IT IS ABOUT PLANTS, MODERNISM, AND OTHER THINGS GUILLERMO TREJO Studio Sixty Six October 30 – November 22, 2015
Text by Lital Khaikin. Excerpt from accompanying exhibition text, “language [im]purity”.
Chaos unscrambled back to the first harmonies And the first light Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Vast Confusion
In a self-contained world of experimental beginnings, Guillermo Trejo’s It is about Plants, Modernism, and Other Things sketches out an abstracted language through multiple series of lithographic prints. The geometric designs on paper and canvas relate to each other in the manner of a compendium—the serialised approach to Trejo’s prints speaks to a desire for coherence, for adhering to a total, logical system. The presence of original woodcuts creates a relationship between the works, where each motif may be seen as a work-in-progress. In this raw demonstration of process, Trejo considers the historic role of printmaking, but asserts broader questions that relate printmaking to its explorative, contemporary identity. Trejo’s practice is entrenched in a critical awareness of print as a method by which to determine, disturb and transform social relationships. The work borrows from Walter Benjamin’s “theory of pure art”, discussed in the essay The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936). Benjamin refers to the lithograph as an example of the increased reproducibility of art, which “emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual”. While embracing the machine for its potential to realise an ideal of objectivity, Trejo is critical of this objective substitution for the artist’s touch: “At the cost of what?” he asks, “The value of art? To question the validity of uniqueness?” Trejo’s reference to the most persistent tenets of Modernism is explicit. The medium reflects the burgeoning of industrialisation and capital, collectivity and uniformity, which defined a greater part of the 20th century. Trejo revisits the connection between the written language and its formation from graphic illustration; language is abstracted back to its origins, as simplest geometric shapes. This abstraction, with the intent to distil an essential form, is found in De Stijl. Artists sought a ‘relationship of equality’ between the communal and the individual, assuming this to be possible through a dissociation of their expression from the impressions of sentiment. Social conflict was believed to derive from too much emphasis on the individual, from the dominance held by the personal upon collective environments and modes of expression. In his book A Democracy of Objects, philosopher Levi Bryant is critical of a ‘reality for us’, which “condemns philosophy to a thoroughly anthropocentric reference”. This kind of worldview cannot imagine that it does not contain or require human presence. It is as if the world of objects, beings, experiences, has no independent existence, made known only by our human relationships and values. In the graphic net of It is about Plants, Modernism, and Other Things, the alternative model, the democracy of objects, is suggested in the presence of a system of knowledge in which the human participant is a visitor, not the centre from which objectivity, the purity of a true reality, is determined.
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