Catártica: March'23

EDITORIAL LETTER

Catártica dedicates a month to dark devotion. The uncertain, the hidden and the repressed.

What hurts, what terrifies, what grieves.

The feitiço, the spell.

Mónica Bonvicini

Italian artist Monica Bonvicini (1965 Venice, Italy) focuses on the construction, the urban, and the architecture that articulates the social spaces where power is exercised. From architectural installations, performances, videos, sculpture, painting, and drawing, almost always using industrial materials or those coming from the construction industry combined with fabrics, leather, and paint, she manages to produce work that invites us to reflect.

Bonvicini presents us with spaces that question power manifestations, spaces that seek to collide with commonplaces that articulate social and gender inequality, that is why she unites concepts of psychoanalysis with gender stereotypes and objects that allude to fetishism to expose how institutional or private spaces determine the behavior social groups are supposed to have. For this reason, her work also discusses the origin of sexual behavior and the construction of sexual identity through architecture, which we can see in pieces such as Never Again (2005), an installation presented at the Aarhus Art Museum in Denmark.

Bonvicini, M. (2022), Love is blind, mirror, aluminum, stainless steel, chain, handcuff, 50 x 100 x 4,5 cm

Her work is a continuous dialogue with the viewer, as it seeks to provoke disruptive, irreverent, protesting, and even funny emotions. The artwork seems to play with the environment and more importantly makes the viewer question the power structures surrounding them Bonvicini challenges the museum world, as most of her pieces are not made to be housed in consecrated, silent spaces or where there is no space for interaction.

This month, the artwork Love is blind features on the cover of the magazine, which, with three simple objects, handcuffs, chains, and a mirror, manages in a very elegant way to challenge and expose the desires of its viewers.

“Art is the fetish per excellence. What I do and what all artists do is produce objects of desire that almost nobody can own and even if you do, you do not own the mind of the artist. So, in that sense you could even think of museums as large clubs or sex houses, places of orgies, annoyances, and pleasure.”

Monica Bonvicini in an interview for Nasty Magazine AGC

Bonvicini, M. (2005), Never Again, Galvanized steel pipes, black leather, black leather men ’ s belts, galvanized chains, clamps 350 x 1600 x 1100 cm

SAILING

That night, during the early morning hours, he realized that he had fallen asleep on the made-up bed. The light of a candle placed on the bureau, which carried the image of Saint John the Baptist, dimly illuminated the chamber while the wax languished almost at the level of the glass. In the same way, on the foot of the bed lay a half-closed book that he had left “half”, before surrendering to his dreams. His eyesight no longer allowed him to read late at night, while his bodily fatigue from so many years of work prevented him from standing up comfortably at night.

Víctor Rivera

Still, I read what I could. Like all bad merchants, he was a sentimentalist, which allowed him to keep countless old watch pieces for decades, from when his father and his father's father were still alive. Similarly, he had some convenient gadgets that he used to repair specimens at his market stall. However, year after year, due to “modernization”, he witnessed clients lose interest in his services; Gradually, the conjunction of adjectives like “digital” or “intelligent” placed before nouns like “watch” and “phone” began to shock him.

He frowned every time his grandchildren tried to teach him how to use technology. His rejection of the news prevented him from keeping up with the latest news, and as one of those few who still bought the newspaper, he constantly chafed when he noticed that the spelling filters weren't as rigorous as before. When he finished reading them, he used the pages that he found least interesting or the ones he considered insulting, depending on his political ideology, and covered valuable and delicate objects that he had inherited. He hid them like a treasure inside some boxes that he hid inside the lower drawers of the cabinet with cabinets, the one that remained intact in a house older than him. Especially, he thought about those trifles during his subsequent journey to the kitchen. Like a jungle journey, she felt vulnerable to the darkness of the corridor, which always remained this way, since there were no bulbs in the rooms.

Upon arrival, he poured himself a glass of water and placed the candle in the center of the living room table. He sat in silence for a few minutes and leaning back, he remembered the time he visited his son in his apartment in the capital, when he had to stretch his legs to eat due to the height of the bar. There, he thought about how the architecture of the new spaces has displaced the old people: “they are no longer designed for the family,” he said aloud, knowing that no one else was listening to his words. When he returned to his room, he unmade the bed and lay down. Prostrated, he extinguished the candle and placed, perhaps without realizing it, the image of the saint facing the wall. After this, he crossed himself and sighed with his eyes open, and stared at the ceiling for a few minutes until he fell completely asleep, unaware that this had been the last night of his life.

All that remains

I developed a devotion to the color of your eyes and to the sun that is painted around your pupil. A fear of the words and a taste for your mustache.

I developed a fear of losing you and the time you leave. Before there is anything left I want to have everything that remains.

San Ildefonso 55 by ANDARÍN/ Presenting Miguel

Casco

This dialogue between inhabiting and intimacy is constructed from the physical-spatial, sociocultural and political Intimacy implies that each person is constructed in the midst of 3 dimensions: physical-spatial, socio-cultural and political-institutional. As a result, each individual inhabits the world in his or her own way and at the same time within the context in which he or she lives.

In San Ildefonso 55 several dimensions of inhabiting can be observed. When Send nudes participants send their nudes to Miguel Casco they not only share the body they inhabit, but also the physical space they are inhabiting at the moment of the photo, both forms of intimacy. Another dimension is found when Casco turns the photographs into paintings, a process that occurs in the intimacy of the studio that the artist inhabits while working. Yet another occurs when the public visits and inhabits the space of San Ildefonso 55.

And who is Miguel Casco?

