Los Carpinteros: Handwork—Constructing the World

thyssen-bornemisza art contemporary

with contributions by Paulo Herkenhoff, Helen Molesworth, Rochelle Steiner, and Eugenio Valdés Figueroa

verlag der buchhandlung walther könig, köln ISBN 978-3-86560-808-6

los carpinteros

The Havana-based collective Los Carpinteros (The Carpenters), consisting of Marco Castillo and Dagoberto Rodríguez, has created some of the most nuanced work to emerge from Cuba in recent decades. Their enigmatic and mordantly humorous sculptures, watercolor drawings, and installations take inspiration from the physical world, particularly that of architec­ture and urban structures, furniture and design objects, tools and construction materials. Expressing latent political implications and ideological twists, the carefully crafted works exploit a visual syntax that dwells on the contradictions between object and functionality, art and the everyday, practicality and uselessness, autonomy and social meaning.

tb A21

los carpinteros handwork — constructing the world

thyssen-bornemisza art contemporary

los carpinteros handwork — constructing the world

edited by gudrun ankele and daniela zyman foreword by francesca von habsburg contributions by paulo herkenhoff helen molesworth rochelle steiner eugenio valdés figueroa

verlag der buchhandlung walther könig, köln

contents

5

havana, full circle, double memory francesca von habsburg

7

handwork – constructing the world gudrun ankele and Daniela Zyman

13 Dismantling the world

paulo herkenhoff

el barrio – building the city 33

politically infected objects

75

water

117

137

melting 143

back to the future: los carpinteros’ watercolors helen molesworth

165

morphing 177

The Contradictory Nature of Things; or, Tropical Political conversation

cold studies

207

241

language 257

where noise and silence meet eugenio valdés figueroa

287

depressions 295

the language of objects rochelle steiner

psycho spaces

325

365

exhibitions

370

index of works

378

colophon

Havana, full circle, double memory FRANCESCA VON HABSBURG

In 2005 I made a much-dreamed-about visit to Cuba, which had long remained for many a terre interdite.

I remember vividly my mother telling me about a trip that she and my father had taken to Havana in December 1958 to try and convince my uncle Stefan, who had been living there in reclusion and extraordinary luxury for quite a while, that it was actually high time to leave.

My parents had flown over from Jamaica in a private plane but returned empty-handed, since my uncle refused to leave with them. My mother was incensed at having her suitcases rifled through by soldiers, who flipped her couture dresses around with the nozzles of their guns. News had spread that Fidel Castro had started his revolution with Che Guevara by hijacking an airplane on the other side of the island, so airports were on high alert already. The days of haute couture in Cuba were definitely drawing to a close, as the revolution to overthrow the Cuban dictator ­Fulgencio Batista had already begun.

I am not proud at all that my uncle Stefan and his wife, Dagmar, lived in self-exile from Europe in ­Monegasque-style luxury in a deeply corrupt system.

He was a scientist and had been welcomed by the Batista regime to take part in Cuba’s elaborate oil research program. My uncle and aunt’s faith in the system that had protected them in a cocoon of privilege and luxury, as well as their refusal to hear the warnings of my parents, led to their having to escape the island a few weeks later, leaving behind all their belongings, including a huge collection of French furniture and several old master paintings, in the Hotel Nacional de Cuba, where they had lived for many years.

For the last six months of the Batista regime, they had barricaded themselves in with their personal butler, refusing even to allow air-conditioning to be installed.

Upon my arrival in Havana, my first stop was in fact the Hotel Nacional, where I tried to conjure up in my imagination the days of grandeur and excess but found it impossible. Not even fifty years had passed, and it had lost all of its soul and elegance, having become a state-run hotel in a communist nation. I was intrigued by the question of how anyone could mis­calculate a situation as badly as my uncle did. After all, the system that existed was a revolution waiting to ­happen.

5

A ­dictatorship of privilege and corruption that had been sponsored by the United States could not be ­sustained forever, especially at a time when Europe was being swept up in a wave of Soviet occupation.

When I met Marco Castillo and Dagoberto ­Rodríguez, the two young artists who make up the ­collective Los Carpinteros, I was introduced to a new generation of Cubans. They were fresh and ­enthusiastic, their work was extremely unusual and really quite beautiful, but what I loved most about them and their work was their wonderful sense of humor!

They were working on a series of drawings of Havana buildings sketched from memory, which were to be made into large sculptures for their upcoming gallery show in New York. I was driving around Havana with them quite carefree in their American army surplus Jeep, which oddly enough was willing to drive only in reverse. I felt myself in another world, especially once we managed to convince it to consider first gear!

The next day and a few mojitos later, now quite a bit more familiar with the old town of Havana, I returned to their studio for a deeper look at their portfolio and found some treasures that I was very excited to be able to acquire! Now, years into collecting their work, I felt that their presence in the T-B A21 collection had become quite an important statement for us.

It has become a long-term commitment to them, and one that demonstrates the faith that we at T-B A21 have in their work. If one has a great appreciation of an artist’s oeuvre and admires the artist’s work and commitment to craft as much as I do theirs, one always comes back for more work, and of course this leads to the temptation of asking them to undertake a special commission as well.

One day they walked into my office and showed me a picture of a large installation work of theirs that I had recently been admiring and ­considering ­acquiring for the collection. They had decided to donate it to T-B A21! I took this very personally and have to admit that I suddenly became very emotional.

After all these years of working with artists, commissioning pieces, installing, and publishing their work, no one had ever donated a work to the foundation.

And certainly not such a substantial one at that!

6

It is called Es ­ pejos de agua | Water Mirrors, 2001 [354/355] and consists of a group of tables that reflect the light of a number of standing lamps, the kind frequently used in interrogation rooms. My mind again wandered to my uncle, who must have been subjected to such procedures after being dragged out of his penthouse arrest at the Hotel ­Nacional. How all this haunts me.

And there they were, these two handsome, ­beaming Cubans, who had just made the greatest gesture, looking at me, puzzled by the tears streaming down my cheeks. My thank-you to them is this book, which I will take the ­opportunity to present to them for the first time in Havana in ­December 2010 to close the circle of this last journey, which I am sure it will lead to a new one … I admire Dagoberto and Marco very, very much and wish them a great career and many, many other ­accolades and exhibitions of their wonderful work.

Gracias amigos, esto es para vosotros, con mi corazón, Francesca

For this catalogue, I asked the artists to make one of their memory sketches of the Hotel Nacional as an illustration to my text, and they kindly obliged. It is in keeping with their highly participatory attitude toward this project. This volume was edited by Gudrun Ankele and Daniela Zyman, who also wrote many of the texts; I am grateful for their extraordinary work. I must also recognize the tireless efforts of Christian Schienerl, who designed this fabulous publication, with its special “flip-flop” edition. Many, many thanks to all who participated—especially to the authors, to the indefatigable editor Karen Jacobson, to the translators, and to the galleries supporting this endeavor with all their might (unfortunately there are too many contributors for all to be listed here). We are so proud of this book!!

handwork – constructing the world gudrun ankele and daniela zyman

The Havana-based collective Los Carpinteros— founded in 1991 by Alexandre Arrechea, Marco Castillo, and Dagoberto Rodríguez and since 2003 consisting of the later two—has created some of the most important work to emerge from Cuba in the past two decades. Exploring the intersection between art and society, the artists merge architecture, design, and sculpture in unexpected, distorted, and often humorous ways. Their elegant and mordantly ironic sculptures, drawings, and installations take inspiration from the physical world, particularly that of architecture and urban structures, furniture and design objects, tools and construction materials. These carefully crafted works exploit a visual syntax that sets up contradictions and ambiguities between object and function as well as between practicality and uselessness. Since their participation in the Havana Biennial in 2003, Los Carpinteros have taken part in several highly acclaimed group exhibitions, including The New Décor, Hayward Gallery, London (2010); Sites, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2009); and The Kaleidoscopic Eye: Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2009). They have presented their work internationally in recent solo shows such as Drama turquesa, ­Ivorypress, Madrid (2010); and Opener 19: Los Carpinteros, Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, New York (2010). The artists also completed the large-scale site-specific public commission Free Basket [239] for the Virginia B. Fairbanks Art and Nature Park at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 2010.

The present monograph reflects Thyssen-­ Bornemisza Art Contemporary’s long-standing interest in and support for Los Carpinteros and their oeuvre and also grew out of our awareness of the lack of any comprehensive study of the artists’ work since their catalogue dating from 2003 published in course of their exhibition during that year’s Havana Biennial.1 Since then, not only has the composition of the collective been in a process of transition, with the departure of Alexandre Arrechea, but at the same time the artists have received an unprecedented level of recognition. Their work has been shown in an increasing number of important international exhibitions and

7

collected by private as well as public institutions. The years from 2003 to 2010 thus represent their critically most acclaimed period. The present monograph is the first that devotes extensive space to the output from these years and at the same time provides the basis for a thorough discussion and contextualization of their oeuvre.

The four commissioned essays in this volume follow different aspects of Los Carpinteros’ works: Paulo Herkenhoff unfolds a topography of artistic positions from Latin America, thus thinking through different possibilities of locating Los Carpinteros’ oeuvre in the geopolitical realm as well as within globally relevant discourses and aesthetics. Helen ­Molesworth discusses the artists’ approach to the practice of watercolor drawing by analyzing the history of the medium, looking at technical aspects as well as themes of time, the artist’s hand, and gender. By diving into a single work and following its exploding lines of flight, Eugenio Valdés Figueroa dissects the multiple layers and substreams of meaning in Frío estudio del ­desastre | Cold Study of Disaster, 2005 [220/221], thus revealing methods of thinking and construction that appear repeatedly in Los Carpinteros’ works. Rochelle Steiner examines the many ways in which the artists’ works establish and subvert linguistic meaning, playing with language on the visual and semiotic levels and thus creating an irritating and flickering mesh of sense and nonsense, reality and fiction, reflection and utopia.

In developing the structure of the book, the intention was to break with the obvious approach of organizing the works by medium—which would involve addressing the drawings (which form the main corpus of works), sculptures, and installations separately— and instead follow the different thematic substreams established by the many processes of transformation and change at work in the whole oeuvre of Los Carpinteros. The selection of works presented here grew out of intensive working sessions with the artists, who very patiently developed with us the grouping of the works and their arrangement in the book. The chapters trace the following substreams: el barrio, the neighborhood and its relevance as point of reference to Havana as well as a departure point into

8

introduction

a ­postrevolutionary utopia; the politically infected object, which responds to politics by changing form or function; water as a medium that produces and reflects the insular condition of Cuba in a geopolitical and economic sense; melting as a specific process of transformation that is connected to liquefaction, ­fluidity, and the loss of shape, whereas morphing can be understood as the changing or merging of shapes and formal structures and functions of objects; cold studies gather the works where the moment of explosion is constructed and meticulously staged as a frozen moment of stillness and suspended gravity; language is addressed in Los Carpinteros’ works on manifold levels—from the indexical sign, to books and libraries as archives of language, to the constitutive and ideologizing potentials of sound; depressions as the marker of the absent, the missing, the nonpresent; and psycho spaces that set free the operations of the dream, condensing, displacing, representing, or symbolizing the dream object in a seeming critique of master-planned rationalism.

This order of works should not be understood as definitive; rather it is one possibility of thinking about the work not only in terms of obvious resemblances of motifs but also through processes at work within the entire oeuvre. The introductory text to each chapter, written by the editors, is therefore just one approach to an experimental grouping of works. It fractures the seemingly smooth surface of the works, shedding light on some possible complications that they produce for our understanding of reality. Additionally, selected drawings and installations are discussed in more detail in short texts written by the editors.2 The function of these texts is also to interweave the works in a different way so as to offer a more focused discussion of the oeuvre that complements the commissioned essays. Thus, the book combines academic aspects of a catalogue raisonné with the idiosyncratic take that the artists might provide on their own work in an artist's book. The slipcase produced for the book’s special edition is based on Los Carpinteros’ numerous ­renderings of flip-flops and city maps and reinforces the reading of the book as a mapping of ideas and objects, of a navigable psycho-structure.

To represent the processual collaboration with the artists, the book encompasses various notes and inserts with a conversation, albums of sketches, and photographs taken by the artists. The two photo inserts show inspirational motifs, places, buildings, and architectural structures in Havana, all of which were taken in the course of the production of the book.

Since they are meant to function like a notebook, the single images are not described and lack captions, yet their resonances can be traced in drawings and sculptures. The sketches document how ideas and plays on words take form and find their first aesthetic translation. Additionally, the insert with a conversation from May 2010 sheds light on the collaborative processes, on how dialogue meanders between the artists, furthered by associations, jokes, different takes on objects, stories, and histories.

The following flows were central to our approach of Los Carpinteros' oeuvre: Repetition Being confronted with a multiplicity of watercolor drawings and realized sculptures and installations raises the question of how to present these works.

The many drawings seem to take up a reduced selection of materials—such as concrete, bricks, pools, houses, drawers, mirrors, and liquids—but apply a whole variety of transformation processes. The work of Los Carpinteros might therefore be described not through a logic of progress but rather by a logic of repetition. The many variations on themes ­create a seemingly endless archive of innovative and un­predictable aspects, turns, and morphed functionalities. Thus, a presentation along chronological lines did not make as much sense as a thematic organization. The book appropriates the modus operandi that Los Carpinteros have established and employed in their artistic work, which resembles the processes of language. The restrictedness of the basic alphabet and vocabulary hence allows for infinite possibilities of combination. This book thus follows lines and nodes in which certain ideas drift through the artists’ work, get materialized in certain projects and contested in others, invoking the logic of the surrealists’ game of

9

exquisite corpse and of associative dreamwork or the semiotic processes of (re)signification.

Handwork The first line of flight in understanding the work of Los Carpinteros derives from their name, which translates as “the carpenters” and signals that they take much of their artistic persona from the notion of craftsmanship in its most material sense—that is, the tradition of the trades or guilds and the notion of the master craftsman. “The name is a camouflage which deals with smuggling, allowing you to function freely. The first works that we fabricated had the appearance of nineteenth-century objects, and they were manifestations of crafts and physical labor. So the people started calling us carpinteros, which we did not even know at the time. We thus accepted it in the early ­nineties; we assumed the role.”3 Los Carpinteros’ interdisciplinary collaboration, also defined as “exchange of services,” uses the identity of the artisan as a meticulous and self-effacing handworker in a quasi-archaeological sense to subvert and ambiguously exploit the apolitical anonymity and lack of ideology associated with the traditional crafts.

This allows them to negotiate the space between “high” and “low,” artisanship and artistry, utopia and reality, and the dominated and the dominant, and to assume incompatible roles within a terrain of conflict. As ­Richard Sennett points out in his study of the practice of the craftsman, the word craftsman is derived from the Greek word demioergos, the “compound made between public (demios) and productive (ergon),” replaced later in Aristotelian thinking by the cheriotechnon, the handworker (a form still found in the German Handwerker).4 The Heideggerian term Zuhandenheit (being ready-to-hand, the condition of being handy) additionally explores the meaning and functional relationship between objects and man, the visceral tangibility of (hand)made things. According to Sennett, in his early work the Grundrisse, Karl Marx “framed craftsmanship in the broadest possible terms as ‘form-giving activity.’ He emphasized that the self and social relations develop through and by making physical things, enabling the ‘all-around development of

the individual,’” thus defining the desire to work (well) as a function of the community and the communal body.5 In the nineteenth century, middle-class ­followers of William Morris and John Ruskin used theories of the craftsman's ideal to distance themselves from the ravages of industrialization. The image of the ­preindustrial artisan was invoked to counteract the alienation of the factory laborer and to introduce a nostalgic sense of the authentic. Eileen Boris summarizes the movement's unique brand of longing and melancholy: "The idealistic, uplifting, optimistic yet paternalistic spirit of the movement reflects the class that turned to arts and crafts as solution to and escape from the industrial world it did so much to forge. Functional and romantic, modern and traditional, individualistic and communal, nationalist and universal—the arts and crafts movement contained contradictory tendencies.”6 But it was precisely these contradictory tendencies that made the craftsman's ideal so useful in containing and narrativizing progressive ambivalence. It links the figure of the craftsman to the "preindustrial" phase of history as a constraint on productive possibilities, as the past holding back the future, and history and performance as collaborators in a kind of backward-forward motion.

The reference to the Arts and Crafts movement and its American followers is introduced here not to serve as a model for the very localized practices of Los ­Carpinteros but rather to exemplify the operation of the appropriation of a historical guild model as a productive imaginary that uses locally situated predecessors (the tobacco industry, the socialist equipo) as well as the progressive social agenda of the figure of the craftsman. It is just as much a social camouflage as it is an articulation of an artistic and utopian program with historic precedents.

