of video games that Ebert is criticizing? To me, it seems like a convenient excuse to dismiss for all time a new form of entertainment that has not only influenced movies (with endless releases of video-game-themed movies such as Tomb Raider, Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil, etc.) but at times even seems to be in competition with cinema itself. Every time movie sales go down, some pundits start looking to the video game industry as being the source of the problem.

I don't believe the "interactive" nature of video games is what Ebert is really railing against here. While he gave a poor review to the movie Clue, which featured multiple endings, he admitted in his review that it would have been more fun for viewers to see all three endings. He seemed to be indicating that if the movie itself was of higher quality, being given a choice of endings would have made it even more entertaining. Like Clue, video games can feature multiple endings or storylines, but all of them have been written by the writer ahead of time. The fact that the player can choose between them does not make any of the choices less of a creation by the game developers.

A closer examination of Ebert's comments seems to indicate that he is critical of the artistic value of the games themselves, not their structure:

I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful. But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.

Some might be eager to tell Ebert about games that he may not have ever seen or played, such as Star Control II, or Planescape Torment, where the story is given higher focus than the graphics and is at least comparable to literary fiction. Or games such as ICO, where the atmosphere and feel of the environment and characters is on par with any "serious" art film. But perhaps Ebert hasn't heard of these titles because video games in general have been deluged with an endless parade of flashy sequels and movie tie-ins that favor graphics over gameplay. Perhaps if a viable analog to the independent movie industry emerged for video games, Ebert might change his tune. But is this likely to happen?

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2. 'Pa Ningun Lao
video sobre high art y low art en la radio Puertoriqueña

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3. enlace a lectura teórica de Guy Debord:

La Sociedad del Espetáculo

filmes:

filmes en UB WEB

Bio:

Guy Debord (1931-1994),

Debord's best known works are his theoretical books, Society of the Spectacle and Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. In addition to these he wrote a number of autobiographical books including "Mémoires", "Panégyrique", "Cette Mauvaise Réputation..." and "Considérations sur l'assassinat de Gérard Lebovici". He was also the author of numerous short pieces, sometimes anonymous, for the journals "Potlatch", "Les Lèvres Nues," "Les Chats Sont Verts," and "Internationale Situationniste".

In broad terms, Debord's theories attempted to account for the spiritually debilitating modernisation of both the private and public spheres of everyday life by economic forces during the post-WW2 modernisation of Europe. He rejected as the twin faces of the same problem both capitalism of the West and the statism of the Eastern bloc. Alienation, Debord postulated, could be accounted for by the invasive forces of the 'spectacle' - "a social relation between people that is mediated by images". Debord's analysis developed the notions of "reification" and "fetishism of the commodity" pioneered by Karl Marx and Georg Lukács. This analysis probed the historical, economic and psychological roots of 'the media'. Central to this school of thought was the claim that alienation is more than an emotive description or an aspect of individual psychology: rather, it is a consequence of the mercantile form of social organization which has reached its climax in capitalism.

The Situationist International, a political/artistic movement organized by Debord and his colleagues and represented by a journal of the same name, attempted to create a series of strategies for engaging in class struggle by reclaiming individual autonomy from the spectacle. These strategies, including "dérive" and "détournement", drew on the traditions of Dada and Surrealism.

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4. Andy Warhol

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5. Arte en el Choliseo

Pro-life' Britney Spears sculpture draws criticism
CBC Arts

An artist who has created a sexy, "pro-life" nude sculpture of pop star Britney Spears giving birth has drawn fire from several groups even before the artwork's exhibition.

Both pro-life and pro-choice proponents, as well as Spears fans from around the world, have criticized the life-size sculpture, which depicts the 24-year-old pop star naked and crouched forward giving birth on a bear-skin rug.

'Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston' by sculptor Daniel Edwards shows pop star Britney Spears in the nude and giving birth to her son. The work, which has already stirred up controversy, will go on display in a Brooklyn art gallery beginning April 7.Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston offers "a new take on pro-life," artist Daniel Edwards told the Associated Press Tuesday."Pro-lifers normally promote bloody images of abortion. This is the image of birth," said the 40-year-old artist and father of three.

The sculpture will be mounted next to a case displaying pro-life materials.

Edwards has courted controversy with his artwork before: last year, he created a sculpture depicting the head of baseball great Ted Williams (whose body, after his death in 2002, was placed in cryonic suspension in hopes that medical science could possibly revive him in the future).

When the Brooklyn gallery that will display the sculpture announced the upcoming exhibit, officials were soon flooded with complaints – including 3,000 e-mails in about a week.

Pro-life advocates "thought this was degrading to their movement. And some pro-choice people were upset that this is a pro-life movement," David Kesting, co-owner of Brooklyn's Capla Kesting Fine Art Gallery, told AP.

He added that the gallery would hire extra security guards for the two weeks that the sculpture is on display.

The free exhibit opens at the Capla Kesting gallery on April 7.

Spears, who gave birth to her son, Sean Preston, last September, has not commented on the sculpture.

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MYSTERIOUS GIRL

KATE MOSS, contorted in every conceivable way, wearing nothing but her bra and pants: every paparazzi's dream, no? Now that dream has become a reality thanks to renowned artist Marc Quinn, whose sculpture of the model is scheduled to go on view in the Netherlands later this month. Called 'Sphinx', the work, which is made in bronze and painted white, shows her with her legs and arms behind her head in a series of yoga positions. At the unveiling, Quinn said the piece was so named because of Kate Moss's mysterious persona. "She is a contemporary version of the Sphinx. A mystery. There must be something about her that has clicked with the collective unconscious to make her so ubiquitous, so spirit of the age," said the artist, whose last sculpture of Alison Lapper - an artist without arms and fully developed legs - took pride of place in Trafalgar Square. There were, however, no actual Downward Facing Dog shenanigans for Miss Moss, who has also sat for Lucian Freud. While the body and head of the cast are that of the one model, the actual positions were drawn from a yoga expert. "It's a portrait of an image, and the way that image is sculpted and twisted by our collective desire," said Quinn. (13 April 2006, AM)

Stephen Doig

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Artículo en el Nuevo Día
Por María Ivette Vega Calles

Aunque en su trayectoria el pintor William Carmona ha plasmado la realidad en sus obras, desde el año pasado tiene que capturar con más frecuencia la esencia de una persona real, aún sin conocerla.
Éste es el principal reto de uno de los proyectos más recientes del artista, a quien el Coliseo de Puerto Rico le encomendó que pintara a todas las estrellas que allí se presentan, para darles la obra como recuerdo de su visita.

Otros proyectos que William Carmona tiene este año incluyen una participación en el evento Arte América, a finales de este mes. También, la subasta de su obra “Jugadores de dominó pa’ la suerte”, en Christie’s de Nueva York, la realización de su libro de pintura a cargo de la escritora Susan Albert y comenzar a trabajar en una exposición de esculturas que presentará el próximo año en el Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico. “Hago una representación del artista un tanto surrealista, que capture el mundo mágico de ese ser. Leo su biografía y me baso en fotografías tratando de ver más allá”, afirmó.
Carmona desarrolla la obra sobre una pieza de cartón que lleva una gráfica estampada -la que representa muchos boletos de los eventos que se han presentado el recinto- y la estructura del Coliseo.

Algunos de los artistas que ha pintado hasta el momento son Elton John, Michael Bolton, David Bisbal, Alejandro Sanz, Draco Rosa, The Police, Ricky Martin y Daddy Yankee, entre otros.
Precisamente, la reacción de los artistas al ver la obra ha sido uno de los aspectos más interesantes de este proyecto, según Carmona.

“No ha sido tan fácil llegar a ellos. Hay unos que no quieren recibir a nadie antes del concierto, porque no quieren perder la concentración. Pero luego cambian al ver la obra. Por ejemplo, Ricky Martin quedó muy impactado, al igual que Daddy Yankee y Draco, quien es mi amigo, quedó muy conmovido. A Michael Bolton también le gustó mucho y quiso que le hablara sobre su significado”, destacó el artista.

Uno de los ejemplos más significativos de la reacción de los artistas es la de Elton John, quien no quería recibir absolutamente a nadie en su camerino, ni siquiera a gente de la producción, pero cuando vio la obra se emocionó y fue muy simpático.
“Me dijo: ‘Mi respeto a usted, maestro’ y le dije ‘no, el maestro es usted’. Y me dijo que lo iba a colocar en su cuarto de música. Hasta se despidió de mí con dos besos, como hacen los europeos. Todo ese enigma que lo rodea se perdió, porque lo que quedó al descubierto fue su calidad de ser humano”, afirmó Carmona, quien también destaca que esta iniciativa demuestra la bondad del puertorriqueño.

Y es que para él, la satisfacción ha sido doble porque muchos de estos artistas son amantes del arte y cuentan con colecciones privadas significativas. Por otro lado, Carmona contó que en algunas de sus piezas se atrevió a tocar sutilmente una controversia del artista, como sucedió con Alejandro Sanz, a quien le dibujó un niño pequeño en alusión al hijo que tuvo fuera de matrimonio. Sin embargo, Sanz quedó encantado.

Otra de las experiencias que ha tenido es que el artista en el que se ha inspirado ha resultado ser muy distinto a lo que proyecta a través de su imagen en los medios. Así le ocurrió con Daddy Yankee, cuya imagen dura contrasta con su calor humano, algo que -sin embargo- Carmona captó y reflejó en la obra.
Por el momento el pintor continuará trabajando en este proyecto, pues supone que en el futuro también participarán otros de sus colegas.

Se espera que en septiembre, cuando sea el cuarto aniversario del Coliseo, se presente una exhibición con todas las piezas.

lecturas Historia Arte PR / Arte 102

2008-10-06T05:34:00.000-07:00

1.PANORAMA HISTORICO DE LAS ARTES PLASTICAS EN PUERTO RICO
Rodolfo J. Lugo-Ferrer

(estudiantes: Este ensayo de Rodolfo J. Lugo es uno que debe ser visto/entendido como una visión independiente.

ensayo:

Artes en PR por Rodolfo Lugo Ferrer

2.El modernismo en el arte y la arquitectura puertorriqueña.
José Ramón Alonso Lorea.

Más de veinte años después de la guerra hispanoamericana (1898), el traspaso de su condición colonial de una metrópolis a otra parece condicionar el retardo de la entrada del modernismo en las artes plásticas puertorriqueñas.

ensayo:
Arte y Arquitectura

Art 115: Lectura Rosalind Krauss

2008-09-22T17:26:00.000-07:00

aprieta el enlace para la lectura

ART 115: Lista de Artistas

2008-09-06T15:53:00.000-07:00

1. Takashi Murakami

2. Gordon Matta Clak

3. Peter Fischli and David Weiss

4. Minerva Cuevas

5. Jonathan Messe

6. Karen Kilimnik

7. Santiago Sierra

8. Carlos Raquel Rivera

9. Marc Quinn

10. Bill Viola

ART 102 Lectura Walter Benjamin

2008-08-27T09:04:00.000-07:00

Walter Benjamin used the term "aura" to refer to the feeling of awe created
by unique or remarkable objects such as works of art or relics of the past.
According to Benjamin older cultures can generate auras around particular
objects of veneration, while capitalist culture has the opposite effect,
causing the decay of the aura due to the proliferation of mass production
and reproduction technologies.

leer ensayo:
Walter Benjamin

ART 115 LECTURA 21 agosto

2008-08-21T09:41:00.000-07:00

Notes On "Camp"
by Susan Sontag

Published in 1964.

Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described. One of these is the sensibility -- unmistakably modern, a variant of sophistication but hardly identical with it -- that goes by the cult name of "Camp."

A sensibility (as distinct from an idea) is one of the hardest things to talk about; but there are special reasons why Camp, in particular, has never been discussed. It is not a natural mode of sensibility, if there be any such. Indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric -- something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques. Apart from a lazy two-page sketch in Christopher Isherwood's novel The World in the Evening (1954), it has hardly broken into print. To talk about Camp is therefore to betray it. If the betrayal can be defended, it will be for the edification it provides, or the dignity of the conflict it resolves. For myself, I plead the goal of self-edification, and the goad of a sharp conflict in my own sensibility. I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it. That is why I want to talk about it, and why I can. For no one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyze it; he can only, whatever his intention, exhibit it. To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.

Though I am speaking about sensibility only -- and about a sensibility that, among other things, converts the serious into the frivolous -- these are grave matters. Most people think of sensibility or taste as the realm of purely subjective preferences, those mysterious attractions, mainly sensual, that have not been brought under the sovereignty of reason. They allow that considerations of taste play a part in their reactions to people and to works of art. But this attitude is naïve. And even worse. To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free -- as opposed to rote -- human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. (One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.)

Taste has no system and no proofs. But there is something like a logic of taste: the consistent sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste. A sensibility is almost, but not quite, ineffable. Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer a sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea . . .

To snare a sensibility in words, especially one that is alive and powerful,1 one must be tentative and nimble. The form of jottings, rather than an essay (with its claim to a linear, consecutive argument), seemed more appropriate for getting down something of this particular fugitive sensibility. It's embarrassing to be solemn and treatise-like about Camp. One runs the risk of having, oneself, produced a very inferior piece of Camp.

These notes are for Oscar Wilde.

"One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art."
- Phrases & Philosophies for the Use of the Young

1. To start very generally: Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization.

2. To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content. It goes without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized -- or at least apolitical.

3. Not only is there a Camp vision, a Camp way of looking at things. Camp is as well a quality discoverable in objects and the behavior of persons. There are "campy" movies, clothes, furniture, popular songs, novels, people, buildings. . . . This distinction is important. True, the Camp eye has the power to transform experience. But not everything can be seen as Camp. It's not all in the eye of the beholder.

4. Random examples of items which are part of the canon of Camp:

Zuleika Dobson
Tiffany lamps
Scopitone films
The Brown Derby restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in LA
The Enquirer, headlines and stories
Aubrey Beardsley drawings
Swan Lake
Bellini's operas
Visconti's direction of Salome and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore
certain turn-of-the-century picture postcards
Schoedsack's King Kong
the Cuban pop singer La Lupe
Lynn Ward's novel in woodcuts, God's Man
the old Flash Gordon comics
women's clothes of the twenties (feather boas, fringed and beaded dresses, etc.)
the novels of Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett
stag movies seen without lust

5. Camp taste has an affinity for certain arts rather than others. Clothes, furniture, all the elements of visual décor, for instance, make up a large part of Camp. For Camp art is often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content. Concert music, though, because it is contentless, is rarely Camp. It offers no opportunity, say, for a contrast between silly or extravagant content and rich form. . . . Sometimes whole art forms become saturated with Camp. Classical ballet, opera, movies have seemed so for a long time. In the last two years, popular music (post rock-'n'-roll, what the French call yé yé) has been annexed. And movie criticism (like lists of "The 10 Best Bad Movies I Have Seen") is probably the greatest popularizer of Camp taste today, because most people still go to the movies in a high-spirited and unpretentious way.

6. There is a sense in which it is correct to say: "It's too good to be Camp." Or "too important," not marginal enough. (More on this later.) Thus, the personality and many of the works of Jean Cocteau are Camp, but not those of André Gide; the operas of Richard Strauss, but not those of Wagner; concoctions of Tin Pan Alley and Liverpool, but not jazz. Many examples of Camp are things which, from a "serious" point of view, are either bad art or kitsch. Not all, though. Not only is Camp not necessarily bad art, but some art which can be approached as Camp (example: the major films of Louis Feuillade) merits the most serious admiration and study.

"The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature."
- The Decay of Lying

7. All Camp objects, and persons, contain a large element of artifice. Nothing in nature can be campy . . . Rural Camp is still man-made, and most campy objects are urban. (Yet, they often have a serenity -- or a naiveté -- which is the equivalent of pastoral. A great deal of Camp suggests Empson's phrase, "urban pastoral.")

8. Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style -- but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the "off," of things-being-what-they-are-not. The best example is in Art Nouveau, the most typical and fully developed Camp style. Art Nouveau objects, typically, convert one thing into something else: the lighting fixtures in the form of flowering plants, the living room which is really a grotto. A remarkable example: the Paris Métro entrances designed by Hector Guimard in the late 1890s in the shape of cast-iron orchid stalks.

9. As a taste in persons, Camp responds particularly to the markedly attenuated and to the strongly exaggerated. The androgyne is certainly one of the great images of Camp sensibility. Examples: the swooning, slim, sinuous figures of pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry; the thin, flowing, sexless bodies in Art Nouveau prints and posters, presented in relief on lamps and ashtrays; the haunting androgynous vacancy behind the perfect beauty of Greta Garbo. Here, Camp taste draws on a mostly unacknowledged truth of taste: the most refined form of sexual attractiveness (as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure) consists in going against the grain of one's sex. What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine. . . . Allied to the Camp taste for the androgynous is something that seems quite different but isn't: a relish for the exaggeration of sexual characteristics and personality mannerisms. For obvious reasons, the best examples that can be cited are movie stars. The corny flamboyant female-ness of Jayne Mansfield, Gina Lollobrigida, Jane Russell, Virginia Mayo; the exaggerated he-man-ness of Steve Reeves, Victor Mature. The great stylists of temperament and mannerism, like Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Tallulah Bankhead, Edwige Feuillière.

10. Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a "lamp"; not a woman, but a "woman." To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.

11. Camp is the triumph of the epicene style. (The convertibility of "man" and "woman," "person" and "thing.") But all style, that is, artifice, is, ultimately, epicene. Life is not stylish. Neither is nature.

12. The question isn't, "Why travesty, impersonation, theatricality?" The question is, rather, "When does travesty, impersonation, theatricality acquire the special flavor of Camp?" Why is the atmosphere of Shakespeare's comedies (As You Like It, etc.) not epicene, while that of Der Rosenkavalier is?

13. The dividing line seems to fall in the 18th century; there the origins of Camp taste are to be found (Gothic novels, Chinoiserie, caricature, artificial ruins, and so forth.) But the relation to nature was quite different then. In the 18th century, people of taste either patronized nature (Strawberry Hill) or attempted to remake it into something artificial (Versailles). They also indefatigably patronized the past. Today's Camp taste effaces nature, or else contradicts it outright. And the relation of Camp taste to the past is extremely sentimental.

14. A pocket history of Camp might, of course, begin farther back -- with the mannerist artists like Pontormo, Rosso, and Caravaggio, or the extraordinarily theatrical painting of Georges de La Tour, or Euphuism (Lyly, etc.) in literature. Still, the soundest starting point seems to be the late 17th and early 18th century, because of that period's extraordinary feeling for artifice, for surface, for symmetry; its taste for the picturesque and the thrilling, its elegant conventions for representing instant feeling and the total presence of character -- the epigram and the rhymed couplet (in words), the flourish (in gesture and in music). The late 17th and early 18th century is the great period of Camp: Pope, Congreve, Walpole, etc, but not Swift; les précieux in France; the rococo churches of Munich; Pergolesi. Somewhat later: much of Mozart. But in the 19th century, what had been distributed throughout all of high culture now becomes a special taste; it takes on overtones of the acute, the esoteric, the perverse. Confining the story to England alone, we see Camp continuing wanly through 19th century aestheticism (Bume-Jones, Pater, Ruskin, Tennyson), emerging full-blown with the Art Nouveau movement in the visual and decorative arts, and finding its conscious ideologists in such "wits" as Wilde and Firbank.

15. Of course, to say all these things are Camp is not to argue they are simply that. A full analysis of Art Nouveau, for instance, would scarcely equate it with Camp. But such an analysis cannot ignore what in Art Nouveau allows it to be experienced as Camp. Art Nouveau is full of "content," even of a political-moral sort; it was a revolutionary movement in the arts, spurred on by a Utopian vision (somewhere between William Morris and the Bauhaus group) of an organic politics and taste. Yet there is also a feature of the Art Nouveau objects which suggests a disengaged, unserious, "aesthete's" vision. This tells us something important about Art Nouveau -- and about what the lens of Camp, which blocks out content, is.

16. Thus, the Camp sensibility is one that is alive to a double sense in which some things can be taken. But this is not the familiar split-level construction of a literal meaning, on the one hand, and a symbolic meaning, on the other. It is the difference, rather, between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice.

17. This comes out clearly in the vulgar use of the word Camp as a verb, "to camp," something that people do. To camp is a mode of seduction -- one which employs flamboyant mannerisms susceptible of a double interpretation; gestures full of duplicity, with a witty meaning for cognoscenti and another, more impersonal, for outsiders. Equally and by extension, when the word becomes a noun, when a person or a thing is "a camp," a duplicity is involved. Behind the "straight" public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing.

"To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up."
- An Ideal Husband

18. One must distinguish between naïve and deliberate Camp. Pure Camp is always naive. Camp which knows itself to be Camp ("camping") is usually less satisfying.

19. The pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious. The Art Nouveau craftsman who makes a lamp with a snake coiled around it is not kidding, nor is he trying to be charming. He is saying, in all earnestness: Voilà! the Orient! Genuine Camp -- for instance, the numbers devised for the Warner Brothers musicals of the early thirties (42nd Street; The Golddiggers of 1933; ... of 1935; ... of 1937; etc.) by Busby Berkeley -- does not mean to be funny. Camping -- say, the plays of Noel Coward -- does. It seems unlikely that much of the traditional opera repertoire could be such satisfying Camp if the melodramatic absurdities of most opera plots had not been taken seriously by their composers. One doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions. The work tells all. (Compare a typical 19th century opera with Samuel Barber's Vanessa, a piece of manufactured, calculated Camp, and the difference is clear.)

20. Probably, intending to be campy is always harmful. The perfection of Trouble in Paradise and The Maltese Falcon, among the greatest Camp movies ever made, comes from the effortless smooth way in which tone is maintained. This is not so with such famous would-be Camp films of the fifties as All About Eve and Beat the Devil. These more recent movies have their fine moments, but the first is so slick and the second so hysterical; they want so badly to be campy that they're continually losing the beat. . . . Perhaps, though, it is not so much a question of the unintended effect versus the conscious intention, as of the delicate relation between parody and self-parody in Camp. The films of Hitchcock are a showcase for this problem. When self-parody lacks ebullience but instead reveals (even sporadically) a contempt for one's themes and one's materials - as in To Catch a Thief, Rear Window, North by Northwest -- the results are forced and heavy-handed, rarely Camp. Successful Camp -- a movie like Carné's Drôle de Drame; the film performances of Mae West and Edward Everett Horton; portions of the Goon Show -- even when it reveals self-parody, reeks of self-love.

21. So, again, Camp rests on innocence. That means Camp discloses innocence, but also, when it can, corrupts it. Objects, being objects, don't change when they are singled out by the Camp vision. Persons, however, respond to their audiences. Persons begin "camping": Mae West, Bea Lillie, La Lupe, Tallulah Bankhead in Lifeboat, Bette Davis in All About Eve. (Persons can even be induced to camp without their knowing it. Consider the way Fellini got Anita Ekberg to parody herself in La Dolce Vita.)

22. Considered a little less strictly, Camp is either completely naive or else wholly conscious (when one plays at being campy). An example of the latter: Wilde's epigrams themselves.

"It's absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious."
- Lady Windemere's Fan

23. In naïve, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve.

24. When something is just bad (rather than Camp), it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish. ("It's too much," "It's too fantastic," "It's not to be believed," are standard phrases of Camp enthusiasm.)

25. The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance. Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers. Camp is the paintings of Carlo Crivelli, with their real jewels and trompe-l'oeil insects and cracks in the masonry. Camp is the outrageous aestheticism of Steinberg's six American movies with Dietrich, all six, but especially the last, The Devil Is a Woman. . . . In Camp there is often something démesuré in the quality of the ambition, not only in the style of the work itself. Gaudí's lurid and beautiful buildings in Barcelona are Camp not only because of their style but because they reveal -- most notably in the Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia -- the ambition on the part of one man to do what it takes a generation, a whole culture to accomplish.

26. Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is "too much." Titus Andronicus and Strange Interlude are almost Camp, or could be played as Camp. The public manner and rhetoric of de Gaulle, often, are pure Camp.

27. A work can come close to Camp, but not make it, because it succeeds. Eisenstein's films are seldom Camp because, despite all exaggeration, they do succeed (dramatically) without surplus. If they were a little more "off," they could be great Camp - particularly Ivan the Terrible I & II. The same for Blake's drawings and paintings, weird and mannered as they are. They aren't Camp; though Art Nouveau, influenced by Blake, is.