Miguel Casco (Puebla, 1991). The artist studied a bachelor's degree in Visual Arts and a master's degree in Visual Information Design at the Universidad de las Américas Puebla. His line of research is based on corporal referentiality in pictorial (or visual) illusionism; he deals with nudity, coexistence and censorship as thematic axes in his current production. His work has been exhibited in Mexico, the United States and Germany

I’M LEFT WITH YOUR VOICE

I have a wound that I never touch that has not healed and sometimes cries a folder and inside of it dozens of programs voices and among them your voice, tender, shy your voice and its strength

I took each one I cut it, I cleaned it, I put it to dry I left them as good as new

I looked at them, I gave them a name I asked them questions and they answered me now they are singing and among their voices yours, serene your voice, like a kitchen knife always cuts me fine you leave me smiling while I bleed to death

there they are and they sing though no one can hear them I haven't opened their cages nor have I taken them out into the street

I'm afraid they'll fly away and go away go south they stand and sing at your window

Fernando Salas

and as soon as you hear them you know where they come from and how they got there who let them out and when you know don't do anything

so I have them with me from time to time they sing and while I cry I tremble and I don't understand

I caress them, I hear your voice like the rim of a broken glass and I don't understand

Only once you made me empty promises because I asked you to I still don't understand but I hear them sing

and one day I will open their cages and the door to the street and I will break the windows and the glasses and the mirrors and the leaves that bear your handwriting which is all I have left

TheGreatMasturbator

Phalluses, ants, and olive trees.

M. I. Flores Nachón

When I started as a student of Art History and Curatorship student, I declared myself a genuine fan of Salvador Dalí. Little by little, I discovered we both had a fixation on the ticking of the clock and the pain of loss. However, after reading and analyzing, I came across the idea that Salvador Dalí and I are pretty different. Our coincidences are more part of the world's thought system and the spirit of the time, universally shared and not necessarily an interspatial-timeless connection.

However, his work, like that of each artist hand, is the highest form of a message, as well explained by Arnold Hauser:

In its highest form, the work of art is a message, and while those who affirm that a correct, suggestive and energetic expression is an indispensable condition for the effective transmission of the message are undoubtedly right, those who affirm that a A form, however perfect it may be, is meaningless if it is not animated by a certain message.(Hauser, 1968, p.24)

Psychoanalyzing Salvador Dalí is probably a common practice, and quite adventurous, especially for an art historian who hardly feels virtuous enough to talk about the facts, not assumptions.

This is how uniting greats like Hauser, Freud and Jung, I can dare to cast a hook in the works of Salvador Dalí and fish a little about his mind behind his brush.

It is well known that his works denote a part of his unconscious. A fear, a disagreement, a fetish. In each of them we see elongated figures, contrasting with each other. Between their flaccid and hardened characters, erect and collapsed. Archaeological reminiscences that remind us of the first figures referring to fertility and what is consistent with the tears of Eros. Salvador Dalí had hidden souls behind his works.

In Freud, the unconscious, although it appears as an acting subject, is nothing other than the meeting place of these forgotten and repressed contents, and only because of these does it have a practical significance. (C. Jung, 1997)

Olive trees, clocks, ants, lions, elephants, grasshoppers, noses and mustaches. Obsessed with these elements, he remembered the disagreement that Freud describes, the forgotten, the repressed, which he loudly paints. Let's take as an exampleThe Great Masturbator (1929).In it, we see a big-nosed and mustachioed face, effectively a self-portrait of the author facing the ground, facing a grasshopper being eaten by a group of ants. Both the grasshopper and the ants signify a latent fear in Dalí's life, one being a phobia and the other being part of the shared terrors towards death.

On the same face, skin to skin melts into the shape of a bust, a woman who temptingly approaches the genital area of a classical sculpture. Delicate, with her eyes closed next to a gannet that covers her chest. Beneath it we see a monstrous face that seeks to devour without mercy. Dalí openly commented on different occasions about his sexuality and his fear of intercourse. Although he felt a great complex about the size of his phallus, his fear increased due to a bad experience given through reading a sexual book in which venereal diseases were described in depth, which greatly impacted the author.

Olive branches extend from the lower left corner, and seem to reach the veins of the delicate woman. It is well known that Gala, Salvador's wife and eternal lover was his muse in various works, is no exception. Her skin, as described by Dalí, was pale and olive-colored. Hence the branches and their extension. Behind the scene, the shadow of a couple, united under the sexual tension that unfolds in the foreground of the painting.

Salvador Dalí spoke of himself as if he were a myth, allowing himself to become the brand he is today. His self-portrait, The Great Masturbator, allows us to delve into the most powerful disagreements of his unconscious. Dalí and I share more than the fear of the passing of time and the dream that ants will eat us. We share a sexual fear that represses us and imprisons us in a body. Salvador invited me to discover his work, the place that houses the repressed. The fearful, the hurtful.

Jacques Rancière (2005) The aesthetic unconscious Editorial From the Publishing Shelf, Argentina

Carl Gustav Jung (1997) Archetypes and Collective Unconscious Paidos, Spain

Hauser, A. (1968) Introduction to art history. Guadarrama.

Instructions for authors

If you are interested in participating in the magazine, you should take into account the following guidelines:

All manuscripts or works must be sent to the official Catártica mail, with their corresponding translation into English or Spanish. All papers received will be submitted for review by the members of Catártica for their selection and publication.

If the editor deems it pertinent, he may make changes and corrections in the writing and style of the manuscripts.

The file must follow the following format:

Microsoft Word

Arial font

Font size in twelve points

The upper and lower margins should be 2.5 centimeters and the left and right must be 3 centimeters.

The line spacing should be 1.5

The images and illustrations must be cited in APA format and in addition to sending them in the file, attach them in JPG, PNG or PDF format

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Artists and writers

Antonella Guagnelli

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María Inés Flores

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