Fables and Myths The real science of myth should start with a study of archaeology, of history and of comparative religion, not in the psychotherapist’s office. Robert Graves, Greek Myths I. Fantasy literature has greatly influenced modern symbols, as fables and religious myths have birthed archetypes. Epic tales of gods and demons are accepted as fictitious cosmogony with morals based on true human passions and our aspiration for transcendence and plenitude. Such fictions appear in the work of Damián Siqueiros as contemporary reinterpretations of the old myths and in the work of Kenia Nárez as reflections of the unconscious universe. Their images project signs that the viewer identifies as references to classical myths and children’s fables. However, their discourses are arbitrary as they remove myths from their traditional contexts. They take possession of recognizable codes to construct their own arguments with. Their imagery then becomes a vehicle to represent what is unsaid, making the immaterial visible.
The World could eliminate everything from itself; to exist it only requires mankind. Roland Barthes, Mythologies.
Science fiction is as popular a genre as it is diverse, having been exported from literature to cinema, due in part to its extraordinary breadth of themes that were once limited to the fields of physics, mathematics and other exact sciences.
Its mass diffusion combined with scientific and technological progress in the last five decades recovered key words for the visual arts formerly used by the futurists: speed and pollution. Hyper-specialized machinery and time travel were then introduced. This reconstrued universe is seen in a type of art that reflects the aspirations of modern society and its space-time renewal. In some cases, we see the permanence of a humanist spirit that places humans at the center of processes of development and change.
Apocalypse An important part of contemporary art declares itself a partisan of chaos, gesticulates on the void or tells the story of its confined soul. Zbigniew Herbert, Still Life with a Bridle. Essays and Apocryphas.
In spite of the rationality and objectivism from which contemporary societies have been constructed, myths remain relevant on the destruction of the world. Expressions of failure, disenchantment and pessimism are found in contemporary art. There is a notion of chaos as redemption, anticipating the end of days and its worst-case scenarios. These expressions reconsider what is real or possible.
There are two outcomes offered by these artists: the final seconds before a violent destruction, and the desolate landscape of the ruined World. Both scenarios, related to stories from literature and cinema, portray catastrophe as a spectacle that is both terrifying and fascinating. Within the end of everything, the possibility for a new order remains.
Ordinary Worlds In the end, I shelter the hope to be able to base that it is much more important, to appreciate the human condition, to comprehend the manners in which human beings construct their worlds than to establish the ontological category of the products of those processes. Jerome Bruner, Mental Reality and Possible Worlds.
Everyday life scenarios are the appropriate context in which to debate and question the conventional perception of existence, how space is experienced, and how life is measured.
Mauricio Alejo and Alex Dorfsman approach these issues from two different places: Alejo operates in public spaces, reinterpreting and re-contextualizing symbols and their meanings, while Dorfsman alters domestic spaces by staging strange events.
When introducing an unnatural situation into the ordinary world, a procedural interpretive phenomenon occurs. The observer accepts what has apparently happened, because the elemental rules of what is understood as natural are preserved. This is a deliberately artificial construction of daily life, a form of fiction that re-appropriates the framework of the physical world and its representational codes.
The kind of fiction that Guillermo Kahlo created and that Roberto Alzati discovered, illustrates the well-known political strategy of pretending that things are better than what they really are. But why would Kahlo want to erase these figures? We may assume that he considered it necessary to alter reality. Perhaps this was to satisfy the interests of those who hired him, or to illustrate his own notions of progress and success. On the other hand, could it have simply been an issue of composition? One hundred years later, Alzati examines the possible worlds fabricated by those who ruled and by those who worked creatively under their supervision.
In 1904, Mexican President Porfirio DĂaz commissioned a photographic album to German-born photographer Guillermo Kahlo. The fifty plates of the album depict the encroachment of a modern urban city upon the rural landscape surrounding Mexico City.
The starting point for this piece was to produce meaningful images based on small details of Kahlo’s plates. I became interested in these details that the photographer was unaware of or unable to control -the view of a prison with its Panopticon design, a pedestrian’s foot, empty landscapes.
I came across a rather unsettling detail in one of the plates. Kahlo had, by hand, erased a woman from the negative plate. This absence is hard to explain since there are plenty of other people in the same photograph. The blot-out turned the photograph into a terrain of constant possibility, a whisper difficult to overhear.