What is extravagant in an inconsistent or an unpassionate way is not Camp. Neither can anything be Camp that does not seem to spring from an irrepressible, a virtually uncontrolled sensibility. Without passion, one gets pseudo-Camp -- what is merely decorative, safe, in a word, chic. On the barren edge of Camp lie a number of attractive things: the sleek fantasies of Dali, the haute couture preciosity of Albicocco's The Girl with the Golden Eyes. But the two things - Camp and preciosity - must not be confused.

28. Again, Camp is the attempt to do something extraordinary. But extraordinary in the sense, often, of being special, glamorous. (The curved line, the extravagant gesture.) Not extraordinary merely in the sense of effort. Ripley's Believe-It-Or-Not items are rarely campy. These items, either natural oddities (the two-headed rooster, the eggplant in the shape of a cross) or else the products of immense labor (the man who walked from here to China on his hands, the woman who engraved the New Testament on the head of a pin), lack the visual reward - the glamour, the theatricality - that marks off certain extravagances as Camp.

29. The reason a movie like On the Beach, books like Winesburg, Ohio and For Whom the Bell Tolls are bad to the point of being laughable, but not bad to the point of being enjoyable, is that they are too dogged and pretentious. They lack fantasy. There is Camp in such bad movies as The Prodigal and Samson and Delilah, the series of Italian color spectacles featuring the super-hero Maciste, numerous Japanese science fiction films (Rodan, The Mysterians, The H-Man) because, in their relative unpretentiousness and vulgarity, they are more extreme and irresponsible in their fantasy - and therefore touching and quite enjoyable.

30. Of course, the canon of Camp can change. Time has a great deal to do with it. Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don't perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as fantasy when it is not our own.

31. This is why so many of the objects prized by Camp taste are old-fashioned, out-of-date, démodé. It's not a love of the old as such. It's simply that the process of aging or deterioration provides the necessary detachment -- or arouses a necessary sympathy. When the theme is important, and contemporary, the failure of a work of art may make us indignant. Time can change that. Time liberates the work of art from moral relevance, delivering it over to the Camp sensibility. . . . Another effect: time contracts the sphere of banality. (Banality is, strictly speaking, always a category of the contemporary.) What was banal can, with the passage of time, become fantastic. Many people who listen with delight to the style of Rudy Vallee revived by the English pop group, The Temperance Seven, would have been driven up the wall by Rudy Vallee in his heyday.

Thus, things are campy, not when they become old - but when we become less involved in them, and can enjoy, instead of be frustrated by, the failure of the attempt. But the effect of time is unpredictable. Maybe Method acting (James Dean, Rod Steiger, Warren Beatty) will seem as Camp some day as Ruby Keeler's does now - or as Sarah Bernhardt's does, in the films she made at the end of her career. And maybe not.

32. Camp is the glorification of "character." The statement is of no importance - except, of course, to the person (Loie Fuller, Gaudí, Cecil B. De Mille, Crivelli, de Gaulle, etc.) who makes it. What the Camp eye appreciates is the unity, the force of the person. In every move the aging Martha Graham makes she's being Martha Graham, etc., etc. . . . This is clear in the case of the great serious idol of Camp taste, Greta Garbo. Garbo's incompetence (at the least, lack of depth) as an actress enhances her beauty. She's always herself.

33. What Camp taste responds to is "instant character" (this is, of course, very 18th century); and, conversely, what it is not stirred by is the sense of the development of character. Character is understood as a state of continual incandescence - a person being one, very intense thing. This attitude toward character is a key element of the theatricalization of experience embodied in the Camp sensibility. And it helps account for the fact that opera and ballet are experienced as such rich treasures of Camp, for neither of these forms can easily do justice to the complexity of human nature. Wherever there is development of character, Camp is reduced. Among operas, for example, La Traviata (which has some small development of character) is less campy than Il Trovatore (which has none).

"Life is too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it."
- Vera, or The Nihilists

34. Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art (and life) a different -- a supplementary -- set of standards.

35. Ordinarily we value a work of art because of the seriousness and dignity of what it achieves. We value it because it succeeds - in being what it is and, presumably, in fulfilling the intention that lies behind it. We assume a proper, that is to say, straightforward relation between intention and performance. By such standards, we appraise The Iliad, Aristophanes' plays, The Art of the Fugue, Middlemarch, the paintings of Rembrandt, Chartres, the poetry of Donne, The Divine Comedy, Beethoven's quartets, and - among people - Socrates, Jesus, St. Francis, Napoleon, Savonarola. In short, the pantheon of high culture: truth, beauty, and seriousness.

36. But there are other creative sensibilities besides the seriousness (both tragic and comic) of high culture and of the high style of evaluating people. And one cheats oneself, as a human being, if one has respect only for the style of high culture, whatever else one may do or feel on the sly.

For instance, there is the kind of seriousness whose trademark is anguish, cruelty, derangement. Here we do accept a disparity between intention and result. I am speaking, obviously, of a style of personal existence as well as of a style in art; but the examples had best come from art. Think of Bosch, Sade, Rimbaud, Jarry, Kafka, Artaud, think of most of the important works of art of the 20th century, that is, art whose goal is not that of creating harmonies but of overstraining the medium and introducing more and more violent, and unresolvable, subject-matter. This sensibility also insists on the principle that an oeuvre in the old sense (again, in art, but also in life) is not possible. Only "fragments" are possible. . . . Clearly, different standards apply here than to traditional high culture. Something is good not because it is achieved, but because another kind of truth about the human situation, another experience of what it is to be human - in short, another valid sensibility -- is being revealed.

And third among the great creative sensibilities is Camp: the sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience. Camp refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness, and the risks of fully identifying with extreme states of feeling.

37. The first sensibility, that of high culture, is basically moralistic. The second sensibility, that of extreme states of feeling, represented in much contemporary "avant-garde" art, gains power by a tension between moral and aesthetic passion. The third, Camp, is wholly aesthetic.

38. Camp is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of "style" over "content," "aesthetics" over "morality," of irony over tragedy.

39. Camp and tragedy are antitheses. There is seriousness in Camp (seriousness in the degree of the artist's involvement) and, often, pathos. The excruciating is also one of the tonalities of Camp; it is the quality of excruciation in much of Henry James (for instance, The Europeans, The Awkward Age, The Wings of the Dove) that is responsible for the large element of Camp in his writings. But there is never, never tragedy.

40. Style is everything. Genet's ideas, for instance, are very Camp. Genet's statement that "the only criterion of an act is its elegance"2 is virtually interchangeable, as a statement, with Wilde's "in matters of great importance, the vital element is not sincerity, but style." But what counts, finally, is the style in which ideas are held. The ideas about morality and politics in, say, Lady Windemere's Fan and in Major Barbara are Camp, but not just because of the nature of the ideas themselves. It is those ideas, held in a special playful way. The Camp ideas in Our Lady of the Flowers are maintained too grimly, and the writing itself is too successfully elevated and serious, for Genet's books to be Camp.

41. The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to "the serious." One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.

42. One is drawn to Camp when one realizes that "sincerity" is not enough. Sincerity can be simple philistinism, intellectual narrowness.

43. The traditional means for going beyond straight seriousness - irony, satire - seem feeble today, inadequate to the culturally oversaturated medium in which contemporary sensibility is schooled. Camp introduces a new standard: artifice as an ideal, theatricality.

44. Camp proposes a comic vision of the world. But not a bitter or polemical comedy. If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

"I adore simple pleasures, they are the last refuge of the complex."
- A Woman of No Importance

45. Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the 19th century's surrogate for the aristocrat in matters of culture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.

46. The dandy was overbred. His posture was disdain, or else ennui. He sought rare sensations, undefiled by mass appreciation. (Models: Des Esseintes in Huysmans' À Rebours, Marius the Epicurean, Valéry's Monsieur Teste.) He was dedicated to "good taste."

The connoisseur of Camp has found more ingenious pleasures. Not in Latin poetry and rare wines and velvet jackets, but in the coarsest, commonest pleasures, in the arts of the masses. Mere use does not defile the objects of his pleasure, since he learns to possess them in a rare way. Camp -- Dandyism in the age of mass culture -- makes no distinction between the unique object and the mass-produced object. Camp taste transcends the nausea of the replica.

47. Wilde himself is a transitional figure. The man who, when he first came to London, sported a velvet beret, lace shirts, velveteen knee-breeches and black silk stockings, could never depart too far in his life from the pleasures of the old-style dandy; this conservatism is reflected in The Picture of Dorian Gray. But many of his attitudes suggest something more modern. It was Wilde who formulated an important element of the Camp sensibility -- the equivalence of all objects -- when he announced his intention of "living up" to his blue-and-white china, or declared that a doorknob could be as admirable as a painting. When he proclaimed the importance of the necktie, the boutonniere, the chair, Wilde was anticipating the democratic esprit of Camp.

48. The old-style dandy hated vulgarity. The new-style dandy, the lover of Camp, appreciates vulgarity. Where the dandy would be continually offended or bored, the connoisseur of Camp is continually amused, delighted. The dandy held a perfumed handkerchief to his nostrils and was liable to swoon; the connoisseur of Camp sniffs the stink and prides himself on his strong nerves.

49. It is a feat, of course. A feat goaded on, in the last analysis, by the threat of boredom. The relation between boredom and Camp taste cannot be overestimated. Camp taste is by its nature possible only in affluent societies, in societies or circles capable of experiencing the psychopathology of affluence.

"What is abnormal in Life stands in normal relations to Art. It is the only thing in Life that stands in normal relations to Art."
- A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated

50. Aristocracy is a position vis-à-vis culture (as well as vis-à-vis power), and the history of Camp taste is part of the history of snob taste. But since no authentic aristocrats in the old sense exist today to sponsor special tastes, who is the bearer of this taste? Answer: an improvised self-elected class, mainly homosexuals, who constitute themselves as aristocrats of taste.

51. The peculiar relation between Camp taste and homosexuality has to be explained. While it's not true that Camp taste is homosexual taste, there is no doubt a peculiar affinity and overlap. Not all liberals are Jews, but Jews have shown a peculiar affinity for liberal and reformist causes. So, not all homosexuals have Camp taste. But homosexuals, by and large, constitute the vanguard -- and the most articulate audience -- of Camp. (The analogy is not frivolously chosen. Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.)

52. The reason for the flourishing of the aristocratic posture among homosexuals also seems to parallel the Jewish case. For every sensibility is self-serving to the group that promotes it. Jewish liberalism is a gesture of self-legitimization. So is Camp taste, which definitely has something propagandistic about it. Needless to say, the propaganda operates in exactly the opposite direction. The Jews pinned their hopes for integrating into modern society on promoting the moral sense. Homosexuals have pinned their integration into society on promoting the aesthetic sense. Camp is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness.

53. Nevertheless, even though homosexuals have been its vanguard, Camp taste is much more than homosexual taste. Obviously, its metaphor of life as theater is peculiarly suited as a justification and projection of a certain aspect of the situation of homosexuals. (The Camp insistence on not being "serious," on playing, also connects with the homosexual's desire to remain youthful.) Yet one feels that if homosexuals hadn't more or less invented Camp, someone else would. For the aristocratic posture with relation to culture cannot die, though it may persist only in increasingly arbitrary and ingenious ways. Camp is (to repeat) the relation to style in a time in which the adoption of style -- as such -- has become altogether questionable. (In the modem era, each new style, unless frankly anachronistic, has come on the scene as an anti-style.)

"One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing."
- In conversation

54. The experiences of Camp are based on the great discovery that the sensibility of high culture has no monopoly upon refinement. Camp asserts that good taste is not simply good taste; that there exists, indeed, a good taste of bad taste. (Genet talks about this in Our Lady of the Flowers.) The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion.

55. Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation - not judgment. Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy. It only seems like malice, cynicism. (Or, if it is cynicism, it's not a ruthless but a sweet cynicism.) Camp taste doesn't propose that it is in bad taste to be serious; it doesn't sneer at someone who succeeds in being seriously dramatic. What it does is to find the success in certain passionate failures.

56. Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of "character." . . . Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as "a camp," they're enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling.

(Here, one may compare Camp with much of Pop Art, which -- when it is not just Camp -- embodies an attitude that is related, but still very different. Pop Art is more flat and more dry, more serious, more detached, ultimately nihilistic.)

57. Camp taste nourishes itself on the love that has gone into certain objects and personal styles. The absence of this love is the reason why such kitsch items as Peyton Place (the book) and the Tishman Building aren't Camp.

58. The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful . . . Of course, one can't always say that. Only under certain conditions, those which I've tried to sketch in these notes.

1 The sensibility of an era is not only its most decisive, but also its most perishable, aspect. One may capture the ideas (intellectual history) and the behavior (social history) of an epoch without ever touching upon the sensibility or taste which informed those ideas, that behavior. Rare are those historical studies -- like Huizinga on the late Middle Ages, Febvre on 16th century France -- which do tell us something about the sensibility of the period.
2 Sartre's gloss on this in Saint Genet is: "Elegance is the quality of conduct which transforms the greatest amount of being into appearing."

Videos de Andy Warhol

2008-05-05T08:27:00.002-07:00

Guy Debord y La Sociedad del Espectáculo

2008-03-31T04:58:00.000-07:00

enlace a lectura teórica de Guy Debord:

La Sociedad del Espetáculo

filmes:

filmes en UB WEB

Bio:

Guy Debord (1931-1994),

Debord's best known works are his theoretical books, Society of the Spectacle and Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. In addition to these he wrote a number of autobiographical books including "Mémoires", "Panégyrique", "Cette Mauvaise Réputation..." and "Considérations sur l'assassinat de Gérard Lebovici". He was also the author of numerous short pieces, sometimes anonymous, for the journals "Potlatch", "Les Lèvres Nues," "Les Chats Sont Verts," and "Internationale Situationniste".

In broad terms, Debord's theories attempted to account for the spiritually debilitating modernisation of both the private and public spheres of everyday life by economic forces during the post-WW2 modernisation of Europe. He rejected as the twin faces of the same problem both capitalism of the West and the statism of the Eastern bloc. Alienation, Debord postulated, could be accounted for by the invasive forces of the 'spectacle' - "a social relation between people that is mediated by images". Debord's analysis developed the notions of "reification" and "fetishism of the commodity" pioneered by Karl Marx and Georg Lukács. This analysis probed the historical, economic and psychological roots of 'the media'. Central to this school of thought was the claim that alienation is more than an emotive description or an aspect of individual psychology: rather, it is a consequence of the mercantile form of social organization which has reached its climax in capitalism.

The Situationist International, a political/artistic movement organized by Debord and his colleagues and represented by a journal of the same name, attempted to create a series of strategies for engaging in class struggle by reclaiming individual autonomy from the spectacle. These strategies, including "dérive" and "détournement", drew on the traditions of Dada and Surrealism.

Arte en el Choliseo (arte 115-102-GEPE 3010)

2008-03-31T04:52:00.000-07:00

William Carmona pinta a Daddy Yankee como una comisión para el Choliseo

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En la tierra del baile, botella y baraja todo es válido. A veces parece que el Día no se coje esto del arte en serio. Yo entiedo que todos tenemos que hacer chavos y aceptar comisiones, pero algunas cosas mejor se mantienen en secreto, o se identifican como lo que son, no todo tiene que ser high art. Este tipo de articulo y obra, en el contexto de arte confunde. Antes de leer el anuncio del Día favor estudiar la historia de Jeff Koons

escultura de Jeff Koons Michael- Jackson and bubbles

y por eso de, aqui otros ejemplos atrevidos de obras basadas en estrellas de la farandula:

Britney Spears por Daniel Edwards. titulo "Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston

Pro-life' Britney Spears sculpture draws criticism
Last Updated: Wednesday, March 29, 2006 | 10:48 AM ET
CBC Arts

An artist who has created a sexy, "pro-life" nude sculpture of pop star Britney Spears giving birth has drawn fire from several groups even before the artwork's exhibition.

Both pro-life and pro-choice proponents, as well as Spears fans from around the world, have criticized the life-size sculpture, which depicts the 24-year-old pop star naked and crouched forward giving birth on a bear-skin rug.

'Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston' by sculptor Daniel Edwards shows pop star Britney Spears in the nude and giving birth to her son. The work, which has already stirred up controversy, will go on display in a Brooklyn art gallery beginning April 7.Monument to Pro-Life: The Birth of Sean Preston offers "a new take on pro-life," artist Daniel Edwards told the Associated Press Tuesday."Pro-lifers normally promote bloody images of abortion. This is the image of birth," said the 40-year-old artist and father of three.

The sculpture will be mounted next to a case displaying pro-life materials.

Edwards has courted controversy with his artwork before: last year, he created a sculpture depicting the head of baseball great Ted Williams (whose body, after his death in 2002, was placed in cryonic suspension in hopes that medical science could possibly revive him in the future).

When the Brooklyn gallery that will display the sculpture announced the upcoming exhibit, officials were soon flooded with complaints – including 3,000 e-mails in about a week.

Pro-life advocates "thought this was degrading to their movement. And some pro-choice people were upset that this is a pro-life movement," David Kesting, co-owner of Brooklyn's Capla Kesting Fine Art Gallery, told AP.

He added that the gallery would hire extra security guards for the two weeks that the sculpture is on display.

The free exhibit opens at the Capla Kesting gallery on April 7.

Spears, who gave birth to her son, Sean Preston, last September, has not commented on the sculpture.

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Kate Moss como una esfinge por Marc Quinn

MYSTERIOUS GIRL

KATE MOSS, contorted in every conceivable way, wearing nothing but her bra and pants: every paparazzi's dream, no? Now that dream has become a reality thanks to renowned artist Marc Quinn, whose sculpture of the model is scheduled to go on view in the Netherlands later this month. Called 'Sphinx', the work, which is made in bronze and painted white, shows her with her legs and arms behind her head in a series of yoga positions. At the unveiling, Quinn said the piece was so named because of Kate Moss's mysterious persona. "She is a contemporary version of the Sphinx. A mystery. There must be something about her that has clicked with the collective unconscious to make her so ubiquitous, so spirit of the age," said the artist, whose last sculpture of Alison Lapper - an artist without arms and fully developed legs - took pride of place in Trafalgar Square. There were, however, no actual Downward Facing Dog shenanigans for Miss Moss, who has also sat for Lucian Freud. While the body and head of the cast are that of the one model, the actual positions were drawn from a yoga expert. "It's a portrait of an image, and the way that image is sculpted and twisted by our collective desire," said Quinn. (13 April 2006, AM)

Stephen Doig

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Artículo en el Nuevo Día
Por María Ivette Vega Calles

Aunque en su trayectoria el pintor William Carmona ha plasmado la realidad en sus obras, desde el año pasado tiene que capturar con más frecuencia la esencia de una persona real, aún sin conocerla.
Éste es el principal reto de uno de los proyectos más recientes del artista, a quien el Coliseo de Puerto Rico le encomendó que pintara a todas las estrellas que allí se presentan, para darles la obra como recuerdo de su visita.

En su agenda
Otros proyectos que William Carmona tiene este año incluyen una participación en el evento Arte América, a finales de este mes. También, la subasta de su obra “Jugadores de dominó pa’ la suerte”, en Christie’s de Nueva York, la realización de su libro de pintura a cargo de la escritora Susan Albert y comenzar a trabajar en una exposición de esculturas que presentará el próximo año en el Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico. “Hago una representación del artista un tanto surrealista, que capture el mundo mágico de ese ser. Leo su biografía y me baso en fotografías tratando de ver más allá”, afirmó.
Carmona desarrolla la obra sobre una pieza de cartón que lleva una gráfica estampada -la que representa muchos boletos de los eventos que se han presentado el recinto- y la estructura del Coliseo.

Algunos de los artistas que ha pintado hasta el momento son Elton John, Michael Bolton, David Bisbal, Alejandro Sanz, Draco Rosa, The Police, Ricky Martin y Daddy Yankee, entre otros.
Precisamente, la reacción de los artistas al ver la obra ha sido uno de los aspectos más interesantes de este proyecto, según Carmona.

“No ha sido tan fácil llegar a ellos. Hay unos que no quieren recibir a nadie antes del concierto, porque no quieren perder la concentración. Pero luego cambian al ver la obra. Por ejemplo, Ricky Martin quedó muy impactado, al igual que Daddy Yankee y Draco, quien es mi amigo, quedó muy conmovido. A Michael Bolton también le gustó mucho y quiso que le hablara sobre su significado”, destacó el artista.

Uno de los ejemplos más significativos de la reacción de los artistas es la de Elton John, quien no quería recibir absolutamente a nadie en su camerino, ni siquiera a gente de la producción, pero cuando vio la obra se emocionó y fue muy simpático.
“Me dijo: ‘Mi respeto a usted, maestro’ y le dije ‘no, el maestro es usted’. Y me dijo que lo iba a colocar en su cuarto de música. Hasta se despidió de mí con dos besos, como hacen los europeos. Todo ese enigma que lo rodea se perdió, porque lo que quedó al descubierto fue su calidad de ser humano”, afirmó Carmona, quien también destaca que esta iniciativa demuestra la bondad del puertorriqueño.

Y es que para él, la satisfacción ha sido doble porque muchos de estos artistas son amantes del arte y cuentan con colecciones privadas significativas. Por otro lado, Carmona contó que en algunas de sus piezas se atrevió a tocar sutilmente una controversia del artista, como sucedió con Alejandro Sanz, a quien le dibujó un niño pequeño en alusión al hijo que tuvo fuera de matrimonio. Sin embargo, Sanz quedó encantado.

Otra de las experiencias que ha tenido es que el artista en el que se ha inspirado ha resultado ser muy distinto a lo que proyecta a través de su imagen en los medios. Así le ocurrió con Daddy Yankee, cuya imagen dura contrasta con su calor humano, algo que -sin embargo- Carmona captó y reflejó en la obra.
Por el momento el pintor continuará trabajando en este proyecto, pues supone que en el futuro también participarán otros de sus colegas.

Se espera que en septiembre, cuando sea el cuarto aniversario del Coliseo, se presente una exhibición con todas las piezas.

Identidad, Alteridad y Travestismo por Haydee Venegas (Art 115-102-GEPE 3010)

2008-03-31T04:38:00.000-07:00

enlace al ensayo original:

ensayo de la crítica, curadora e historiadora Haydee Venegas

ARTE PUERTORRIQUEÑO DE CARA AL MILENIO

IDENTIDAD, ALTERIDAD Y TRAVESTISMO 1

HAYDEE VANEGAS

Arte puertorriqueño de cara al milenio: Identidad, alteridad y travestismo1
Haydee Venegas

Identidad

Desde su descubrimiento en 1493 Puerto Rico fue colonia española hasta que en 1898, nuestro territorio fue cedido a los norteamericanos. Durante estos cien años en los que ha sido botín de guerra, colonia y desde 1952 Estado Libre Asociado, Puerto Rico ha mantenido una cultura, costumbres y lenguaje que se han ido transformando y adaptando hasta crear una sólida y vibrante cultura caribeña hispanohablante. El puertorriqueño ha vivido quinientos años de historia en los cuales sólo ha conocido un sistema, el colonial. Desde que la conciencia del criollo se desarrolla en el siglo pasado, nos hemos hecho la eterna pregunta, qué o quiénes somos.

El tema principal de la década de los ochenta fue la revisión de esta larga búsqueda de la identidad en todas sus acepciones, principalmente la socio-política. Por muchos años el puertorriqueño se ha preguntado quién es. Por muchos años ha querido ser el otro. ¿Ser o no ser puertorriqueño? ¿Ser o no ser español? ¿Ser o no ser africano? ¿Ser o no ser norteamericano? Estas preguntas vitales que no han tenido ni tienen respuesta, mantienen a un pueblo dividido en un complicado embrollo político.

Continuamente, el puertorriqueño busca formas de ser incluido en importantes eventos, otras veces vemos con dolor, como nos excluyen. Nuestro mayor orgullo es ver desfilar el equipo olímpico. El pueblo se desborda para recibir los ganadores de medallas en estos eventos internacionales. Los recibimientos a nuestras tres "Miss Universe" han sido históricos. Por otra parte, se nos rechaza la afiliación en la UNESCO perdiendo así la participación de tan importante foro de intercambio cultural. Una de las consignas políticas que más ha calado en nuestra mente es que Puerto Rico tiene "lo mejor de dos mundos".2

El arte puertorriqueño ha sufrido por décadas, ese proceso de búsqueda de la puertorriqueñidad. Durante las últimas cuatro décadas se ha buscado inspiración tanto en movimientos internacionales como en nuestras raíces, yendo de un extremo a otro. Cuando Marta Traba publica en 1971 Propuesta polémica sobre el arte puertorriqueño, critica nuestro eclecticismo y afirma que el arte puertorriqueño tiene una "incapacidad de escoger entre actitudes muchas veces antagónicas, aquellas que convienen a un sistema peculiar de expresión".3 Edward Lucie Smith, se niega a incluir el arte puertorriqueño en su libro Latin American Art por que "se le hace difícil trazar una línea absoluta ente el arte del siglo veinte de Puerto Rico y el de los Estados Unidos".4

A pesar de todo, puedo afirmar que en estas últimas cuatro décadas ha habido brillantes artistas que han sobrepasado las fronteras del colonialismo y/o la alteridad, y se mantienen produciendo un arte de carácter, drama y autenticidad como lo son Myrna Báez, Rafael Ferrer, Domingo García, Luis Hernández Cruz, Antonio Martorell, Francisco Rodón, Julio Rosado del Valle o Noemí Ruiz.