The Object The figure of the craftsman also allows Los Carpinteros to focus on the singularities of the “­everyday object,” of furniture pieces, and functional tools and materials—their preferred topos of operation. Carpenters construct such everyday objects, thereby often using a pragmatic inventiveness to find solutions

10

introduction

their status, meaning, and relationship to us. Very to problems occurring in their realization. Given the simple alterations (such as in size and form), con­ political and highly precarious context of Cuba, one genial systems of stacking, morphological operations can assume that Los Carpinteros invent and construct (such as the liquefaction or temporalization of objects), a reality that at the moment is unreal but thinkable— one aspect that connects their work to that of utopians. cross-programming of functionalities (a bed that is a roller coaster/highway, a pool that is an aircraft Working within a postcolonial imaginary, they construct carrier) invoke a totally new understanding of their objects of an unreal reality, a seemingly absurd utopia, objecthood and reconnect to narratives that are at thus posing questions about what this other world times humorous, cynical, utopian, or critical. Their might look like, how it might work, and what it would visceral tangibility derives from astute interpretations enable. Yet their work is free of sentimentality and of details, such as small drawers that can be manipurefuses to represent the “Cuban experience” as either lated, precious materials and surfaces, and ingenious an exotic one or one characterized by victimization, as installations that render perfect illusions of reality. As Marilyn Zeitlin has noted.7 the artists often work in series, certain metaphoriLos Carpinteros’ strategies of craftsmanship raise cal functions or functional metaphors are revisited, the question of how the artists complicate the object. rewritten, even exhausted in the various renderings of The way they use the aesthetic of handcrafted objects their preferred subjects. Thus the many variations of makes them stand out in a neoconceptual context of objects become the building blocks of Los Carpinteros’ artistic production in which the occupational and language and of their world. handmade aspects are assumed to have been overcome. Their carefully designed sculptural works and Language drawings show a certain simplicity in the way that they One strategy is Los Carpinteros’ development of a very are presented. The drawings often work like ­studies specific and literal language of disruption, which can in focusing completely on one object, exempting it be understood as a generational phenomenon among from all contexts, sometimes even giving its measureCuban artists who emerged in the 1990s and who ments or different views. The sculptures and most “chose not to directly confront the limitations of what of the installations show “what they are”: objects of they could show. Instead they opted for a more deeply daily use, everyday objects—yet they are not free of subversive and, ultimately, more engaging strategy: agency. “I really do not believe that the emphasis of Irony replaced open critique.”9 To speak about a Cuban artists on the formal is about the restoration of three-dimensional form means to establish a relationthe artistic object's aura; it is rather just a citation, a ship between the act of speaking and the appearreproduction in an ironical sense. It may be that the ance and functioning of that particular form with the resulting object is important in the way that it works intention to determine a function from which further as a support to a series of alternative ideas about speech (and meaning) can be derived. This creates the issues of art-reality and artist-society. This is the a parallel between the appearance of a form and an conceptual complication of said works, which ultimately act of speech. To speak about a three-dimensional pursue the ‘narration’ of the art object's new condi8 form that not only is absent but also possibly does not tion, as well as that of the artist.” even exist creates yet another relationship between Los Carpinteros’ sculptural works and drawings language and form: the form becomes a continuation of use narrativity and humor to exploit a visual syntax the possibilities of language; it creates a potential that that sets up contradictions among object, function, is not prefigured as a form or as a memory. The works and language. Their practice often consists in redrawof Los Carpinteros often rely on these resonances ing, “copying,” or transcribing objects (both in the and dissonances between verbal and visual content. drawing process and subsequently from the second Whereas their earlier work reflects on post­colonial into the third dimension) and simultaneously ­changing

11

and postrevolutionary ironies, using humor and materials loaded with meaning, their work since 2000 can be understood, as Marilyn Zeitlin has put it, as post-postcolonial. It has widened in focus to address issues that are less Cuba-specific. It no longer addresses the question of identity but is concerned with more philosophical questions about the nature of meaning, about the relationship of object to text, and about the expectations of this relationship, thus ­applying languages of appropriation and subversion.10 Dreamwork At work in Los Carpinteros’ oeuvre are not only these languages of subversion but also something that might be understood as dreamwork happening in the craftsmen’s night. What are the rules that work within these processes of transformation? Can we understand these metamorphoses better if we use the ­Freudian understanding of dreamwork, with its concepts of condensation, displacement, figurability, and second revision? Dreams transform reality, and sometimes the line between these two realms is blurred. Following that trace, the objects and drawings conceived and transformed by Los Carpinteros lead us into the realm of the night, of sleep, and of dreaming. But there also evolves another trace, a trace of the political: the night is the time when craftsmen should sleep to renew their energies and to be productive again the next morning.

Los Carpinteros, however, produce various objects that could be understood as an inventory of dreams, an archive of dreamwork, a book of dreams. As we consider them as craftsmen, we propose looking more closely at the act of constructing something “unreal.”

Artists can tell us about unreal worlds, about fictions; craftsmen build things for “the” reality, which can be used and function in “our” reality. What happens if craftsmen construct new worlds, if they appropriate this fictional competence from the arts and employ it in their own “simple” work of crafting, building, and realizing? What if this construction of new worlds is no longer restricted to artists or politicians but practiced by self-empowered craftsmen as well? Here we find a level of engagement with the political, understood as a new ordering of the relations among art, politics,

and the sensible. The practice of Los Carpinteros can thus be read as a double game, a game within a game, which plays with exactly these configurations and disturbs them, at least showing the possibilities that might reside in such a subtle disturbance of the sensible.11 The Constructed Archive In history everything begins with the gesture of setting aside, of putting together, of transforming certain classified objects into “documents.” This new cultural distribution is the first task. In reality it consists in producing such documents by dint of copying, transcribing, or photographing these objects, simultaneously changing their locus and their status. This gesture consists in “isolating” a body—as in physics—and “denaturing” things in order to turn them into parts which will fill the lacunae inside an a priori totality.12

What Michel de Certeau described as a historiographic procedure of cultural redistribution can be applied and brought into the context of the artistic operation. The archive of objects fabricated and devised by Los Carpinteros reads like an inventory of prototypical anomalies of the everyday or the distorted representations of Cuba’s fragmented ­history.

They are citations and “documents” but, as such, much more than mere referents to an actual object.

They are the aesthetic archive constituting the act of “writing history.” As the artists have stated: “We use swimming pools almost as toothpaste. We use swimming pools not for pleasure. No, this is a language. This is a platform for us to say something.”13 The constant reworking of elements and signs from this idiosyncratic “language” (repetition, furniture, functional objects, pools, bricks, water, beds, spaces, etc.) allows Los Carpinteros to overcome the static character of objects, determined by convention and use, and serves as a tool for constructing a world of difference. Through endless variations and reformulations (fabulations), they isolate selected objects from the archive of the everyday and reposit them in a vital dialectic between current conditions, political contaminations, and utopian visions. The mimetic is in this case a simulated imitation, creating room for resistive and imaginative agency within the space of representation, achieved by a parodist restoration of

12

introduction

the aura of the artistic object, its seeming authenticity and uniqueness.

The dialectic process of imitation and the undermining of the very same within the practice of representation narrativize the “real” and the “present,” positioning them within the context of ideologies, institutions, and social practices. The covert nature of narrativity, however, lies in effacing the social foundations of historical facts and eliding any remaining gaps between “representation,” "reality," and "truth.” By drawing attention to the elements of the ­imaginary, fantasy, and desire, Los Carpinteros spotlight the narrative not as fiction per se, but as the process of mediating and arbitrating the respective claims of social structures, the performative character of cultures and identities, and projective and transgressive competences of the artistic practice.

The book follows these flows and substreams within the whole oeuvre of Los Carpinteros, approaching groups of works or single works with the intent of discovering how to make these twisted worlds tell their stories, what questions they pose, and how they complicate the relationship between the aesthetic and the political.

Notes 1. Alexa Favata and Noel Smith, eds., Los Carpinteros, published in conjunction with the exhibition Fluid, Eighth Havana ­B iennial, National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana (Tampa: Institute for Research in Art, University of South Florida, 2003).

2. Texts on pages 280 and 330 written by Verena Platzgummer.

3. Los Carpinteros, in “Tracing Aleph,” conversation between the exhibiting artists and curators Daniela Zyman and Adam Budak held in conjunction with the exhibition Collection as Aleph, Kunsthaus Graz, March 5, 2008.

4. Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 22–23.

5. Ibid., 29.

6. Eileen Boris, Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988).

7. See Marilyn Zeitlin, “Los Carpinteros Updated,” Afterall, no. 9 (Spring–Summer 2004): 76.

8. Eugenio Valdés Figueroa, “The Key and the Keyhole in the Lock: Construction and Utopias in Contemporary Art,” in The Way Things Are… Works from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection at the Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu in Torun (Cologne: Walther König, 2008), 108.

9. Zeitlin, “Los Carpinteros Updated,” 73.

10. See ibid., 76.

11. See Jacques Rancière, The Nights of Labor: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, trans. John Drury (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).

12. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 72.

13. Los Carpinteros, conversation with the editors, May 2010.

dismantling the world paulo herkenhoff

14 paulo herkenhoff

One might well start out by imagining all the things engineered by modern man being perverted by Los Carpinteros until the whole of their work coincides with the disconcerting totality of industrial society itself—or at least with such things as bricks and cities or beds and swimming pools. Yet such a prophecy shall never be fulfilled, for the mordant act of perverting everything in existence could never be accomplished in a subject’s lifetime, even if the subject were a group of artists. This is Los Carpinteros’ doomed and carefully planned project. Faced with the impossibility of ­constructing a voracious work with regard to a predetermined totality, the artists resolve to establish a lacunary order of things. A process of vulnerability, entropy, and reempowerment of the relationship between form and function shall guide that order. This is interrogative art. What would the emergence of these objects disturb? Contrary to what they appear to be—devices for defamiliarization—they operate only when recognized because it is only then that they are able to attack commodity fetishism. Such is the case of the unproductive truck with its ampersand-shaped tank in Cargo grande | Big Cargo, 2004 [277]. The objects provoke discreet laughter as a way of destabilizing every manner of social utopia and affirming the world as irreconcilable place.

Initially there were three artists in the ­collective known as Los Carpinteros—Alexandre Arrechea, Marco Castillo, and Dagoberto Rodríguez—the first of whom left the group in 2003. The progress of Los Carpinteros’ international career accelerated around 1995 with solo shows and participation in group exhibitions throughout Europe and in Mexico.

Cuban artists had begun to circulate in the preceding decade, partly as a result of the Havana Biennial, which started out as a new perspective for discussing art beyond the north-south model that characterized the Venice and São Paulo biennials and Documenta.

Certain international exhibitions had already started qualifying their relationship with Latin America as a process of opening up. According to curator JeanHubert Martin, the exhibition Magiciens de la terre (1989) opposed ethnocentric practices in the international art system, opened up possibilities for new

intercultural relations, and embraced cultural relativism, a problem that was initially defined by Montaigne in his Essays. Under the curatorship of Jan Hoet, the ninth edition of Documenta (1992) was the first international recurring exhibition in which the curatorial vision effectively encompassed all the continents.

Artists themselves began to experience globalization, artistic nomadism, and the transterritoriality of ideas.

In an interview conducted in 1999, when Los ­Carpinteros had already begun their international trajectory, Dagoberto Rodríguez takes into account the fact that Cuba’s socialist revolution was only forty years old: “All of the recent history of the country is colored by this fact. It’s been very difficult to shed this; it has been something that has marked all Cubans these past 40 years. What was our goal? I don’t know, maybe this will sound odd, but the idea was maybe to forget that past, to put it aside.”1 For all intents and purposes, Los Carpinteros—along with Carlos Garai­coa, Tania Brugera, Sandra Ramos, Antonio Eligio Fernández (“Tonel”), Ibrahim Miranda Ramos, Kcho, and others—belong to a generation that was born after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Art historian María Magaly Espinosa Delgado believes that the ruptures and continuities of that generation of Cuban artists imply fluctuations, declivities, and routes that are often determined by social milieu. “Visual narrative in Cuba is a narrative of the ­fragment; the city, exile, utopias, and rituals are fragments,” she concludes.2 The artistic activity of Los Carpinteros began with the end of the cold war, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the establishment of Pax Americana as the basis of “Empire,” as described by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.3 The group was formed in an age of speculation regarding the “end of history,”4 the topic raised by Francis Fukuyama in the wake of Hegel, developed by Karl Marx and taken up again by ­Alexandre Kojève. Its emergence occurred after the consolidation of the prestige of the Havana Biennial, which established a dynamic relationship between Cuba and world art that prioritized ties with peri­ pheral regions. The full, worldwide acceptance of Cuban artists revealed by the biennial was confirmed

Lygia Clark soft work “19”, 1964

Guillermo Kuitca Capitonée House Plan, 1989

Marta Minujin Soft Gallery, 1973

15

by the exhibition Kuba O.K.: Aktuelle Kunst aus Kuba at the Städtische Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf in 1990.

The environment in which Los Carpinteros appeared had already consolidated criticism that was then centered on American and (above all) Cuban culture. The Cuban curator Gerardo Mosquera was the paradigm of a critical approach that learned to keep its distance from the state, maintaining ties with the Cuban environment but becoming part of the international theoretical and curatorial scene. Espinosa Delgado says that Cuban art of the last three decades owes a great deal to Mosquera.5 Like the system of objects, art history runs through the corpus of Los Carpinteros like a field of experiments that takes the form of an anxiety-ridden Nietzschean delirium, a political mirage that cannot be reconciled with power.

Art History Certain works in Los Carpinteros’ oeuvre instantly remind us of historic pieces of art from modernism to the present, by artists as disparate as Marcel Duchamp, the Dadaists, surrealist René Magritte, Joseph Beuys, Pop artists Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns, minimalist Carl Andre, and neoconcretist Lygia Clark. Of his education at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA), established in 1976 in Havana, Arrechea has said: “At our school in Cuba, the teachers were focused on seventies Dada in America, and the sixties of course. From Marcel Duchamp to Joseph Beuys exists a line, and we always intersect that line.”6 At the ISA, Professor Flavio Garzandia introduced the ideas of North American conceptualism to his students.

Los Carpinteros may also be referenced diffusely to fairly recent Latin American art, as exemplified by the work of Cildo Meireles, Waltercio Caldas, Guillermo Kuitca, Jorge Pardo, and Iran do Espírito Santo among others. The output of all these ­artists is reduced to the condition of stylemes that are devoured and metabolized by Los Carpinteros in a discourse of their own, including the form and material conditions of the sign or rule of their agenda by the signifier. An example would be their drawing Casa suave | Soft House, 2008 [338] , neither a reinterpretation nor a citation of Kuitca’s Capitonnée House

but its inclusion in the Cuban duo’s formal vocabulary. With Soft House, Los Carpinteros alluded to a history of softness in contemporary aesthetics in response to materials introduced by artists such as Lygia Clark, Piero Manzoni, and Claes Oldenburg, a way of constituting the signifier with materials from art history.7 Ironically, there is a material vocabulary with technical connotations that takes shape based on the concept of styling within the system of industrial objects, in which carpentry and watercolor—as well as chrome metal or industrialized tents—all become material and sign. Los Carpinteros’ discourse does not pretend to conceal the “anxiety of influence” that Harold Bloom conceptualized after Roland Barthes introduced the idea of the death of the author.8 Arrechea concludes, “We love Marcel Duchamp. But Marcel doesn’t love us. He is dead—he can’t.”9 Los Carpinteros’ scopic regime permeates art history itself as a semiotic source that contaminates gigantic projects like Piscina arena | Arena Pool, 2004 [189], or small objects such as the transformed giant hand ­grenade in Estuche | Jewelry Case, 1999 [height 225 cm].

Yet melancholy haunts the gaze in the prostrated architecture of Torre acostada | Reclining Tower, 2006 [53]. It is therefore a matter of exploring and contaminating the image repertory of modern art. The transverse relationship between the work of Andy Warhol or that of Cildo Meireles and the procedures of Los Carpinteros may reflect the Cuban artists’ relationship to an agenda that includes pop art and the culture of Latin America.

The work of Los Carpinteros allows for a comparison with several classic moments in the work of Meireles. One conclusive meaning of such a juxta­ position would be to show how in the last few decades Latin American art began to feed on itself, becoming a fundamental source of references for its own dynamic. Yet, like Meireles with regard to Brazil, Los ­Carpinteros do not debate affirmations of Cuban identity; they construct objects and situations under a regime of political-economic crisis. The Meireles perspective implies understanding the crucial matter of how the concept of value is formed in historical materialism as based on the capitalist experience.

Plan (1989)

Cildo Meireles Insertions into Ideological Circuits: banknote Project, 1970

Cildo Meireles Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Coca-Cola Project, 1970

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If correlations of any sort may be established between the work of Meireles and that of Los Carpinteros, they are of interest only inasmuch as they qualify interpretation of the duo’s output. Topological distortions—for example, the absurd extension of rubber parts—function as a perversion of the thing in the extravagant group of objects in Meireles’s ­scrapers (1978) and in Los Carpinteros’ watercolor Patas de rana, final | Flippers, Final, 2009 [132]. Accumulation and the gathering of objects of the same class (nails, knives, and razor blades) resulted in Meireles’s Neutralization through Addition and Opposition (1978) .

Los Carpinteros’ Carretera de tornillos | Highway of Screws, 2003 [200] , possesses an analogous logic.

Los Carpinteros’ Rojo | Red, 2009, made of a kerosene lamp and painted metal, might also be seen as a modest tribute to Henri Matisse’s Red Studio (1911) and Alexander Rodchenko’s Pure Red Color (1921) as well as to ­Meireles’s Redshift (1967/1984). Yet a puddle of red ink lies next to the kerosene lamp, as in Spill / Surrounding, the second part of Redshift. Spill / Surrounding is a tiny bottle that spills much more red ink than it could possibly contain, a metaphor for the limit and power of knowledge. On a more immediate level, Meireles’s work confronted a military dictatorship that seized power in 1964, aiming to realign Brazil with the capitalist system at the cost of state terrorism. The propagative redness of Red allowed interpretation of the disseminated ideological color, revolutionary Cuba’s historical task in Latin America since 1959. The analytic shift of the gaze reveals that the kerosene lamp in Red spills color rather than light. And here light could be an unpretentious metaphor for the Enlightenment.

Meireles’s language of numbers includes disparate proportions. Science offers non-Euclidian ­mathematics, density, relativity, entropy, or chaos theory. His Virtual Spaces: Corners (1967–68) consists of domestic sections with unwonted occurrences: the floor climbing to the walls or an extra corner within a corner. His architecture smiles even as it mocks Euclidian geometry. Los Carpinteros’ Cuarto oscuros | Dark Rooms I and II, 2008 [328, 331] , likewise composed this phenomenology of the body’s passage through an impenetrable space, as in the ghostly

architecture of Una puerta y dos ­v entanas | One Door and Two Windows, 2008 [327].

