NICANOR ARÁOZ: SOLID SLEEP

La escala de las piezas, que empequeñecen a quien las mire, su cercanía con la visualidad del render y el desarrollo de universos ficcionales cercanos a los videojuegos o a la sensación que se tiene después de largas horas frente a la pantalla vinculan la exposición con estados de abandono del cuerpo, en los que, en palabras del músico y escritor David Toop, “la parte no corporal del ser humano empieza a cuestionar sus propios límites y a desafiar la creencia convencional de que la conciencia está alojada en algún lugar de la cabeza”.7 El acéfalo, la figura del descabezado, vuelve a la muestra encarnada en quien la recorra.

Por eso no llama la atención que Aráoz se haya detenido largo tiempo en los materiales que reúne la rockola. Allí logró construir un pequeño museo sonoro que rastrea los derroteros de la música electrónica en la década de los noventa, entre “el mundo electrónico high tech y el universo de lo étnico”,8 según señala Agustina Vizcarra, productora de la exposición y asesora en la selección del catálogo de discos. En ese aparato, Aráoz comparte los sonidos que dieron forma a la rave, entendida como la mitología colectiva de aquella época que permitió a una generación entrar en sótanos y discotecas por la noche, bailar hasta desplomarse y salir a la mañana para describir la experiencia como “trascendental”, “comunión”, “ritual”, “trance”, “altar”.

Estos indicios de pasado reciente, con sus inscripciones míticas, lisérgicas y comunitarias, son elaborados en la exposición bajo la forma de un pequeño museo. Si años antes, también en el Museo Moderno, Aráoz había convocado a una exposición que fue una fiesta, un ritual expiatorio para cualquiera que la recuerde, en esta devuelve la música convertida en escucha, propone estos sonidos como capa ambiental y alucinatoria que se suma a la exposición y la contiene, pero que también señala su carácter de reliquia. Estos compact discs, con su ingenua tecnología analógica, son hoy objetos preciados del consumo vintage, como también la moto que corona una pasarela nacarada. En su uso desmedido del poliuretano, ese derivado del petróleo que permite superficies lisas y brillantes sobre las que resbala cualquier historia, un compuesto con el que se hacen desde tarjetas de crédito hasta juguetes para bebés, computadoras y platos, la exposición señala ciertas formas ineludibles del mundo del consumo. La moto y los discos, exhibidos como fetiches, subrayan tanto el carácter ritual de la exposición como la preeminencia de esos objetos como talismanes de fascinación.

En una entrevista reciente, la psicoanalista y crítica cultural Suely Rolnik describe las formas con que el capital financiero, en tanto no produce mercancías como el capital industrial, da forma a mundos, imágenes para que nos identifiquemos con ellas y las deseemos. Solo cuando esas mercancías sean deseadas serán producidas. Para Rolnik, el capital es una fábrica de mundos, portadora del mensaje de que existirían paraísos: “En su versión terrestre, el capital sustituyó a Dios en la función de garante de la promesa, y la virtud que nos hace merecerlo pasó a ser el consumo: éste constituye el mito fundamental del capitalismo avanzado. Ante esto, es de mínima equivocado considerar que carecemos de mitos en la contemporaneidad: es precisamente a través de nuestra creencia en el mito religioso del neoliberalismo que los mundos-imagen que este régimen produce se vuelven realidad concreta en nuestras propias existencias”.9

Si en varias de sus muestras anteriores Araoz había trabajado sobre pulsiones reprimidas –el crimen, la sexualidad, la tortura–, aquí parece preguntarse por

el universo del consumo y su infinita capacidad de metamorfosis como una de las fuerzas más evidentes e inconfesables del deseo. Siguiendo la estructura del deseo, Araóz aspira, como los poetas neobarrocos, a “una fuga total del sentido”, un universo ramificante de exploraciones que traiciona cualquier vínculo con la explicación o la didáctica. Situando sus imágenes en el universo inviolable del dormir, ese espacio que subsiste como “una de las grandes afrentas humanas a la voracidad del capitalismo contemporáneo”,10 se atreve a dar forma a un jardín estimulante y poshumanista, en donde la tecnología y las formas de lo vivo se intersectan, un espacio de religiosidad latente para todos los que deseen una vida llena de sentidos exuberantes y contradictorios, una vida más alucinada y digna que la que estamos viviendo.