Travestismo

En la búsqueda de la identidad, varios artistas de mediados de la década de los ochenta comenzaron a reinventarse, disfrazarse y a mostrarnos esa posibilidad camaleónica que poseen los artistas, que procede del pueblo mismo. En la trilogía, Hay que soñar azul, Hay que disfrazarse y Azabache, de 1986, Arnaldo Roche se retrata como un negro de ojos azules, tez blanca y/o cabello rubio. Marimater O'Neill y Carlos Collazo se auto-retratan uno al otro intercambiando sus estilos en la pintura Autorretrato X: It's not me (1989). Héctor Méndez Caratini, con su lente antropológico, realiza un inventario de ese gran abanico de disfraces de nuestras tradiciones y carnavales. Por su parte, Antonio Martorell se convierte en actor, dramaturgo, escritor, se promueve como recitador de brindis de duelos y artista; y para cada uno de estos roles crea su vestimenta.

Los noventa traen aún más libertades y problemas. Al acercarse el nuevo milenio, el centenario de la invasión norteamericana y un posible referéndum que intenta cambiar el estatus político y convertirnos en estado de la Nación Norteamericana, nuestros artistas se sienten obligados a reexaminar nuestras raíces y a tratar de entendernos como pueblo. Ante la conflictiva definición política, asumen múltiples posturas, se convierten en camaleones, cambian identidades, transgreden los géneros. Conscientemente travisten la identidad, aunque se sientan incómodos en ese nuevo espacio indeterminado.

El pueblo también busca nuevas vías. El "spanglish"5 cae en desuso. Se percibe un intento de eliminar estas palabras inventadas y de buscar un mayor casticismo del español. El puertorriqueño educado, la mayoría de ellos en universidades norteamericanas, cuando no encuentra la palabra correcta o cuando cree que lo dicho tendrá más claridad, recurre a intercalar en una misma conversación frases u oraciones completas en inglés y retoma la conversación en un español gramaticalmente correcto. Se comienza a cambiar de un idioma a otro con bastante naturalidad y la mayor de las veces no nos apercibimos de ello.6 Planteamos que en un intento de subsistir como pueblo caribeño, se asume la dualidad o fragmentación cultural a la que hemos sido expuestos por los últimos cien años.

Pero una dualidad análoga la poseían ya nuestros tradicionales santos de vestir, que pueden ser vestidos tanto de santo como de santa. En el mundo actual la poseen también los juguetes llamados "transformers" que siendo un automóvil, en segundos se convierten en robot o un monstruo y vuelven a ser autos sin dejar de ser juguetes. También la vemos en los hologramas, en cuyo reflejo se pueden ver dos imágenes diferentes que cambian de una a otra dependiendo de cómo se mueva. Estas maravillas del diseño y la tecnología moderna nos muestran claramente que sí se puede ser dos o tres cosas a la misma vez.

Hay algo claro: siempre fuimos poli-mulatos. Somos parte de la mescolanza de razas y lenguas que por quinientos años ha existido en el Caribe. Se vive la dicotomía de ser puertorriqueño, hablar español, sentirse latinoamericano y portar pasaporte norteamericano. Por nuestras venas corre sangre de las tres razas. Los más blancos oyen las congas y se les altera el esqueleto y se les encrespa el pelo lacio. La bomba, la plena y la salsa, viven insertadas en nuestra tradición. Comer paella periódicamente es necesario para tocar base con las raíces hispanas. El defender nuestra lengua española ha sido vital durante cien años. Llevar los niños los domingos después de misa a McDonalds al igual que ver cable TV, oír rock y rap y celebrar Thanksgiving son parte de nuestra actual tradición.

El puertorriqueño postmodernista, ante la imposibilidad o quizás haya que decir ya, la inutilidad, de definir su identidad, descubre de cara al milenio que ser y ser, es la respuesta. Es ahí donde nuestros artistas plásticos, obedeciendo a su misión de visionarios, intervienen y nos ofrecen una multiplicidad de opciones a la respuesta.

Arte actual

I. La década de los 80
Desde principios de la década se venían gestando grandes cambios. Uno de los más visibles fue la creciente inestabilidad administrativa del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña.7 Al perder el respaldo oficial, se crearon y/o fortalecieron agrupaciones de artistas que sirvieron de foro, de apoyo a la clase artística y de intercambio de ideas. Entre ellos se encuentra la Hermandad de Artistas Gráficos (1981), el Congreso de Artistas Abstractos de Puerto Rico (1981-2), la Asociación de Escultores de Puerto Rico (198//) y la Asociación de Mujeres Artistas de Puerto Rico (1982).8

El Museo de Arte de Ponce9 se convierte en el más dinámico centro de exhibiciones, organiza una serie de importantes muestras de los principales maestros locales, los más destacados jóvenes y las retrospectivas, del maestro del siglo XIX, Francisco Oller en 1983 y José Campeche, máximo exponente del siglo XVIII, en 1986. El Museo de la Universidad de Puerto Rico10 concentra sus esfuerzos en una serie de magníficas colectivas itinerantes que estudian el proceso histórico de la gráfica, el cartel, y la pintura puertorriqueña. Por su parte la Liga de Estudiantes de Arte11 comienza un activo programa de conciertos y performances de medianoche a la misma vez que da cabida en su sala a los artistas de más vanguardia. El intercambio propiciado por la Bienal de San Juan del Grabado Latinoamericano y del Caribe, continuó siendo importante para el desarrollo de nuestro arte. Las aperturas de Casa Candina,12 (1980-1992) que por muchos años fue un importante centro de estudios y exhibición de cerámica; del primer Museo de Arte Contemporáneo13 (1988) y la creación del Capítulo de Puerto Rico de la Asociación Internacional de Críticos de Arte (1988) fueron vitales para este cambio que floreció en el segundo lustro de la década de los 80.

Aunque ya en 1967 Rafael Ferrer, acompañado de Robert Morris, realizaron diez instalaciones, performances y happenings en el Colegio Universitario de Mayagüez, y a fines de los 70, un pequeño grupo de jóvenes artistas y estudiantes entre los que se encontraban Félix González Torres y Dhara Rivera hicieron varias instalaciones, estas formas de arte no cobraron fuerza entre nuestros artistas locales hasta entrada la década.

Solo el gran visionario incomprendido, Antonio Navia, nos enfrentó a tres magníficas experiencias a principios de la década del ochenta; con sus instalaciones/perfomances, la impresionante representación de un Hoyo negro (1983) en la Liga de Estudiantes de Arte, Homenaje a Oller (1983) en el Museo de Ponce y Nubestratos en el Colegio Regional de Humacao (1985). Muy temprano en la década realizo unos bellos dibujos que afirmaba eran diseños o planos para construir computadoras capaces de predecir el futuro y transmutar y traspasar la materia. El viernes 8 de marzo de 1991 a las 4:32 A.M. comenzó a dibujar en computadora los planos del funcionamiento de su cerebro. Por mes y medio, hasta que la computadora se quemó, fue concentrándose en cada una de las áreas de la estructura cerebral y las dibujó. Todavía nadie cree en estos dibujos, todos dudan de su capacidad, personalmente he sido tildada de demente por solo creer en la sinceridad de la intención del artista. De todas maneras, los dibujos son impresionantes. Cuando en 1968 intentó ganarse la vida haciendo consultas síquicas por teléfono, tampoco le creyeron, fuimos muy pocos los que vivimos esta extraña aventura. Desgraciadamente nadie ha visto su obra en los últimos cinco años.

El 1984 es un importante año que marca el comienzo de un gran cambio en el arte puertorriqueño. Es en este año que Antonio Martorell regresa a su patria luego de seis años en México, Marimater O'Neill obtiene un bachillerato de Cooper Union y Arnaldo Roche, una Maestría del Chicago Art Institute. Los tres artistas intervienen activamente en el campo de las artes de Puerto Rico, comenzando una concientización, e impartiendo frescura a nuestro ambiente artístico; también ayudaron a fortalecer el mercado. Un año más tarde, Carlos Collazo, que había permanecido siempre en Puerto Rico y que nos impresionaba con su precoz madurez artística, conmueve a la crítica con su exposición Bodegón Escenografía del crimen en Galería Palomas, 1985 y continuó impresionándonos hasta su temprana muerte en 1991. Por su parte Nick Quijáno logra interesar a los miembros de la Asociación Americana de Directores de Museos de Arte, con la exposición, Elementos de la vida criolla en 1985-86 en el Museo de Bellas Artes de San Juan.

Tan pronto Martorell llega a Puerto Rico, organiza junto a Rosa Luisa Márquez, profesora visitante de teatro del Colegio Universitario de Cayey, el grupo de Teatreros Ambulantes. Esta fusión de la plástica con el teatro llevará a Martorell a realizar obras de gran impacto que abren las puertas a un trabajo colectivo y se entrega de lleno a las instalaciones y performances, estableciendo así un continuo.

Arnaldo Roche, luego de su exposición Actos Compulsivos, en el Museo de Arte de Ponce (1984), comienza una vertiginosa carrera. Tres años más tarde es seleccionado para las importantes colectivas en Estados Unidos: Hispanic Art in the Unites States y Art of the Fantastic y representado a Puerto Rico en la Bienal de Sao Paulo.

Néstor Otero y Néstor Millán también regresan a Puerto Rico después de haber logrado abrirse un camino en Nueva York. El primero, que trabaja una obra más conceptual, siempre nos asombra con su sofisticada conceptualización, aunque exhibe muy poco. Su obra Los Cuatro Elementos (1996), fue muy bien recibida por la crítica en la pasada Bienal de Sao Paulo. Millán, que se destacó al principio como fotógrafo, en los últimos años viene experimentando con la gráfica y la pintura. Crea unos espacios íntimos de una especial sensibilidad homoerótica.

Por más de veinte años Héctor Méndez Caratini, se ha dedicado a documentar fotográficamente las tradiciones, religiosidad, festividades, arquitectura y todos los elementos que constituyen la historia visual puertorriqueña. Sus primeros ensayos fotográficos, en los 70, fueron sobre personalidades como Pablo Casals y Luis Muñoz Marín; tradiciones que se perdían como El Artesano y su Ambiente (1975-76), El ayer: recuerdos de un Puerto Rico Olvidado, (1978) y documentaciones históricas como Petroglifos de Boriquen, (1977) y las Haciendas de Cafetaleras (1988-90). Ya para comienzos de la década del 80 concentra en elementos de la religiosidad popular. Las investigaciones incluyen la serie de Los Vejigantes, de los carnavales de Ponce y de las fiestas de Santiago Apóstol en Loiza Aldea y las máscara de Santos Inocentes del pueblo de Hatillo. Su principal interés en ésta década fue rescatar y mostrar la riqueza de la aportación de los negros a nuestra cultura. Esto lo ha llevado a viajar por todo el caribe y Brasil para documentar y comparar la religiosidad popular de los grupos negros de estos países con las nuestras. En Salvador de Bahía fotografió a los Orixás; en Venezuela el culto a María Lionza, en Martinica documentó los cultos hindúes de Marianman y en la República Dominicana realizó un ensayo antropológico, sobre las religiones de los haitianos que cortan la caña, titulado Gagá y Vudú. Las tres fotografías presentadas en esta exposición pertenecen a este último estudio. Del rojo de su sombra (1992) muestra al Mayor Gagá en trance. Los impresionantes ojos inflamados contrastan con el resto de los objetos en la composición. Tambores rituales, el cuello de collar bordado, a mano, con espejos y lentejuelas y el tocado de lazos a color producto del comercio extranjero, nos hablan de los elementos culturales de la tradición africana. Viella, Reina de la Alcancía del Gagá, posa orgullosa, con un huevo en la mano, frente al altar y con su banderín y demás atributos. El brillante colorido caribeño que tiene sus raíces en la Africa negra, se manifiesta en todo su esplendor en Saludo ritual de los mayores con los "Palitos" o "Jong". En estos años el lente de Méndez Caratini ha visto como desaparecen tradiciones y como otras se enriquecen con la evolución. La tradición ni la cultura son estáticas y el fotógrafo nos regala un documento extraordinario que refleja estos cambios. Actualmente trabaja en un ensayo que tiene que ver con el centenario de la invasión de los norteamericanos. Para Ser o no ser (1997-8) está retratando todas las actividades, manifestaciones y protestas a favor y en contra que conmemora la presencia norteamericana en Puerto Rico y otras que muestran los efectos de esta presencia en nuestra vida cotidiana. Méndez Caratini es posiblemente el artista puertorriqueño que ha participado en más exhibiciones individuales y colectivas en el extranjero. Sus fotografías han viajado el mundo entero. También como Director del Consejo Puertorriqueño de Fotografía, se ha dedicado a promover la labor fotográfica de otros compañeros de profesión. Con mucho trabajo ha organizado exposiciones, foros de fotografía en Puerto Rico y coordinado la participación de nuestros fotógrafos en el exterior. En estas exposiciones participan fotógrafos de la talla de Carlos Arnaldo Meyners, John Betancourt, Nitza Luna, Rafael Ramírez, Sandra Reus, y Víctor Vázquez entre otros.

Víctor Vázquez, es el otro fotógrafo de más exposición internacional. Estudió sicología. Este conocimiento lo ayuda a penetrar con una asombrosa intensidad en el sujeto retratado. Actualmente realiza una serie de foto-instalaciones que tienen que ver con ritos de la santería. En esta década surge un sinnúmero de jóvenes pintores comprometidos que han continuado su actividad y compromiso. Carlos Dávila Rinaldi, criado en bases aéreas norteamericanas, conoce el mundo en su niñez. Al regresar a Puerto Rico pasa por un proceso de búsqueda de este mundo que conoció durante las breves visitas a los abuelos. Sus pinturas mezclan el neo-expresionismo con un pop caribeño. Ha trabajado varios temas, que van del ruido de nuestras carreteras, la violencia, las drogas, la locura hasta los indocumentados. Sus obras están llenas de energía y colorido.

Otra gran colorista lo es Nora Rodríguez Vallés, artista de profundo pensamiento y una simpática ironía. Este juego de lo irónico que se convierte en algo terriblemente serio se manifiesta en una de sus más mordaces pinturas, Domineichon. Esta obra le ganó medalla de oro en la Segunda Bienal de Pintura de Santo Domingo, (1994). En ella muestra una página de un cuaderno de un niño en el que ha tomado un dictado en inglés. La cita que trata sobre el colonialismo y la dominación es del filósofo francés, Michael Foucault o "Michel Fucó" forma en que el niño redacta el inglés utilizando la gramática castellana. La forma onomatopeíca en que se escribe la cita, y el significado del texto, evoca la complejidad del ser puertorriqueño.

Rafael Rivera Rosa, grabador y pintor, posee una larga carrera. Comenzó en la década del 60. Este año es uno de los artistas homenajeados en la Bienal de San Juan del Grabado Latinoamericano y el Caribe. Su pintura cobra fuerza en ésta década. Realiza un cautivante estudio de las máscaras tradicionales y las transforma en una mascarada moderna. También dedica parte de su producción al tema de la ecología.

Otros dos pintores que traen una revisión al surrealismo caribeño los son Zeno y Rafael Trelles. Sus alucinantes composiciones proyectan un sugerente surrealismo tropical.

El grabado, aunque pierde el respaldo del público, tiene en estas últimas dos décadas a varios exponentes: Haydee Landing y Martín García, quienes han participado y ganado importantes premios internacionales, ayudando así a mantener viva una tradición.

La escultura tiene también un gran momento en esta década. Pablo Rubio es invitado a varios simposios internacionales de escultura, incluyendo el de las olimpiadas de Corea.

Jaime Suárez abre un campo en la cerámica artística y la eleva al nivel de la pintura y escultura. Sus instalaciones y objetos en barro son adquiridos por importantes museos, entre ellos el Metropolitan Museum of Art. Melquiades Rosario en la escultura en madera también se abre paso. Logra ser invitado a participar en eventos en Argentina, Perú y otros países. Sus impresionantes construcciones realizadas con pedazos de madera sobrantes de los aserraderos, poseen una fuerza primitiva, casi pre-histórica. La tradición de una escultura fuerte continúa en la próxima década con Carmen Inés Blondet, y la aparición de otros jóvenes como Ramón Berríos, y Linda Pintor.

II. La década de los 90

Entrando a la década de los 90, el arte puertorriqueño se vio fortalecido por toda la efervescencia de los 80. A principios de la década, son las galerías comerciales las que asumen la responsabilidad de la promoción de nuestro arte, mientras que las agrupaciones de artistas comienzan a desaparecer. Las galerías Botello, Luigi Marrozini y Raíces envían a sus artistas a participar en bienales y ferias, a conseguir galerías en el exterior y participar en una gran serie de exhibiciones itinerantes. Los artistas individualmente logran obtener becas, grants y apoyo de mecenas para costearse sus participaciones en eventos de importancia internacional. Surge un creciente número de coleccionistas importantes, mientras que el Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña continúa sus altas y bajas.

Las celebraciones de los 500 años de los descubrimientos, América (1992) y Puerto Rico (1993), la construcción del Pabellón de la Feria Sevilla (1992-3) y la visita de los miembros de la Asociación Internacional de Críticos de Arte (1993), se convirtieron en excelentes excusas para organizar memorables exposiciones. Queda inaugurado en el 92 el Museo de las Américas,14 que junto al Museo de Arte Contemporáneo ha hecho una excelente aportación en esta década.

La Escuela de Artes Plásticas15 se convierte en foco de producción de una nueva generación de artistas jóvenes, los Novísimos,16 que han logrado imponerse. Dos de los artistas puertorriqueños seleccionados para esta exposición dos son egresados de la Escuela de Artes Plásticas y otros dos son profesores.

El trabajo comenzado por Martorell desde temprano en la década del 60, experimenta una transformación en la década de los noventa. En 1992 se monta en la guagua aérea,17 que ahora tiene regreso, y establece el puente entre la isla y lo que se puede llamar la segunda capital de Puerto Rico, Nueva York. Su educación como diplomático y su multiplicidad de intereses se refleja en una diversidad de técnicas y temas. Martorell ha trabajado en casi todos los medios artísticos conocidos y posiblemente en algunos todavía no aceptados como tal, aunque se resiste a la cibernética. También ha incursionado en todos los temas vitales de la contemporaneidad. Como un renacentista, ha abordado todos y cada uno de los aspectos de la vida cotidiana, social y política puertorriqueña en su serie de casas. En los últimos años amplía su mirada al Caribe. Con obras como Casaribe Caricasa, (1992), dedicada al descubrimiento de América invita al público, a pisar el colorido mapa caribeño mientras que se ve reflejado en una serie de espejos rotos cuyos pedazos escriben las palabras, Discover, recover, uncover y cover-up. El espectador se convierte en un sorprendido partícipe del mismo proceso colonial que la obra denuncia. En Caribordados y Mundillo Desencajado de 1997, obras realizadas por tejedoras boricuas, crea un nuevo orden o geografía caribeña y mundial. La instalación Blanca Snow (1998), nos habla de este transformarse del puertorriqueño. La mítica princesa del cuento se convierte en matrona puertorriqueña. La geografía boricua adquiere una nueva dimensión, el gran mapa por el cual se camina se transforma y trastoca tanto en la geografía como en los nombres de los pueblos que la conforman. Elementos de nostalgia, precariedad, generaciones de luchadores, tradiciones familiares, tradiciones populares, se interelacionan dentro de un complicado ritual a la memoria. Para la obra que se presenta en esta exposición redactó un provocativo texto definitorio de la caribeñidad, que fue escribiendo en tres idiomas, sobre paños que cuelgan del techo formando un ambiente en el cual el espectador puede penetrar. En esta obra une dos de sus grandes talentos, el de brillante escritor con el de excelente calígrafo. Palabra y forma permiten la entrada al mágico mundo caribeño, un mundo que habla muchas lenguas que luchan por hacer presente su voz, que es multi cultural, que parece pero no es paraíso. El texto, que sirve de diseño y puede ser también leído, captura la atención e invita a la reflexión. La sensualidad del movimiento de los paños provoca sensaciones marinas y tal vez alguno sienta el calor o respire los olores a exóticas flores caribeñas.

Arnaldo Roche, que desde sus tempranos autorretratos había desarrollado el discurso personal de lo que es ser puertorriqueño, amplía su visión y comienza a entrar en la década de los 90 en otras áreas de la historia y socio-política puertorriqueña, este gran paralelismo cultural. No le interesa entrar en controversias políticas, su planteamiento es entender y enfrentarnos a esta dualidad o dicotomía que nos afecta y ayudar a mostrar el camino de nuestra sobrevivencia. En sus pinturas señala las principales preocupaciones del fin de milenio, con un estilo expresionista y utilizando una iconografía caribeña. Buscando el norte (1993) forma parte de la exploración del colonizado, la alteridad que nos ha afectado por años. Eclipse total del sol (1991) muestra el congreso norteamericano y su poder de eclipsarnos al igual que Padre dime si me amas (1995) donde los capitolios de Puerto Rico y Estados Unidos se distinguen en segundo plano mientras que el padre es transmutado en un mono que juega indiferente el tradicional juego de la cuerda. En Quinientos años sin una oreja (1993), se disfraza de Van Gogh para recordarnos que durante los quinientos años desde nuestro descubrimiento por los españoles todavía no estamos atentos a lo que nos es vital. En Imperio de Pantaleón18 (1991), se apropia de la imagen del niño sin brazos de una pintura de José Campeche, y la transforma en una especie de macho cabrío, para presentar a un Puerto Rico, que aunque inválido por su indefinido estatus político, se siente orgulloso y poderoso. Obras tan desgarradoras como La isla de los miedos (1993), Refugio de los exilados (1994) y Dime si estoy listo para un sacrificio cultural (1994), tratan los más candentes temas de nuestra sociedad, el miedo a un futuro incierto, la terrible invasión de indocumentados dominicanos que llegan a nuestras playas diariamente y el peligro de una anexión a los Estados Unidos. Su última exposición titulada, Entre la Vida y la Muerte, se refiere al gobierno de las tres B instituido en el siglo XIX para mantener contento al pueblo y evitar la rebelión, Las B se refieren a Baile, Botella y Baraja, las mismas prácticas de nuestro actual gobierno. Las dos obras seleccionadas para ésta exposición son una del comienzo de la década y la otra del pasado año. En You tell me if this is not an omen (1991), la figura del artista se entrecruza o transmuta con una especie de dragón mientras que varias máscaras flotan en las esquinas de la composición. Algo parecido ocurre en El hombre pulpo (1996-7). En esta obra, Roche se representa mitad hombre y mitad pulpo. Mientras que el hombre se aferra a una estrella de mar que a su vez es la estrella de la bandera puertorriqueña, el pulpo con sus ocho tentáculos intenta apropiarse de todo el resto de la composición.

Mari Mater O'Neill se ha destacado como una gran colorista, ha trabajado además en teatro, realizado ambientaciones, videos, diseños gráficos y desarrollado un importante trabajo en computadoras. Posee su propio periódico en el Internet, el Cuarto del Quenepón.19 En sus pinturas va en búsqueda de los símbolos de nuestra tierra para entenderlos e internalizarlos. En El Castillo del Morro (1992), principal punto de defensa en época de la dominación española y hoy máxima atracción turística, y la serie de Mapas (1993), escudriña los más recónditos problemas de la sociedad. En otras obras como en Juegos de Poder y Buscando Casa, utiliza la multiplicidad de imágenes para hablarnos de la multiplicidad cultural puertorriqueña. El pequeño cementerio de Culebra (1992) es la obra que más la acerca al colorido caribeño y a la defensa de la ecología, aunque en realidad nos habla del enterramiento de nuestra cultura. En la serie Paisajes en fuego (1992-3) aparece el fuego y el agua como elemento purificador. Y su propio retrato como diosa capaz de apaciguar las fuerzas de la naturaleza/política destructora.