Meireles and Los Carpinteros propose ­experiments in the synchronic layering of heterotopic things, spaces, and places. Meireles’s project is to challenge epistemo­ logical arrogance and scientific rationality. The tape measures in Los Carpinteros’ work return to the prob­ lems of the failure of metrology, as reflected in the symmetrical and asymmetrical carpenter’s rulers of Meireles’s Fontes (1992), emblems of the crisis of knowledge.10 Both are room-size installations, as are the tape measures in Biblioteca I, II y III | Library I, II, and III, 2001 [282, 283] , which are arranged like books. Each one bears a title and the name of its author (the Kama Sutra and the Decameron, along with William Burroughs, Federico García Lorca, Vladimir Nabokov, and Salman Rushdie). Each tape measure contains a few meters of writing of banned literature, the first few lines of text having been censored (in most cases). The transportability of the tape measures refers to acts of smuggling censored texts across the border. As in Meireles’s Insertions into Ideological Circuits (1970), portability and transit are diagrams of political resistance. In them, the Cuban artists and Meireles alike allude to the unfinished project of the Enlightenment, which is the basis of Jürgen Habermas’s conception of modernity.11 The deployment of culture that is common to both Meireles and Los Carpinteros keeps them at a remove from Theodor W. Adorno’s skepticism, a deliberate taking of responsibility.12 In Los Carpinteros’ work, such direct, transparent citations take on meaning in order to anticipate the failure of modernity in its undecided pendulum swinging back and forth between the collapse of rational order and art’s resistance to the entropic processes of the sociocultural dimension.

The Name Arrechea warns that “the name Los Carpinteros itself is a joke. When people first see us, they think we are carpenters who are trying to make art. Really, it’s the way of conceiving life and organizing one’s thoughts that gives a particular form to a piece of art.”13 One of the first conceptual questions posed by the collective was their inquiry into the name of this or that

Cildo Meireles scrapers, 1978

Cildo Meireles geometry box (Neutralization through Opposition and Addition), 1977–79

Cildo Meireles Red Shift, 1967–84

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process, which articulated itself fluidly in the meeting of the three original members. Maurice MerleauPonty speculates that individuals are constituted by their first (or Christian) names.14 The choice of the name Los Carpinteros did not precede the subject’s encounter with his own image (per Jacques Lacan);15 it corresponded instead to the symbolic construction of the artists’ social status. In the case of the Cuban group, the name grew out of the praxis of art, out of that which refused to seek the useless transparency of merely indicating the division of labor, leaving an authorial vacuum. Initially they considered using the initials of their first names (Marco, Alex, and Dago) to make up the acronym Équipo MAD. The name Los Carpinteros was given by other people, however, who identified the work of the three artists with materials, tools, and forms that pertain to the work of carpenters.

Arrechea reveals the strategic reasons for the choice of the collective’s name: “The idea of being a carpenter, that is, a common person, without great pretensions of other sorts, reduced the notion of the artist to something simpler. Of course, as artists we always aspire to a greater dialogue; but the concept of ‘a carpenter’ was a form of subterfuge for us; it gave us something to hide behind and therefore to circumvent the prevailing climate of vigilance.”16 To Rosa Lowinger, however, the matter was more than a way to understand the business of the carpenters guild; it raised social, political, and economic questions from the standpoint of a collective practice focused on a method of producing objects that were socially inscribed as art.17 For another reason altogether, Andy Warhol called his studio the Factory because of his art production system, with its social division of labor, mechanization, serial production, and so forth. Furthermore, Warhol revealed, his reason for working in such a manner grew out of wanting to “be a machine.”18 Ostensibly, Romanian artists Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor deal with the problems of the former Eastern Europe. In the film Surplus Value (2009), the duo refers to labor, accumulation, and surplus value in order to retrace the past and confront the principles of historical materialism (above all in Marx) with the historical and contemporary conditions of Romania

within a global context. To Cosmin Costinas¸, the dissection of ideological representations, the enunciation of the disagreements between theory and praxis, and the exploitation of hardships in collective memory transform Vatamanu and Tudor’s accounts into “stories of us all.”19 The visual action of Los Carpinteros retains something of the dialectical operation of updating that permeates modes of production, periods, borders, and contradictions in order to establish itself as the collective memory that derails ideology.

The name Los Carpinteros also points to the process by which alienation is engendered in the physical process of commodity production and social history. They design Flipper, Final , an object for swimming, whose exaggerated scale renders visible both its uselessness and the chasm between the swimmer’s physical labor and its own probable inefficacy.

In the Grundrisse, Marx explains that alienation is a process inherent in society itself, one that cannot be reduced to the imagination of workers and capitalists.

In 1994, when the group’s name was chosen, Cuba could not be considered an “industrial” economy, much less a “postindustrial” one. Because they are neither architects nor engineers, the name Los Carpinteros indicates the specific nature of their work and problematizes manual craft for the execution of ideas in industrial society. This is not only an affirmation of manual labor but also an operation that occurs within the field of the superstructure, at the forefront of which lies the problem of the division of labor and its relation to the production of the exchange value of objects. Thus, the symbolic effort inherent in the name Los Carpinteros would be a removal of some of the causes of alienation from the critical field of artistic discourse.

Los Carpinteros repeatedly present instruments and objects that are related to the profession of carpentry. There are working tools (tape measures or torques), parts, and objects that appear to be produced by carpentry. Screws—used by many skilled tradesmen, including carpenters—emerge as constitutive modules in Highway of Screws. Ironically the Cuatro ciudades | Four Cities, 2007 [285] bookcase is built out of PVC. Furthermore, some of their objects are produced entirely by carpentry (for example, the

Cildo Meireles Virtual Spaces: Corners, 1967–68

Cildo Meireles Fontes,1992

Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor surplus value, 2009

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three versions of Estantería I-III | Shelves I-III, 2008 [162, 163] , in maple wood) or combine carpentry with other types of work, such as masonry and electrical engineering. Manufacture is a fundamental element in their work process. Although their group name is Los Carpinteros, in regard to labor, they are also aware that its contribution to the final formulation of exchange value remains concealed.

Los Carpinteros know that the mystical character of the commodity, as argued by Marx in Capital, does not arise from its use value. It would be seemingly impossible to consider use value for things as useless as the bed called La montaña rusa | The Roller Coaster, 2008 [343] , the absurd Anfiteatro Bermuda #2 | Bermuda Shorts Amphitheater #2, 2004 [188] , or the irrational Shelves, in spite of their false resemblance to the Carlton cabinet (1981), designed by Ettore Sottsass for Memphis. “As use-values, commodities differ above all in quality,” states Marx.20 In this instance, Los Carpinteros problematize the matter in terms of the symbolic value of their “art” product and their way of producing it.

The transmutational operation of the ­relationship between form and function creates an unsteady field in which all things are dictated by a perversion of use— “the usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value,” de­clared Marx in Capital, taking his cue from John Locke (“the natural worth of anything consists in its fitness to supply the necessities, or serve the convenience of human life”).21 Los Carpinteros question the subordination of useful work to use value as raised by Marx. Los Carpinteros are among those artists who, like Meireles in Money Tree (1969), question the way in which artistic action implies a process of adding value, articulating notions of use value, exchange value, and symbolic surplus value. For these artists the problem is to understand how—beyond objects—the immaterial production of late capitalism includes relations that are interpersonal in themselves, part of the field of biopolitics.22 If, to Los Carpinteros, immaterial production is also the product of social life, their art must produce politics of perception as action in the political field of knowledge.

Within the historical context of Cuban art in 1994, adoption of the name Los Carpinteros apparently had

less of a direct political connotation than the activity of artists such as Ana Mendieta and Marta María Pérez Bravo (photography as original space in the correlation between the feminine and Afro-Cubanness) and Kcho (the balseros, extraterritoriality, and the symbolic mutation of the rafts). In Cuba, as in ­Brazil under the military dictatorship, artists needed to create a dense critical process: critical art, complex strategies for inscribing the work that would enhance its real presence in the environment with a program that included circumventing the optical gluttony of censorship while simultaneously retaining the political and communicative potential of a critical agenda and creating an audience.23 “We did not want our work censored. So we disguised it. We cloaked it in a mantle of manuality and manufacture.”24 For Los Carpinteros, awareness, subtlety, conceptual disguise, and irony were strategic responses to democratic obscenity in the conspiracy for the autonomy of art and freedom of expression. This may be why the name initially proposed by the acronym MAD involved direct references to madness, the order of the state, and the regulation of bodies in social space. The allusion to Michel Foucault and his archaeology of “mental alienation” in The History of Madness (1961) was always inevitable. The frequent questions about how his work comments on communism or socialism led Rodríguez to respond through the slippage of the signifier: “When we get asked that type of question, we sometimes think it’s a joke. Cuba is pure energy for us, not a point of reflection. There are things in our work that refer to Cuba, but they are disguised and ­subtle.”25 In spite of the ­theatrical aspect of his art and Rodríguez’s political denial (Freud’s Verneinung),26 it is, however, an acknowledgment of the repressed, the name Los Carpinteros and their labor.27 The sinthome occupies its place. Thus, the work needed to be a residue of the ob-scenus, that is, of being outside the scene of power.

Linguistic Sign In the logic of Los Carpinteros, objects of personal or domestic use take on a public quality as a form of “communicational reason” in a state of collapse. The

Ana Mendieta rock heart with blood, 1975

Marta Maria Pérez Bravo the boat of life does not capsize, 1995

Kcho selected works, 1994

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label of Cildo Meireles’s Money Tree (1969) specifies that the object is formed by 101 cruzeiro banknotes and that its value is 2,000 cruzeiros.28 The operation exposes the added value of the “art” factor (which Los Carpinteros would also do later on). By adding everything (currency, price, exchange value, work of art, labor), Money Tree questions the "discrepancy between exchange value and use value, or between real and symbolic value," says the artist.29 In confronting the Marxist concepts of use value and exchange value, ­Meireles casts light upon the operation of the art object’s imaginary constitution as a sign—its exchange value. Artists—and Meireles and Los Carpinteros understand this—dismantle the monetary illusion of value as a secret exploitation of the labor force, for their task is one of revelation. Contemporaneous with Money Tree, Jean-Joseph Goux’s article "Marx et l’inscription du travail" points out the homologous relations between writing and labor and between meaning and value, denouncing the complicity between logocentrism and the fetishism of currency and merchandise that includes art.30 Finally, it should be noted that the parallel hegemony of linguistic meaning and the exchange value of merchandise is a question that occurs in the work of Los Carpinteros.

Both the objective and subliminal actions of Los Carpinteros imply disorientation of the idea of usefulness. Because the modern experiments of surrealism and nonsense have become commonplace, it is ­difficult to describe their work as “unfamiliar” (unheimlich), according to Sigmund Freud’s definition of the term. The psychoanalytic notion of the uncanny (das Unheimliche) has had considerable impact on recent critical discourse. The intellectual operation of nonsense is the antieconomic operation of certain laws of nature (e.g., gravity) and ideology of modern society (functionality) in their model for use value exploitation. “There is always something fundamentally humorous in the work,” says Rodríguez, “given the fact that we create objects that look one way in reality, but are really something else.”31 A semantic approach to the work of Los Carpinteros indicates that the historical matrix of dissonance between signifier and signified that they proposed could already

be found in Francis Picabia’s dadaist Portrait of an American Girl in a State of Nudity (1915), in which the girl is a spark plug, a metonymic representation of the body machine. The draw­ing El gran picnic | The Great Picnic, 2008 [96/97] re­sembles an ad for a barbecue grill.

The neutral object exists—especially where there is anthropomorphism. An army of barbecue grills moves through space with the hallucinatory impetus of consumers and hungry stomachs.

Within the context of the system of objects of Los Carpinteros, all things sacrifice their own possible validity in favor of disconcerting linguistic operations. Signifier and signified would appear to coexist in a state of scission. Marx discussed some questions in a discreet footnote to Capital concerning the consequences of the features of linguistic systems with regard to referents.32 For Marx it is a ­matter of understanding that the use of Teutonic words would point toward the actual thing, while Romance words—this is also the condition of the referent in Los Carpinteros’ visual discourse—point to its reflection.

Like every sign (and, therefore, like every product), art is also use value. Arrechea compared the relationship between the drawing and the object represented to the “conversations between Wittgenstein and his disciples in the forests outside Cambridge.”33 And yet in the work of Los Carpinteros the linguistic sign permeates art history as well as the order of design.

The fact that we are able to find a network of historical references in specific works by the artists means that each object, whether it is a two-dimensional project or its actual execution, is always part of a corpus, the purpose of which is not the achievement of a major catalogue raisonné or a taxonomic order of objects that cannot be reconcilable with reason. After all, what is a swimming pool in the shape of an aircraft carrier? There is a game of density here (the place of flotation) and a strategic inversion of logic: diving into the landing field. The referent is seldom a single firstness, for there is also a secondness (that cannot exist without firstness). The work configures itself as a thirdness. Recourse to the second object occurs through inscription of the other. It is the compulsive relationship that Los Carpinteros establish in order

20 paulo herkenhoff

to inscribe dependency, independence, and negation.

Charles Sanders Peirce understood the meaning of trichotomy in mathematical logic: the first must always be totally separate from any concept or reference to any other thing.34 After leaving him perplexed, the result leads the spectator to unanswerable questions.

Economy of Pure Visuality: Manual Labor The index that exposes the ideological dimension of objects is based on the morphology impinged upon them. The cynicism of contradictions within the bourgeois discourse of Cuban director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s classic film Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) is now inverted. The deliberate contradictions of the artistic practices, technical processes, images, and things produced by Los Carpinteros—in their double condition as artists and artisans—are inscribed within the historicity of collective existence.

In the social process of knowledge, the art of Los ­Carpinteros chooses to replace cynicism with irony.

Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha states: “On paper the written word is one thing. You imbue it with ‘thingness’ and edit. Shakespeare’s blackened hands, sullied with ink, that is important to architects: to understand the adventure between the idea and the thing.”35 Like Mendes da Rocha, Los Carpinteros attack the separation between manual labor, technique, and imagination in the aesthetic object. The choice of the name Los Carpinteros emphasizes the “labor” factor in producing works of art—an evocation of the Aristotelian relation of techné as poiesis.

The availability of materials in each place is a decisive factor in defining the form of an object constructed by them. A lighthouse can be a tent in Belgium, because the material is found there, or it might be a product of carpentry because wood is available in Cuba. What they have in common is that, to Los Carpinteros, all materials must be correlative to human labor with regard to vocation or traditional trades such as plumbing or carpentry. Mutatis mutandis, it is a form of constructing visual language out of the cultural history, technological stage and economic situation of each place in which the work is constructed. In these terms, Los Carpinteros’ visual discourse, based on

the conditions of production of each place, bears a certain resemblance to the “generative grammar” of Noam Chomsky.

Los Carpinteros invert the notion of “speaking architecture,” which lies in expressing the purpose of a building through its formal structure, as in ÉtienneLouis Boullée’s designs for Newton’s Cenotaph (1784) and for a phallus-shaped brothel. Social alienation as a consequence of the separation between mental labor and physical labor is exposed and dealt with

by Los Carpinteros in works such as Casa en forma de ­a licate | Pliers-Shaped House, 2003 [183] , which clearly has the form of such a work instrument. In Los Carpinteros’ dialectic strategy, that work proposes a “speaking architecture” that is defined not according to a building’s function but according to its production process, for its shape is that of a work instrument.

The architectural sign in Bermuda Shorts Amphitheater #2 or in Arena Pool upsets the debates on form and function in modernity through heteroclite associations. One example of this is the obnoxious conflation of a utilitarian form (e.g., a bread bin) with a construction whose form serves a real purpose (e.g., a garage) in Garage (Bread Bin), 2002 [46]. The result is an antieconomical, practically useless form. By virtue of their very disparity, these projects are antinomic to the idea of “speaking architecture.” In architect Louis Sullivan’s classic formulation, form follows function, whereas to Frank Lloyd Wright form and ­function converged toward unity. The form of a building or object must be considered in terms of its function and purposes. Form ignores function in the praxis of Oscar Niemeyer, which therefore arrives at an opposite result to that of Wright.36 Marjetica Potrcˇ has produced institutional criticism of Niemeyer’s architecture of power in her series of drawings Modernism Takes Root (2007) . Far beyond Niemeyer, Los Carpinteros’ ironic disregard exacerbates the dysfunctionality of form and detonates a heterotopic perversion of architecture. Form annihilates function, a contextual metaphor for problematizing the autonomy of art devoid of social tasks and political functions.

Los Carpinteros’ object Embajada rusa | Russian Embassy (Part of Downtown), 2003 [56] asserts Soviet

Étienne-Louis Boullée newton's cenotaph, 1784

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bureaucracy’s distortion of Russian constructivism.

The simulation of the state’s architectural grandiloquence and the regime’s aesthetic order is visible in the work of Cuban artist Glexis Novoa, as in the installation of paintings Etapa practica (1991). Within the context of Los Carpinteros’ La Habana as it appears in Downtown, 2002–3 [56], the modern architec­ture of Someca (a title lifted from the name of a city building) is contaminated by architecture’s idea of an official image.

The transhistorical problem posited by Los Carpinteros for social space is a jumble of ideology, representation, utopia, its countercurrents, and social entropy. In fact, Los Carpinteros’ architecture is always the criticalpoetic constitution of a countersite, a place in which utopia seems to establish itself only to fail.