—— NOTAS 1— Traducido a partir de Isamu Noguchi, A Sculptor's World, New York and Evanston, Harper Row, 1968. 2— Sigmund Freud, Más allá del principio de placer, OC XVIII 1920, Buenos Aires, Amorrortu, 1976, p. 29. 3— Sin título, 2010. Mesa, colchón, puré de papas, fotocopia, rosa seca. 114 × 100 × 59 cm. La obra fue expuesta en Últimas tendencias II, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, 2012, y en Nicanor Aráoz, Antología genética, Universidad Di Tella, Buenos Aires, 2016. 4— Sin título, 2010. Resina que brilla en la oscuridad, pájaro embalsamado, zapatillas, walkman y sweater. 250 x 320 x 150 cm. Colección del artista. 5— Sin título, 2010. Yeso, poliuretano expandido, periódico, mesa, cadenas, sierra circular y media. 187 x 158 x 85 cm. Colección Alec Oxenford, Buenos Aires. 6— Claudio Iglesias, “Esperando nacer”, en Página/12, suplemento “Radar”, 2 de mayo de 2010. Disponible en <https://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/ radar/9-6120-2010-05-02.html> 7— David Toop, Océano de sonido. Palabras en el éter, música ambiente y mundos imaginarios, Buenos Aires, Caja Negra, 2016, p. 143. 8— Agustina Vizcarra, texto inédito. 9— Ver: “Entrevista a Suely Rolnik”, en revista digital La vaca, 16 de septiembre de 2006. Disponible en: <https://www.lavaca.org/ notas/entrevista-a-suely-rolnik/> 10— Jonathan Crary, 24/7. El capitalismo tardío y el fin del sueño, Buenos Aires, Paidós, 2015, p. 37.

BY LUCRECIA PALACIOS

If, in planting a coffee tree, you bend the taproot, that tree will start, after a little time, to put out a multitude of small delicate roots near the surface. That tree will never thrive, nor bear fruit, but it will flower more richly than the others.

Isak Dinesen, ‘The Dreamers,’ 1934

Among the first industrial spaces to be converted into a cultural institution back in the 1980s, the Noguchi Museum grounds its peaceful russet brickwork in Long Island. It was created and designed by the artist Isamu Noguchi years before his death. An old man by then, he himself set about assembling several of his basalts there; the archives of his collaborations with Martha Graham; the chair designs he did for Herman Miller and Knoll; the delicate, hand-made, Shoshi-paper Akari lamps, which soften ‘the harshness of electricity’ from the light and transform it into a warm, contained glow.

There Noguchi also built the last of his gardens, a modest space, organized into several pebble-covered small islands and levels. It is a petrified, mineral garden. Along the paths rise stones sculpted in soft, smooth shapes, as if under the action of the wind rather than human hand. The humble green of the trees and creepers stands out against a grey landscape that seems frozen. Having trained with Constantin Brancusi, Noguchi understood that any space is sculpture. ‘ This is why sculptures, or rather sculptural objects, create space. Their function is illusionist. The size and shape of each element is entirely relative to all the others and the given space. [...] These sculptures form what I call a garden, for want of a better name’,1 he wrote. The italics are Nicanor Aráoz’s.

Aráoz visited the Noguchi Garden on one of his latest trips. Still, it comes as some surprise that this space proved a revelation to him. After all, Aráoz’s work has developed as an intense sculptural reflection on the body and the violences committed against it. The references to criminology, the comic book aesthetic, the anime and the Gothic aesthetic are the cypher of some of the disparaged materials out which Aráoz builds his pieces and exhibitions, where the presence of dissection, arousal and fragmentation of bodies have led to them being compared to torture chambers or anatomy theatres, bringing out the sinister and disturbing side of his exhibitions. In recent history, his most direct precedents are those who restored the presence of the body during the dark season of Argentina’s last military dictatorship, such as Norberto Gómez, Alberto Heredia or Juan Carlos Distéfano, artists who processed the violence of the period through those tortured forms.

Librada, an exhibition held in 2013 at the Galería Sendrós named after Aráoz’s mother, was intended as a war scene in which two characters confronted each other. On one side, a victorious samurai, arm raised; on the other, a character only one hand of whom could be seen, as if the ground had swallowed them up. On the wall, in a frenzied piece of editing, a virally-repeated image of a weapon formed a cross. In this exhibition, there were already clear signs of pop and psychedelic imagery, the fluorescent colours and rapid transitions that inform Aráoz’s use of materials, a speed that contrasts with the level of detail and plastic sophistication with which the artist executes his

works. The pen-strokes on the paper of the samurai costume, the fine origami of his cape, the woven wicker of his belt, demonstrate a poignant craftsmanship, a richness of elements and materials serving an intense visuality and the construction of ‘a salon of strong emotions’, as Alejo Ponce de León explained in his review of the exhibition.