Dhara Rivera se establece permanentemente en Puerto Rico en 1993. Pasa un largo tiempo realizando bocetos que nunca llegaron a ser obras terminadas (1985-88). Los tres años en los que se dedica a la introspección son vitales para su forma de crear. Rivera trabaja como una escritora, siente que en su obra va entretejiendo historias que tienen muchos niveles de interpretación y que a la misma vez son un continuo. Una tras otra, sus obras se van confeccionando como capítulos de una novela por entregas y cada una se alimenta de la otra. En 1992 muestra en el Museo de Arte e Historia una serie de libros. Cada libro realizado en un material diferente; cristal, cerámica, cuero, recoge elementos de la literatura. Poemas de César Vallejo, Luis Palés Matos, León Felipe se entrecruzan y dan un nuevo sentido al objeto libro. No son libros para la lectura. Estos libros nos hablan del amor y terror a la palabra y tratan de capturar lo que uno desea contener y dejar libre lo que se fuga. Para la serie titulada "Soft Columns" (1995), utiliza tamices de tejer en los que aprisiona telas a las que le dibuja cicatrices. Cicatrices como escritura, hilando las historias de nuestras abuelas. Historias que se repiten, que se construyen y deconstruyen, que hablan de penas, que a la misma vez le dan sentido a la existencia. En su serie de ositos, utiliza el suave juguete infantil, y lo transmuta en un engañoso objeto realizado en cemento. Lo dulce del recuerdo, se entreteje con lo terrible de la infancia, lo duro de la vida, lo aterrador del convertirse en adulto. Los osos de Rivera se multiplican, y son aprisionados por cadenas que los atan. Para la obra que se presenta en esta exposición utilizó una serie de probetas encontradas, las cuales rellena de cemento, destruyendo el original, para convertirlas en fantasmas de lo que alguna vez fueron. Los objetos originales, encontrados en un almacén abandonado, pertenecieron al buque Heráclito y habían sido utilizados para hacer experimentos a las aguas de los mares del caribe.

Luego de haber completado una maestría en Bellas Artes de la Universidad de Yale, Charles Juhasz-Alvarado, regresa a la isla a enseñar en la Escuela de Artes Plásticas (1995). De Juhasz-Alvarado se ha dicho que "El signo más evidente en su obra parece ser el de la transgresión de los significados y usos habituales atribuidos a los objetos"20 La obra que se presenta en esta exposición, Travestoys (1994), fue parte de su proyecto de tesis de maestría. La pieza, está compuesta de tres elementos que interaccionan con el público. El esqueleto o réplica de juguete para ensamblar, de un enorme avión de madera modelo Focke-Wulf alemán, instalado en posición de ataque "camicasi."21 Una serie de imágenes impresas sobre papel, que se le entregan al público, con propuestas de diversos disfraces para revestir la estructura. Amenazado por el avión, una maqueta de Hammond Hall, edificio que alberga la facultad de escultura de Yale. La réplica del egregio edificio reviste un nuevo uso, el de un prostíbulo moderno. Este burdel, según el artista "está abierto a tantas formas de transacciones de lívido como la fantasía sea capaz de imaginar." En él hay espacios para una clínica/farmacia, un centro de cuidado de niños, una biblioteca, un gimnasio, un misterioso "grotto", varias barras, escenarios, pista de baile, restaurante con menú afrodisiaco, habitaciones individuales, además de rampas para impedidos. Las habitaciones del burdel están representadas por diez gavetas. Cada una de gavetas ha sido elaborada por un artista puertorriqueño contemporáneo que Juhasz-Alvarado comisionó para que infiltraran su obra. En los últimos dos años ha estado fascinado con el comején. Las termitas tropicales, incansables escultores de madera, que trabajan a escondidas moviéndose a oscuras dentro de túneles y devorando toda la madera que encuentra a su paso. A pesar de que se les considera el enemigo número uno en realidad son necesarias para el ecosistema tropical ya que solo atacan árboles enfermos. El comején le ha servido de metáfora de la imaginativa puertorriqueña. Como el mismo artista plantea: "Nuestra cultura continúa desarrollándose intensamente aun bajo la agresiva influencia de políticas imperialistas de asimilación y homogeneización cultural". Actualmente construye una enorme réplica en madera del módulo lunar del Apollo II. Voluptuosos nidos de comején arropan totalmente la pieza. La cultura de conquista espacial siendo infiltrada y reconquistada por la termita tropical. El público tendrá acceso físico al interior de uno de los nidos. También realiza un enorme avión en madera, un "jet" privado, que por turbinas tiene congas con bocinas por las cuales se escucha un pegajoso son caribeño. Físicamente Juhasz-Alvarado trabaja desde el otro lado, crea objetos de la cultura del norte y los traviste e infiltra de tal manera que sus atributos actuales son puramente caribeños.

Cuatro mujeres jóvenes realizan profundos estudios de la puertorriqueñidad y nos los presentan en sus instalaciones y objetos. Ada Bobonis teje estupendas crisálidas, nudos y racimos, con una enorme carga erótica. Anex Burgos, realiza pequeños mundos, donde el amor y la tentación son los protagonistas. Ana Rosa Rivera, va en búsqueda de los detalles arquitectónicos del siglo pasado y las manualidades de nuestras abuelas y las re-interpreta para adaptarlas a sus instalaciones. La magia y el misterio del pasado se mezclan en una serie de gavetas que nos hablan de recuerdos de tiempos pasados y un futuro en continua evolución. Mientras que Aixa Requena, utiliza la fotografía impresa sobre enormes telas las cuales interviene y transforma en un sofisticado juego de significados y significantes. En Canción festiva para ser llorada, utiliza el título de dos poemas de Palés Matos, el otro es Burundanga22 Este enorme banderín que intenta resumir cien años de historia, está lleno de fotografías históricas y algunas de su niñez. Todas las fotos han sido manipuladas e integradas a una serie de objetos símbolos de la historia, nuestra bandera, un candado esclavista, el pasaporte americano y la estatua de la libertad.

Los que se incluyen y los que se excluyen

En esta última década Puerto Rico se disputa con Cuba la nacionalidad de tres hijos por nacimiento cubanos y por adopción puertorriqueños, Felix González Torres, Rosa Irigoyen y Ernesto Pujol. Los tres se graduaron en la Universidad de Puerto Rico. González Torres tuvo una corta pero fructífera carrera, desgraciadamente murió en 1995 dejando un impresionante legado. Irigoyen y Pujol examinan su niñez en Cuba, los problemas que les causó la diáspora y la adaptación cultural a sus nuevos ambientes. Ambos han creado unos códigos similares. En sus obras, de estilos que rayan uno en lo clásico y la otra en lo barroco, aparecen las mismas imágenes: aviones, maletas y palmas.

Ernesto Pujol, va primero a su natal Cuba donde rescata y decodifica la cultura patriarcal machista de la clase blanca oligárquica hacendada en la cual nació. A su regreso en Puerto Rico, intenta recuperar los contradictorios recuerdos de su niñez y adolescencia de un país bi cultural donde para convertirse en macho puertorriqueño se tenía que jugar a los indios y vaqueros y copiar las hazañas de los programas americanos que veía en la televisión. Actualmente realiza un estudio para una instalación sobre la historia de la caña y su importancia para el caribe.

Rosa Irigoyen, viene realizando una serie de instalaciones que tienen que ver con su partida de Cuba en avión. Crea su propio Pasaporte a la memoria y trabaja con la metáfora del cuento infantil de Pedro Pan, como se le llamó al movimiento de sacar niños de Cuba. Su última instalación, Tránsitos y peaje (1997), dividida en tres, trata de su salida de Cuba en 1961, visita a Cuba y regreso a Puerto Rico en 1997. En la primera se destrozan las ilusiones, los recuerdos, se pierde un país, una familia y hasta sus queridas dormilonas. En la segunda visita a Cuba se confirman las pérdidas y al regreso, la aduana le incauta los puros cubanos. La pérdida sufrida, el peaje que se paga. La aduana como el lugar donde se transita de un estado físico a otro, donde se confirman las pérdidas, donde se pierden las pertenencias, donde se mueve uno de un estado mental a otro. Actualmente realiza una serie de Escotillas,(1997). En ellas incluye mapas antiguos, los que trastoca, reestructura y reviste de un nuevo significante. Los mapas dejan de ser documentos históricos para enfrentarnos al cambiante mundo de hoy. Las escotillas que se usan en barcos y aviones para mirar hacia afuera, son usadas por Irigoyen para la introspección. Son una mirada al mundo caribeño, a este constante viaje al fluir de un estado a otro.

Tenemos también el fenómeno de los artistas puertorriqueños nacidos y criados en Nueva York, que en los últimos años se han interesado en mostrar sus obras en la patria de sus padres: José Morales y Juan Sánchez son los que más exhiben en la Isla. Ambos se inspiran en la vida cotidiana del Barrio, mezclada con elementos de la iconografía boricua.23 La obra de ambos examina el bi-culturalismo en el que se criaron y nos confronta con la brutal vida cotidiana en el Barrio latino de Nueva York y a la gran nostalgia que sienten por su patria.

Los magníficos grabados, dibujos y pinturas de Juan Sánchez están repletos de símbolos de la cultura cotidiana, todos con el brillante colorido caribeño que es verdaderamente más intenso en la nostalgia. Mientras que José Morales retoma imágenes de la plástica puertorriqueña que por su importancia se convierten también en símbolos de la puertorriqueñidad, se apropia y deconstruye obras de tres de los principales artistas puertorriqueños. Las vírgenes de José Campeche, que eran copiadas de láminas devocionarias, aparecen en su obra Lámina (1995); los Plátanos Verdes de Francisco Oller, principal pintor del siglo XIX son radiografiados, reinterpretados y deconstruidos en El sobreviviente (1994), De una caja y En la brisa (1996). Morales también nos da su interpretación El Velorio (1996), en esta nueva versión el muerto es la cultura. Se apropia también de El pan nuestro (1907), la obra principal de Ramón Frade un pintor de principios de siglo. En camino (1996) le sirve de símbolo a la deconstrucción de nuestra cultura.

El tercer grupo de artistas que sufren la "bi-residencialidad", son los que han decidido radicar fuera del país, muchos de ellos logrando destacarse en el difícil mundo del arte. El primero fue Rafi Ferrer (1966), seguido de Edgard Franceschi (1968), Pepón Osorio (1974), René Santos (1976), Diógenes Ballester (1984) y desde hace dos años Anaida Hernández y Arnaldo Morales.

La carrera de Pepón esta última década ha sido vertiginosa. Estudió sociología y estableció una doble carrera de artista performero y creador de instalaciones. La exageración de sus diseños y lo abigarrado de sus superficies tienen hondas raíces en las decoraciones del Barrio hispano de Nueva York. Sus temas son representaciones de la vida cotidiana del West Side. Van desde la escenificación de un crimen de 1993, hasta reproducir una común barbería del Barrio de 1994. En Badge of Honor (1996) representa los cuartos de un padre que está en la cárcel y el de su hijo, en ambos existen monitores que permiten una conversación entre ellos donde se manifiestan sus más hondas penas anhelos y corajes.

Anaida Hernández, en solo dos años ha logrado la inclusión en importantes eventos y exposiciones. Actualmente trabaja en una instalación para el New Museum of Contemporary Arts titulada Moving Violations. Deja de un lado su tema principal que ha sido la violencia de la mujer, para trabajar un laberinto donde se investigan los juegos ilegales: el casino, la entrada de indocumentados y los intercambios culturales.

Hacia París partió, en el verano pasado, el fogoso Heriberto Nieves. Sus dramáticas y a la misma vez poéticas composiciones están realizadas en los materiales tradicionales de las construcciones de la arquitectura vernácula puertorriqueña: madera, zinc y brea. Nieves entra en un mundo donde mezcla la tecnología, la tradición y la introspección con una visión muy rica del futuro.

No debemos olvidar a Eliazim Escobar, preso político, que desde la prisión continúa enviándonos sus pinturas y principalmente publicando ensayos en una impresionante serie de ediciones norteamericanas que estudian la postmodernidad. La fuerza de su color y de su pensamiento marca a todo el que lo ve o lo lee.

III. De cara al Milenio

Los novísimos

Los artistas que han surgido ya entrada la década, han sido catalogados por el crítico Manuel Alvarez Lezama como los Novísimos. El grupo más joven graduados, casi todos, de la Escuela de Artes Plásticas en los últimos cuatro años, mantiene una gran movilidad. Tienen todos menos de 30 años y nacieron en un Puerto Rico en pleno crecimiento económico.

Arnaldo Morales, uno de los más originales artistas puertorriqueños actuales, tomó al país por sorpresa con sus máquinas perversas. Las dos exhibiciones realizadas en el año y medio de su graduación, recibieron premio de la Asociación de Críticos de Arte, como la mejor exposición de escultura, 1995 y la mejor exposición individual, 1996. Estas máquinas superfluas, solo capaces de hacer horripilantes sonidos, parar los pelos de punta, moverse de un lado a otro sin llegar a ninguno, escupir agua caliente, o simplemente mostrar visualmente la electricidad, nos conmueven por su inútil belleza. El tamaño y movimiento de sus máquinas ha crecido en proporción a la ciudad donde las construye, Nueva York. Ahora inmensas grúas se acercan amenazantes al espectador que cree va ha ser recogido por una gran palanca y vuelven a su lugar, creando sensaciones de impotencia entre los que pensaron ser devorados por el gran monstruo. Las mismas sensaciones de impotencia que sufren los puertorriqueños ante la nación norteamericana y su poder en nuestra isla.

Ramón Berríos, es un enamorado de la piedra, material que ha logrado dominar. Sus sensuales formas crean un seductor juego con el espectador, que se ve invitado a participar de ellas y descubrir su misterio.

Aaron Salabarias, comenzó una fructífera carrera como grabador. Mezclaba temas de la religiosidad con elementos de la vida cotidiana puertorriqueña. Para sus tempranos grabados se apropiaba de imágenes religiosas, como los sagrados corazones y las últimas cenas, las transfería a la obra utilizando un engañoso juego romántico de transparencias. La fuerza de la monocromía pone de manifiesto la brutal realidad que estos grabados encierran. Al trasladarse a Nueva York, donde estudió la maestría en artes, su obra sufre una transformación. Entra en el mundo de las instalaciones, además de que comienza a añadir color a sus obras. Para su proyecto de graduación utilizó el tema del diluvio universal, con el que mezcla objetos plásticos que representan la cultura norteamericana.

Carlos Rivera vive obsesionado con la criminalidad que arropa al país. Sus pinturas e instalaciones muestran horrendos crímenes, pistolas, diablillos, puntos de drogas, matones y todo tipo de parafernalia para el crimen. Sus desgarradoras imágenes cobran fuerza con los intensos colores primarios. Rivera nos enfrenta a la violenta realidad que se vive en muchas de las calles de este pseudo paraíso.

Edra Soto, la magnífica colorista, actualmente está estudiando una maestría en el Chicago Art Institute. Su primera exposición, a sólo meses de graduarse, fue un gran éxito comercial. Luego pasó un año en París como recipiente de la Beca Arana. Soto tiene una extraña capacidad de crear unas obras de estupendo colorido, complicado significante y alta ingenuidad.

Otro extraordinario colorista es Rabindranat Díaz. Su primera exposición individual le ganó el premio de mejor primera exposición de la Asociación de Críticos de Arte de Puerto Rico, 1996. La mayoría de las obras en esta exposición tenían títulos en bilingüe como LaStress Gracias y Best society of esposas perfectas. Todas sus obras poseen un doble significado para lograrlo recurre a un sofisticado humor. Sus graciosas imágenes esconden una mordaz verdad. Actualmente prepara su segunda exposición.

Guillermo A. Calzadilla es un joven muy intenso y altamente intelectual que en unión a su compañera, Jeniffer Allora, crean bajo el nombre de Allora y Calzadilla. Su principal tema es la indiferencia que sufre nuestra juventud. Este "espectáculo de la indiferencia" es provocado por el ritmo acelerado de la información y la tecnología, el consumismo, la violencia en la televisión, la pérdida de la unión familiar y las comunicaciones. Su deseo: "Ir más allá de la Postmodernidad mediante un ejercicio estético que prueba los límites de la indiferencia." Romper los límites de la indiferencia es su meta. Engañar, distraer y seducir al espectador ante una obra en la cual no puede permanecer indiferente, ha sido la ardua tarea trazada. Para ello cuidadosamente buscan formas y técnicas dentro del dibujo y la pintura. Con una precisión casi imposible realizan perfectos dibujos que aparentan ser fotografías, objetos reales o personas atrapadas en la superficie. Este engañoso juego, que aunque rápidamente se descubre, mantiene al espectador debatiendo sobre su verdadero origen, queriendo saber más, y en ocasiones esperando a que, los objetos y personas, salgan de su encierro y se conviertan en una realidad virtual ante nuestros ojos. En sus pinturas juegan con la neutralidad del color y la tecnología para crear tibieza capaz de interesar al espectador. Utilizan pinturas de carro para crear superficies que funcionan como si fueran espejos donde el espectador se ve reflejado y es obligado a observar su propia indiferencia y reflexionar sobre ella. En la serie Writing Landscapes (1996-7) mediante el minucioso dibujo de pequeñas hojas, crean una escritura inteligible. Estas pinturas se convierten en poemas que denuncian la destrucción del ambiente. Otro de sus temas es "el melodrama de la carne". Es aquí donde el género, la sexualidad y la auto-identificación entran en el juego. Trae a la vida carne pintada y la dota de cualidades humanas, estableciendo una relación entre lo bello, lo grotesco y el consumerismo mediante un espectáculo travestista.24 La obra presentada en la exposición Dance Floor (1997), representa un grupo de jóvenes bailando en una discoteca. El espectador que puede caminar sobre la pista de baile, observa el espectáculo, como si estuviera en un piso más alto. Esta impresión la logra utilizando la antiquísima técnica del dibujo en escorzo. Calzadilla siempre ha dicho "Me parece que es más fácil encontrar un medio nuevo que encontrar nuevos usos para uno viejo. La sutileza del dibujo, la claridad de las figuras, el realismo de sus posiciones y las sombras de las figuras, confunden y a la misma vez convierten el espectáculo en uno real. Pero nos preguntamos,¿Qué es real? Nada lo es. ¿Qué es irreal? ¡Nada!, todo parece real. Esta obra abre la posibilidad a la meditación sobre nuestro tiempo, nos induce a la reflexión y a concentrar en la manera que reaccionamos a la información.

Freddie Mercado, es a primera vista el gran travestista de los artistas seleccionados para esta exposición. Mediante el uso de paños, encajes y extravagantes vestidos, Mercado, transforma su propio cuerpo en una obra de arte viviente. Continuamente los residentes del Viejo San Juan esperamos verlo llegar a las aperturas de exhibiciones y demás actos culturales, para admirar su singular vestimenta de Menina o dama victoriana caribeña. Sin embargo el no se siente travestista, su transformación y vestimenta responden más a su filosofía de vida, a una necesidad interna de dejar su verdadero yo andrógino expresarse y de transgredir los parámetros tradicionales de vestimenta. Siempre se supo diferente, siempre se supo único y lo es. Luego de una búsqueda interna dejó que su ser andrógino se manifestara con toda la agudeza e ingeniosidad de la que es capaz. El proceso de transformación se hace con extremo cuidado, en ocasiones puede tomarle tanto que termina sobre las dos de la madrugada y a esa hora comienza a desvestirse, con la egoísta sensación de saber que su nueva creación fue solo disfrutada por él. Cuando logra tener lista la obra y salir a la calle a tiempo, hace su entrada como diosa caribeña barroca, e impone con su formidable presencia. Nunca pasa desapercibido. Integra maravillosamente su dual personalidad propia y nos hace pensar en la dualidad cultural colectiva. Sus dibujos preparatorios y osados diseños nos muestran la seriedad de su planteamiento a la misma vez que nos muestra su atinado uso de colores. Crea unas muñecas llenas de prendas, encajes y vestimentas tan fantásticas como las propias. Para la apertura de la presente exhibición preparó un performance titulado Coco barroco. Se inspiró en la extravagancia, lujo y frivolidad del siglo XVIII y la majestuosidad de la presencia caribeña. Utilizando una mezcla de música caribeña y barroca, se va transformando por medio de cambios en los paños, encajes y prendas utilizadas. Para la foto que le tomaron en el Yunque, Freddie Mercado utilizó, cual si fuera un espejo, una hoja de yagrumo. Es significativo el uso de esta hoja, única en el mundo en tener dos colores, por un lado es plateada y el otro cuando está en el árbol es verde y al secarse marrón. La dualidad del yagrumo ha sido comparada con la ambigüedad cultural puertorriqueña. En esta fotografía, tiene un importante significado, en ella Mercado se convierte en reflejo de la dualidad que nos ha llevado de la búsqueda de la identidad al travestismo.

HAYDEE VENEGAS

1. Deseo agradecer a Lolita González Quilan que fue la primera persona que me habló del travestismo como una solución para la supervivencia. Agradezco también a Marimar Benítez, Antonio Martorell y a Rubén Ríos Avila por sus aportaciones y correcciones al texto.

2. Consigna política acuñada por el Partido Popular Democrático. Surge de un intento de evitar la anexión a los Estados Unidos lo que eliminaría nuestras participaciones olímpicas.

3. Traba, Marta. Propuesta polémica sobre arte puertorriqueño. San Juan: Ediciones Librería Internacional, 1971. P 11

4. Lucie-Smith, Edward. Latin American Art of the 20th Century. Londres: Thames & Hudson, 1993. P. 8.

5. Spanglish, palabras mezcladas del inglés y el español, principalmente inventadas por los puertorriqueños que viven en Nueva York y que se infiltraron en Puerto Rico durante los 70 cuando los hijos de estos inmigrantes empezaran a regresar a la isla en busca de sus raíces.

6. Este fenómeno lo ha venido recogiendo la literatura. En su última colección de ensayos No llores por nosotros Puerto Rico, Luis Rafael Sánchez incluye, siempre en itálicas, palabras, frases, oraciones y hasta títulos en inglés. Por otra parte Rosario Ferré escribe su última novela, The House in the lagoon, totalmente en inglés.

7. El 16 de junio de 1983 un grupo de militantes de la cultura tocaron las campanas de la Iglesia San José y celebraron la destitución de la directora del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña. Desde ese momento al día de hoy se han nombrado cinco personas a este puesto.

8. Todas estas agrupaciones fueron capitaneadas por nuestros mejores artistas, Myrna Báez, Antonio Torres Martinó, la EAG, Luis Hernández Cruz, organizó varias exposiciones de los abstractos, Pablo Rubio asumió la presidencia de los escultores y un nutrido grupo de mujeres comenzó la labor de organizarse.

9. En enero de 1980 hasta enero del 1988, Haydee Venegas se convierte en Directora Auxiliar/Curadora del Museo de Arte de Ponce, en 1982 trae a Marimar Benítez de Curadora invitada, ambas crean un activo programa de exhibiciones.

10. De 1983 al 1989 Maricarmen Ramírez dirige el Museo activando un importante programa de exhibiciones muchas de ellas viajaron a museo en el exterior.

11. La Liga de Estudiantes de Arte bajo la administración de Delta Picó, y la presidencia de Jorge Rigau entre otros muchos, organizan un activo programa de conciertos de música contemporánea, exhiben abren sus salas para instalaciones de Martorell, Dhara Rivera, Antonio Navia y Charles Juhasz. También amplían la revista Plástica, que a principio tubo editores invitados y luego la editó Ruth Vasallo.

12. Casa Candina un centro de educación y promoción de la cerámica fue organizado por Jaime Suarez, Susana Espinosa, Bernardo Hogan y Tony Hambleton.

13. El Museo de Arte Contemporáneo fue un sueño de varios artistas, galeristas e historiadores que por cuatro años trabajaron para que al fin se abriera en la Universidad del Sagrado Corazón. Este esfuerzo fue capitaneado y actualmente lo dirige Miyuca Somoza.

14. Este museo es el más joven proyecto del creador del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, Don Ricardo Alegría. Ha obtenido premio de AICA-PR como la institución cultural del año durante los últimos dos años, por la maravillosa serie de exhibiciones de maestros latinoamericanos que ha presentado.

15. En 1985 la EAP se convierte en un ente autónomo bajo la dirección de Margarita Fernández, actualmente tiene como rectora a Marimar Benítez.