Not only did philosopher Konrad Fiedler’s ideas influence Theo van Doesburg’s concrete art; he also developed the theory of pure visuality and articulated relationships between art and concept, between preimagined form and its full execution. To Giulio Carlo Argan, Fiedler posited art as “productive contemplation” and influenced the thinking of Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius. To Argan, the contrast between manual crafting and industry—so intense in Los Carpinteros’ objects—was the unresolved internal antithesis of modern society’s productivity that so worried Gropius.37 Los Carpinteros appreciate unresolved relationships. Their task is the nonconsignation of forms as answers. They prefer profound explorations of doubts and questions.

System of Objects The universe of Los Carpinteros is centered on objects produced or constructed by man, that is, on commodities. Occasionally the transference or distortions of functions are modes of mutation of the logical regime of such objects. The mechanisms of perception are challenged. The title of the watercolor Tsunami, 2008 [349] , refers to a sea made of waves of sheets of industrialized material that more closely resemble rubber flippers than water. The rubber in Flippers, Final undulates like the surface of a calm sea. In the final analysis, the objects in the drawings and threedimensional constructions do not escape the regime of commodity fetishism, the same one to which labor

is submitted within the capitalist production process.

And yet such objects always present themselves as things in a perverse state of becoming.

The logic of Los Carpinteros must be confronted with the ideas of Jean Baudrillard in The System of Objects (1968), The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (1970), and For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972).38 The System of Objects developed a critical program of social practices through commodities in industrial capitalism and consumer society. Now institutionalized as “art objects,” Los Carpinteros’ objects are contaminated by a fetishizing drive that is all the more complex because it stems exclusively from their prestigious status as art. The artists afford spectators the possibility of critically deciphering industrial production and the consumer experience.

Los Carpinteros’ economy of signs is historically based on the island of Cuba, but Baudrillard offers a few keys for understanding their syntax. They established their discourse around 1995, a dramatic period in the life of that country, what with cold war Soviet protectionism suffering a collapse that was reflected in Cuba’s social dynamic and the U.S. boycott reaching maximum levels of effectiveness. Food and electrical power shortages resulted in rationing and long daily blackouts. In some cases the objects do not deal with technical deficiencies but with an economy of improvisation and precariousness, as in the tent-buildings of Ciudad transportable | Transportable City, 2000 [48, 49]. Affluent consumer society can be seen only as the antithesis of the society of minimal, marginal, and rationed consumption. The use of famous brands such as that of fashion designer Donna Karan in DKNY bota | DKNY Boot, 2004, is a recent and sporadic occurrence in Los Carpinteros’ corpus. Their fixation on objects does not aspire to glamour, as in the economy of Warhol’s window displays (1961), his work for purveyors of luxury goods such as Bonwit Teller and Tiffany, his D ­ iamond Dust Shoes canvases (1980), or interviews with celebrities such as international fashion icon Diana Vreeland on his television program Andy Warhol’s TV (1982). Hence the uselessness— that is, the inconsumability—of these objects by Los

Glexis Novoa Etapa practica, 1991

los carpinteros DKNY bota | DKNY BOOT, 2004

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Carpinteros—from sandals, beds, and work tools to trucks and premolded swimming pools. The metacritical operation of Trash Shopping Cart, 2008 [81] conflates the recognizable form of an (originally plastic and closed) trash cart with the open wire structure of supermarket shopping carts, which are given closed lids. The irony and paradox staged by Los Carpinteros are constituted in the consumption/trash binomial that is planned obsolescence and the ecological imbalance of waste. Furthermore, like a cage, the closed cart still evokes the severe limitations upon consumption on the island. Warhol investigated the fantasies of North American society (which a good Marxist would describe as alienated). Los Carpinteros rouse certain phantoms of socialist society. From such a perspective, Trash Shopping Cart is a parodic inversion of consumer society imbricated with the society of extreme social control.

Objects such as bricks possess the ability to emphasize their own technical deficiencies: Ciudad perfecta | Perfect City, 2005 [36/37] , depicts piles of houses and buildings as if they were some sort of junior architect’s toy. Were this real, it would be the aftermath of a major disaster. And yet the very same brick object may emerge as a factor of pure irrationality when used in the design and construction of trailers [63–65], imposing a strange mobility as a result of that material’s weight. Some objects are designed as chiasmata, others as arrangements of chaos.

Many of Los Carpinteros’ ideas and projects are unrealizable in their condition as objects. Regardless of the form that their works take, the artists place art, conceptual approaches, and their works in the weft of discussions about corporative capitalism and situate them in the passage between material and immaterial production. Their crucial question is: what place does art occupy in this process? According to Slavoj Žižek, “In immaterial production, the products are no longer material objects, but new social (interpersonal) relations themselves—in short, immaterial production is directly biopolitical, the production of social life.”39 In any situation, beyond arguing about immateriality and about the relationship between the mental and the physical, Los Carpinteros create

oppositions to biopower, a problem raised by Foucault in his History of Sexuality. Performing a critique of social relationships, their art is a pure product of biopolitics; hence their physically inappropriate, antiergonomic objects and their architecture for rigid social control.

To Los Carpinteros, the place of art is the place of the ruins of industrial logic’s production of objects, that is, the ruins of reason. They reveal that the empirical philosophy that disturbs them is the spontaneous philosophy that emerges from the Cartesian nature of things themselves.40 “Nothing pleases me more than vulgar sentiments, vulgar expressions, vulgarity itself. Nothing vulgar can be divine, that’s true, but all vulgarity is human,” wrote Guillermo Cabrera Infante in Infante’s Inferno.41 If, to Los Carpinteros, things elude us in a Kantian way, they then produce phenomena—things to facilitate our access to them through their ontological crisis.

Los Carpinteros’ objects resist functional domesti­cation (as in the case of gadgets or kitsch) or the ex­temporaneous, gratuitous associativity of forms and functions. They are operations in counter­ design. After all, revolutionary Cuba was never known for its industrial (or even graphic) design work. Los Carpinteros assemble heterotopic monsters by using ambivalent objects that can simultaneously be aircraft carriers and floating swimming pools, as in ­ ortaaviones | Aircraft Carrier, 2005 [119, 121]. This P unacceptable combination articulates historical militarism (the territory of Cuba as the object of economic and geopolitical disputes between the United States and the Soviet Union) and the current tourist industry, a Cuban “destiny” before the revolution and subsequent to the cold war. Rarely, as in the watercolor Ameba I | Amoeba I, 2008 [156], do the Cuban artists resort to the concept of the informe (or formlessness), the term that Georges Bataille used to declassify the world.42 It is that situation perceived by Adorno in which “in semblance nonsemblance is promised.”43 No matter how confusing the object’s identity, the convulsive beauty of these works does not stem from abjection or from the surreal quality of their structures but from the discomfort that they cause by establishing

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a world recognized as plausible but executed as the failure of a certain kind of instrumental reason.

In the end, Los Carpinteros defend the existence of the world of objects at the brink of a total collapse of logic that affects the functioning of the world and the economy. Adorno wrote that the “indelible in resistance to the fungible world of exchange is the resistance of the eye that does not want the world’s colors to vanish.”44 Meireles’s appropriation of capitalist circuits of distribution and consumer goods and Los Carpinteros’ distortion of objects in consumer society are ways of violating violence, the expression of an omnipresent Foucault. Yet in their case it means (above all) the violation of ideological violence. With a vast corpus of skeptical images, Los Carpinteros take on world disorder as denoted by objects. It is not a skepticism that resolves itself in nihilism, however, but a continued belief in art’s task of taking on the entropy of the world.45 Architecture The architectural corpus of Los Carpinteros includes a group of works that constitute the entire political scopic regime at the levels of the visible and the invisible. In putting together a possible metafunctionality, Los Carpinteros simulate the exhaustion of panoptical functionality in Reclining Tower and in the disarticulation of several such constructions as an integrated group in Sistema | System, 2006 [52/53]. Lying towers would appear to negate the attention necessary to their scopic regime through the absence of surveillance or a privileged point of view (height). The scene is one of exhaustion, as in Beckett. Gilles Deleuze argues that “tiredness” in Samuel Beckett’s work can no longer achieve anything at all.46 The stillness in the repose of the observation tower merely simulates the nonexistence of a system of repression. The Deleuzean exhaustion of the towers is tantamount to an indirect indication that no longer makes surveillance possible. The irony of the drawings thus corresponds to approaching the operation of the official denials issued by totalitarian regimes with regard to their use of methods of oppression.

The drawing Las luces del estadio del pueblo | The Lights of the People’s Stadium, 2007 [274/275] refers

to the lights of the people’s (or the town’s) stadium and proposes a confrontation with large, threatening light towers that suggest the forceful thrust of a penis.47 The point of view adopted by Los Carpinteros in the drawing emphasizes the grandiose quality of the architecture even as it suggests a certain fascist intentionality. The searchlights suggest of the use of light in an inquisitorial torture session, even as the reference to “the people’s stadium” re­iterates the linguistic instance of architectural spectacle for fascist mass manipulation. The monumental architecture—a threatening phantasmagoria—of Los Carpinteros’ stadiums must be likened to the quasiabstract yet oppressive and almost prisonlike structure of ­Warhol’s painting Stadium (Zeitgeist Series) (1982) . As if adapted from a play by Beckett, the lights of the people’s stadium are ready to shine the blinding “shadowless light” of modern absolutism.48 The drawing Puente almendrado | Almond Bridge, 2008 [228/229] , analyzes the structure of a work of engineering in which reinforced concrete has been replaced by chocolate and almonds. Physical trans­ mutation overcomes visual play so as to exhibit material proof of the corruption that has become a commonplace in our contemporary world with the appropriation of state resources by alliances between politicians and companies in public construction projects. The social engineering of Piscina con reflejo | Pool with Reflection, 2004 [42] , displays the shameless political staging of progress and collective well-being. In Los ­Carpinteros’ drawing, architecture itself becomes a “prison ­warden,” a construct of the social superego according to the terms in which a Freudian Bataille discussed culture in Documents (1929).49 Michel Foucault’s criticism of architecture may be found in works such as The History of Madness and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975). In a sense, Los Carpinteros’ architecture might have been drawn from Foucault, for it contains concepts such as the panopticon, heterotopia, and disciplinary institutions, all of which seek to make man predictable—a necessary quality for his domination. Los Carpinteros refute the tamed gaze.

In the twenty-first century, the obsolescence of the classical panopticon prison as proposed by Jeremy

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Bentham in 1785 and examined by Foucault in Discipline and Punish is a consequence of sophisticated developments in electronic surveillance technology for social control. To update Bentham’s prison architecture, Los Carpinteros proposed their Rediseño de ­c árcel con comedor central | Redesign of Jail with ­C entral Canteen, 2007 [47].

There is something disingenuous and jokey about the fact that the original panopticon’s structure is now reduced to circular closets, hundreds of drawers, and a central refectory. More disingenuous still would be the reduction of architectural language to Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenology of the drawer in The Poetics of Space rather than an updating of its political character. For this philosopher, the drawer is the place in which man, that “great dreamer of locks,” “contains or conceals” his secrets.50 The problem lies in knowing who is contained in cell-drawers and what is concealed in Redesign of Jail with Central Canteen. Furthermore, to Bachelard, concepts are drawers, dead thoughts. Just when it is in danger of being reduced to a banal type of furniture and receptacle, Los Carpinteros propose to reactivate the concept of the panopticon.

Henri Bergson speaks of “memory diseases,” although the brain is not formed by boxes of memories in which the past is abolished.51 In another instance, Jacques Derrida deals with “archive fever,” in which existence is consigned to oblivion by the archive and, furthermore, operates the topology of an “archive without outside.”52 The drawers in Redesign of Jail with Central Canteen are external because the refectory occupies the center, the place of the tower of panoptical vigilance in Bentham’s model. Surveillance has been replaced by collective coexistence, were not Los Carpinteros’ principal gesture the establishment of the refectory as a basic need: food as a primordial geopolitical factor for survival. Discussing malnutrition in general or hunger in Latin American prisons is taboo.

It is the body ob-scenus, the “offstage” being that is at stake. Hunger was already taboo when Josué de Castro wrote The Geography of Hunger in 1946. To Los Carpinteros, body politics begin not with desire but with the stomach. Subtly, the empty space in the “central dining room” of Los Carpinteros’ quasi-panopticon raises

the problem of biopolitics within the penal institution— which includes the simple withholding of food as torture and the hunger strikes of political dissidents—as a mechanism for the domination or resistance of bodies in state-controlled terrorist societies. According to Josué de Castro, hunger is both delicate and dangerous.

In its remounting of the panopticon, the structure of Redesign of Jail with Central Canteen dismisses any surveillance: each drawer operates as a closed cell. They are isolated compartments that “enclose and dissimulate” their own contents as a way of producing social oblivion and political obliteration. The furniture is a structure of solitary prisons, that is, of closedoff drawers for the purpose of inflicting physical and psycho­logical trauma. In a regime opposed to the rule of law, the drawer is the solitary cell, the space of homo sacer. In Giorgio Agamben’s ­reconsideration, homo sacer is identified as the outlaw, the banned one, the exile.53 The drawers could well be “refrigerators,” the tiny torture chambers used by the ­Brazilian military dictatorship of 1964, squat cubicles that prevented prisoners from standing upright. Disturbing noises were piped into these cells, along with alternating blasts of heat and cold, and the occupants were deprived of food and water. The torture and political imprisonment binomial as a definition of homo sacer’s space in Latin America appears in the works of Meireles (Tiradentes: Totem – Monument to the Political Prisoner, 1970), Bruce Nauman (South American Triangle, 1981), Luis Camnitzer (the Uruguayan Torture series, 1983–84), and Antonio Dias (The Electrician, 1986). Redesign of Jail with Central Dining Room is the very image of the secret hiding places of the sectarian (or even totalitarian) state that sullied modern civilization. The drawers reveal themselves as spaces for liquidation of the subject rather than spaces of confinement or surveillance. They are the hidden stages upon which state terrorism performed. Better yet, they are landscapes of the eclipse of Western reason.

The Urban Planning of Transterritoriality “Whatever the need, a pool gives opportunity for selfexpression in its design, or individuality and eccentricity in its use,” writes John Dawes in The Swimming

Cildo Meireles Tiradentes: Totem – Monument to the Political Prisoner, 1970

Luis Camnitzer He Practiced Every Day From the Uruguayan Torture Series, 1983–84

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Pool and the Garden, an introduction to the history, architecture, and idiom of swimming pools. A swimming pool can be functional or ornamental, as Dawes points out,54 but Los Carpinteros suggest that it can also be absurd and political, as in Arena Pool , Pool with Reflection, Aircraft Carrier, Piscina infinita III | Infinite Pool III, 2006 [312] , or Piscina compartida | Shared Swimming Pool, 2007 [40] , a perverted model experiment in socialization based on division by a wall, the result of which is a pool that is partly filled with water and partly dry. This inegalitarian wall may allude to contemporary walls such as the ones at the borders between Mexico and the United States or Israel and Palestine, as well as invisible (albeit no less closed) borders such as those of the Caribbean Sea around Cuba.

In Mapa mundi (Havana Biennial, 2003), Costa Rican artist Federico Herrero painted an orange map of the world at the bottom of a blue public swimming pool. In hypothetical transit through the world, people swim in this watery “planisphere.” The pool’s syntax depends less on its architectural shape (as in the case of Los Carpinteros) and more on water itself. Painting does not exist without water. Herrero says that he wanted to make something “that was useful for the locals and for people who did not necessarily care that much about art specially but who had very strong feelings regarding their political situation and a lack of optimism about a better life, as in the case of many Cubans.”55 The pool-painting negotiates freedom of movement with this border. In Cuba, to use Herrero’s metaphor, swimming in the pool above the map of the world is an imaginary experiment in the freedom to come and go in any direction the world over. That pool “had to do with enhancing the possibility to have dreams for freedom,” says Herrero.56 His pool-painting is a political habeas corpus.

Topology The word infinity is derived from the Latin infinitas, or “unboundedness.” In Piscina infinita | Infinite Pool, 2002 [310] , Los Carpinteros suggest that water is a situation of non-Euclidean geometry within a fourth dimension that refers to Marcel Duchamp’s Three ­Standard Stoppages (1913–14) . The concept of the Möbius strip inscribes Los Carpinteros’ image of a swimming pool

within the Western constructivist tradition, along the lines of the work of Max Bill, Lygia Clark, and Hélio Oiticica—a rare experiment in Cuba. The topology of the Möbius involves half-twisting a strip once and then joining its ends to form a loop. The result is a continuous surface without a right side or a reverse, with no inside or outside, a thing that presents only one side.

Bill contradicts the crystalline form of the Möbius strip in his works in metal and stone. In Tripartite Unity (1948-49), he attached a cylindrical bar that fixes it onto the pedestal, interrupting the trajectory of the gaze upon the strip’s unilateral surface. The weight of the stone strips eliminates manipulation and, once again, the visual and tactile experiment of Möbius’s topology. In the 1960s Oiticica organized his Parangolés as structures that fuse with the body as sensorial, linguistic, and political experiences of the other. The Möbius strip is always an experience of becoming. In Going (1963), Clark proposed that her public make a Möbius strip out of paper, inserting the tip of a pair of scissors into a piece of paper and cutting away longitudinally.

The act creates an awareness of time and immanent experience. “I re-encountered Going, an interior itinerary outside myself,” she said.57 Los Carpinteros understood that the Möbius strip is both imago mundi and forma mentis. Their images and objects establish antithetical relationships with the world, for—beyond affronting the logic of the design and utility of things— these structures contradict all of physics, from the law of gravity to the laws of fluid mechanics.