One of his latest exhibitions, Glótica [Glottal], was described as a ‘gruesome spectacle’. Staked out by a series of vibrant coloured panels in a kind of via crucis, a series of sculptures recreated beheadings and impalings, dissections of different kinds and crucifixions. Somewhere between pleasure and torture, submerged in an ambience of neon and night-life, separated by the panels that alternately revealed and concealed them as one explored the space, they were also a scene of partying and clubbing, images of the on-off of the flash, of the small hours of all-nighters and of hallucination. There were bodies made of plastercasts, a technique Aráoz has been perfecting for years, consisting of dripping liquid rubber over the bodies and faces of those able to bear the martyrdom, then waiting several hours for it to dry and form a mould. Aráoz wraps the mould in bandages to form a counter-mould, which is then doused in polyurethane.

So why were Noguchi and his Zen gardens transformed into the cornerstones for the design of this exhibition? What can the Zen garden say about a Dionysiac flower whose petals are 36 life-size bodies? How can those polished, biomorphic stones be linked to a jukebox that archives the history of techno music in a dragon’s body? Isn’t neon light the most precise form of ‘electrical harshness’ that Noguchi wanted to get away from? What is there in this garden of powerful stimuli that Sueño sólido has become of the peace and meditation that Noguchi aspired to? FREE-FLOATING ATTENTION The techniques and discourse of psychoanalysis are no strangers to Aráoz’s work, who coincidentally studied psychology before switching to art. Just as it is impossible to conceive of his work outside the concept of trauma (Freud defined it as the ‘breaching of the barrier against stimuli’),2 so is it impossible to give an account of it without noting, as Martín Legón points out, the many ‘references to dream and sleep as an unconscious place for processing fear or trauma’. Araóz once described his work method as ‘freefloating attention’, a concept of the Freudian clinic that describes how analysts listen to their patients: avoiding hierarchies between the materials and exercising free association about what they hear. Similarly, Aráoz is capable of reworking the most diverse sources, displacing, mixing and making them unrecognizable. As psychoanalysis might term it, ‘condensation and displacement’ as central methodologies. In this sense, it is no coincidence that the figure of the chain, the image Freud used to explain the relationship connecting the elements in dream processes, is also a trope, an image occurring repeatedly throughout Aráoz’s oeuvre.

Steven Spielberg’s film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which the artist saw in his teens, can resurface in a piece made in 2010.3 Here Araóz reworks a scene in which the father, obsessed with the presence of UFOs, sculpts a mountain in mashed potato in front of his wife and children. It is a dramatic domestic scene of family collapse, in which the tearful son watches his father caught in the grip of madness. Years later, Aráoz presented an enigmatic sculpture: a baby’s mattress on a table, and on the mattress a mountain of mash in which he had set photocopies of hands holding flowers. Half cradle, half burial, the work was a cypher for the fragility of childhood, precariousness, innocence and disaster.

In this period, he also became interested in photographs of Murderous Mary, a case that filled the tabloids in the United States around September 1916, when a circus elephant was hanged from a crane in Tennessee for having killed – ‘murdered’, as the papers put it – one of her keepers. Even then the public spectacle was already being described as animal abuse. Araóz summoned the ghost of the elephant, who arranged to meet at the Galería Abate in the form of angry, avenging ectoplasm.4 The figure of this resin pachyderm lit up in the dark, dragging with it dead birds, walkmans, training shoes, attached to its back and legs. The 1980s and their detritus returned in the form of an animal ghost.

In these pieces, it is clear that Aráoz’s work had shifted from the depiction of scenes of family trauma, citing comics, domesticity, the sinister and the world of childhood, and embarked on a reflection about the introjection of these violences on bodies. For one untitled work widely known by the title El jinete [The Rider], the artist used his own body as a model.5 The headless body, bluish and stitched, like some teenage Frankenstein, straddles a domestic table. One arm wields a barbed chain that lashes through the air around it. This piece marks the beginning of Aráoz’s romance with baroque contorsions and the world of the monstrous. It is also directly quotes Acéphale, the journal and secret society created by Georges Bataille. For the cover of the first issue of the journal, André Masson created a headless figure with arms outstretched, holding a torch and a sword.