16. Término acuñado por el crítico de arte Manuel Alvarez Lezama.

17. La guagua aérea se le ha llamado a los aviones que en la década del 50 transportaron a miles de trabajadores puertorriqueños a Nueva York en búsqueda de una mejor vida y que en los 70 comenzó a traer muchos de ellos y o a sus hijos que vinieron en búsqueda de sus raíces. Gracias a la ciudadanía americana el puertorriqueño ha tenido una gran movilidad.

18. El niño Pantaleón Avilés (1808), una de las últimas pinturas de José Campeche (1751-1809), muestra a un niño que nació sin brazos.

19. Quenepa es una fruta tropical. La dirección del Internet el http://www.cuarto.quenepon.org

20. Texto que acompaña un escrito inédito de Santiago Flores

21. La posición del avión es inconsistente con las posibilidades reales de maniobra del avión alemán.

22. Burundanga, palabra de extracción africana que significa un gran lío o embrollo.

23. Borinquén era el nombre que le daban los indios a la isla de Puerto Rico

24. Basa esta teoría en una cita del libro Seduction de Jean Baudrilliard , St. Martin's Press: New York, 1990: "la habilidad de la carne para interpretar dos personajes al mismo tiempo sin ofrecer una identidad sexual biológica, para entonces ofrecer teatro y maquillaje con la obra en sí mima".

Repaso y lecturas para exámen 1

2008-03-03T19:13:00.000-08:00

1.PANORAMA HISTORICO DE LAS ARTES PLASTICAS EN PUERTO RICO
Rodolfo J. Lugo-Ferrer

(estudiantes: Este ensayo de Rodolfo J. Lugo es uno que debe ser visto/entendido como una visión independiente. Puede contener algunos errores de juicio...aunque no deja de ser interesante).

Si estan interesados en una versión oficial favor referirse al siguiente libro: PUERTO RICO; ARTE E IDENTIDAD.

ensayo:

ensayo Arte en PR

2.El modernismo en el arte y la arquitectura puertorriqueña.
José Ramón Alonso Lorea.

Más de veinte años después de la guerra hispanoamericana (1898), el traspaso de su condición colonial de una metrópolis a otra parece condicionar el retardo de la entrada del modernismo en las artes plásticas puertorriqueñas.

ensayo:

Arquitectura en PR

Francisco Oller

Bubu Negron

Boticelli

Paul Cezanne

Francisco Oller

Francisco Oller

Myrna Báez

Edgar Degas

Carlos Irizarry

alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5175136999042405826" />

Giotto

Francisco Oller

Paul Cezanne

Gustave Courbet

Arnaldo Roche

José Campeche

Lecturas Art 102/GEPE 3010

2008-01-29T07:48:00.001-08:00

WALTER BENJAMIN

Aura
Walter Benjamin used the term "aura" to refer to the feeling of awe created
by unique or remarkable objects such as works of art or relics of the past.
According to Benjamin older cultures can generate auras around particular
objects of veneration, while capitalist culture has the opposite effect,
causing the decay of the aura due to the proliferation of mass production
and reproduction technologies.

leer ensayo:

Walter Benjamin

articulo ARTE Y ESPACIOS NUEVOS en PR:

Pedro Velez

2008-01-29T07:48:00.000-08:00

Yoko Ono (Cut Piece, Fly, y otros trabajos)

2007-11-05T10:17:00.000-08:00

Lennon y Ono durante la navidad del '69 rentaron espacios públicos en 11 ciudades de los EU y colocaron estos anuncios...

"To Be Appreciated Only When It’s Broken"
cast bronze, '65

"Cut Piece" '65

Michael Heizer / Walter de Maria (Land Art/Earth Works)

2007-11-05T09:51:00.000-08:00

*Heizer

"North, East, South, West" 1967—2002

"double negative"

Heizer
Essay by Michael Govan

In the mid-1960s, during the same period that Michael Heizer was making large-scale, shaped, "negative" paintings in his New York City studio, he began a series of trips to his home states of Nevada and California to experiment on the expansive raw canvas of the American desert landscape, where he created "negative" sculpture. The genre that he and his colleague Walter De Maria invented there—later dubbed "Earth art" or "Land art"—changed the course of modern art history. Working largely outside the confines of the gallery and the museum, Heizer went on to redefine sculpture in terms of scale, mass, gesture, and process, creating a virtual lexicon of three-dimensional form.

Heizer's Double Negative (1969) comprises two giant rectangular cuts (and the space in between them) in the irregular cliff edges of a tall desert mesa near Overton, Nevada. This monumental piece is iconic of the period and of works made in and of the landscape, as are Robert Smithson's later Spiral Jetty (1970), in Utah, and De Maria's The Lightning Field (1977), in New Mexico. Facing each other in the cliffs on either side of a wide cleft in the mesa, the cuts define rectilinear spaces from which bulldozers have removed the sandstone strata and rock. These spaces, which would roughly absorb the Empire State Building lying on its side, might as aptly be compared to the large-scale feats of modern engineering, or to the monumental earthen architecture of ancient times, as to sculpture. Thus, Heizer's work constitutes a challenge to sculpture's long history.

Although the "sculptural volume" of Double Negative was created by a massive movement of earth, performed with the help of heavy machinery, it isn't physical at all. Instead it is made literally of nothing, of negative space: the volume that traditionally defines a sculpture is described in these works by a void, by absence rather than presence. The first such "negative" form in Heizer's work was North, East, South, West, which the artist produced in wood and sheet metal in 1967, putting two of the four elements, North and South, in the ground in the Sierra Nevada in California. The work has now been constructed in its entirety as a permanent feature of Dia's museum in Beacon, in the size and material (weathering steel) that Heizer originally specified for it. These four diverse sculptural elements— two stacked cubic forms, one larger and one smaller (North); a cone (South); a triangular trough (West); and an inverted truncated cone (East)—together measure more than 125 feet in length, and sink from the floor of the gallery to a depth of 20 feet. When the work was first developed, such dimensions had no precedent in the art of recent times.

Heizer prefers the term size to scale in descriptions of his work, in part to emphasize the factual and visual implications of the actual distance traversed by the eye or on foot in viewing it. The sheer physical dimensions of North, East, South, West, and its physical integration into, or displacement of, the fabric of the Dia building, force an entirely different viewing experience from that of traditional sculpture in the round, an experience that is a function less of movement to allow multiple viewpoints than of the extended journey in time and space required to comprehend it. And the fact that the sculpture literally displaces the floor on which the visitor walks creates a sense of potential physical danger that further challenges the viewing experience.

The architectural scale and construction of Heizer's work, particularly Double Negative and City, begun in 1970 and still under construction in Nevada, often call forth comparisons to the megalithic monuments of ancient cultures. The son of an anthropologist, Heizer acknowledges numerous ancient sources for some of his forms but sees the comparison as more apt in the realm of effect than of specific reference:
It is interesting to build a sculpture that attempts to create an atmosphere of awe. Small works are said to do this but it is not my experience. Immense, architecturally sized sculpture creates both the object and the atmosphere. Awe is a state of mind equivalent to religious experience, I think if people feel commitment they feel something has been transcended. . . . I think that large sculptures produced in the '60s and '70s by a number of artists were reminiscent of the time when societies were committed to the construction of massive, significant works of art.1
The simplified, monumental geometric forms of North, East, South, West also share affinities with futuristic Constructivist sculpture and modernist architecture. In sum, the piece suggests the underlying Euclidean lexicon of basic three-dimensional forms—box, cone, and wedge—essential for all sculpture, ancient and modern. Going more deeply still, the forms suggest the molecular crystalline morphology from which all physical shapes in matter are derived.2

The emphasis on elemental vocabularies of form and gesture is key to Heizer's work. His most massive single (positive) sculptural shape, 45°, 90°, 180°/Geometric Extraction, is a focal point of his ongoing City project; he also created a slightly smaller version (made of industrial corrugated cardboard) of it for an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 1984. The work comprises eighteen diverse geometric forms, but its title refers to its feature elements, three rectangular blocks respectively placed at a forty-five-degree angle, vertically, and horizontally. Set on a rectangular plaza, the forms are separate volumes cut from a single triangular monolith that was itself a by-product of a drilling plan that Heizer originally developed for the removal of masses of stone block from a cliff for a vertical sculpture. As in Dragged Mass (1971), which is the result of earth displaced by literally dragging a massive thirty-ton block of stone over the ground, Heizer's "forms" are sometimes less designs than the results of a practical physical process.

Another outdoor work, Adjacent, Against, Upon (1976), comprises three poured-concrete geometric shapes, each so paired with a comparably huge natural rock as to enumerate the possible relation ships between a movable object and a fixed one: as the title describes, one rock is adjacent to, one is against, and one stands upon its concrete counterpart.3 The title 45°, 90°, 180° describes another essential axiom of three-dimensional potential: any object can stand, lean, or lie in relationship to a horizontal and a vertical plane. Similarly, the title North, East, South, West— defining the cardinal points of the compass as well as describing in total the 360° plane of the floor or ground—suggests a primary set of conditions that rest at the core of more complex variations.

Described like this by the artist himself in his titles, Heizer's work can seem less art than a collection of data or a list of fundamental laws of sculpture. Yet, to the contrary, these matter-of-fact titles only partially account for the experiential effects of each sculpture, because the translation of any abstract principle into actual form in time and space involves countless formal decisions. Even the most minimal artistic intentions, then, are infused with the unique perspective and biases of the artist and of the culture within which the work is made. The "minimal" shapes in Heizer's sculpture abound with references to the objects and architectures of ancient cultures, to the language of sculpture, and even to the underlying crystalline morphology defining all shapes. But what lies at the core of Heizer's art is his extreme reduction of such myriad specific sources.

Ancient sculpture may have specific commemorative or religious meaning to convey, but for Heizer it generates its sense of awe through its intense "commitment" to making an "architecturally sized" work that becomes "both the object and the atmosphere." Those issues of commitment and scale can equally be embodied in the contemporary artist's intense and self-reflexive process of abstraction—even negation— with the same overall results.

Notes

1. Michael Heizer, in an interview with Julia Brown, in Brown, ed., Michael Heizer: Sculpture in Reverse (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), p. 33.

2. On crystalline morphology, Heizer references James D. Dana, Manual of Mineralogy and Petrography (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1889).

3. The two materials, concrete and natural rock, are also contrasted by their different crystalline morphology.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

de Maria

Walter de Maria
"Lightning Field"

The Lightning Field, 1977, by the American sculptor Walter De Maria, is a work of Land Art situated in a remote area of the high desert of southwestern New Mexico. It is comprised of 400 polished stainless steel poles installed in a grid array measuring one mile by one kilometer. The poles—two inches in diameter and averaging 20 feet and 7½ inches in height—are spaced 220 feet apart and have solid pointed tips that define a horizontal plane. A sculpture to be walked in as well as viewed, The Lightning Field is intended to be experienced over an extended period of time, and visitors are encouraged to spend as much time as possible in it alone, especially during sunset and sunrise. In order to provide this opportunity, Dia offers overnight visits during the months of May through October.

Commissioned and maintained by Dia Art Foundation, The Lightning Field is recognized internationally as one of the late-twentieth century's most significant works of art and exemplifies Dia's commitment to the support of art projects whose nature and scale exceed the limits normally available within the traditional museum or gallery. Dia also maintains two other of De Maria's projects, both located in New York City: The Broken Kilometer, 1979, and The New York Earth Room, 1977. Another large-scale work by De Maria—The Equal Area Series (1976-90)—is currently installed at Dia:Beacon, Dia's museum for its permanent collection north of Manhattan in Beacon, New York.

Art 115 ( Vienna AKtionist, Fluxus, Arte Povera)

2007-11-05T09:22:00.000-08:00

Link con información extensa sobre los Accionistas:

http://www.freewebs.com/vienna-actionists/index.htm

Nitsch
"placer material"

Brus

Filliou
"Música Telepática"

Eric Dietman
"unwell saw"

Manzoni

Daniel Sperri

Soto

Luciano Fabro

Fontana

Pistoletto

Piero Manzoni

Soto

Lucio Fontana

Jesus Rafael Soto

Luciano Fabro

Pistoletto

Chris Burden (performance art) ART 115

2007-10-26T19:16:00.000-07:00

Chris Burden: "My God, are they
going to leave me here to die?"

by Roger Ebert / May 25, 1975

At 8:20 p.m., the body artist Chris Burden entered a large gallery of the Museum of Contemporary Art, did not look at his audience of 400 or more, set a clock for midnight, and lay down on the floor beneath a large sheet of plate glass that was angled against the wall.

So began on April 11 a deceptively simple piece of conceptual art that would eventually involve the imaginations of thousands of Chicagoans who had never heard of Burden, would cause the museum to fear for Burden's life, and would end at a time and in a way that Burden did not remotely anticipate.

"White Light/White Heat": Burden remained on the platform in the corner from February 8 to March 1, 1975, without eating, and was not seen or heard the entire time.

The piece began, in a sense, a month earlier, when I was interviewing Burden at the Arts Club of Chicago in the company of Ira Licht, the museum's curator. At that time Burden had just completed a piece in a New York art gallery that involved his living for three weeks on a triangular platform set so high against one of the gallery's walls that no one could see for sure if he was really up there. He took no nourishment except celery juice.

The piece had been spooky, mystical, Burden was saying. There had been something infuriating, for some of the visitors to the gallery, in the notion that a human presence was up there in the shadows under the ceiling, not speaking, not doing anything, just waiting.

Some of the visitors tried to take running jumps up the wall in an attempt to see Burden, or a hand, or a shoe, or a couple of eyeballs in the darkness. Others took it on trust that he was there. Burden heard one young man telling his friend that the feeling in the gallery was almost spiritual: "He can hear us, and he doesn't answer, but he can't help listening...it's like God."

Burden had been invited to Chicago to participate in an exhibition of "conceptual art" at the museum. Earlier that morning, he'd visited the gallery where he'd be performing, and now at lunch he said he wasn't sure yet what he would do, but he had a few ideas.

Would it be fair, Ira Licht asked, to ask for some rough estimate of how long the piece might last?

No, Burden said, it wouldn't. A piece lasting 45 seconds might be richer than one lasting two hours.

Licht said there might be a problem if some of the museum's members arrived a few minutes late and the piece was already over. Well, Burden sighed, he couldn't please all of the people all of the time. And it was at that moment that the idea for his April 11 performance came to him...

The talk at the luncheon moved on to some of Burden's earlier pieces, and inevitably to the performance by which he earned his master's thesis at the University of California at Irvine: He had himself locked into a locker measuring 2-by-3-by-3 feet for five days; there was a five-galloon jug of water in the locker above him and, with admirable logic, an empty five-gallon container in the locker below him. Word of the piece had spread all over the campus, and hundreds of students had come to talk to him through the locker's grillwork. One of the beauties of the piece, Burden said, was that, of course, he had to listen: "I was a box with ears and a voice."

On another occasion, Burden had himself manacled with brass rings to a concrete floor, flanked by two buckets of water with live electric wires in them. The audience was admitted, and trusted not to knock over a bucket and electrocute the artist. "I had absolute faith that they wouldn't," Burden said. "After all...I'm not suicidal."

For other works Burden had himself nailed to the roof of a Volkswagen, and shot in the arm with a rifle ("It was supposed to be a graze wound, but the marksman missed"). These more violent pieces tended to attract more attention, he said, but some of his quieter pieces were perhaps more interesting. The idea in conceptual art is that the artist causes experiences to happen to himself, and then ruminates on the interaction between the self and the experience; an audience may be permitted to observe, but is not essential.

When he returned to Chicago in April, Burden told the museum he would require the large industrial-style clock, the sheet of plate glass, and nothing else. The clock was fastened to the wall and the sheet glass was leaning against it at a 45-degree angle when the museum's doors were opened at 8 p.m.

An unusually large crowd filed in, attracted perhaps by publicity about Burden's previous performances. There was a slight carnival atmosphere. The tone was muted somewhat because of a large number of spectators who were seriously interested in body art, but all the same a definite feeling existed in the room that some people had come to see blood.

At 8:20, Burden entered the gallery, set the clock for midnight and laid down under the glass. He was wearing a Navy blue sweater and pants, and jogging shoes. He let his hands rest easily at his sides and looked up at the ceiling, blinking occasionally. He could not see the clock.

The audience perhaps expected more. There was a pregnant period of silence, about 10 minutes, and when at the end of it nothing else had happened, there were a few loud whistles and sporadic outbursts of clapping. Burden did not react. At various times during the next two hours, audience members tried to approach Burden with advice, greetings, exhortations, and a red carnation. They were politely but firmly kept away by the museum attendants. A girl threw her brassiere at the glass; it was taken away by a smiling guard.

At 10:30 p.m., when I left, the crowd had dwindled down to perhaps 100. I came back to the Sun-Times to write a mildly quizzical article, and then called Alene Valkanas, the museum's publicist, to ask if Burden was still on the floor.

"Yes, he is," she said. "It's a really strange scene here right now. There are about 40 people left, and they're all very quiet. Burden doesn't move. It was more like a circus before; but now it's more like a shrine...very mysterious and beautiful."

I filed the story with a pre-written editor's note: "At (fill in the time and day), Chris Burden ended his self-imposed vigil." The editor's note was never to run.

I left to meet friends for a drink, and we talked about Burden and what he was up to. There was the suggestion that this was another of his danger pieces, that eventually someone would become impatient enough to throw something at the plate glass and break it, that Burden's immobility was an impudent invitation of violence toward himself. Nobody had a better idea.

The room was crowded and happy and noisy, but I felt my thoughts being pulled back to that vast, empty gallery with the sheet glass leaning against one wall. At 1:15 a.m., I went to the pay telephone and called Alene. She said Burden was still on the floor. I said the hell with it and drove back downtown to the museum. Burden had not moved.

Two of the museum guards still remained (one of them, Herman Peoples, would become so involved in the piece that he would voluntarily share the vigil with Burden, vowing not to leave until it was over). There was a television reporter, Rich Samuels of WMAQ, sitting on a mat of foam rubber, and a young couple who left soon after I arrived. Two banks of spotlights illuminated Burden against the wall, and the other lights had been turned out; a zaftig nude by Gaston Lachaise lounged in the shadows.

"He doesn't move except for what look like isometric flexings," Alene Valkanas said "He flexes his fingers sometimes, and once in a while you can see his toes flexing."

Burden seemed removed to a great distance. He was not asleep. There was no way to tell if he was in a meditative trance, or had hypnotized himself, or was fully aware of his surroundings. After an hour, I left very quietly, as if from a church.

The next day I'd planned to drive down to Urbana, but before I left I called the museum. It was noon; Burden had still not moved, the museum said. Fifteen hours and 40 minutes.

During the drive downstate, my thoughts kept returning to him, and I wondered what he was thinking and how he felt, and if he were thirsty, and if he had to piss. The radio stations had picked up on the piece by now, and were inserting progress reports on their newscast. Disc jockeys were finding the whole thing hilarious.

On Sunday, driving back to Chicago, I stopped at the Standard Oil truck stop in Gilman to call the museum. Burden had not moved. The time was 2:30 p.m. Forty-two hours and ten minutes. I came into the office, where I learned that Ira Licht and other museum authorities were consulting specialists to determine whether Burden's life was in danger. A urologist said no one could go more than perhaps 48 hours without urinating and not risk uremic poisoning. Burden hadn't had anything to drink, but that was not a problem at the moment, apparently; since he was not exercising he would not dehydrate dangerously in only two days.

Alene Valkanas called at a little before 6 p.m.

"The piece ended at 5:20," she said. Forty-five hours. "We felt a moral obligation not to interfere with Burden's intentions, but we felt we couldn't stand by and allow him to do serious physical harm to himself. There was a possibility he was in such a deep trance that he didn't have control over his will. We decided to place a pitcher of water next to his head and see if he would drink from it. The moment we put the water down, Chris got up, walked into the next room, returned with a hammer and an envelope, and smashed the clock, stopping it."

The envelope, sealed, contained Burden's explanation of the piece. It consisted, he had written, of three elements: The clock, the glass, and himself. The piece would continue, he said, until the museum staff acted on one of the three elements. By providing the pitcher of water, they had done so.

"I was prepared to lie in this position indefinitely," he continued. "The responsibility for ending the piece rested with the museum staff but they were always unaware of this crucial aspect." The piece had been titled "Doomed."

The idea for the piece, Burden explained later, had come during our lunch with Licht: "I thought, if he's concerned about how long the piece will be, I'll do a piece in which he has complete control over the length."

"My God," Alene Valkanas said. "All we had to do was end it ourselves, and we thought the rules of the piece required us to do nothing."

During the 45 hours, Burden had been in psychological danger, perhaps, but not in physical danger; he had urinated, but the museum staff had not noted the signs on his navy-blue dungarees. He had been thirsty and hungry, Burden said, and he had been completely conscious at all times except for some fleeting periods of sleep. He had not used a self-imposed trance, or yoga, or anything else except self-discipline to keep himself lying there.

"I thought perhaps the piece would last several hours," Burden said. "I thought maybe they'd come up and say, okay, Chris, it's 2 a.m. and everybody's gone home and the guards are on overtime and we have to close up. That would have ended the piece, and I would have broken the clock, recording the elapsed time.

"On the first night, when I realized they weren't going to stop the piece, I was pleased and impressed that they had placed the integrity of the piece ahead of the institutional requirements of the museum.

"On the second night, I thought, my God, don't they care anything at all about me? Are they going to leave me here to die?"

Funny Games US

2007-10-26T12:29:00.000-07:00

Michael Haneke ha decidido re-hacer su obra maestra Funny Games, escena por escena, pero en ingles, una copia exacta de la peli original para asi evitar un remake ridículo de los estudios americanos. Estará lista America???

trailer 2007

trailer 1997

entrevista con el director

2007-10-18T10:05:00.000-07:00

Art 115

2007-10-15T17:54:00.000-07:00

1. Trabajos sonoros por John Lennon y Yoko Ono:
http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen7/audio7B.html

2. Estudiar estas ediciones de Aspen Editions, son de los años '70:

a. Performance Art:

http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen6A/index.html

b. Leer el ensayo de Roland Barthes "Dead of the Author":

http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/threeEssays.html#barthes

c. Ver estos videos de Lazlo Moholy-Nagy y Robert Raushenberg:

http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/film.html

2007-10-11T04:36:00.000-07:00

2007-10-10T08:38:00.000-07:00

2007-10-10T07:39:00.000-07:00

2007-09-19T18:30:00.001-07:00

Notes on Camp por Susan Sontag (art 115)

2007-09-17T17:55:00.000-07:00

Notes On "Camp"

by Susan Sontag

Published in 1964.

Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described. One of these is the sensibility -- unmistakably modern, a variant of sophistication but hardly identical with it -- that goes by the cult name of "Camp."

A sensibility (as distinct from an idea) is one of the hardest things to talk about; but there are special reasons why Camp, in particular, has never been discussed. It is not a natural mode of sensibility, if there be any such. Indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric -- something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques. Apart from a lazy two-page sketch in Christopher Isherwood's novel The World in the Evening (1954), it has hardly broken into print. To talk about Camp is therefore to betray it. If the betrayal can be defended, it will be for the edification it provides, or the dignity of the conflict it resolves. For myself, I plead the goal of self-edification, and the goad of a sharp conflict in my own sensibility. I am strongly drawn to Camp, and almost as strongly offended by it. That is why I want to talk about it, and why I can. For no one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyze it; he can only, whatever his intention, exhibit it. To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.

Though I am speaking about sensibility only -- and about a sensibility that, among other things, converts the serious into the frivolous -- these are grave matters. Most people think of sensibility or taste as the realm of purely subjective preferences, those mysterious attractions, mainly sensual, that have not been brought under the sovereignty of reason. They allow that considerations of taste play a part in their reactions to people and to works of art. But this attitude is naïve. And even worse. To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free -- as opposed to rote -- human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. (One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.)

Taste has no system and no proofs. But there is something like a logic of taste: the consistent sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste. A sensibility is almost, but not quite, ineffable. Any sensibility which can be crammed into the mold of a system, or handled with the rough tools of proof, is no longer a sensibility at all. It has hardened into an idea . . .

To snare a sensibility in words, especially one that is alive and powerful,1 one must be tentative and nimble. The form of jottings, rather than an essay (with its claim to a linear, consecutive argument), seemed more appropriate for getting down something of this particular fugitive sensibility. It's embarrassing to be solemn and treatise-like about Camp. One runs the risk of having, oneself, produced a very inferior piece of Camp.

These notes are for Oscar Wilde.

"One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art."
- Phrases & Philosophies for the Use of the Young

1. To start very generally: Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization.

2. To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content. It goes without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized -- or at least apolitical.