As used by Los Carpinteros, Möbius topology is a paradigm for differences in density between the exile of some and the “insile” (interior exile) of writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, including the internal “pressure” of boundary controls circumvented by the balseros (those who leave Cuba on rafts or small boats). Therefore, the exile/insile binomial would make Cuba a place without an inside or an outside, per the topology of Möbius. Cabrera Infante fought many battles in revolutionary Cuba. He opposed Andrei ­Zhdanov’s Stalinist tendencies. He derided the literature of the communist Alejo Carpentier and the ­Catholic José Lezama Lima. To Che Guevara, the task of the new political class was to prevent the ­intellectual

Federico Herrero mapa mundi, 2003

Hélio Oiticica P07 Parangolé Cape 04 "Clark", 1964–65

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generation to which Cabrera Infante belonged from being displaced by its conflicts or perverting the new ones.58 In Mea Cuba, Cabrera Infante declares: “A revolutionary always digs graves. In fact, he does nothing but dig graves—most of the time other people’s graves.” In El camino | The Road, 2003 [306] and Salón de reuniones | Meeting Room, 2003 [307], Los Carpinteros draw fields of open holes in cement floors that resemble “empty graves.” If the water in Infinite Pool takes the form of a Möbius strip, the structure’s balance simulates a hypothetical game between speed, density, and pressure—one that resembles the nature of the concrete political process within which they are inscribed.

The False Rule of Truth; or, The Necessity of Lying The linguistic density of Los Carpinteros’ work lies in the abyss between modern visual grammar and the rhetoric of power. This abyss is a region of sarcasm and of the symbolic dismantling of power operations.

The change in the rule of truth comes about in the middle of a digital age in which the numerical image defines itself upon the computer screen and configures itself in postproduction. Perhaps the work of Los Carpinteros should be expunged from the art system in order that it might be submitted and inscribed within Jeremy Campbell’s The Liar’s Tale: a History of Falsehood and other kindred works.59 Los Carpinteros did not return to art history until later—as a necessary condition. Yet drawing and constructing objects is a deliberate choice for rendering methods of producing art obsolete in light of digital technology or of truth as permanent virtual becomings, a choice that implies an insistence upon the ancien régime of truth. Thus, to Los Carpinteros, the sign retains the power of analogical photography manipulated by the regimes of the left and the right in their constitution of an ideological program of the image through cropping, erasure, collage, or montage as party methods for submitting truth to political interests. For more than a century, the regime of truth of analogical photography faced up to the growing crisis of its role as evidence of the truth.

Los Carpinteros’ caustic humor resorts to methods of the totalitarian image in order to enhance the sign in the task of corroding the regime of that power’s truth.

Ideology In discussing a work with a lighthouse, a commonplace construction along the Cuban coast, Dagoberto ­Rodríguez declares that this object “works from an ideological point of view. The lighthouse, for us, is not just the light that guides, it is much more than that.”60 What does he mean when he says that a lighthouse can be more than “the light that guides”? In order to understand the way in which Los Carpinteros relate to ideology, one must consider it from the perspective of Louis Althusser’s concept of the “ideological state apparatus” (ISA). The psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan led Althusser to displace the understanding of exclusively analytic ideology onto Marx’s initial point of view as “false consciousness” in order to conceptualize it as a representation of the imaginary in the presence of the real—the real world. Marxist theory created a spatial metaphor in which the infrastructure (or the economic base, implying the “unity” of productive forces and production relations) supports the upper level, which is the superstructure (the legalpolitical and the ideological levels). The objects idealized or constructed by Los Carpinteros restructure Althusserian topology (topique, in the original French), which experiences frictions and develops strategies and platforms with regard to the ISA. Althusser situates the ISA between the base and the superstructure of society and considers it less repressive or violent than the state apparatus (SA). Museums and public galleries are classified as cultural ISAs,61 but art is not necessarily determined by the economic base or the SAs. The ideological state apparatus can act through pressure, censorship, and other forms of repression.

What, then, is that force that “guides”? The lighthouse itself? Ideology? Or all this and more: the lighthouse as art object?

The material existence of objects (or designs for them in drawings) creates fissures in the idea of “social wholeness” as an edifice in which ideology rests atop the economic base. Yet ideology (still according to Žižek) “is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupportable reality; in its basic dimension it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our ‘reality’ itself: an ‘illusion’ which structures

Louise Bourgeois Cell (Eyes and Mirrors), 1989–93

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our effective real social relations and thereby masks some insupportable, real, impossible kernel,” but its function is “to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel.”62 Thus, Los Carpinteros’ project remains within the field of knowledge—that is, the lighthouse is “the light that guides.”

If what they do violates and renders the system of objects useless, the question posed by Žižek in The Sublime Object of Ideology is quite apposite: “Why is there something instead of nothing?”63 Michel Foucault exposed the perverse logic of the necessary relationship between power and truth, between power and knowledge. This relationship is so radical that it permeates legal formalities themselves.64 Near-Surrealism, nonsense, and crazy logic appear to inculcate the sign of unexplained functional aberrations in the objects. In Los Carpinteros’ inversion, the order of discourse would be to examine power and its (un)truth. Thus, they became engaged in the “lying truth,”65 art’s paradoxical potentiality that counterpoints ideology. Cabrera Infante assesses the effect of politics on the magical realism that devastated Latin American literature: “Writing is essentially literary: it is neither political nor pamphletary. Literature’s greatest enemy is politics.”66 Los Carpinteros cautiously steered clear of subordinating their work to any political force or ideological vassalage. “Cuba is a socialist country, a leftist country. The art which was being made in the ’80s was very revolutionary in political terms. It was an art of the left,” said ­Castillo, “We [Los Carpinteros] wanted to do something that would collide with that atmosphere. So how do we make work that would be aggressive in that socialist climate? Quite simply, we decided to make pieces that appeared conservative.”67 A comparison between the strategies of John Heartfield’s resistance against Nazism and the structural system of Los Carpinteros’ objects points to ways and possibilities of challenging censorship. Heartfield’s photomontage O Christmas Tree in German Soil, How Bent Are Thy Branches (1934) consists of a Christmas tree whose branches are twisted into the form of a swastika, accompanied by a caption. The tree is rough and forbidding. Its functionality is corrupted by the

distortion of its anatomy, which betrays the universal association of Christmas with peace. There is an architectural quality in Heartfield’s topiary and in Los Carpinteros’ perverse designs that comes together in works such as Jardín francés | French Garden, 2007 [340] , a set of beds arranged to resemble the symmetrical designs of the eighteenth-century formal gardens that demonstrated aesthetic control under the guise of vegetation. French Garden introduces the subject of topiary. The art of topiary, the etymology of which lies in Latin (ars topiaria, “the art of landscape,” topos meaning place) dates back as least as far as the Natural History (AD 77–79) of Pliny the Elder, who disapproves of it (12.6). The art of topiary is widely represented in the sculpture, drawings, and prints of Louise Bourgeois, who also makes use of the panoptical regime to discuss forms of social domination over women’s bodies based on eighteenth-century European traditions. At the opposite end of the spectrum from Bourgeois, Puppy (1992) by Jeff Koons is a large-scale sculpture that was assembled at New York’s Rockefeller Center (2000) from seventy thousand flowers. To Koons, the form of a puppy is an image of “love, warmth, and happiness.” If topiary can be violence against nature, Los ­Carpinteros seize upon it in order to violate it as an idea of art: the flower beds trimmed to make up a French garden are actual beds. Control therefore refers to the space of sleep, a locus in which dreams— the language of the unconscious—emerge untamed even as they remain a hypothesis for control. Here Los Carpinteros lead to one of the extremes of the modern totalitarian state: disciplining the unconscious as a form of controlling individual and collective will.

Some of Los Carpinteros’ works appears to call upon the spectator’s mental apparatus in an unconscious dimension and in its four forms of ­manifestation, even though it may not be possible to speak of an absolute adjustment between the work of art and the concept of the slip or parapraxis (Fehlleistung), dream (Traum), joke (Witz), or symptom (Symptom) in Freud. Freud dealt with dissimilar problems—in the eventual manipulation of memory by his patients or the erroneous anthropological interpretation of ­customs68—as modes for the construction of truth and

jeff koons Puppy, 1992

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its ­understanding. Theorist Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen has written that, to certain theorists, there is in Lacan “a sort of privileging of the lie, and this is because the lie, being inadequate to the thing it speaks about, is better able to reveal the truth of the subject.”69 It is a matter of the possible encounter between the artists’ topology and the Freudian topic. In the work of Los Carpinteros, which barely touches upon Freudian and Lacanian psychology, there is a measured freeing of psychological energy through humor (the visual joke)— one that surprises and acts through a mild elimination of inhibitions.

The Freudian slip emerges as a compromise between conscious intention and the repressed—one reveals the other. In the works of Los Carpinteros, the intentionality of art (as suggested by Edmund ­Husserl) stimulates the repressed, which exists at the collective level of political censorship. The basketball stadium column in basquet, 2008 [234/235], has the form of the ball’s movement in the pass, or dribbled across the court. There is a dynamic, futurist quality in this register of things, such as the simulated movement of the backboard and the basket. This changing of the target in flight is an inverted form of the libido’s plasti­ city, that is, of the ease with which it changes both its object and its mode of satisfaction. As for the column in The Lights of the People’s Stadium, it is quite clearly a deliberate ideological manipulation of the unconscious, as previously discussed. By making the ideology of architecture and the objectives of power explicit, Los Carpinteros reveal the repressed (Zensur), not through a lapsus linguae but by intentionally confronting spectator and “slip” with that which is or eludes political prohibition.

For Los Carpinteros the potentiality of written language is situated in titles, as opposed to texts inscribed within the works: Frío estudio del ­desastre (muebles) | Cold Study of Disaster (Furniture), 2005 [222]

and Redesign of Jail with Central Dining Room.

Through a friction of logic, their titles accelerate hesitations and induce the attribution of critical meaning to the image. Here Los Carpinteros do not hold back from paying tribute to the René Magritte of La trahison des images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe) (1929), which Foucault

describes as a “nonaffirmative” painting. The ­caption in Heartfield’s photomontage O Christmas Tree in German Soil blends mythological and political fact: “By decree of Reich Food Minister Darré, as of Christmas 1934, propagation of the Christian fir tree, an alien intruder, is forbidden on German soil, in future only the brown ‘standard fir tree DRGM,’ cultivated in Valhalla, will be allowed.”70 Valhalla is the hall of the Valkyries in the celestial regions. A leader of farmers and the minister of food and agriculture, Darré developed the ideology of “blood and soil,” which celebrated traditions that articulated German peasantry and the Nordic race. Even though he was already under pressure in 1934, Heartfield still enjoyed freedom of expression— a circumstance that would be unthinkable under contemporary totalitarian regimes. In order to imbue their work with universality, Los Carpinteros often maintain visual information at a generic level unaccompanied by any text that might specify place. Whereas Heartfield argues rhetorically, Los Carpinteros choose to argue nonverbally (except for the use of titles, which are almost always neutral). Thus the task of the object’s or drawing’s irony requires subtle tactics. The photography in a Heartfield photomontage needed to be patently mendacious in order to expose his analytical arguments about the rawness of Nazism’s objective facts. The transparent faking of the photographic image made the opaqueness of National Socialism crystal clear. Los Carpinteros simulate a pseudo-functionality of sorts when they may have wanted to indicate a disparate transdisciplinarity inscribed in an identical object, as in the bed-shaped Roller Coaster [343]. Knowing the original Spanish title for the installation (La montaña rusa , which literally translates as “the Russian mountain”) is essential because the very first roller coasters did, in fact, appear in Russia. A bumpy bed, a place for resting and dreaming, presents a bumpy, “Russian” trajectory, as it were, quite aside from being in itself a metaphor for the relations between revolutionary Cuba and Russia—in other words, the Soviet Union—during several periods of its history. In recent history the dismantling of the Soviet bloc and the process of instability, disorganization, and ultimate disappearance of the Soviet Union in 1991 had structural consequences for

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Cuban society. Cuba was led to review its production goals as a result of the loss of its privileged market and newfound international trade competitors. The crisis in the Cuban sugar production sector led to the closing down of the ministry of sugar and imposed other macroeconomic strategies upon the country’s economy.

Symptomatically (as in the historical Russo-Cuban roller coaster), the bumpy toy administers energy: potential energy, kinetic energy, and the loss of energy caused by entropic attrition. Within this tradition, Los Carpinteros’ linguistic base intersperses signs of truth, signs of lies, and signs of irony.

In the “Arrows and Epigrams” section of Twi­ light of the Idols, Nietzsche proclaims, “‘All truth is simple’—Isn’t that a double lie?”71 As proposed by Nietzsche, the paradox invites us to compare certain strategies used by Warhol with those of Los ­Carpinteros. The electoral campaign poster with the portrait of President Nixon in abject color combinations bears the caption of its title Vote McGovern (1972, serigraph) . Warhol proposes a disturbing contradiction between naming and representation, between the image of the negated figure of Nixon associated with the imperative to vote for his opponent Mc­Govern.

Rodríguez has remarked that Cuban artist Jorge Pardo “designs a space and makes it livable, and we try to do that as well, but in a false way. Our designs always have a point at which you realize they are fake.”72 In the deliberately explicit dialogue of cynicism, Los Carpinteros’ stance of presenting a simulacrum as the real, crystalline face of the fake in liberal democracy is as disturbing as Warhol’s work. Is it an assertion of truth? Los Carpinteros invest in the currency of the Epimenides paradox about the liar,73 restructured

by Nietzsche (for whom lying is more natural than telling the truth): is a liar’s confession of lying or a lie

by Los Carpinteros a form of truth? Do they deny or confirm the status of the liar?

Nietzsche’s question concerns the cognitive status of art, its ability to produce “truth.” To the philosopher, science and philosophy are less well equipped than art to produce objective truth. The trajectory of Nietzsche’s reflections on the subject includes essays such as “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense”

(1873). Within the context of his book Nietzsche as Philosopher (1965), Arthur C. Danto attempts to define memory as “a mobile army of metaphors, ­metonymies, anthropomorphisms, a sum, in short, of human relationships which, rhetorically and politically intensified, ornamented, and transformed, come to be thought of, after long usage by a people, as fixed, binding, and canonical.”74 To ponder the corpus of Los ­Carpinteros is to come and go among this mobile army of phantom objects that enunciate human relationships, as in the watercolors Psycho Hayward, 2008 [356] ; La gente | The People, 2008 [262] , which depicts an auditorium made up of empty podiums; and Free ­Basket, 2009 [237] , a basketball court with constructions of columns that cross one another in space like a ­diagram of the ball’s trajectory. The deliberate structural rhetoric of Los Carpinteros’ objects leads to another one of Danto’s conclusions about Nietzsche: “Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.”75 Things exist in functional trance. Every object by Los ­Carpinteros is a doppelgänger of the subject.

To Ludwig Wittgenstein—and Los Carpinteros now appear to be situated in some proximity to his philosophical positions—the role of language (that is, of words) is not to refer, to name, to allude, or to make statements about things or facts, but to construct the use within which words are situated in language games. During his 1934 visit to the Soviet Union, Wittgenstein was not impressed by Stalin. “Lying is a language-game that needs to be learned like any other one,” he wrote in the Philosophical Investigations.76 Or one that needs to be invented like any other, think the artists. Furthermore, it needs to be reinvented constantly in order to keep itself from becoming style or canon—territories of predictability. As in the work of Los Carpinteros, it is inconstancy against crystallization that supports the ironic power of the lie.

The improbable design and engineering of Aircraft ­Carrier lead their work to converge toward Harald Weinrich’s synthesis in The Linguistics of Lying: “Truth and lie are not opposed in irony.”77 Art is what destabilizes truth and lies.78 Such is the aporia within which the gaze finds itself in Los Carpinteros’ visual traps as it hesitates before recognizing truth and illusion.

Jorge Pardo untitled, 2009

30 paulo herkenhoff

Notes 1. Rosa Lowinger, “The Object as Protagonist: An Interview with Los Carpinteros—Alexandre Arrechea, Marco Castillo, and Dagoberto Rodríguez,” Sculpture Magazine 18 (December 1999), http:// www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag99/dec99/carp/carp.shtml.

2. Maria Magaly Espinosa Delgado, “Las narraciones del nuevo arte cubano,” in Pensamiento crítico en el nuevo arte latinoamericano,

by Kevin Power et al. (Teguise, Canary Islands: Fundación César Manrique, 2006), 201.

3. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).

4. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

5. Espinosa Delgado, “Narraciones del nuevo arte cubano,” 212.

6. Trinie Dalton, “Los Carpinteros” (interview), BOMB, no. 78 (Winter 2002), http://bombsite.com/issues/78/articles/2441.

7. See Paulo Herkenhoff, “A aventura planar de Lygia Clark— de caracóis, escadas e Caminhando,” in Lygia Clark (São Paulo: Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 1999), 40–44.

8. See, respectively, Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), and Roland Barthes, “La mort de l’auteur” (1968), in Le bruisement de la langue (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 63–69. Barthes’s text has been published in English translation as “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), 142–48.

9. Dalton, “Los Carpinteros.”

10. fontes combines four different types of (im)precise rulers in (a) normally spaced numbers in normally ascending numerical order, (b) irregularly spaced numbers in ascending numerical order, (c) normally spaced numbers that are out of sequence, and (d) irregularly spaced nonsequential numbers.

11. Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity: An Unfinished Project,” in ­Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, ed. Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 38–54.

12. See Jürgen Habermas, “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno,” in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 128.

13. Dalton, “Los Carpinteros.”

14. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, ed. Claude Leforte, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 6.

15. Jacques Lacan, “Some Reflections on the Ego,” cited in Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996), 115. The reference is to Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage.

16. Lowinger, “Object as Protagonist.”

17. Ibid.

18. Cited in “Warhol in His Own Words,” selected by Neil Printz, in Andy Warhol: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), 457.

19. Maria Hlavaloja, foreword to Mona Vatamanu e Florin Tudor, ed. Cosmin Costinas¸ and Jill Winder (Utrecht: BAK, 2009), 7, 30.

20. Karl Marx, “The Commodity,” chapter 1 of Capital (1867), trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), vol. 1, 128.