‘The interest in surrealism and the figures of the monstrous involves not only a turn away from the comic-strip to the history of art, but also an interest in the role of violence in the structuring of the subject,’ remarked Claudio Iglesias6 about the exhibition called Mocoso insolente [Insolent Brat], which featured the rider. The world of adolescence, with its scars and aftermath, would from then on be an area Aráoz allowed to grow in his shows. The monstrous time of the adolescent, the instability and deformity of an identity in metamorphosis, replace childhood as an emotional time from which the artist collects things, obsolete technologies, adverts and films, generational memories for those who lived their early youth in the 1990s.

One of the elements he recovers from the emotional universe of adolescence is the Internet, perhaps the one that, because it is so essential in his work, should be recorded as another of his materials, along with neon and plastic. Aráoz would, like Kenneth Goldsmith, agree about relating the DNA of the Internet to surrealism. For him, the Web is a kind of collective social dream, a high-speed, à-la-carte surrealist archive, from which he can draw music or news; a flickering cloud of ideas, images with no defined origin and conflicting desires that can anchor those images without the inhibitions of physical proximity. In any case, his use of the Internet is anything but a transparent vehicle for communication. For Aráoz, it is a source of the most secret and mysterious, the most opaque and inaccessible information. He demands from the web a broader theoretical and referential universe than he does from psychoanalysis, one that offers more images, more stimuli, more irresponsibility.

SOLID SLEEP Echoing Noguchi’s garden, Sueño sólido too is organized in archipelagos that convey differentiated emotional tones. From excitement to calm, from movement to stillness, from battle to shelter, Aráoz

arranges four large sculptural groups in the space. The exhibition does not contain, as his work usually does, any extra-sculptural resources to create its ambience: there are no graphic marks, no carpets, no panels, no spices, strategies which Aráoz used to deploy to transform the white cube into complete self-referential illusions. An immense flower made of 36 bodies, two tornadoes looming above a gangway on which a motorbike stands, a winged jukebox and a neon dungeon or forest are the main structures to create a fictional universe of his own, as indebted to the visuality of the videogame as to the Noguchi garden’s ‘little islands’. Despite the 36 bodies – an exorbitant number – the exhibition does not develop the human form as a trope; instead Aráoz’s imagery is recast in other types of biomorphic silhouettes that form a counterpoint to the gallery’s other views produced by a technical imagination: a motorbike, the neon, a jukebox.

Aráoz’s vocabulary is still there, as are the purple hues and the nocturnal atmosphere of his exhibitions, the vivid processes of matteric transformation; the tornadoes to remind us of violence; the readymade elements he places in his exhibitions; the world of contorsion, music and dancing. Yet Solid Sleep is a difficult exhibition to relate to his previous concerns. Even the idea of sleep, a track, as we have seen, much-beaten by the artist, seems to take on a different meaning, less linked to the dream space than to physiology. ‘A solid sleep’ is a common phrase in English, with no reference to the images travelling through people’s heads at night, but simply expressing they have slept well for a long time and are well-rested.

In this sense, sleep as an ultimate synthetic moment of subjectivity seems to interest Aráoz less than that deindividualized space of ‘sleeping’. The individual body’s transformation into a flower built of several bodies could also suggest the shift of the construction of cryptic personal mythologies towards more collective concerns. After all, the images of catastrophe suggested by tornadoes are photos that our retinas have already catalysed in relation to climate change and ecological disaster, a trauma on a planetary scale that it is impossible to individualize. The body flower could also be an image of mutation and monstrosity, an act of violence with no visible aggressor.

Even when these images are on display in an exhibition, it is hard to imagine that in Aráoz’s work – an artist who has systematically escaped any kind of documentary intent – they are a post-apocalyptic, anthropocenic vision. The psychedelic culture he refers to in his exhibitions leads him to the image of hallucination as a more accurate description. The scale of the pieces, which dwarf the viewer, their closeness with the visual impact of the render and the development of fictional universes verging on videogames or the feeling you get after long hours in front of the screen link the exhibition with states of out-of-body experiences. In the words of the musician and writer David Toop, ‘the non-corporeal part of humanness begins to question its own boundaries and to challenge the conventional belief that consciousness is housed somewhere within the head’.7 The acephalos, the figure of the headless man, returns to the show embodied in the visitor.

So it is no surprise that Aráoz spent a long time on the material he has brought together in the jukebox. He has built up a small sound museum that traces the paths of 1990s electronica, between ‘the high-tech electronic world and the universe of the ethnic,’8 according to Agustina Vizcarra, producer of the exhibition and adviser on the selection of the catalogue of discs. In this machine, Aráoz shares the sounds that shaped rave as the collective mythology of a time that enabled