3. Not only is there a Camp vision, a Camp way of looking at things. Camp is as well a quality discoverable in objects and the behavior of persons. There are "campy" movies, clothes, furniture, popular songs, novels, people, buildings. . . . This distinction is important. True, the Camp eye has the power to transform experience. But not everything can be seen as Camp. It's not all in the eye of the beholder.

4. Random examples of items which are part of the canon of Camp:

Zuleika Dobson
Tiffany lamps
Scopitone films
The Brown Derby restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in LA
The Enquirer, headlines and stories
Aubrey Beardsley drawings
Swan Lake
Bellini's operas
Visconti's direction of Salome and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore
certain turn-of-the-century picture postcards
Schoedsack's King Kong
the Cuban pop singer La Lupe
Lynn Ward's novel in woodcuts, God's Man
the old Flash Gordon comics
women's clothes of the twenties (feather boas, fringed and beaded dresses, etc.)
the novels of Ronald Firbank and Ivy Compton-Burnett
stag movies seen without lust

5. Camp taste has an affinity for certain arts rather than others. Clothes, furniture, all the elements of visual décor, for instance, make up a large part of Camp. For Camp art is often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content. Concert music, though, because it is contentless, is rarely Camp. It offers no opportunity, say, for a contrast between silly or extravagant content and rich form. . . . Sometimes whole art forms become saturated with Camp. Classical ballet, opera, movies have seemed so for a long time. In the last two years, popular music (post rock-'n'-roll, what the French call yé yé) has been annexed. And movie criticism (like lists of "The 10 Best Bad Movies I Have Seen") is probably the greatest popularizer of Camp taste today, because most people still go to the movies in a high-spirited and unpretentious way.

6. There is a sense in which it is correct to say: "It's too good to be Camp." Or "too important," not marginal enough. (More on this later.) Thus, the personality and many of the works of Jean Cocteau are Camp, but not those of André Gide; the operas of Richard Strauss, but not those of Wagner; concoctions of Tin Pan Alley and Liverpool, but not jazz. Many examples of Camp are things which, from a "serious" point of view, are either bad art or kitsch. Not all, though. Not only is Camp not necessarily bad art, but some art which can be approached as Camp (example: the major films of Louis Feuillade) merits the most serious admiration and study.

"The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature."
- The Decay of Lying

7. All Camp objects, and persons, contain a large element of artifice. Nothing in nature can be campy . . . Rural Camp is still man-made, and most campy objects are urban. (Yet, they often have a serenity -- or a naiveté -- which is the equivalent of pastoral. A great deal of Camp suggests Empson's phrase, "urban pastoral.")

8. Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style -- but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the "off," of things-being-what-they-are-not. The best example is in Art Nouveau, the most typical and fully developed Camp style. Art Nouveau objects, typically, convert one thing into something else: the lighting fixtures in the form of flowering plants, the living room which is really a grotto. A remarkable example: the Paris Métro entrances designed by Hector Guimard in the late 1890s in the shape of cast-iron orchid stalks.

9. As a taste in persons, Camp responds particularly to the markedly attenuated and to the strongly exaggerated. The androgyne is certainly one of the great images of Camp sensibility. Examples: the swooning, slim, sinuous figures of pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry; the thin, flowing, sexless bodies in Art Nouveau prints and posters, presented in relief on lamps and ashtrays; the haunting androgynous vacancy behind the perfect beauty of Greta Garbo. Here, Camp taste draws on a mostly unacknowledged truth of taste: the most refined form of sexual attractiveness (as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure) consists in going against the grain of one's sex. What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine. . . . Allied to the Camp taste for the androgynous is something that seems quite different but isn't: a relish for the exaggeration of sexual characteristics and personality mannerisms. For obvious reasons, the best examples that can be cited are movie stars. The corny flamboyant female-ness of Jayne Mansfield, Gina Lollobrigida, Jane Russell, Virginia Mayo; the exaggerated he-man-ness of Steve Reeves, Victor Mature. The great stylists of temperament and mannerism, like Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Tallulah Bankhead, Edwige Feuillière.

10. Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It's not a lamp, but a "lamp"; not a woman, but a "woman." To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.

11. Camp is the triumph of the epicene style. (The convertibility of "man" and "woman," "person" and "thing.") But all style, that is, artifice, is, ultimately, epicene. Life is not stylish. Neither is nature.

12. The question isn't, "Why travesty, impersonation, theatricality?" The question is, rather, "When does travesty, impersonation, theatricality acquire the special flavor of Camp?" Why is the atmosphere of Shakespeare's comedies (As You Like It, etc.) not epicene, while that of Der Rosenkavalier is?

13. The dividing line seems to fall in the 18th century; there the origins of Camp taste are to be found (Gothic novels, Chinoiserie, caricature, artificial ruins, and so forth.) But the relation to nature was quite different then. In the 18th century, people of taste either patronized nature (Strawberry Hill) or attempted to remake it into something artificial (Versailles). They also indefatigably patronized the past. Today's Camp taste effaces nature, or else contradicts it outright. And the relation of Camp taste to the past is extremely sentimental.

14. A pocket history of Camp might, of course, begin farther back -- with the mannerist artists like Pontormo, Rosso, and Caravaggio, or the extraordinarily theatrical painting of Georges de La Tour, or Euphuism (Lyly, etc.) in literature. Still, the soundest starting point seems to be the late 17th and early 18th century, because of that period's extraordinary feeling for artifice, for surface, for symmetry; its taste for the picturesque and the thrilling, its elegant conventions for representing instant feeling and the total presence of character -- the epigram and the rhymed couplet (in words), the flourish (in gesture and in music). The late 17th and early 18th century is the great period of Camp: Pope, Congreve, Walpole, etc, but not Swift; les précieux in France; the rococo churches of Munich; Pergolesi. Somewhat later: much of Mozart. But in the 19th century, what had been distributed throughout all of high culture now becomes a special taste; it takes on overtones of the acute, the esoteric, the perverse. Confining the story to England alone, we see Camp continuing wanly through 19th century aestheticism (Bume-Jones, Pater, Ruskin, Tennyson), emerging full-blown with the Art Nouveau movement in the visual and decorative arts, and finding its conscious ideologists in such "wits" as Wilde and Firbank.

15. Of course, to say all these things are Camp is not to argue they are simply that. A full analysis of Art Nouveau, for instance, would scarcely equate it with Camp. But such an analysis cannot ignore what in Art Nouveau allows it to be experienced as Camp. Art Nouveau is full of "content," even of a political-moral sort; it was a revolutionary movement in the arts, spurred on by a Utopian vision (somewhere between William Morris and the Bauhaus group) of an organic politics and taste. Yet there is also a feature of the Art Nouveau objects which suggests a disengaged, unserious, "aesthete's" vision. This tells us something important about Art Nouveau -- and about what the lens of Camp, which blocks out content, is.

16. Thus, the Camp sensibility is one that is alive to a double sense in which some things can be taken. But this is not the familiar split-level construction of a literal meaning, on the one hand, and a symbolic meaning, on the other. It is the difference, rather, between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice.

17. This comes out clearly in the vulgar use of the word Camp as a verb, "to camp," something that people do. To camp is a mode of seduction -- one which employs flamboyant mannerisms susceptible of a double interpretation; gestures full of duplicity, with a witty meaning for cognoscenti and another, more impersonal, for outsiders. Equally and by extension, when the word becomes a noun, when a person or a thing is "a camp," a duplicity is involved. Behind the "straight" public sense in which something can be taken, one has found a private zany experience of the thing.

"To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up."
- An Ideal Husband

18. One must distinguish between naïve and deliberate Camp. Pure Camp is always naive. Camp which knows itself to be Camp ("camping") is usually less satisfying.

19. The pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious. The Art Nouveau craftsman who makes a lamp with a snake coiled around it is not kidding, nor is he trying to be charming. He is saying, in all earnestness: Voilà! the Orient! Genuine Camp -- for instance, the numbers devised for the Warner Brothers musicals of the early thirties (42nd Street; The Golddiggers of 1933; ... of 1935; ... of 1937; etc.) by Busby Berkeley -- does not mean to be funny. Camping -- say, the plays of Noel Coward -- does. It seems unlikely that much of the traditional opera repertoire could be such satisfying Camp if the melodramatic absurdities of most opera plots had not been taken seriously by their composers. One doesn't need to know the artist's private intentions. The work tells all. (Compare a typical 19th century opera with Samuel Barber's Vanessa, a piece of manufactured, calculated Camp, and the difference is clear.)

20. Probably, intending to be campy is always harmful. The perfection of Trouble in Paradise and The Maltese Falcon, among the greatest Camp movies ever made, comes from the effortless smooth way in which tone is maintained. This is not so with such famous would-be Camp films of the fifties as All About Eve and Beat the Devil. These more recent movies have their fine moments, but the first is so slick and the second so hysterical; they want so badly to be campy that they're continually losing the beat. . . . Perhaps, though, it is not so much a question of the unintended effect versus the conscious intention, as of the delicate relation between parody and self-parody in Camp. The films of Hitchcock are a showcase for this problem. When self-parody lacks ebullience but instead reveals (even sporadically) a contempt for one's themes and one's materials - as in To Catch a Thief, Rear Window, North by Northwest -- the results are forced and heavy-handed, rarely Camp. Successful Camp -- a movie like Carné's Drôle de Drame; the film performances of Mae West and Edward Everett Horton; portions of the Goon Show -- even when it reveals self-parody, reeks of self-love.

21. So, again, Camp rests on innocence. That means Camp discloses innocence, but also, when it can, corrupts it. Objects, being objects, don't change when they are singled out by the Camp vision. Persons, however, respond to their audiences. Persons begin "camping": Mae West, Bea Lillie, La Lupe, Tallulah Bankhead in Lifeboat, Bette Davis in All About Eve. (Persons can even be induced to camp without their knowing it. Consider the way Fellini got Anita Ekberg to parody herself in La Dolce Vita.)

22. Considered a little less strictly, Camp is either completely naive or else wholly conscious (when one plays at being campy). An example of the latter: Wilde's epigrams themselves.

"It's absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious."
- Lady Windemere's Fan

23. In naïve, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve.

24. When something is just bad (rather than Camp), it's often because it is too mediocre in its ambition. The artist hasn't attempted to do anything really outlandish. ("It's too much," "It's too fantastic," "It's not to be believed," are standard phrases of Camp enthusiasm.)

25. The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance. Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers. Camp is the paintings of Carlo Crivelli, with their real jewels and trompe-l'oeil insects and cracks in the masonry. Camp is the outrageous aestheticism of Steinberg's six American movies with Dietrich, all six, but especially the last, The Devil Is a Woman. . . . In Camp there is often something démesuré in the quality of the ambition, not only in the style of the work itself. Gaudí's lurid and beautiful buildings in Barcelona are Camp not only because of their style but because they reveal -- most notably in the Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia -- the ambition on the part of one man to do what it takes a generation, a whole culture to accomplish.

26. Camp is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is "too much." Titus Andronicus and Strange Interlude are almost Camp, or could be played as Camp. The public manner and rhetoric of de Gaulle, often, are pure Camp.

27. A work can come close to Camp, but not make it, because it succeeds. Eisenstein's films are seldom Camp because, despite all exaggeration, they do succeed (dramatically) without surplus. If they were a little more "off," they could be great Camp - particularly Ivan the Terrible I & II. The same for Blake's drawings and paintings, weird and mannered as they are. They aren't Camp; though Art Nouveau, influenced by Blake, is.

What is extravagant in an inconsistent or an unpassionate way is not Camp. Neither can anything be Camp that does not seem to spring from an irrepressible, a virtually uncontrolled sensibility. Without passion, one gets pseudo-Camp -- what is merely decorative, safe, in a word, chic. On the barren edge of Camp lie a number of attractive things: the sleek fantasies of Dali, the haute couture preciosity of Albicocco's The Girl with the Golden Eyes. But the two things - Camp and preciosity - must not be confused.

28. Again, Camp is the attempt to do something extraordinary. But extraordinary in the sense, often, of being special, glamorous. (The curved line, the extravagant gesture.) Not extraordinary merely in the sense of effort. Ripley's Believe-It-Or-Not items are rarely campy. These items, either natural oddities (the two-headed rooster, the eggplant in the shape of a cross) or else the products of immense labor (the man who walked from here to China on his hands, the woman who engraved the New Testament on the head of a pin), lack the visual reward - the glamour, the theatricality - that marks off certain extravagances as Camp.

29. The reason a movie like On the Beach, books like Winesburg, Ohio and For Whom the Bell Tolls are bad to the point of being laughable, but not bad to the point of being enjoyable, is that they are too dogged and pretentious. They lack fantasy. There is Camp in such bad movies as The Prodigal and Samson and Delilah, the series of Italian color spectacles featuring the super-hero Maciste, numerous Japanese science fiction films (Rodan, The Mysterians, The H-Man) because, in their relative unpretentiousness and vulgarity, they are more extreme and irresponsible in their fantasy - and therefore touching and quite enjoyable.

30. Of course, the canon of Camp can change. Time has a great deal to do with it. Time may enhance what seems simply dogged or lacking in fantasy now because we are too close to it, because it resembles too closely our own everyday fantasies, the fantastic nature of which we don't perceive. We are better able to enjoy a fantasy as fantasy when it is not our own.

31. This is why so many of the objects prized by Camp taste are old-fashioned, out-of-date, démodé. It's not a love of the old as such. It's simply that the process of aging or deterioration provides the necessary detachment -- or arouses a necessary sympathy. When the theme is important, and contemporary, the failure of a work of art may make us indignant. Time can change that. Time liberates the work of art from moral relevance, delivering it over to the Camp sensibility. . . . Another effect: time contracts the sphere of banality. (Banality is, strictly speaking, always a category of the contemporary.) What was banal can, with the passage of time, become fantastic. Many people who listen with delight to the style of Rudy Vallee revived by the English pop group, The Temperance Seven, would have been driven up the wall by Rudy Vallee in his heyday.

Thus, things are campy, not when they become old - but when we become less involved in them, and can enjoy, instead of be frustrated by, the failure of the attempt. But the effect of time is unpredictable. Maybe Method acting (James Dean, Rod Steiger, Warren Beatty) will seem as Camp some day as Ruby Keeler's does now - or as Sarah Bernhardt's does, in the films she made at the end of her career. And maybe not.

32. Camp is the glorification of "character." The statement is of no importance - except, of course, to the person (Loie Fuller, Gaudí, Cecil B. De Mille, Crivelli, de Gaulle, etc.) who makes it. What the Camp eye appreciates is the unity, the force of the person. In every move the aging Martha Graham makes she's being Martha Graham, etc., etc. . . . This is clear in the case of the great serious idol of Camp taste, Greta Garbo. Garbo's incompetence (at the least, lack of depth) as an actress enhances her beauty. She's always herself.

33. What Camp taste responds to is "instant character" (this is, of course, very 18th century); and, conversely, what it is not stirred by is the sense of the development of character. Character is understood as a state of continual incandescence - a person being one, very intense thing. This attitude toward character is a key element of the theatricalization of experience embodied in the Camp sensibility. And it helps account for the fact that opera and ballet are experienced as such rich treasures of Camp, for neither of these forms can easily do justice to the complexity of human nature. Wherever there is development of character, Camp is reduced. Among operas, for example, La Traviata (which has some small development of character) is less campy than Il Trovatore (which has none).

"Life is too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it."
- Vera, or The Nihilists

34. Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art (and life) a different -- a supplementary -- set of standards.

35. Ordinarily we value a work of art because of the seriousness and dignity of what it achieves. We value it because it succeeds - in being what it is and, presumably, in fulfilling the intention that lies behind it. We assume a proper, that is to say, straightforward relation between intention and performance. By such standards, we appraise The Iliad, Aristophanes' plays, The Art of the Fugue, Middlemarch, the paintings of Rembrandt, Chartres, the poetry of Donne, The Divine Comedy, Beethoven's quartets, and - among people - Socrates, Jesus, St. Francis, Napoleon, Savonarola. In short, the pantheon of high culture: truth, beauty, and seriousness.

36. But there are other creative sensibilities besides the seriousness (both tragic and comic) of high culture and of the high style of evaluating people. And one cheats oneself, as a human being, if one has respect only for the style of high culture, whatever else one may do or feel on the sly.

For instance, there is the kind of seriousness whose trademark is anguish, cruelty, derangement. Here we do accept a disparity between intention and result. I am speaking, obviously, of a style of personal existence as well as of a style in art; but the examples had best come from art. Think of Bosch, Sade, Rimbaud, Jarry, Kafka, Artaud, think of most of the important works of art of the 20th century, that is, art whose goal is not that of creating harmonies but of overstraining the medium and introducing more and more violent, and unresolvable, subject-matter. This sensibility also insists on the principle that an oeuvre in the old sense (again, in art, but also in life) is not possible. Only "fragments" are possible. . . . Clearly, different standards apply here than to traditional high culture. Something is good not because it is achieved, but because another kind of truth about the human situation, another experience of what it is to be human - in short, another valid sensibility -- is being revealed.

And third among the great creative sensibilities is Camp: the sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience. Camp refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness, and the risks of fully identifying with extreme states of feeling.

37. The first sensibility, that of high culture, is basically moralistic. The second sensibility, that of extreme states of feeling, represented in much contemporary "avant-garde" art, gains power by a tension between moral and aesthetic passion. The third, Camp, is wholly aesthetic.

38. Camp is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of "style" over "content," "aesthetics" over "morality," of irony over tragedy.

39. Camp and tragedy are antitheses. There is seriousness in Camp (seriousness in the degree of the artist's involvement) and, often, pathos. The excruciating is also one of the tonalities of Camp; it is the quality of excruciation in much of Henry James (for instance, The Europeans, The Awkward Age, The Wings of the Dove) that is responsible for the large element of Camp in his writings. But there is never, never tragedy.

40. Style is everything. Genet's ideas, for instance, are very Camp. Genet's statement that "the only criterion of an act is its elegance"2 is virtually interchangeable, as a statement, with Wilde's "in matters of great importance, the vital element is not sincerity, but style." But what counts, finally, is the style in which ideas are held. The ideas about morality and politics in, say, Lady Windemere's Fan and in Major Barbara are Camp, but not just because of the nature of the ideas themselves. It is those ideas, held in a special playful way. The Camp ideas in Our Lady of the Flowers are maintained too grimly, and the writing itself is too successfully elevated and serious, for Genet's books to be Camp.

41. The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to "the serious." One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.

42. One is drawn to Camp when one realizes that "sincerity" is not enough. Sincerity can be simple philistinism, intellectual narrowness.

43. The traditional means for going beyond straight seriousness - irony, satire - seem feeble today, inadequate to the culturally oversaturated medium in which contemporary sensibility is schooled. Camp introduces a new standard: artifice as an ideal, theatricality.

44. Camp proposes a comic vision of the world. But not a bitter or polemical comedy. If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

"I adore simple pleasures, they are the last refuge of the complex."
- A Woman of No Importance

45. Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the 19th century's surrogate for the aristocrat in matters of culture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.

46. The dandy was overbred. His posture was disdain, or else ennui. He sought rare sensations, undefiled by mass appreciation. (Models: Des Esseintes in Huysmans' À Rebours, Marius the Epicurean, Valéry's Monsieur Teste.) He was dedicated to "good taste."

The connoisseur of Camp has found more ingenious pleasures. Not in Latin poetry and rare wines and velvet jackets, but in the coarsest, commonest pleasures, in the arts of the masses. Mere use does not defile the objects of his pleasure, since he learns to possess them in a rare way. Camp -- Dandyism in the age of mass culture -- makes no distinction between the unique object and the mass-produced object. Camp taste transcends the nausea of the replica.

47. Wilde himself is a transitional figure. The man who, when he first came to London, sported a velvet beret, lace shirts, velveteen knee-breeches and black silk stockings, could never depart too far in his life from the pleasures of the old-style dandy; this conservatism is reflected in The Picture of Dorian Gray. But many of his attitudes suggest something more modern. It was Wilde who formulated an important element of the Camp sensibility -- the equivalence of all objects -- when he announced his intention of "living up" to his blue-and-white china, or declared that a doorknob could be as admirable as a painting. When he proclaimed the importance of the necktie, the boutonniere, the chair, Wilde was anticipating the democratic esprit of Camp.

48. The old-style dandy hated vulgarity. The new-style dandy, the lover of Camp, appreciates vulgarity. Where the dandy would be continually offended or bored, the connoisseur of Camp is continually amused, delighted. The dandy held a perfumed handkerchief to his nostrils and was liable to swoon; the connoisseur of Camp sniffs the stink and prides himself on his strong nerves.

49. It is a feat, of course. A feat goaded on, in the last analysis, by the threat of boredom. The relation between boredom and Camp taste cannot be overestimated. Camp taste is by its nature possible only in affluent societies, in societies or circles capable of experiencing the psychopathology of affluence.

"What is abnormal in Life stands in normal relations to Art. It is the only thing in Life that stands in normal relations to Art."
- A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated

50. Aristocracy is a position vis-à-vis culture (as well as vis-à-vis power), and the history of Camp taste is part of the history of snob taste. But since no authentic aristocrats in the old sense exist today to sponsor special tastes, who is the bearer of this taste? Answer: an improvised self-elected class, mainly homosexuals, who constitute themselves as aristocrats of taste.

51. The peculiar relation between Camp taste and homosexuality has to be explained. While it's not true that Camp taste is homosexual taste, there is no doubt a peculiar affinity and overlap. Not all liberals are Jews, but Jews have shown a peculiar affinity for liberal and reformist causes. So, not all homosexuals have Camp taste. But homosexuals, by and large, constitute the vanguard -- and the most articulate audience -- of Camp. (The analogy is not frivolously chosen. Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.)

52. The reason for the flourishing of the aristocratic posture among homosexuals also seems to parallel the Jewish case. For every sensibility is self-serving to the group that promotes it. Jewish liberalism is a gesture of self-legitimization. So is Camp taste, which definitely has something propagandistic about it. Needless to say, the propaganda operates in exactly the opposite direction. The Jews pinned their hopes for integrating into modern society on promoting the moral sense. Homosexuals have pinned their integration into society on promoting the aesthetic sense. Camp is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness.

53. Nevertheless, even though homosexuals have been its vanguard, Camp taste is much more than homosexual taste. Obviously, its metaphor of life as theater is peculiarly suited as a justification and projection of a certain aspect of the situation of homosexuals. (The Camp insistence on not being "serious," on playing, also connects with the homosexual's desire to remain youthful.) Yet one feels that if homosexuals hadn't more or less invented Camp, someone else would. For the aristocratic posture with relation to culture cannot die, though it may persist only in increasingly arbitrary and ingenious ways. Camp is (to repeat) the relation to style in a time in which the adoption of style -- as such -- has become altogether questionable. (In the modem era, each new style, unless frankly anachronistic, has come on the scene as an anti-style.)

"One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing."
- In conversation

54. The experiences of Camp are based on the great discovery that the sensibility of high culture has no monopoly upon refinement. Camp asserts that good taste is not simply good taste; that there exists, indeed, a good taste of bad taste. (Genet talks about this in Our Lady of the Flowers.) The discovery of the good taste of bad taste can be very liberating. The man who insists on high and serious pleasures is depriving himself of pleasure; he continually restricts what he can enjoy; in the constant exercise of his good taste he will eventually price himself out of the market, so to speak. Here Camp taste supervenes upon good taste as a daring and witty hedonism. It makes the man of good taste cheerful, where before he ran the risk of being chronically frustrated. It is good for the digestion.

55. Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation - not judgment. Camp is generous. It wants to enjoy. It only seems like malice, cynicism. (Or, if it is cynicism, it's not a ruthless but a sweet cynicism.) Camp taste doesn't propose that it is in bad taste to be serious; it doesn't sneer at someone who succeeds in being seriously dramatic. What it does is to find the success in certain passionate failures.

56. Camp taste is a kind of love, love for human nature. It relishes, rather than judges, the little triumphs and awkward intensities of "character." . . . Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying. People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing they label as "a camp," they're enjoying it. Camp is a tender feeling.

(Here, one may compare Camp with much of Pop Art, which -- when it is not just Camp -- embodies an attitude that is related, but still very different. Pop Art is more flat and more dry, more serious, more detached, ultimately nihilistic.)

57. Camp taste nourishes itself on the love that has gone into certain objects and personal styles. The absence of this love is the reason why such kitsch items as Peyton Place (the book) and the Tishman Building aren't Camp.

58. The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful . . . Of course, one can't always say that. Only under certain conditions, those which I've tried to sketch in these notes.