21. Ibid., 126; John Locke, “Some Considerations on the Consequences of the Lowering of the Interest” (1691), in Works (London, 1777),

vol. 2, 28, cited by Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 126. Marx explains, “In English writers of the 17th century we frequently find ‘worth’ in the sense of value in use, and ‘value’ in the sense of exchange value.”

22. See Hardt and Negri, Empire, as discussed in Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 261–64.

23. Régis Debray, L’obscenité démocratique (Paris: Flammarion, 2007), 37.

24. Dagoberto Rodríguez, in Lowinger, “Object as Protagonist.” 25.

Dalton, “Los Carpinteros.”

26. The term negation—Freud’s Verneinung—does not possess a uni­ vocal meaning. It may pertain to logic and psychology among other things. It is employed here in terms of psychological confutation—that is, it appears as a representation that becomes conscious under the condition that its origin is denied. It is related to Lacan’s “no” as the unconscious recognizing the place of the unknown.

27. Marx preferred use of the English word work over labor, which he considered bourgeois. Yet in the translation of the present text, the author has specified the use of labor as a means of conveying greater precision with regard to physical and mental effort in the process of production, given that work, when used in reference to the activities of Los Carpinteros, can mean both “labor” and “art piece,” or “work of art.”

28. The cruzeiro was the Brazilian currency of the periods from 1942 to 1967 and from 1970 to 1986.

29. Cildo Meireles, in Cildo Meireles (Rio de Janeiro: FUNARTE, 1981), 28.

30. Jean-Joseph Goux, “Marx et l’inscription du travail,” in Théorie d’ensemble, by Michel Foucault et al. (Paris: Seuil, 1968), 191–98.

31. Dalton, “Los Carpinteros.”

32. Marx, Capital, 126n4.

33. Lowinger, “Object as Protagonist.”

34. Charles Sanders Peirce, “A Guess at the Riddle,” in Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic, ed. James Hooper (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 187–202.

35. Paulo Mendes da Rocha, conversation with the author, January 20, 2010.

36. This is what occurred with the buildings designed by Oscar Niemeyer for the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói, the Museu do Índio, and the Museu Nacional de Brasília, all of which are inefficient structures in terms of their museological functions.

37. Giulio Carlo Argan, Walter Gropius e la Bauhaus (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1951), 34.

38. See Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 1996); Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, trans. Chris Turner (London: Sage, 1998); and Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis: Telos, 1981).

39. Žižek, Parallax View, 262.

40. Castillo said, “It’s not that we renounce philosophy; it’s that the philosophy that we try to convey is that which arises from the nature of the object” (in Lowinger, “Object as Protagonist”).

41. Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Infante’s Inferno, trans. Suzanne Jill Levine and the author (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 2005), 262.

42. “Formless,” in Georges Bataille, ed., Encyclopaedia Acephalica, trans. Iain White (London: Atlas, 1995), 51.

43. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (1966), trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), 404–5.

44. Ibid.

31

45. See Mário Pedrosa, Untitled (“Maio de 1970”), in Antonio Manuel (Rio de Janeiro: FUNARTE/Instituto Nacional de Artes Plásticas, 1984), 16.

46. Gilles Deleuze, “L’épuisé,” afterword to Samuel Beckett, Quad et autres pièces pour la télévision, trans. É. Fournier. (Paris: Minuit, 1992), 57; published in English translation as “The Exhausted,” trans.

Anthony Uhlmann, SubStance 24, no. 3 (1995): 3–28.

47. See George Hersey, The Monumental Impulse (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001).

48. Samuel Beckett, “Heard in the Dark 2,” in The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove, 1995), 251.

49. Georges Bataille, “Architecture,” in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), vol. 1, 171–72. Statements regarding Bataille in this paragraph are indebted to Denis Hollier’s comments in Against Architecture: The Writings of George Bataille (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), i–xxiii.

50. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. M. Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 74–76.

51. Henri Bergson, La pensée et le mouvant (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1946), 172.

52. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, a Freudian Impression, trans.

Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 11–12.

53. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 104–11.

54. John Dawes, The Swimming Pool and the Garden (Edinburgh: John Batholomew & Son, 1975), 20, 22.

55. “El Ofício de Pintar: A Conversation between Federico Herrero and Jens Hoffmann,” archive of the artist.

56. “Immersions in Mental Landscapes: A Conversation between Federico Herrero and Pablo Leon de la Barra,” archive of the artist.

57. Lygia Clark, “Caminhando,” in Lygia Clark (Rio de Janeiro: FUNARTE, 1980), 25–26.

58. Ernesto Che Guevara, El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1971), 118.

59. Jeremy Campbell, The Liar’s Tale: A History of Falsehood (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).

60. Dalton, “Los Carpinteros.”

61. See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes toward an Investigation),” in Essays on Ideology (London: Verso, 1993), 1–60.

62. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 2008), 45.

63. Ibid., 77.

64. Michel Foucault, “La vérité et les formes juridiques” (1974), in Dits et écrits (Paris: Gallimard, 1994).

65. See Anne Dunand, “The End of Analysis II,” in Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 251.

66. Geneton Moraes Neto, interview with Guillermo Cabrera Infante, March 23, 2004, http://www.geneton.com.br/archives/000035.html.

67. Lowinger, “Object as Protagonist.”

68. Jean Pouillon, “Manières de table, manières de lit, manières de langage,” in Destins du cannibalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 10.

69. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan, the Absolute Master,

trans. ­Douglas Brick (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), 112.

70. In David Evans, John Heartfield AIZ: Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung, Volks Illustrierte, 1930–1938 (New York: Kent Fine Art, 1992), 280.

71. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 156.

72. Dalton, “Los Carpinteros.”

73. Michael Clark, Paradoxes from A to Z (London: Routledge, 2002), 99–106.

74. Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 38–39.

75. Ibid., 39.

76. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003), 76.

77. See Harald Weinrich, The Linguistics of Lying and Other Essays, trans. Jane K. Brown and Marshall Brown (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 57.

78. See Campbell, Liar’s Tale, 248.

el barrio – building the city

34

el barrio – building the city

The Spanish word barrio traditionally means “district” or “­quarter” and refers to the neighborhood where one lives and its urban surroundings. It is the part of a larger city where everything seems familiar. In recent years the barrio and the precarious, self-organized, and provisional housing model of the settlement have become ­focal points for architectural thinkers and practitioners. The barrio ­reverses and disrupts the logic of the master plan, the imposed organization of public planning, and is based on the use of low-cost materials, on concepts of fluidity, immediacy, and autopoietic self-empowerment.

It is a preferred site for thinking about cities and the larger metropolitan agglomerations that proliferate through urban “sprawl” and serve densely populated urban communities, a place of relentless change where everything is unstable, nomadic, negotiated, and improvised.

Los Carpinteros’ concept of the barrio is located somewhere between the idea of the traditional neighborhood and the new “hoods” emerging on urban peripheries. It consists of intimate, idiosyncratic structures, created out of personal need and the private means of people who cannot afford or are not entitled to traditionally planned and regulated housing structures—low-cost homes, built for a short time, under the radar of state regulation, sometimes just shelters put up in derelict swimming pools or assembled haphazardly.

Los Carpinteros present in their take on the neighborhood different relations to reality. Beginning with elemental architectural structures such as containers, concrete tubes, and steel beams, which offer lowcost possibilities to construct simple housing, they apply the strategy of transforming objects like bread bins into garages (Garage (Bread Bin), 2002 [46] ) or defunctionalizing trailers by giving them solid brick walls and thus rendering them immobile [63–65].

The Solimar building is restaged as a loudspeaker-sculpture (Alto­ parlante Solimar | Loudspeaker Solimar, 2008 [272] ) or dresser (­G avetero—Solimar | Dresser—Solimar, 2007 [101] ), and the map of Havana is presented on the soles of sandals [204–205]. Architectural motifs often refer to the history of Cuba and the Cuban revolution, which tend to render a rather apocalyptic postrevolutionary view on former icons of the revolution, such as the different takes on the model prison and its history (e.g., in Ciudad Transportable | Transportable City, 2000 [48, 49] , Transformación de comedor del Presidio Modelo en ­g avetero | Transformation of the Canteen of the "Modelo" Jail into a Dresser, 2007 [100] ),

or Alto parlante—Sierra Maestra | Loudspeaker— Sierra Maestra, 2007 [271] , a loudspeaker building referring to Cuba’s highest mountain range, which has a long history of guerilla warfare.

A very singular photographic project that deals which these shifts is Túneles populares | The People’s Tunnels, 1999 [319–324] , an uncanny documentation of public rescue tunnels and underground shelters that

were built in an enormous collective effort to shield the people against an enemy that vanished at the end of the cold war, thus rendering the structures obsolete before they were even finished.

Strategies of manipulation, reinterpretation, or transformation actualize and aestheticize the dysfunctional character of the barrio as a functional and practical model of city building and architectural thinking. They are based on accurate observations of real-life hybrid adaptations of the habitat and of public structures that are taking place in Havana but at the same time envision new imaginary sites, places, and structures of inhabitation. The cracks that have been opened up by the breakdown of the collectively organized and state-planned social order create new regimes of the provisional, imaginary, fictional, and temporary. This is the “vague terrain” where Los Carpinteros’ structures take form and subvert the rigidity of prevailing urban narratives.

Despite its idealistic title, Ciudad perfecta | Perfect City, 2005 [36/37] simply shows an accumulation of houses, a densification that follows no linear order but instead presents a shifting and wild assemblage of traditional housing and civic motifs. As in the drawing and installation both titled El Barrio | The Neighborhood, 2004 [35] and 2007 [38], the buildings are chaotically piled up but not destroyed. The disarrangement is produced through an accurate design of suspended relations and structures. The drawings of Los Carpinteros are often staged as studies, pretending to be sketches “after nature,” but they are far more exploratory and performative: they create a reality rather than depicting one. Thus, these watercolors are using the potential and function of architectural sketches, which point toward the future in their use of drawings as a means of planning and imagining. Los Carpinteros transcend the self-imposed boundaries of their duty as craftsmen by designing the future of a community.

Suspended relations, fragmented structures, disintegrated order— what kind of social space can such a “barrio” produce? What kind of community is invoked by the twisted world of Los Carpinteros? Since all their works present worlds for “a people who are missing,”1 the question of utopia resonates in their studies and drawings as well as—and maybe even more so—in their realizations as sculptures and installations. “Existence is with: otherwise nothing exists.”2 Thinking in terms of Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of being-with as a precondition of subjectivity, we might read the community in Los Carpinteros’ urban structures as a dystopia of solitude. The subject, constituted by its relations, stays absent, a promise not yet realized. Thus the world remains a lonely ghost town.

1. Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel D. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 5.

2. Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 4.

35

El Barrio The neighborhood, 2004 115 × 167.5 cm | 45 1/4 × 66 in.

Private Collection

36

el barrio – building the city

Ciudad Perfecta Perfect city, 2005 triptych, 200 × 420 cm | 78 3/4 × 165 3/8 in.

Courtesy Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo

37

El Barrio The neighborhood, 2007 corrugated cardboard and velcro 10 parts, 130 × 250 × 150 cm | 51 1/4 × 98 3/8 × 59 in. each Courtesy Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo

“The monumental installation El Barrio | The neighborhood [shown 2007 at Kunst­haus Graz] is a post-apocalyptic, cynical and grotesque version of an (any) city district, composed of a gigantic pile of identical (cardboard-made miniature) prefabricated houses, the most standardized units of human (mainly family-like) habitation. Here, in this catastrophic and depressive scenario for a dwelling environment of precarious life, the critique of a mass production, consumer culture and uniformized living conditions is performed, and in addition the transient nature of the urban experience in today’s global age is portrayed. As such, El Barrio—with its significant dose of irony and absurdity—evokes the earlier work by Los Carpinteros, Ciudad Transportable | Transportable City, 2000 [48, 49] , a tent-like miniature model of a city for a nomadic community of the global phenomenon, composed of abstracted forms of vernacular Cuban architectural structures and thus reflecting an essential institutional framework for a modern urban society. According to the artists, Transportable City is about the basic minimum that a person or a society needs to function. ‘We wanted to create the basic cell of what a city could be.’ Realized a couple of years later, El Barrio erases all desires for utopian forms of living and cohabitation.”1

39

Casita de cartón y despiece Little cardboard house and exploded view, 2007 Diptych 78.5 × 214 cm | 30 7/8 × 84 1/4 in.

The Progressive Corporation / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

40

el barrio – building the city

Piscina compartida Shared swimming pool, 2007 108 × 200.5 cm | 42 1/2 × 79 in.

Chris Von Christierson Collection

The two drawings of divided pools show a quotidian practice of dealing with the ruins of “decadent” prerevolutionary times in Cuba. Pools—former symbols of the golden age of gambling, drinking, and easy living—are now dried-out residues of a ­better life that most Cubans, living under precarious conditions, cannot even imagine. Los Carpinteros’ images of deserted ruins of an era of luxury recall the atmosphere evoked by Robert Smithson’s Hotel Palenque (1969). The work, which takes the form of a slide lecture, documents the simultaneous decay and reconstruction of a desolate hotel, with photographs showing only traces of people who at some point worked there, drained pools, evacuated dance halls, but also a basin with living turtles in the foyer, awaiting guests or perhaps just left there, forgotten—an atmosphere oscillating between never more and not yet. “So,” as Smithson remarks, “you get this kind of really sensuous sense of something extending both in and out of time, something that doesn’t belong to the earth and really something that is rooted very much in the earth.”2 Neville Wakefield adds, “So we too might surmise that the mortar of some unbuilt future is also the dust of an equally distant past, but in the end, and perhaps most satisfyingly, it is just a pile of cement—there to be dug for its cementness.”3 This might be how Los Carpinteros’ work relates to the utopian and at the same time melancholic concept of the nonsite, poised between a derelict history and an unbuilt future.

Piscina para ambos Pool for both, 2008 139.9 × 220 cm | 55 1/8 × 86 5/8 in.

Private Collection / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

41

42

el barrio – building the city

Piscina con Reflejo Pool with reflection, 2004 133 × 200 cm | 52 3/8 × 78 3/4 in.

Meana-Larrucea Collection, Spain

Foso Moat, 2003 140 × 226 cm | 55 1/8 × 89 in.

Private Collection

43

Vecinos Neighbors, 2004 151 × 203.8 cm | 59 1/2 × 80 1/4 in.

Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

44

el barrio – building the city

Túneles Populares The People s tunnels, 2002 130 × 246 cm | 51 1/4 × 96 7/8 in.

Private Collection / Courtesy Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo

45

Bajo costo Low cost, 2005 Diptych 70 × 200 cm | 27 5/8 × 78 3/4 in.

Private collection / Courtesy Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo

46

el barrio – building the city

Garage (Bread Bin), 2002 153 × 199 cm | 60 1/4 × 78 3/8 in.

The Progressive Corporation / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

47

Rediseño de Cárcel con Comedor Central Redesign of jail with central canteen, 2007 watercolor, pencil, wooden knobs on paper 122.5 × 218 cm | 48 1/4 × 85 3/4 in.

Collection Luis and Maria Corina Sosa, Miami

is a large-scale ­installation first presented at the Seventh Havana Biennial in 2001, followed by showings that year at P.S.1 ­Center for Contemporary Art in Long Island City, New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and in 2002 at the Contemporary Art Museum of Hawaii in Honolulu and the Shanghai Biennale. It consists of ten white tents, made for both ­indoor and outdoor use, that take the form of buildings: a factory, a Gothic-style church, a hospital, a military outpost, a university, a domed capitol, a lighthouse, a prison, a warehouse, and an apartment building. The structures are made of ­fabric over aluminum frames, with numerous rectangular cutout windows and zippers that allow visitors to enter and circulate. Some of the tents resemble existing buildings, such as the panopticon of Cuba’s Presidio Modelo, the model prison, which also ­appears in many of Los Carpinteros’ drawings, the cupola of the Capitolio, and the iconic Havana lighthouse.

Nevertheless, this work can be read in a far more universal sense: “During the past decades many people have been made refugees by natural disasters and wars, becoming nomads in the hope of a better future. At the same time, the commercial and economic dynamics of mass culture have provoked a cultural nomadism. Under the depredation of one system of world power, the ideologies inherited from modernity do not allow for a true alternative. The hopeful optimism of the West at the end of the nineties has led to uncertainty. To walk through Ciudad Transportable can be, depending on one’s mood, a pleasurable or anguishing experience; we know that the work is a model, a work of art,” as Jorge Reynoso Pohlenz states. By stretching the artwork’s potential for consolation, the question arises of whether “a fiction that becomes real through a form of art [can] console us from the loss of utopia? This, for many of us, is the question that lingers over contemporary Cuban art and the ‘suspended’ island from which it emerges.”4 Ciudad transportable | Transportable City

Ciudad Transportable Transportable city, 2000 10 parts, ripstop nylon, nylon screen, aluminum, zippers and rope Variable dimensions University of South Florida Collection

49

50

el barrio – building the city

Three identical towers form the installation Torres de vigía | Watchtowers which was first shown as an indoor installation at the Twenty-fifth Bienal de São Paulo in 2002, titled Metropolitan Iconographies. Los Carpinteros’ Watchtowers were part of the artistic positions representing the “Twelfth City”—not related to an existing mega­city, but sketching the “design of a utopia.” The towers, conceived as portable and collapsible structures of surveillance, consist of a sturdy aluminum framework with an accompanying ladder, which holds a small observation capsule with translucent water green polycarbonate walls, a material also used for bullet-resistant “glass.”

As Marilyn Zeitlin has noted: “The translucency of the cabins on top of the ­towers leaves room for no secrets—a condition that one could read as reflective of the ­Cuban ­presence of mirones, watchers who monitor activity as defenders of the revolution. … And they echo, however dimly, the call to vigilance that has survived in official Cuba and, like the outdated missile, clumsily remind Cubans of the threat—which is often quite real—from the powerful neighbor across the Straits of Florida.”5 The translucent capsules are large enough to climb up into, and the watchtowers seem quite similar to those used along borders, in prisons or in military camps. Originally they were planned with a transparent floor to intensify the effects of visibility and vulnerability: not only can the people outside be observed from above, but the one inside the tower becomes an exhibited object—a reversal between the observer and the observed that is exacerbated by the close spacing of the towers, causing them to lose their position of sovereignty. The watchtowers reappear lying on the ground in Torre acostada | Reclining Tower, 2006 [53] and have been multiplied and given a loaded title in Sistema | System, 2006 [52/53]—both drawings drastically render visible the impotence of the ordering position. This felling of towers is also applied to lighthouses, as in the drawing Faro tumbado | Fallen Lighthouse, 2004 [232] and the installation of the same title dated 2006 [233]. The subversion of icons, symbols, and structures that ­represent a certain power, and their ultimate defeat, can be seen as a recurring theme in Los Carpinteros’ work.

Torres de vigía Watchtowers, 2002 Aluminum, polycarbonate 3 parts, 740 × 300 × 300 cm 291 1/4 × 118 1/8 × 118 1/8 in. each Private collection, São Paulo / Courtesy Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo

51

Sistema System, 2006 138 × 178.5 cm | 54 1/4 × 70 1/2 in.

Private Collection, Rome

53

Torre Acostada Reclining Tower, 2006 114 × 147 cm | 44 7/8 × 57 7/8 in.

IP Collection / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

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el barrio – building the city

consists of five sculptures that were intended to function as working lighthouses. Conceived for the campus of the University of Computer Sciences in Havana in 2002, the work found a highly symbolic place for its permanent installation: one Havana landmark is the lighthouse of Castillo de los Tres Santos Reyes Magos del Morro (Morro Castle), a fortress built in 1589 to guard the entrance to the Bay of Havana. The lighthouse was added in 1846 and became one of the most frequently photographed and popular sights of Cuba’s capital. Cuba itself was referred to as the “Lighthouse of South America,” also because of its influence on a rebellious continent. The fact that the meticulously produced sculptures do not function—the fabrication company started with the plan to make them shine but gave up on the idea before they were completed—turns them into mere artificial constructions. Lacking their real-world potential to guide and illuminate, the lighthouses take on the effect of Potemkin villages. As in other subversive disempowerments of icons and architectural structures in Los Carpinteros’ oeuvre (e.g., Piscina con reflejo | Pool with Reflection, 2004 [42] , Ciudad perfecta | Perfect City, 2005 [36/37] , Salón de ­reuniones | Meeting Room, 2003 [307] , Torre acostada | Reclining Tower, 2006 [53] , S ­ istema | System, 2006 [52/53], Trash Shopping Cart, 2008 [81] ), the lighthouse also appears as a fallen symbol of orientation and power (in the drawing Faro tumbado | Fallen Lighthouse, 2004 [232] , and in the installation of the same title from 2006 [233] ).

World of Lighthouses is not only dysfunctional: because of their multiplication and closeness, the lighthouses, similarly to the watchtowers [51–53] lose their sovereign position and ability to communicate, thus suggesting a paranoid world of delirious watching and guiding without orientation.

Mundo de faros | World of Lighthouses

55

Mundo de Faros World of lighthouses, 2003 Steel, glass Variable dimensions Donation to the UCI (University of Computer Sciences), Havana

Downtown, 2002–3 6 parts all solid cedar and cedar plywood Variable dimensions

back row: Someca (Part of Downtown), 2003 304 × 60 × 124 cm 119 3/4 × 23 5/8 × 48 3/4 in.

Daros Foundation (Switzerland)

Retiro Médico | Medical retreat (Part of Downtown), 2003 280 × 84 × 84 cm 110 1/4 × 33 1/8 × 33 1/8 in.

Daros Foundation (Switzerland)

Focsa (Part of Downtown), 2002 280 × 200 × 80 cm 110 1/4 × 78 3/4 × 31 1/2 in.

Daros Foundation (Switzerland)

Cuchillo | Knife (Part of Downtown), 2003 178.5 × 104 × 70 cm 70 1/4 × 41 × 27 5/8 in.

Private Collection, São Paulo / Courtesy Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo

Embajada Rusa | Russian embassy (Part of Downtown), 2003 300 × 110 × 110 cm 118 1/8 × 43 1/4 × 43 1/4 in.

The Mugrabi Collection

front row: Edificio Jerez Jerez Building (Part of Downtown), 2003 69.5 × 330 × 342 cm 27 3/8 × 129 7/8 × 134 3/4 in.

Collection of the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky

57

“We think that you are also what you live in and what you jealously keep. … We create downtowns on the scale of furniture. If your house was the city, your furniture would be the buildings, the flats would be your drawers, and you would be something that you would keep along with your most familiar, important and intimate secrets inside those drawers. It is something like seeing oneself caught between the minimal expression of the city and the maximal expression of a piece of furniture.”6 Downtown is a mini-­ mundus consisting of six buildings that are exceptionally articulated, both in their meaning and function and in their architectural forms. First presented in 2003 at the Fourth Bienal de Mercosur in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the installation toured in the United States with the exhibition Los Carpinteros: Inventing the World / Inventar el mundo (2005–6).

Some parts of the installation (the Soviet Embassy, the FOCSA building, the Retiro Medico, and the Jerez building) are modeled after architectural icons of the 1950 and 1960s in Havana, whereas the symbolic knife-shaped Cuchillo and the half-circular Someca reference the landmark Flatiron Building in New York and the I. M. Pei tower in downtown Miami (today called the Miami Tower). The FOCSA was one of the largest modernist skyscrapers in Latin America at the time and the first to introduce a kind of “metropolis inside the metropolis” to Cuba, with more than 375 deluxe apartments and various social amenities. The former Soviet Embassy in the upscale Miramar district, said to be designed to represent “a dagger in the heart of America” after the Cuban Missile Crisis, was one of the most powerful and guarded buildings in the city and of strategic importance to propagate Soviet interests in the entire Caribbean and South American regions.

“We are interested in the verticality of those towers and their association with progress and modernity,” Los Carpinteros have stated. “The selection of buildings was connected with the paradoxes that they contain, in relation to the optimization of the spaces and the commercialization of the luxury floors. They are buildings which, symbolically, are associated with collectivization and the gravitational pull of consumerism, individual isolation and the law of horizontal property, and, simultaneously, with collective isolation by means of self-sufficient tower-cities, which separate themselves in some way from the fabric and life of the city. However, the compartmentbuildings are not exact reproductions; they have been translated into the language of furniture, the furniture has been translated into the language of architecture, and, through its place in the gallery, the exhibition space is translated into the urban language.”7 By integrating an array of small compartments (drawers), the Downtown buildings reference typologically both Soviet apartment blocks—with their collectivist, anonymous housing structures—and the storage system of the archive, containing documents and historical records. “What you imagine,” the artists have explained, “is what fills the space inside those compartments. Occasional hosts of illusions and mysteries, they end up by converting themselves, simply, into labyrinths of sterile searches, detonators of riddles that are never solved. Each compartment-building is a potential archive, but the urgency of the departure never leaves sufficient time for its compartments to be occupied … at all.”8

58

el barrio – building the city

Embajada Rusa Russian embassy, 2002 238 × 153 cm | 93 3/4 × 60 1/4 in.

Private Collection

59

Someca II, 2002 238.8 × 152.4 cm | 94 × 60 in.

Private Collection / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

60

el barrio – building the city

Edificio Hueco Hole building, 2002 154 × 215 cm | 60 5/8 × 84 3/4 in.

Miller Meigs Collection

61

Shelf building, 2002 154 Ă— 215 cm | 60 5/8 Ă— 84 3/4 in.

Valdemarin Collection

62

el barrio – building the city

As vehicles that allow one to travel without leaving home, trailers have dual implications: endless freedom versus precarious homelessness. A series of watercolors from 2009 takes up this ambiguity and translates it into the visual metaphor of a brick trailer. The trailers become immobile and petrified, a hybrid between a house and a vehicle, a premeditated permanent structure. The reference to low-cost housing and trailer parks is evident, yet—like the artists’ other drawings—the study presents it without any sentimentality but rather as an exploration of the growing and merging of two forms. The bricks thus seem to become organic, a symbiotic lichen growing over and merging with the supporting structure of the trailer.

Bricks—together with cinder blocks, concrete, water, and wood—are an essential material of Los Carpinteros’ works. Like the drawers of compartment furniture ­pieces (Downtown, 2002–3 [56] ), the bricks can also be seen in terms of their potential to create space, as in Acumulación de materiales—ladrillos II | Accumulation of Materials—Bricks II, 2003 [215] or Ladrillos inertes | Inert Bricks, 2004 [214]. The artists refer to brick on its material level: “how hard it can be, how strict it and how ­angular—the material is talking.”9 The red terra-cotta bricks are derived from colonial architecture in Cuba, especially the sugar factories, with their huge towers made out of bricks, which today are desolate ruins. The bricks are also connected to the condition of scarcity in Cuba, where people make the bricks for their houses themselves: “To build a house in Cuba means to start from zero and embrace an enormous work. First you create a cast. You weld the metal. Then you do the blocks. This is how people do things in Cuba from scratch.”10 The brick trailers recall the “cellules” by the Israeli artist Absalon, white structures that can be read as metaphors for inner spaces, spaces of solitude. They ­demonstrate an obsession with order, arrangement, and containment, and have associations with both protective shelters and monastic cells. They were designed to be placed in several cities and to function as living pods for the artist as he traveled. But at the same time they are a space for being alone, being isolated within a ­caravan and not really being able to communicate with the outside world. Whereas many artists are trying to create mobile units, Los Carpinteros try to attach structures that are made to be mobile to the ground. As always in their work, they rewrite the script with a slight détournement.

63

Untitled, 2009 75.5 × 112 cm | 29 3/4 × 44 1/8 in.

Collection of Beth Rudin de Woody / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

top: Untitled, 2009 76 × 112 cm | 29 7/8 × 44 1/8 in.

Collection Isabel Martínez Gordillo – Pablo Barrios, Spain

bottom: Untitled, 2009 75 × 114 cm | 29 1/2 × 44 7/8 in.

Denver Art Museum Collection / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

opposite: Untitled, 2009 Diptych 132 × 102 cm | 52 x 40 in.

Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

67

68

69

70

71

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74

politically infected objects

76

politically infected objects

What we see at first glance are objects, allegedly timeless, lacking reference to any concrete sociopolitical reality, objects frozen on drawing paper, muted and sanitized from the intricacies of the real world.

These objects, as autonomous and self-referential as they might seem, are driven, manipulated, and transmuted by exogenous forces at times.

In the visual archive of Los Carpinteros we find the perfectly commodified object of art, the aestheticized object of consumerism, and twisted objects of daily life haunted or infected by elemental ­powers and forces, which animate and dramatize their forms and shapes. ­Directed into awkward appearances, eccentric positions, juxtapositions, proliferations, symmetrical alignments, or conflicting transmutations, these mutating objects seem to be subjected to an infectious or toxic substance, to the deformation caused by pressure, force, or stress, which creates from within certain isolated or widespread distortions, and pathologies.

The travesties performed by the objects not only manifest their delirious and humoresque potentials but are also the contortions adopted to resist, internalize, or adapt to the frameworks of the political. The sense of the political that is acted out by the object, however, is a spectral residue, the specter of a vanished, reformed, and rescripted ideology, an order of the second degree. It is the specter of ideology that returns to haunt and that penetrates and resounds in the production of signs and meanings. “[Los Carpinteros] have concentrated on an iconography, a narrative and a symbolism of the utopian, localizing its areas of conflict in such notions as history, the nation, mythology or ideology, but avoiding any political literalness in their messages,” states Eugenio Valdés Figueroa.1 Even if the language of artistic production has changed from the clear articulation of political and social issues evident in works produced up until 2003 to a more poetic and abstract form in recent years, the worlds constructed in Los ­Carpinteros’ works have the potential to produce events that question and irritate the prevalent “distribution of the sensible,” of what makes sense or nonsense and allows us to understand the world.2 When Los Carpinteros talk about their objects’ relation to reality—to a real cultural, social, and historical background—they often refer to processes of infection or contamination: “The barrio we came from is always infected by politics. Even if you try not to, even if you want to avoid it—it’s really contaminated”.3 In tres relojes | Three Clocks, 2003 [77] , one clock mutates into three; it is tripled like a growing cell, like an organic entity, multiplied. Unlike a process of linear growth, which is marked by and sticks to a single center, multiplication also affects and subverts the power of the center, of the origin. This tactic of multiplying objects is to be found in many of Los Carpinteros’ watercolor drawings and sculptural works, for example, in Bombas de agua |

Fire Hydrants, 2006 [85].

One aspect of this operation is its reflection of the commodified object, its infection by capital and its production of desires, which can be seen at work in Papel reciclable | Recyclable Paper, 2005 [84] and La gran compra | The Great Shopping, 2006 [90].

Another process of infection often takes place in the relation of the titles to the visual objects, twisting their denotations in seemingly simple ways and introducing blunt double meanings. Counter Party, 2005 [89] suggests and reflects the blurring of communist or real socialist reality and jargon with processes of unification and commodification connected with capitalist economies. In the multiplied kitchen structure, the desire for an individual living space is foiled by the repetition of the always-same and can be understood as a metaphor for assimilational effects. Such linguistic and visual processes are also evident in drawings such as Gran marcha hacia la izquierda | Great March to the Left, 2006 [90] , in which the bicycles for the protest march are all in line and headed to the left, or El gran picnic | The Great Picnic, 2008 [96/97] , in which high-end American barbecues stage a gathering, in both cases evoking a reference to the ideological use of “greatness.”

The “penetration of the sign by capital,” as discussed by Hal Foster,4 is one process at work in many of Los Carpinteros’ works, sometimes also appearing as the “penetration of the sign by ideology.” This ­variation transforms works such as Sub Oficial Grill, 2008 [78] or Trash Shopping Cart, 2008 [81] into striking and obvious statements about the clash of commodification and ideology and opens up a way to question this reality and the potential that it offers—or refuses— for a better life.

1. Eugenio Valdés Figueroa, “Los Carpinteros,” in Las Horas: Artes visuales de América Latina contemporánea / The Hours: Visual Arts of Contemporary Latin America (Zurich: Daros-Latinamerica; Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2005), 75.

2. See Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2006).

3. Los Carpinteros, conversation with the editors, May 2010 4. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 73.

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Tres Relojes Three Clocks, 2003 75.5 × 106 cm | 29 3/4 × 41 3/4 in.

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

78 politically infected objects

Sub Oficial Grill, 2008 141 × 203.8 cm | 55 1/2 × 80 1/4 in.

Collection of Diane and Bruce Halle, Phoenix, Arizona / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

Movimiento de Liberación Nacional | National Liberation Movement, 2010 Metal, plastic 93 × 120 × 120 cm 36 5/8 × 47 1/4 × 47 1/4 in.

Courtesy IvoryPress, Madrid

80 politically infected objects

The practice of shopping and its ideological and economic connotations are addressed in a series of works that collectively serve as a commentary on the obsessive and allconsuming identificatory and fetishistic character of consumption in affluent societies.

The right to the free access and circulation of commodities and consumer goods is of course even more entangled and inflammatory as a concept and practice in societies of scarcity. Both in sociological discourse and in everyday experience, it has become the single most influential indicator of social status, class, and wealth. In Mancha de bolsas rojas | Patch of Red Bags, 2006 [85] and La gran compra | The Great Shopping, 2006 [90] the composition of paper shopping bags takes the form of apartment buildings and commercial structures, suggesting a great shopping mall—or perhaps a shopping city for obsessive shopaholics. The series Trash Shopping Cart, 2007–8 [81–82] offers a rather critical interpretation of this universal phenomenon.

Based on the shape of plastic garbage containers but executed in the delicate chrome wire of an ordinary shopping cart, the drawings and executed sculpture merge the ideas of shopping and disposal. Their appearance is exquisite and commercial, placing them in the world of consumerism by merging two concepts that are not as divorced as they appear to be. Trash Shopping Cart applies a strategy of translating the rhetoric of ideology into form, which is widely used by Los Carpinteros. As the artists say of this operation: “It doesn’t need a lot of explanation. It’s very clear. It’s almost like a billboard or propaganda. Sometimes we create objects like political posters. The way they are presented is blatant and direct. We have this series of work, with the hand grenade (Versión negra abierta / Versión negra cerrada | Black version open / Black version closed, 2008 [102] ), the missile (Panera | Breadbox, 2004 [103] ), or the grills (Sub Oficial Grill, 2008 [78] ), etc. They look almost too obvious, but it is the language of billboards and of propaganda. Political posters have to be easily understandable, no?

Sometimes we try to do this.”11

Trash Shopping Cart, 2008 Edition of 5, 2 AP Chrome steel, plastic 115 × 55 × 82 cm 45 1/4 × 21 3/4 × 32 1/4 in.

Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

81

82 politically infected objects

Trash Shopping Cart, 2007 107 × 78.5 cm | 42 1/8 × 30 7/8 in.

Private Collection / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

Trash Shopping Cart (Versión Grande) Trash shopping cart (Large version), 2007 79 × 107 cm | 31 1/8 × 42 1/8 in.

Private Collection, São Paulo

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Sal y Pimienta Salt and pepper, 2004 152.4 Ă— 227.3 cm | 60 x 89 1/2 in.

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

84 politically infected objects

Papel Reciclable Recyclable paper, 2005 141 × 215 cm | 55 1/2 × 84 3/4 in.