1 The sensibility of an era is not only its most decisive, but also its most perishable, aspect. One may capture the ideas (intellectual history) and the behavior (social history) of an epoch without ever touching upon the sensibility or taste which informed those ideas, that behavior. Rare are those historical studies -- like Huizinga on the late Middle Ages, Febvre on 16th century France -- which do tell us something about the sensibility of the period.
2 Sartre's gloss on this in Saint Genet is: "Elegance is the quality of conduct which transforms the greatest amount of being into appearing."

The Matrix of Sensations por Donald Kuspit (art 115)

2007-09-17T17:51:00.000-07:00

leer link:

http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/kuspit8-5-05.asp

When a Museum Behaves Badly ( lectura art 115)

2007-09-17T17:44:00.000-07:00

By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: September 16, 2007
North Adams, Mass.
NY Times

WHEN a museum behaves badly, it’s never pretty. But few examples top the depressing spectacle at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

I refer to Mass MoCA’s decision to exhibit “Training Ground for Democracy,” an immense but incomplete work of installation art, despite strenuous opposition from Christoph Büchel, the Swiss artist who conceived it and oversaw its construction until his relationship with the museum dissolved in acrimony early this year. By opening this show without his assent, the museum has broken faith with the artist, the public and art itself.

The legal principles at stake in this dispute will be argued on Friday when lawyers for the museum and Mr. Büchel face off in federal court in Springfield, Mass. Each side hopes for a summary judgment against the other.

The Büchel project was an inspired, nervy move for Mass MoCA, which has struggled to find its voice since it opened eight years ago in a rehabilitated mill complex in downtown North Adams. It was the first American museum to commission one of Mr. Büchel’s dense, fraught creations, which compress masses of material and objects into historically charged labyrinthine environments through which viewers walk, climb and crawl.

And the pairing made perfect sense, given that Mass MoCA has one of the largest galleries of any museum in the United States — known as Building 5 — and annually stages big installations there.

“Training Ground for Democracy” was to be assembled at the museum’s expense, with its staff members seeking out and installing items on a long list in collaboration with Mr. Büchel. His outsize list included a two-story Cape Cod cottage, a leaflet-bomb carousel, an old bar from a tavern, a vintage movie theater and various banged-up rolling stock (a trailer, a mobile home, a bus, a truck). Nine full-size shipping containers were requested. There was even to be a re-creation of Saddam Hussein’s spider hole. But things did not go smoothly. By the end of January, and well past the scheduled Dec. 16 opening date, Mr. Büchel had departed for good and begun accusing the museum of interference, unprofessionalism and wasting his time.

The museum said it had tried mightily to gather everything on Mr. Büchel’s wish list but balked at acquiring a burnt-out fuselage of a 737 airliner. It pointed out that it had spent more than double the show’s $160,000 budget; Mr. Büchel countered that an amount had never been agreed upon.

Mass MoCA argues that it has a responsibility to deliver a show to its public. “At some point the realities of our budget, resources and staff imposed themselves,” Joe Thompson, the museum’s director, told The New York Times.

Now the components of “Training for Democracy” loom as if in a desolate ghost town, surreally camouflaged by plastic tarps in Building 5. Mass MoCA says it shrouded the elements pending a court decision that it hopes will allow it to display the installation. Mass MoCA may have been a little naïve about what it was getting into with Mr. Büchel. Artists can be difficult and demanding, and the bigger the artwork, the greater the stress on all sides. And while Mr. Büchel’s environments are huge in scale, they are also often guided by a sense of horror vacui, and so obsessively detailed that they might best be described as panoramic collage.

They’re like bristling three-dimensional history paintings: messy offices, banal living rooms, sinister hideouts, piles of old appliances or towers of newspapers, with each space telling its own story. It is as if the detritus of dozens of sad lives has been warehoused yet remains in use. Everyone has just gone out to lunch, or has been arrested.

Occasionally there are moments of respite. In an installation that Mr. Büchel carved into Michelle Maccarone’s crumbling two-story gallery on the Lower East Side in 2001, for example, I spent a calm moment crouched in a child’s classroom chair while facing a blackboard that ran floor to ceiling — the room was only four feet high — wondering what on earth would come next.

Since Mr. Büchel walked off the Mass MoCA project in January, accusations have flown back and forth like poison arrows, and it’s hard to sort out who did or didn’t do what and when.

Mr. Thompson, director of Mass MoCA, said the museum had “clearly bent over backwards” for Mr. Büchel. Yet by opening the show, covered, last spring against Mr. Büchel’s wishes and now seeking a court’s go-ahead to remove the tarps, the museum renders all of that moot. If an artist who conceived a work says that it is unfinished and should not be exhibited, it isn’t — and shouldn’t be. End of story.

(His lawyer cites a federal law that says as much, the Visual Artist Rights Act. But Mass MoCA argues that the law applies only to finished works of art.)

It’s hard for a museum to recover when it forfeits the high ground. To this day the Corcoran Gallery of Art remains infamous for canceling its 1989 exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs after his work was denounced by Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina. To conservatives’ horror, the show had been partly financed by the National Endowment for the Arts.

The meltdown at Mass MOCA is sad for all concerned, yet is also a reflection of the changes wrought since the late 1960s, as installation art evolved from renegade form into an institutional staple of ever-bigger galleries and museums.

Training Ground for Democracy
Although museums still focus most of their energy on finished works that they believe should be shown or collected, they now routinely function as patrons, using their budgets to help artists create works from scratch. They have happily become producers because these days installation artworks are often crowd pleasers, circuslike in their appeal. Viewers gasp at their scale or their sensational optical effects, as with “Sleepwalker,” the Doug Aitken video display on the Museum of Modern Art’s facades last winter.

Yet the experience can be very superficial. It’s strange to think that these big temporary installations may be the only contemporary art that some people know or enjoy. And there are dangers, including the possibility that in controlling the purse strings, a museum starts thinking of itself as a co-author who knows what the artist wants better than he or she does.

Yes, artists can be formidably difficult. The larger the artwork, the bigger the ego. Maybe Mr. Büchel was behaving like a diva. But what some call temper tantrums are often an artist’s last, furious stand for his or her art.

Initially I felt some sympathy for Mass MoCA. I was impressed that it had the courage to be the first American museum to take on Mr. Büchel, whose outsize ambition has anted up ideas implicit in Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau environments of the 1930s, Arman’s “Le Plein” of 1960 and Gordon Matta-Clark’s sliced buildings of the ’70s.

But when the museum became set on opening the unfinished piece over Mr. Büchel’s objections, my sympathy evaporated. And when I visited MassMoCA, my sentiments curdled.

The shrouded non-Büchel is a kind of museological car crash. You can’t stop looking, but tarps or no tarps, you also want to avert your eyes, especially if you are familiar with his previous work.

Mr. Büchel contends that the display damages his reputation. It will certainly give people unfamiliar with his obsessive, history-driven aesthetic an inaccurate sense of his art, and this is indeed a form of damage. But by opening this strange quasi display, MassMoCA does even more damage to itself and to its reputation as a steward of art and as a conduit between living artists and the public.

My first thought while walking among the tarps is that no one working at the museum had ever seen a finished Büchel, which would be pretty astonishing, especially since a very large Büchel installation was on view in London while things were unraveling in North Adams. Titled “Simply Botiful,” this 13,000-square-foot London piece was commissioned by the artist’s primary dealer, Hauser & Wirth, in its huge warehouse in the Coppermill neighborhood.

Interestingly, the gallery says it cost £80,000, or about $162,000, and was assembled by Mr. Büchel and 12 assistants and workers in three weeks. This might seem to suggest that when given full artistic control, Mr. Büchel delivers.

At Mass MoCA, meanwhile, there is a sense of something gone deeply awry. In one of two smaller galleries in Building 5, the museum has removed the bar that was part of the Büchel piece to make way for “Made at Mass MoCA,” a self-serving, slapped-together display of photographs of previous installations. It accomplishes little but to suggest the frequent vacuity of those projects and underscore the possibility that the Büchel was too big a reach for the museum. Beyond that and up a flight of stairs, things get stranger still.

Here you’ll find a wall covered with Mr. Büchel’s extensive wish list, which conceptually conveys something of the surface density, historical references and regional evocations he planned to incorporate. Requested are accouterments for Mass and Baptism; a hospital bed and related medical equipment; eight voting booths; hundreds of old tires; piles of old computers; 1,000 beverage cups from a race track; 1,000 feet of barbed wire; 12 grenades and 35 pounds of bullet casings; eight body bags and 75 white protective suits; four prosthetic legs; decorations and campaign buttons from election rallies; a concession stand, popcorn and popcorn buckets; Christmas lights; and 16 large bags of corn leaves and husks.

The list scrolls along in chapterlike clusters of related items, evoking recent events in or involving the United States, including the 2000 presidential election, Hurricane Katrina and the war in Iraq. On the opposite wall newspaper articles and editorials about the controversy are pinned to the wall, although a scathing indictment of Mass MoCA by The Boston Globe’s art critic is absent.

The museum deserves to be scathed. Although there may be parts of the installation proper that Mr. Büchel considers finished, what is visible above and below the tarps today is barely the skeleton of a Büchel. It’s just a lot of stuff.

You are reminded of Hollywood, where directors (that is, artists) are routinely denied “final cut.” Of course, Renaissance popes often had final cut too. But I prefer to invoke the spirit of Robert Rauschenberg, who, when asked to contribute to a show of portraits of the Paris dealer Iris Clert in 1961, sent a telegram that read, “This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so.”

Never underestimate the amount of resentment and hostility we harbor toward artists. It springs largely from envy. They can behave quite badly, but mainly they operate with a kind of freedom and courage that other people don’t risk or enjoy. And it can lead to wondrous things.

In the end it doesn’t matter how many people toil on a work of art, or how much money is spent on it. The artist’s freedom includes the right to say, “This is not a work of art unless I say so.”

espacio 1414 / sabado

2007-09-04T08:04:00.001-07:00

video sobre sus gustos musicales

2007-08-29T12:10:00.000-07:00

Check out this video: Pa Ningun Lao

Add to My Profile | More Videos

2007-08-29T12:09:00.001-07:00

The Elements & Principles of Art and Design (Arte 102 & GEPE 3010)

2007-08-14T18:07:00.000-07:00

The Elements & Principles of Art and Design

The elements and principles of design are standard references for the visual parts and the manipulation of those visual parts in an artwork. Applying these references to a painting, sculpture, or art piece in general is similar to the material available to a writer, filmmaker or a musician. There are a finite number of elements and principles of design, just like there are a finite number of alphabetical characters and musical notations. Yet, the manner in which this finite material is used is dependent only upon the creativity of the user.

There are many styles of design that have been developed over the ages, yet much of this visual creativity is based on the application of a short list of elements and principles of design. These are:

ELEMENTS

LINE: A line results when a mark is left by a tool of some kind. Line is also detectable as the defining edge limit of an object. Line is an abstract concept and is referred to as a one-dimensional mark - meaning it possesses only length. Yet, in order to see a drawn line it must have some weight or width. The path or movement of a point in space that creates a line.

SHAPE: A shape is an object that possesses both length and width. A line that is drawn to connect itself creates an enclosed area. This enclosed area is a shape.

FORM: A form is a three-dimensional object - it possesses length, width, and depth. A form is the actual solid object. A photograph of a form is an illusion where the three-dimensional qualities of an actual object are represented with shaded shapes.

COLOR: Color refers to the property of light to be absorbed and to reflect from a surface. The only colors able to be seen by the unaided human eye are those found in the visible color spectrum.

TEXTURE: Texture is the surface quality of an object. Textures are defined as either being tactile (how something feels) or as visual (how something looks like it would feel). Textures are often implied in a drawing or painting creating a strong tactile illusion.

SPACE: There are two kinds of space - positive and negative. Positive space, (also referred to as the field), is that area taken up, or displaced, by an object. The space remaining around that object is referred to as negative space (also referred to as the ground). Positive and negative space are interchangeable. What was positive easily becomes negative and vice versa when your point of view regarding the object changes. It's also the distance between, above, top, bottom, inside and outside of an object or element.

The principles are suggested “rules” for using the elements. Applied principles of design allow for unlimited possibilities in how the elements are utilized. Think of a musician with only one note at his disposal or an artist who only has yellow paint. He could paint an object yellow, and he could vary some of the qualities of how he used line and shape, but you would soon tire of looking at only the same yellow surfaces. Applying the principles to the work helps to keep it interesting.

PRINCIPLES

EMPHASIS: Placing an item that quickly attracts the viewer's eye establishes a focal point within your design. This is also referred to as a center of interest.

PROPORTION: Proportion is the comparison of parts to parts and parts to the whole. Notice the proportional relationships found within the parts of the human face. The head is a given shape and the features found on the face are located in specific areas and are specific sizes and shapes. These relationships can be mapped out and used as a general guideline when drawing heads.

BALANCE: Balance is an achieved state of equilibrium among the parts of a design. There are two kinds of balance - symmetrical and asymmetrical. Symmetrical balance is also referred to as formal balance and there are two types of symmetrical balance - bilateral and radial. An object that is bilaterally symmetrical can be divided in one direction and both halves will end up being equal, or nearly so (think of the human face). If an object is radially symmetrical it is equally divisible in more than one direction (think of the spokes in a wheel). If an object is asymmetrical, it is not equally divisible in any direction. Asymmetrical balance is also referred to as informal balance.

REPETITION: When objects and markings are repeated a pattern results. The eye begins to sense a relationship among similarly treated surfaces. It provides the work with a sense of unity.

VARIATION: Variation prevents repetition from becoming too monotonous and boring. When change is applied to similar objects, variation results.

RHYTHM/MOVEMENT: These principles of design are related. Rhythm refers to a means of leading a viewer's eye throughout an art work. Adding pointing, touching, and overlapping objects to your design work helps to set up a rhythm in the arrangement. Movement refers to the pattern of scanning the eye follows through the design surface.

DIRECTION: Direction is not a specific principle of design but it is a variable that can be applied to how the elements are arranged within the design space.

UNITY: When different areas of a design have similar things in common, this makes it seem as though those objects are somehow related to each other. Unity helps to harmonize the surface relationships.

LA jETTE de Chris Marker

2007-08-06T21:16:00.000-07:00

http://tv-links.co.uk/video/4/2687/3951/25528/39752

2007-06-19T16:17:00.000-07:00

ARTE 102 GEPE 3010 / Lecturas Historia Arte PR

2007-06-01T08:39:00.000-07:00

1.PANORAMA HISTORICO DE LAS ARTES PLASTICAS EN PUERTO RICO
Rodolfo J. Lugo-Ferrer

(estudiantes: Este ensayo de Rodolfo J. Lugo es uno que debe ser visto/entendido como una visión independiente.

ensayo:

Artes en PR por Rodolfo Lugo Ferrer

2.El modernismo en el arte y la arquitectura puertorriqueña.
José Ramón Alonso Lorea.

Más de veinte años después de la guerra hispanoamericana (1898), el traspaso de su condición colonial de una metrópolis a otra parece condicionar el retardo de la entrada del modernismo en las artes plásticas puertorriqueñas.

ensayo:
Arte y Arquitectura

Discusion sobre la obra de Matt Hanner

2007-05-01T06:57:00.000-07:00

video games/ low art or high art?

2007-04-29T10:40:00.000-07:00

Resident Evil

Takashi Murakami

articulo publicado en :

http://arstechnica.com

Roger Ebert says games will never be as worthy as movies
By Jeremy Reimer | Published: November 30, 2005 - 04:30PM CT

Roger Ebert, the movie critic for the Chicago Sun-Times and co-host of the syndicated TV show "Ebert and Roper at the Movies" has thrown down the gauntlet on his web site by stating that video games will never be as artistically worthy as movies and literature. Ebert does not believe that this quality gap can ever be crossed, as he feels it is a fundamental limitation of the medium itself:

There is a structural reason for that: Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.

Whether or not interactive art can still be art is an interesting question. Modern artists such as Chin Chih Yang, (http://www.123soho.com/artists/featured/f_artist_index_artist.phtml?artnum=artidv00159&category=1.%20The%20Control%20of%20Fear), who design interactive multimedia projects as well as creating "traditional" art, would probably tell you that whether something is "art" depends on only the artist and the audience, and not the medium itself. However, there are undoubtedly more conservative artists who would dismiss "interactive multimedia projects" as not being worthy of the term art. Of course this debate is not a new one, nor has it been confined to video games. Movies and comic books both struggled (and still struggle) to receive the same level of respect as traditional media, such as literature and dramatic plays.

But is it really the "interactive" part of video games that Ebert is criticizing? To me, it seems like a convenient excuse to dismiss for all time a new form of entertainment that has not only influenced movies (with endless releases of video-game-themed movies such as Tomb Raider, Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil, etc.) but at times even seems to be in competition with cinema itself. Every time movie sales go down, some pundits start looking to the video game industry as being the source of the problem.

I don't believe the "interactive" nature of video games is what Ebert is really railing against here. While he gave a poor review to the movie Clue, which featured multiple endings, he admitted in his review that it would have been more fun for viewers to see all three endings. He seemed to be indicating that if the movie itself was of higher quality, being given a choice of endings would have made it even more entertaining. Like Clue, video games can feature multiple endings or storylines, but all of them have been written by the writer ahead of time. The fact that the player can choose between them does not make any of the choices less of a creation by the game developers.

A closer examination of Ebert's comments seems to indicate that he is critical of the artistic value of the games themselves, not their structure:

I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful. But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.

Some might be eager to tell Ebert about games that he may not have ever seen or played, such as Star Control II, or Planescape Torment, where the story is given higher focus than the graphics and is at least comparable to literary fiction. Or games such as ICO, where the atmosphere and feel of the environment and characters is on par with any "serious" art film. But perhaps Ebert hasn't heard of these titles because video games in general have been deluged with an endless parade of flashy sequels and movie tie-ins that favor graphics over gameplay. Perhaps if a viable analog to the independent movie industry emerged for video games, Ebert might change his tune. But is this likely to happen?

ARTE 102 /GEPE 3010 (imagenes referencia)

2007-04-27T13:44:00.000-07:00

Nam Jun Paik

Myrna Báez

Edgar Degas

Julio Rosado Del Valle

Vermeer

Yves Klein

Louise Bourgeois

Donald Judd

Kiki Smith

Barbara Kruger

Peter Doig

Giorgio De Chirico

Man Ray

Ana Mendieta

Donatello

Eva Hesse

Kara Walker

Georges Braque

Caravaggio

Surrealismo y Futurismo

2007-04-24T16:24:00.000-07:00

Surrealism ,

Literary and art movement influenced by Freudianism and dedicated to the expression of imagination as revealed in dreams, free of the conscious control of reason and free of convention. The movement was founded (1924) in Paris by André Breton , with his Manifeste du surréalisme, but its ancestry is traced to the French poets Baudelaire , Rimbaud , Apollinaire , and to the Italian painter, Giorgio de Chirico . Many of its adherents had belonged to the Dada movement. In literature, surrealism was confined almost exclusively to France. Surrealist writers were interested in the associations and implications of words rather than their literal meanings; their works are thus extraordinarily difficult to read. Among the leading surrealist writers were Louis Aragon , Paul Éluard , Robert Desnos , and Jean Cocteau , the last noted particularly for his surreal films. In art the movement became dominant in the 1920s and 30s and was internationally practiced with many and varied forms of expression. Salvador Dalí and Yves Tanguy used dreamlike perception of space and dream-inspired symbols such as melting watches and huge metronomes. Max Ernst and René Magritte constructed fantastic imagery from startling combinations of incongruous elements of reality painted with photographic attention to detail. These artists have been labeled as verists because their paintings involve transformations of the real world. "Absolute" surrealism depends upon images derived from psychic automatism, the subconscious, or spontaneous thought. The movement survived but was greatly diminished after World War II.

(Bibliography: A. Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism (tr. 1969); L. Lippard, ed., Surrealists on Art (1970)

Futurismo:

http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/

ORIFICIO/publicacion de la Profesora Teresa Lopez

2007-04-20T15:26:00.000-07:00

Pueden bajar su propia copia en este link:

http://www.orificio2006.blogspot.com/

Foros en el MAC

2007-04-16T11:32:00.000-07:00

estudiantes, finalmente el MAC, luego de 10 anos, realiza un proyecto interesante y de provecho para la comunidad...

SEMANA DE FOROS
En el Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico

Con motivo de la presentación de la obra Homenaje al Cosmos de Heriberto
González, el Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MAC) estará llevando a
cabo dos foros/presentaciones sobre los temas del Hibridismo y el Arte Digital
en Puerto Rico. El primero se llevara a cabo mañana martes, 17 de abril en el
Patio Interior del MAC. Este cuenta con la participación de los artistas
Heriberto González, Jessica Almy-Pagán y de la Dra. Kate Weyland. El segundo
foro será este próximo jueves y contará con la participación de Heriberto
González, Teo Freytes, Rosa Irigoyen y Javier Olmeda. Luego del foro se
presentara dos performances de sonido experimental por Claudio Chea y Omar
Obdulio Peña. Ambos foros comienzan a las 7:00 p.m.

Foro: Hibridismo: Manifiesto
Martes 17 de abril/ 7:00 p.m. a 9:00 p.m.
Patio Interior
El hibridismo, no es un nuevo planteamiento para la ciencia, ni menos aún en su
adaptación en la compleja definición de la cultura hoy día. Este constituye el
procesamiento y producción de la mezcla cultural que articula dos o más
elementos disparejos para engendrar un ente nuevo y distinto. Este concepto
fue compartido por un sin numero de artistas y teóricos a partir de la década
de los ochenta, donde se reconocía su potencial y necesaria interrupción de lo
binario y su dicotomía, codificando por ende un nuevo orden en la
diferenciación cultural. Artistas en Puerto Rico y la Diáspora han explorado
diversos aspectos de lo que conocemos hoy como la identidad post colonial. Que
incluye un gran interés y reconocimiento de políticas de representación, que
inclusive aun, veinte años más tarde, surgen en espacios ennegrecidos de gran
complejidad y ambivalencia.

En el arte, esto se plantea de dos formas. La primera a través del hibridismo
de lo tangible que se figura esencialmente en la selección y manipulación de
materiales y el segundo por medio de un desvanecimiento de los límites de
representación que forjan nuevas definiciones de lo cultural y lo identitario.
Por otra parte, la inclusión de ideas que traspasan los bordes de localización,
culturalización, hegemonía y tiempo se multiplican, para así asimilar sin
cuestionamiento sus posibilidades interpretativas y por ende su valoración.

Foro: La otra intervención: el arte digital, los últimos 20 años
Jueves 19 de abril/ 7:00 p.m.-9:30 p.m.
Patio Interior

La computadora ha sido mucho más que un instrumento de recolectar data. Su
adaptación al modelo de creación e información global ha redefinido nuestra
visión, no solo en su utilización, sino también en nuestra capacidad inventiva
de hacer arte, como crearlo y establecerlo.
Es importante discutir y reflexionar de como las nuevas herramientas, como los
programas de computadora y el Internet, han impactado y alterado nuestros
espacios privados y comunes, nuestras ideas sobre la ficción y lo real, y como
el artista mantiene su perspectiva critica cuando se sostiene sobre la
tecnología. También plantearnos como dentro de los nuevos modelos que sugieren
la descripción de lo que es “new media”; como la representación podría ser
reemplazada por la simulación y la identificación por la inmersión.
Tras el resurgimiento de nuevas practicas en el arte digital, se analizan las
múltiples vertientes que el artista contemporáneo ha utililizado como nuevos
referentes. Esto podemos decir, que ha sido determinado por elementos de la
vida cotidiana, las demandas y ofertas en el arte, la tecnología, la ciencia
del entretenimiento, y la comunicación global. Planteamiento que nos hace
reflexionar sobre: ¿Cual es el rol del museo, el del espectador, de la academia
y del mercado en esta transfusión de este lenguaje

8:00 p.m. a 9:30 p.m.
Performance sonido experimental

Brenda Torres-Figueroa
Curadora
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico
Edificio Histórico Rafael M. de Labra
Avenida Ponce de León Parada 18 en Santurce
787.977.4030 ext. 242
787.977.4036 Fax
www.museocontemporaneopr.org

Lo que El Nuevo Dia decidio "obviar" en relacion a la feria CIRCA

2007-04-15T09:04:00.000-07:00

por Walter Robinson
ARTNET

http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/reviews/robinson/robinson4-10-07.asp

PUERTO RICAN SUN
by Walter Robinson

Scenic San Juan peninsula looks a little like Miami Beach, with new hotels and condos cutting a pretty figure against the deep blue ocean and sky. At the heart of the new waterfront development is the $188-million, 580,000-square-foot Puerto Rico Convention Center, the largest in the Caribbean, which opened 18 months ago. Here, one of the warehouse-like exhibition halls housed Circa Puerto Rico ’07, Mar. 30-Apr. 2, 2007, the second annual installment of Puerto Rico’s new international art fair.
Fair directors Celina Nogueras Cuevas and Paco Barragán take note of Circa Puerto Rico’s potential to give new visibility to the entire Caribbean art world. "Puerto Rico has the money, the important collectors, the big corporations," said Barragán, optimistically. "We want to make Circa into a funky and intelligent art fair, with a humane scale," he noted. "The business is just starting -- there’s good energy, good sales."

In fact, Circa ’07 logged total estimated sales of $4 million, a fairly modest number in these times, though the sum is double the $2 million posted by the first fair in 2006. A total of 12,000 visitors passed through the gate, an increase from 10,000 last year. About 270 foreign VIPs, including dealers, collectors, artists and others, also visited the fair. Booths ranged in price from around $3,000 to $12,000.

The most curious thing, then, was that so few New Yorkers took the opportunity to fly down and enjoy the lovely weekend weather. Circa ’07 was small and intimate, with only 62 exhibitors (34 of them commercial galleries), an on-site bar and restaurant, and a large communal area with a stage for musical and art performances.

Sponsor was Rums of Puerto Rico, which boosted the fair with the slogan, "Come for the art, stay for the rum." The Puerto Rico tourist board also kicked in $7,500.

Overall, the mood was quite pleasant. Everyone agreed that things went off much better this time around. The change of dates worked well in the crowded art-fair calendar; last year, the event took place under a hotter sun in late May.

Circa ’07 also managed to spark the interest of local collectors and art patrons, in part thanks to the concurrent exhibition at the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico featuring a selection of buzzworthy artists drawn from local collections. Organized by Miami curator Silvia Karman Cubiña, the show was titled "Appropriation, Authority and Authenticity" and featured works by Wade Guyton, Seth Price, Josh Smith, Kelley Walker and Aaron Young.

Circa ’07 also featured a row of smaller booths housing individual projects by invited artists. One of the most popular was "Artistas de Hoy," a project stage-managed by Braulio Espinosa Castillo of Producto? Inc., for which he somehow convinced 40 artists to pose in a glass display case alongside a video of their artwork. The combination was a perfect gambit. Not only were the videos illuminating, but fair visitors clearly were enchanted by the opportunity to stare at real artists standing in a booth.

Another project was a suite of red punching bags, courtesy the Cuban artist who lives and works in Miami and goes by the single name of Antuan. Titled Left or Right, the bags were all printed with photo-transfers of the world’s most belligerent leaders, including Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Osama bin Laden and George Bush. Not too many people bothered to take a whack at an el supremo. Hmmm.

Also on hand was Amanda Coulson, the Frankfurt-based director of the Volta Show in Basel, who culled artworks from the exhibitors for a special exhibition about Puerto Rican identity dubbed "In the Spot." Barragán described this effort as part of his attempt to inject a curatorial component into the fair.

"Amanda had to come up with the idea in three hours," said Barragán. "It’s ‘instant curating’." The idea came from his frustration with art institutions, he said, which can take several years between approving a proposal and actually mounting the exhibition. "An art fair can provide a platform to explore a curatorial point of view," he insisted. "Art fairs can be made more intelligent by making them smaller and more focused."

Another curatorial booth was occupied by an installation overseen by Belgrade-born curator Lara Pan, who currently lives in Paris and plans to relocate her New Art Project to a space in Brussels. At Circa ’07 she had brought a new video by Braco Dimitrijevic -- the Sarajevo-born artist who is famous for his early Conceptual Art photos of "casual passersby" in 1971 -- and another video piece projected on a string construction by the Cuban artist Duvier Del Dago, currently having a show at the artist-run Galerie Ouizeman in Paris.

The heart of Circa ’07 was the mix of native Puerto Rican dealers and artists, of course. Sadly, two dealers who have made it to Art Basel Miami Beach and beyond, Galeria Comercial and Punto Gris, were absent, but otherwise the fair featured a great mix of Puerto Rican dealers and independent thinkers that aren’t found at other fairs.

Holding pride of place at the booth of San Juan’s Walter Otero Gallery, for instance, was an eight-foot-tall, four-tiered faux wedding cake, slowly spinning on a round table draped with satin and clear plastic beads. Loaded down with bright pastel-colored frosting and covered with glitter and plastic fruits, the cake -- a work by San Juan artist Melvin Martínez (b. 1977) smelled like cherries and softly played Eat Me Again, a popular salsa tune from the ‘80s. It appeared as if the Cookie Monster had already taken a few overscaled bites from the sweet confection -- an over-the-top allegory of Circa ’07, or for the art market at large?

Also notable at Otero were the fantastically tropical paintings of Arnaldo Roche, who was born in Puerto Rico in 1955 and who has been starring in Latin-American survey shows since the mid-1980s (at LACMA in 1984 and MoMA in 1992, among others). For his densely worked, large-scale paintings, Roche typically uses live models, wrapping the canvas around their bodies and using a kind of frottage to transfer their images into his pictures, which are about "the celebration of life, the denial of death."

Business was good, by the way. "I sold practically everything in the booth," said Otero. Roche’s paintings typically go for $45,000 each, and Martínez’s cake was sold for $20,000. Martínez has an exhibition opening at Yvon Lambert Gallery in New York on May 31, 2007.

Another strong impression at the fair was made by Zilia Sánchez, a card-carrying member of the shaped-canvas movement of the 1960s. Typically Minimalist and softly colored in pale white and blue, paintings from the 1990s by the 70-something Cuban-born artist (a longtime Puerto Rico resident) ranged in price from $12,000 to $75,000. They were presented at Circa ’07 by CMLC Corp. Galería Itinerante, headed by Carlos M. Lopez, who has been working as a private dealer for two years.

Another notable local is the multi-tasking Pablo Rodriguez, who operates -- under the umbrella name of Candela -- a sound studio, music label, hotel and bar on Calle San Sebastian in Old San Juan with, upstairs, the curiously named Carlos Irizarry En Candela! gallery (which also houses the studio of the famed 60-something Puerto Rican political Pop realist Carlos Irizarry).

The Candela booth at Circa ’07 included a working digital sound studio, with local musicians mixing music during the run of the fair, as well as a selection of artworks with what might be called a post-graffiti cast. These included works by Lee Quinones, Dzine, Rostarr and Swoon, whose large wall installation of two fearsome skeletons doing battle, painted on a mosaic of corrugated cardboard, was priced at $7,000.

Also on view at Candela were small works by New York artist Rafael Vargas-Suarez Universal, whose graphic, abstract wall drawings turn technical data into a visual music of the spheres. His work was on view at Candela’s San Juan gallery as well.

Another local exhibitor was Galería 356, a two-year-old San Juan space run by 25-year old Michelle Fiedler and featuring puppet-filled dioramas by Elsa Mariá Meléndez -- a smaller one was $1,500, a bargain [see Puerto Rican Sun, Feb. 21, 2007].

One of San Juan’s private galleries is Cr3ma, directed by Herbert Mattei and originally launched 18 months ago by three artists (thus the "3" in the name). "We do art fairs," said Mattei, who formerly worked in advertising, and at a gallery in Tel Aviv. "You get access to art that you would otherwise rarely see."

Among the works in the Cr3ma booth were one of New York artist Arnaldo Morales’ fearsome mechanical prostheses (a fairly small one, priced at $7,500), a rotating stainless-steel kinetic light work by Erik Guzmán-Shorrok titled Mine Eclipse, and a suite of three sound sculptures by Charles Juhasz-Alvarado (b. 1965), a Puerto Rico-based Yale grad who has shown his works widely, most recently at the Moscow and Singapore biennials.

Titled Polilla x 200 (2006), Juhasz-Alvarado’s sculpture consisted of large wooden cut-out models of termites perched upon conga drums that double as speakers. For the accompanying audio track, Juhasz-Alvarado overlaid the magnified sound of termites and a classic Caribbean rhythm section. The works are $8,200 each, or $40,000 for five.

For a selection of 19th- and 20th-century classics of Puerto Rican art, Circa ‘07 boasted Carmen Correa Contemporáneo. Among the choice works was The Red Bandana, a large painting from 1985 by the 74-year-old Puerto Rican artist Rafael Ferrer. The price was $32,000.

One visitor from the cold northeast was Space Other, which hails from Boston’s new South End gallery district. Dealer Gamaliel R. Herrera (a native Puerto Rican) had a hit on his hands with a kind of computerized tree by artist Peter Schmitt (b. 1977), who now lives in Boston (and is pursuing a master’s degree at MIT’s media lab).

For 004#3 (2006), as it is called, a "trunk" of gray computer cables snaked up in the middle of the space, spreading out into a penumbra of "branches," each of which had a little handmade, wooden "fruit" at its end -- a tiny machine, complete with motor, gears and a roll of paper that was mechanically extruded a few inches and then cut off, to flutter to the floor like an accountant’s leaf. Done in an edition of three, two were on reserve at $18,000 each.

Miami galleries were in relatively short supply, perhaps because of a kind of communal recoil from the perceived disasters of Circa ‘06, as suggested on Rotund World by Puerto Rican art critic and blogger Joel Weinstein. Miami dealers, he suggested with tongue in check, were "dicked around by Fate itself" during the 2006 fair, and may well have "decided never to return to la Isla del Encanto."

Undaunted, however, was Andreina Fuentes, an artist and dealer who runs Hardcore Art Contemporary Space on North Miami Avenue in Miami. In addition to manning her booth in the fair, she put on a special performance at Café Seda in Old San Juan on Saturday night. Rechristening the place the Blue Pill Bar, she circulated among the crowd in her stage identity of Nina Dotti, handing out packaged blue condoms as souvenirs and dispensing from a large tank on her back a mysterious blue elixir (blue curaçao and pineapple juice, someone said). Called Blue Pill, the bit was billed as a celebration of menopause and andropause as milestones that allow us to "set a new flow in our life."

From Europe came dealer Christa Schübbe, who has operated her Galerie Schübbe Project in Düsseldorf for some 30 years, keeping a daunting schedule that most recently includes art-fair visits to Miami, Palm Beach, Düsseldorf, Beijing and Seoul. One star exhibit in her booth is a "Great Criticism" painting by Wang Guangyi, a signature work mixing propaganda images of the Cultural Revolution with Capitalist logos and slogans. "It’s one of the originals, from 1994," Schübbe said. "Not one of the later ones when he started copying himself!" The price is $280,000.

"I have a lot of collectors here, and they wanted me to come" Schübbe said. "So it’s like being part of a family." Puerto Rico has "world-class collectors," Schübbe went on, predicting that Circa ’07 "has a big, big future." Among the other works in her crowded, lively booth were a heap of large fish -- made of aluminum -- by Carl Emmanuel Wolff, some large-scale wall constructions marked with gnomic graffiti and hung with an assortment of photos, including some from old pinup magazines -- works that doubled as booth dividers -- by Franz Burkhardt ($18,000), and an assortment of glossy, artfully painted images of high-class babes drinking champagne -- done in oil on aluminum -- by Matthias Köster ($9,000-$32,000).

From Milan came dealer Tomaso Renoldi Bracco, who established his Contemporary Art Vision gallery in 1996. In his booth at Circa ’07, he was featuring works by David LaChapelle, Erwin Olaf, Orlan and Andres Serrano. "Much can be done in Puerto Rico, especially in photo-based art," he said.

From Bogotá came dealer Catalina Casas, whose Casas Riegner Gallery specializes in young Colombian artists. Among the offerings were shaped paintings by Rodrigo Echeverri (b. 1975) that resembled piles of red bricks or a black brick wall in a curving arabesque, and a small crate filled with slight Duchampian drawings and modest odds and ends by Mateo López (b. 1978).

Among the items in López’s latter-day " Box in a Valise" is a less-than-spherical rock from a stream painted to resemble a baseball, and an eye-chart that reads "I don’t like America and America doesn’t like me," a play on the title of Joseph Beuys’ 1974 performance with a live coyote in New York. The prices are similarly modest, beginning at $100; a clear light bulb painted in black with a map of the earth was $700.

One of the most eye-catching artworks was at the booth of Galería Fernando Pradilla from Madrid, a partner space of Galería el Museo in Bogotá. Holding pride of place was a large, hand-painted color photograph by the 49-year-old Argentinian artist Marcos López titled Snacks at the Terrace of Fundación Proa (2005), the image (from Buenos Aires, as it happens) that the fair used on all its marketing materials.

Featuring bronzed bathers of both sexes relaxing on a checkerboard patio in front of the sea, complete with cocktails and fried snacks, the photo updates picnic images by artists as varied as Edouard Manet and Henri Matisse while gently poking fun at the clichés of luxe Latin life held dear by North Americans and, no doubt, a few Puerto Ricans as well. The 39 x 39 in. photo, done in an edition of six, was $8,500.

WALTER ROBINSON is editor of Artnet Magazine.

grafiteros y feria CIRCA en revista Rotund

2007-04-15T09:02:00.000-07:00

Rotund World Magazine de Joel Weinstein
http://www.rworld.thenextfewhours.com/

Publica en Desto

2007-04-15T08:59:00.000-07:00

Exhibición colectiva mostrando diversos proyectos interdisciplinarios que actualmente difunden información, abordando en el periodismo, arte visual y literatura en Puerto Rico. Dos partes componen la exhibición. La primera: “Impresos Independientes”, presenta una serie de revistas, libros y páginas d e web (impresas y/o cibernéticas), que actualmente están circulando, en proceso o hicieron un paréntesis reaccionario en años pasados.

La segunda parte de la exhibición muestra “Impresos Inusuales” (”Rare Book Collection”). Pensando en la definición de las palabras, impresión y publicación, esta sección convoca las personas a crear piezas experimentales que aludan o rompan con formatos y métodos establecidos dentro del diseño de materiales impresos (ej. folleto, “flyer”, “post-card”, “flip-book”, revista, ‘t-shirts”, entre otros).

=DESTO, por un instante transformándose en archivo - (lugar donde se guardan documentos // Conjunto de documentos // Fichero de informática; información que se almacena fuera del ordenador o computadora en discos o en casetes), agrupará en su espacio publicaciones que pretenden marcar un momento significativo, además de motivar al desarrollo de nuevas propuestas independientes.

<>

Sol LeWitt, Maestro del Arte Conceptual, ha muerto.

2007-04-14T15:04:00.000-07:00

Michael Kimmelman
souce: New York Times, April 9

Sol LeWitt, whose deceptively simple geometric sculptures and drawings and ecstatically colored and jazzy wall paintings established him as a lodestar of modern American art, died yesterday in New York. He was 78 and lived mostly in Chester, Conn.

Mr. LeWitt helped establish Conceptualism and Minimalism as dominant movements of the postwar era. A patron and friend of colleagues young and old, he was the opposite of the artist as celebrity. He tried to suppress all interest in him as opposed to his work; he turned down awards and was camera-shy and reluctant to grant interviews. He particularly disliked the prospect of having his photograph in the newspaper.

Typically, a 1980 work called “Autobiography” consisted of more than 1,000 photographs he took of every nook and cranny of his Manhattan loft, down to the plumbing fixtures, wall sockets and empty marmalade jars, and documented everything that had happened to him in the course of taking the pictures. But he appeared in only one photograph, which was so small and out of focus that it is nearly impossible to make him out. His work — sculptures of white cubes, or drawings of geometric patterns, or splashes of paint like Rorschach patterns — tested a viewer’s psychological and visual flexibility. See a line. See that it can be straight, thin, broken, curved, soft, angled or thick. Enjoy the differences. The test was not hard to pass if your eyes and mind were open, which was the message of Mr. LeWitt’s art.

He reduced art to a few of the most basic shapes (quadrilaterals, spheres, triangles), colors (red, yellow, blue, black) and types of lines, and organized them by guidelines he felt in the end free to bend. Much of what he devised came down to specific ideas or instructions: a thought you were meant to contemplate, or plans for drawings or actions that could be carried out by you, or not.

Sometimes these plans derived from a logical system, like a game; sometimes they defied logic so that the results could not be foreseen, with instructions intentionally vague to allow for interpretation. Characteristically, he would then credit assistants or others with the results. With his wall drawing, mural-sized works that sometimes took teams of people weeks to execute, he might decide whether a line for which he had given the instruction “not straight” was sufficiently irregular without becoming wavy (and like many more traditional artists, he became more concerned in later years that his works look just the way he wished). But he always gave his team wiggle room, believing that the input of others — their joy, boredom, frustration or whatever — remained part of the art.

In so doing, Mr. LeWitt gently reminded everybody that architects are called artists — good architects, anyway — even though they don’t lay their own bricks, just as composers write music that other people play but are still musical artists. Mr. LeWitt, by his methods, permitted other people to participate in the creative process, to become artists themselves.

A Dry Humor

To grasp his work could require a little effort. His early sculptures were chaste white cubes and gray cement blocks. For years people associated him with them, and they seemed to encapsulate a remark he once made: that what art looks like “isn’t too important.” This was never exactly his point. But his early drawings on paper could resemble mathematical diagrams or chemical charts. What passed for humor in his art tended to be dry. “Buried Cube Containing an Object of Importance but Little Value” (1968), an object he buried in the garden of Dutch collectors, was his deadpan gag about waving goodbye to Minimalism. He documented it in photographs, in one of which he stands at attention beside the cube. A second picture shows the shovel; a third, him digging the hole.

Naturally, he was regularly savaged by conservative critics. By the 1980s, however, he moved from Manhattan to Spoleto, Italy, seeking to get away from the maelstrom of the New York art world. (He had had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1978.) His art underwent a transformation. Partly it grew out of what he saw in Italy. But it was all the more remarkable for also proceeding logically from the earlier work.

Eye-candy opulence emerged from the same seemingly prosaic instructions he had come up with years before. A retrospective in 2000, organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, concluded with some of these newly colorful wall drawings. (Mr. LeWitt always called them drawings, even when the medium became acrylic paint.)

His description for a wall drawing, No. 766 — “Twenty-one isometric cubes of varying sizes each with color ink washes superimposed” — sounded dry as could be: but then you saw it and there were playful geometries in dusky colors nodding toward Renaissance fresco painting. “Loopy Doopy (Red and Purple),” a vinyl abstraction 49 feet long, was like a psychedelic Matisse cutout, but on the scale of a drive-in movie. Other drawings consisted of gossamer lines, barely visible, as subtle as faintly etched glass.

Some people who had presumed that Mr. LeWitt’s Conceptualism was arcane and inert were taken aback. He began making colored flagstone patterns, spiky sculptural blobs and ribbons of color, like streamers on New Year’s Eve, often as enormous decorations for buildings around the world. It was as if he had devised a latter-day kind of Abstract Expressionism, to which, looking back, his early Conceptualism had in fact been his response.

Sol LeWitt was born in Hartford, on Sept. 9 1928, the son of immigrants from Russia. His father, a doctor, died when he was 6, after which he moved with his mother, a nurse, to live with an aunt in New Britain, Conn. His mother took him to art classes at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. He would draw on wrapping paper from his aunt’s supply store.

Finding His Way

At Syracuse University, he studied art before he was drafted for the Korean War in 1951, during which he made posters for the Special Services. After his service he moved to New York to study illustration and cartooning. For a while he did paste-ups, mechanicals and photostats for Seventeen magazine. He spent a year as a graphic designer in the office of a young architect named I. M. Pei.

Meanwhile, he painted, or tried to. For a while, he hired a model to draw from life and copied old masters. He felt lost. An aspiring artist in New York during the waning days of Abstract Expressionism, an art squarely about individual touch, he thought he had no particular touch of his own and therefore nothing to add.

But then he took a job at the book counter at the Museum of Modern Art, where he met other young artists with odd jobs there, including Dan Flavin, Robert Ryman and Robert Mangold. He noticed the nascent works of Flavin and also absorbed early art by Jasper Johns and Frank Stella. Minimalism, a yet-unnamed movement, seemed like a fresh start. Mr. LeWitt was meanwhile intrigued by Russian Constructivism, with its engineering aesthetic, and by Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs, sequential pictures of people and animals in motion, which he came across one day in a book that somebody had left in his apartment. From all this he saw a way forward. It was to go backward.

He decided to reduce art to its essentials, “to recreate art, to start from square one,” he said, beginning literally with squares and cubes. But unlike some strict Minimalists, Mr. LeWitt was not interested in industrial materials. He was focused on systems and concepts — volume, transparency, sequences, variations, stasis, irregularity and so on — which he expressed in words that might or might not be translated into actual sculptures or photographs or drawings. To him, ideas were what counted.

At the time, linguistic theorists were talking about words and mental concepts as signs and signifiers. Mr. LeWitt was devising what you might call his own grammar and syntax of cubes and spheres, a personal theory of visual signs. It was theoretical, but not strictly mathematical. Partly it was poetic. He began with propositions for images, which became something else if they were translated into physical form by him or other people.

He also liked the inherent impermanence of Conceptual art, maybe because it dovetailed with his lack of pretense: having started to make wall drawings for exhibitions in the 1960s, he embraced the fact that these could be painted over after the shows. (Walls, unlike canvases or pieces of paper, kept the drawings two-dimensional, he also thought.) He wasn’t making precious one-of-a-kind objects for posterity, he said. Objects are perishable. But ideas need not be.

“Conceptual art is not necessarily logical,” he wrote in an article in Artforum magazine in 1967. “The ideas need not be complex. Most ideas that are successful are ludicrously simple. Successful ideas generally have the appearance of simplicity because they seem inevitable.”

Relishing Collaboration

To the extent that Mr. LeWitt’s work existed in another person’s mind, he regarded it as collaborative. Along these lines he became especially well known in art circles for his generosity, often showing with young artists in small galleries to give them a boost; helping to found Printed Matter, the artists’ organization that produces artists’ books; and trading works with other, often needier artists, whose art he also bought. Some years back he placed part of what had become, willy-nilly through this process, one of the great private collections of contemporary art in the country on long-term loan to the Wadsworth Atheneum, his childhood museum and the one that again was in his neighborhood after he moved, in the mid-’80s, from Spoleto to Chester. He lived there with his wife, Carol, who survives him, along with their two daughters, Sofia, who lives in New York and works at the Paula Cooper Gallery, and Eva, a senior at Bard College.

It was said that Mr. LeWitt didn’t like vacations. His pleasure was being in his studio. He explained that he had worked out his life as he wanted it to be, so why take a vacation from it?

To the sculptor Eva Hesse, he once wrote a letter while she was living in Germany and at a point when her work was at an impasse. “Stop it and just DO,” he advised her. “Try and tickle something inside you, your ‘weird humor.’ You belong in the most secret part of you. Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool.” He added: “You are not responsible for the world — you are only responsible for your work, so do it. And don’t think that your work has to conform to any idea or flavor. It can be anything you want it to be.”

Gary Garrels, a curator who organized Mr. LeWitt’s retrospective for San Francisco in 2000, said: “He didn’t dictate. He accepted contradiction and paradox, the inconclusiveness of logic.”

He took an idea as far as he thought it could go, then tried to find a way to proceed, so that he was never satisfied with a particular result but saw each work as a proposition opening onto a fresh question. Asked about the switch he made in the 1980’s — adding ink washes, which permitted him new colors, along with curves and free forms — Mr. LeWitt responded, “Why not?”

He added, “A life in art is an unimaginable and unpredictable experience.”

The Armory Show

2007-04-08T16:52:00.000-07:00

Recientemente estuve en la feria de arte contemporaneo The Armory Show
en NY. Fue una buena experiencia ver las galerias y los museos. Lo
bueno de las ferias es que uno como estudiante no tiene los recursos
economicos para comprar arte, pero podemos visitarlas y ver que es lo
que se esta haciedo en el mundo.
Tienes una instalacion a tu izquierda de Berlin y un video a tu
derecha de Tokio.

Aqui estan algunas de las fotos de la feria
Noel

Theodor Adorno //German Aesthetic Theory

2007-03-14T09:35:00.000-07:00

Adorno

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/adorno/

New German Aesthetic Theory:
Martin Seel's art of diremption

AUSTIN HARRINGTON
http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2188&editorial_id=9881

Art 115 ayuda al artista Gean Moreno con su pieza

2007-03-07T06:47:00.000-08:00

2007-02-24T09:39:00.000-08:00

Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’artista no. 19 (1961), est. $50,000-$70,000, at Christie’s New York, Feb. 26, 2007