Private Collection, New York

top: Bombas de Agua water hydrants, 2006 75.5 × 111 cm | 29 3/4 × 43 3/4 in.

Collection of Donald Crawshaw and Matthew Hoffmann / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

bottom: Mancha de Bolsas Rojas Patch of red bags, 2006 75.5 × 112 cm | 29 3/4 × 44 1/8 in.

Collection of Anne and William Palmer / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

86 politically infected objects

Barricada de tornillos Barricade of screws, 2008 Diptych 75.5 × 224 cm | 29 3/4 × 88 1/4 in.

Paula Traboulsi, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

87

88 politically infected objects

"Cuba is a concrete society. The concrete is very important. It’s a substitute for ­sophisticated materials like metal, porcelain, or glass. Basins, sinks, countertops are all self-made. The material fabricators have the ingenuity of sculptors. They interpret the real thing, and turn them into some kind of postmodern objects."12 In a society of scarcity, the “do-it-yourself” ethos becomes a necessity. Building, repairing, creating furnishings for one’s home, and refunctioning objects that can have an alternative use are all part of a gray economy of self-sustainability. The resourcefulness and inventiveness generated by this practice are exemplified in Counter Party, 2005, and Panera | Breadbox, 2004 [103] , and also in the spatial appropriations of Bajo costo | Low Cost, 2005 [45] , and Complejo Martí | Martí Complex, 2007 [104/105].

Beyond the resourcefulness of individuals, artist and theoretician Luis Camnitzer has described the collective affinity for improvisation and self-sufficiency arising out of the need to replace missing parts and finding alternatives for obsolete techniques: "Between food and buildings I should mention the contributions of the ANIR (National Association of Innovators and Rationalizers), a group designed to find alternative ­solutions for those technological products no longer available because of the U.S. blockade. When an institution needed hinges to build silkscreen drying racks, this group designed them by bending pieces of scrap aluminum that turn around nails.

The whole printing industry was saved by ANIR, which was able to keep the presses functional by recreating missing and broken pieces. The paper industry was also reconstructed following this drive for a degree of self-sufficiency, and a process for papermaking was developed using 80 percent bagasse (cane remnants from the sugar production) content. In 2004 the claim was that ANIR introduced 3500 inventions that year and that membership of ANIR was 41589, 44% of which are women."13 In the midst of a chronic housing shortage and drab living conditions in Cuba, people have built their own houses from scratch. The self-made cinder block is the material of choice. It is cast out of concrete and uses industrial waste or sand as aggregate.

The many drawings featuring bricks and cinder blocks in Los Carpinteros’ oeuvre (e.g., Parte de parte | Part of a Part, 2008 [216/217], Objeto y esencia | Object and Essence, 2007 [91] , 4 sitios de quema | 4 Sites for Burning, 2008 [197] ) take up the process of selfempowerment and the close relationship between worker-fabricators and the objects that they produce.

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Counter Party, 2005 114 × 207 cm | 44 7/8 × 81 1/2 in.

The Mugrabi Collection

90 politically infected objects

La Gran Compra The great shopping, 2006 77 × 112.5 cm | 30 1/4 × 44 1/4 in.

Private Collection

Gran Marcha hacia la izquierda Great march to the left, 2006 76 × 112 cm | 29 7/8 × 44 1/8 in.

Courtesy of Pan American Art Projects, Miami

91

Objeto y Esencia Object and Essence, 2007 76 × 112 cm | 29 7/8 × 44 1/8 in.

Valdemarin Collection / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

92 politically infected objects

Proyecto para vaso cerámico "Francia" Project for ceramic vase "Francia", 2007 130.5 × 154 cm | 51 3/8 × 60 5/8 in.

Private Collection, Panama

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Proyecto para vaso cerámico "Germany" Project for ceramic vase "Germany", 2007 130.5 × 153 cm | 51 3/8 × 60 1/4 in.

Private Collection, Panama

94 politically infected objects

Bloque infectado Infected block, 2003 75.5 × 106 cm | 29 3/4 × 41 3/4 in.

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

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Bloque negro al lado de un bloque blanco Black block beside a white block, 2003 75.5 × 106 cm | 29 3/4 × 41 3/4 in.

Blake Byrne, USA

96 politically infected objects

El Gran Picnic The great picnic, 2008 114.5 × 222.5 cm | 45 1/8 × 87 5/8 in.

Courtesy Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo

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99

opposite: Marea Verde Green tide, 2008 205.1 × 140.7 cm | 80 3/4 × 55 3/8 in.

The Progressive Corporation / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York right: Marea Roja Red tide, 2008 200 × 114.5 cm | 78 3/4 × 45 1/8 in.

Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

Transformación de Comedor del Presidio Modelo en Gavetero Transformation of the Canteen of the “Modelo” Jail into a Dresser, 2007 70.5 × 100.5 cm | 27 3/4 × 39 5/8 in.

Collection Felix Aguirre Cabanyes, Madrid

One process at work in Los Carpinteros’ oeuvre is the transformation of buildings into other objects, mostly furniture. This becoming-furniture plays with the scale and the proportions of buildings and design objects, as well as with the relationships of their different functions. These shifts in shape and use often imply a semiotic shift, which engenders a twisted meaning that goes beyond the seemingly playful ­adaption.

In the case of the drawing Transformación de comedor del Presidio Modelo en gavetero the canteen of the notorious model prison located on the Isla de Pinos (Isla de la Juventud) undergoes this operation. This prison is remarkable not only for the panoptical construction of all five of its buildings but also for its ­prisoners, who have reflected Cuba’s history: after the attack on the Moncada Barracks in 1953, the event regarded as the beginning of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl were imprisoned there together with other surviving rebels. After the victory of ­Castro’s revolution, the Presidio Modelo housed political dissidents, counterrevolutionaries, homosexuals, and other “enemies” of the socialist Cuban state. When the prison was closed in 1967, the ruins of these impressive buildings, with their cellblocks and grim atmosphere, were turned into a museum. Los Carpinteros refer to this building in several works, changing the prisoners’ small cells into drawers. And yet the forbidding history still resonates in those neatly constructed pieces of furniture.

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Gavetero – Solimar Dresser – Solimar, 2007 140 × 251 cm | 55 1/8 × 98 3/4 in.

Private Collection

102 politically infected objects

Versión negra abierta / Versión negra cerrada Black version open / Black version closed, 2008 Diptych 180.5 × 228 cm | 71 × 89 3/4 in.

103

Panera Breadbox, 2004 Edition of 5, 1 AP Maple wood on two sawhorses 100 × 145.5 × 312.5 cm 39 1/4 × 57 1/4 × 123 in.

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Complejo Martí Marti Complex, 2007 triptych 248 × 423 cm 97 5/8 × 166 1/2 in.

Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, Gainesville

106 politically infected objects

Pools play a very prominent role in the work of Los Carpinteros and are a repeatedly used topos, in drawings as well as in sculptural realizations. Describing the ubiquity of this symbolic motif, the artists have stated, “We use pools like toothpaste.”14 Since pools are also subject to manifold transformations, they can be understood as a basic element or even primary material in their oeuvre. Pools in Havana are remnants of the “golden age” of luxury, gambling, organized crime, and U.S.-dominated economic interests in the 1940s and 1950s. Today, with water a precious commodity and the decadence of the prerevolutionary decades displaced by the rigidities of a planned economy beset by shortages, the pools serve very pragmatic purposes. One of the first pools realized by Los Carpinteros as sculpture is Piscina llena | Filled Pool from 2001, a roundish pool with stairs all around its edge: access to luxury for everyone.

The title as well as the multiple points of entry are realized again in the model-size Piscina llena | Full Pool, 2004, presented in the show En el jardín at Fortes Vilaça Gallery, São Paulo, in 2005. Like the artists’ other sculptural pools, the models work exactly like actual swimming pools, equipped with pumps, lights, drains, and all other necessary equipment.

In other works by Los Carpinteros, pools are transformed into high-end models of amphibious living, as in Casa con piscina | House with Swimming Pool, 2005 [126/127], or into complete underwater living spaces, as in the sculpture Home Pool, 2006 [129]. In Huella Adidas | Adidas footprint, 2005 [313] , sneaker soles become a fancy and colorful luxury pool. Others are converted into bunkers; home gardens for cultivation; or, as in the drawing Complejo Martí | Marti Complex, 2007 [104/105], shooting ranges or military training grounds. The name of this today run-down sport center in Havana refers to the poet and revolutionary José Martí (1853–1895), a symbol of Cuba’s quest for independence from Spain as well as an important precursor of Latin American ­modernismo in literature. Many Cubans still refer to Martí as an inspirational historical figure, while in some scholarly circles his political writings are being studied as critical reflections of existing conditions. His statement that “there is no permanent work, because in times of rearranging and reshaping, the works are in essence changeable and restless”15 shows the idealistic hopes connected with transformation, a concept that attains a postrevolutionary sense of absurdity and disillusionment in the reimagined swimming pools of Los Carpinteros.

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Piscina Llena Full pool, 2004 water, fiber glass, polyester resin, stainless steel, PVC tubes, optical fiber, water pump, glass pills 108 × 147.5 × 76 cm | 42 1/2 × 58 1/8 × 29 7/8 in.

The Mugrabi Collection

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111

112

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water

118 water

Los Carpinteros’ water objects and architectures are utopian design proposals that bring together various aspects of the artists’ research on the reuse of obsolete structures, the study of alternative living spaces, and the meaning of “water” in an insular society living in extreme poverty, lacking essential resources at times. In Cuba the medium of “water” generally bears the connotations of scarcity, health risks, and procurement hazards. Because of the country’s poor sanitation system and acute water shortages, access to an abundant and clean water supply is not always guaranteed. Yoani Sánchez reports in her blog about this precarious situation: “On the corner there is a hydrant which, at night, turns into the water supply for hundreds of families in the area. Even the watercarriers come to it, with their 55 gallon tanks on rickety old carts that clatter as they roll by. People wait for the thin stream to fill their containers and then return home, with help from their children to push the wagon with the precious liquid. … The creak of the wheels has a different sound, when the tanks are full versus empty.”1 Drawings such as Transporte de agua (camión) | Water Transportation (Truck), 2005 [201] , and Bombas de agua | Water Hydrants, 2006 [85] , allude to this situation and illustrate strategies of morphing and multiplication typical of Los Carpinteros’ subtle twisting of reality.

The dual nature of water as a necessity for survival, on the one hand, and as a resource associated with luxury and pleasure, on the other, is explored in Los Carpinteros’ manifold interpretations of the swimming pool and extravagant swimwear (e.g., Patas de rana | Flippers, 2010 [134/135] ). Havana’s swimming pools and the modernist tropical villas built for an affluent colonial society of the 1950s epitomize the “old regime” ousted by the revolution. They are the residue of a past that has been labeled ideologically corrupt but that has never been removed from the cityscape. Slowly and over time, these structures have been reappropriated by new inhabitants, converted into provisional housing structures, and adapted for their various needs, such as habitation, raising livestock, and growing vegetables and fruits.

Subsistence farming and black-market activities are important elements of Cuba’s gray economy and were more so during the period of the U.S. embargo.

In today’s Havana the obsolete is being recycled, and as a result the signs and symbols of wealth are being swiftly converted into pragmatic spaces of self-organization. One and the same pool can be adapted and recycled for different uses, as in Piscina compartida | Shared Swimming Pool, 2007 [40] , and Piscina para ambos | Pool for Both, 2008 [40/41] , in which neighbors assign completely different functions to their respective halves (one using it as a pool and the other as a bunker or a field for cultivation). In Complejo Martí | Martí Complex,

2007 [104/105] the

abandoned pool of a former sports center becomes a military training area, while in other works pools simply take the shape of a pool table. As Eugenio Valdés Figueroa has written: “A recycling culture is a subsistence culture, in which the limits between utopias and pragmatism are dissolved within social dynamics.

This marks, for example, the close relationship between the real and the unreal in Cuba, between social praxis and fiction. Such a ­situation allows us to understand the profound metaphorical and simulative character, as well as the level of fantasy and ambiguity, of an art that is tremendously interested in being involved in social processes and in transforming its ritualism into aesthetic procedures.”2 This simulative and fictional character is further elaborated in projects such as Vecinos | Neighbors, 2004 [43]; Casa con piscina | House with Swimming Pool, 2005 [126/127] ; or Home Pool, 2006 [129] , in which entire houses are designed under the surface of water or modernist architectural designs are built as floating islands. Los Carpinteros’ sculptures and drawings are far too aesthetic and accomplished to serve a real community and recycling culture. What is drawn from the social praxis of the everyday is transformed into perfect models and simulated realities, thereby mixing the codes of affluence/scarcity, privilege/precariousness, modernism/dystopia, and poetic/real—­ evident in sculptures that merge pools and other objects and functions, such as Portaaviones | Aircraft Carrier, 2005 [119, 121]; Piscina arena | Arena Pool, 2004 [189] , produced as a sculpture in 2006; Vecinos I | Neighbors I, 2006 [131] ; and Huella Adidas | Adidas Footprint, 2005 [313].

What do the multivalent references to water found in the work of Los Carpinteros tell us, not only about the specific context and situation in Cuba but also about a more general state of being in the world? The question of whether a “fiction that becomes real through a form of art [can] console us from the loss of utopia” is one that not only “lingers over contemporary Cuban art and the ‘suspended’ island from which it emerges,”3 as Jorge Reynos Pohlenz has stated, but that is also relevant for all art in a period of global economic upheaval.

1. Yoani Sánchez, “The Route of the Moisture,” Generation Y, posted May 10, 2010, http://www.desdecuba.com/generationy/?p=1704.

2. Eugenio Valdés Figueroa, “The Key and the Keyhole in the Lock: Constructions and Utopias in Contemporary Cuban Art,” in The Way Things Are: Works from the ThyssenBornemisza Art Contemporary Collection, exh. cat., Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu, Torun, Poland (Cologne: Walther König, 2008), 106.

3. Jorge Reynos Pohlenz, “Los Carpinteros: Utopian Model Makers,” Afterall, no. 9 (2004): 69.

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top and 121: Portaaviones Aircraft carrier, 2005 water, fiber glass, epoxy resin, stainless steel, PVC tubes, optical fiber, water pump, glass pills 160 × 250 × 110 cm | 63 × 98 3/8 × 43 1/4 in.

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

120 water

Portaviones Aircraft carrier, 2004 130 × 200 cm | 51 1/4 × 78 3/4 in.

Private Collection, USA

121

122 water

Piscina Olímpica Olympic pool, 2004 Diptych 76 × 226 cm | 29 7/8 × 89 in.

Private Collection

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The pools that appear in the work of Los Carpinteros usually refer to private spaces, offering a twisted take on the numerous private pools in prerevolutionary Cuba, which began to be seen as a symbol of bourgeois decadence after the revolution and were gradually restricted. In most of the interpretations, pools are either understood as a material to build with and morphed into unlikely shapes (Portaaviones | Aircraft ­C arrier, 2005 [119, 121] ), transformed into amphibious architectural structures (Casa con piscina | House with swimming pool, 2005 [126/127] or Home Pool, 2006 [129] ), or used as a means to address the social implications of private and collective property in a precarious economic and political context (Vecinos I | Neighbors I, 2006 [131], and Piscina para ambos | Pool for Both, 2008 [40/41] ). In Piscina olímpica | Olympic Pool the form of a regulation-size swimming pool is presented as a sculpture, yet what disturbs the slickness of the model is the ice on the surface of the water. A freezer unit transforms the pool into a kind of skating rink, bringing all movement, all possible ­activity, to a standstill. This take on Los Carpinteros’ “cold studies” adds a literality to coldness, producing the frozen moment as a prototype in which disaster is closer and even more palpable. In the frozen Olympic Pool , disaster is present only as a vague future reference.

Piscina Olímpica Olympic pool, 2005 Ice, fiber glass, epoxy resin, stainless steel, PVC tubes, optical fiber, water pump, glass pills 80 × 150 × 80 cm 31 1/2 × 59 × 31 1/2 in.

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Casa con piscina House with swimming pool, 2005

triptych, 200 Ă— 420 cm | 78 3/4 Ă— 165 3/8 in.

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

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128 water

reflects the absurdity of the precisely crafted model: the structure of a spacious apartment executed as a pool. With blue mosaic tiles and spectacular lighting and flooded with water, it suggests a luxurious amphibious space for living. Like all the artists’ pool-sculptures, it is equipped with a pump to guarantee the circulation of water. Thus, despite its status as a reduced-scale model, it mimics the function of a full-size pool, rendering all the effort put into its construction seemingly absurd. All these ambiguities and absurdities develop a very special productiveness, weaving a net of references, which expands the sense of the work.

The watercolor Piscina para ambos | Pool for Both, 2008 [40/41] can be seen as a sympto­matic image for the merging of living and swimming space: the division of a single pool into a land part and a water part reduces this dialectic to its essential core. This differentiation, taken up in many drawings, can be seen in the context of the reinterpretation of structures, which often refers to the shortages of various commodities that are endemic to the precarious sociopolitical context of Cuba (e.g., Complejo ­Martí | Marti Complex, 2007 [104/105] ). The huge watercolor drawing Casa con piscina | House with Swimming Pool, 2005 [126/127] , in contrast, addresses the context of psycho spaces, with their productive potential for rupturing the allegedly smooth surface of reality and opening it up to the substreams of an architectural unconsciousness. In Casa con piscina , the living space and swimming space have the same formal structure, which is that of an apartment, yet here the pool area is painted a light turquoise and embedded in the ground, whereas the other part is painted gray and built above the ground. In Home Pool , these differentiations are leveled and reduced to one continuous form, which incorporates all the above-mentioned dialectics without erasing them. Thus a highly ambivalent and charged amphibious space emerges, which, despite its smooth and perfect surface, has the potential to complicate the conception of reality.

Home Pool

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Home Pool, 2006 water, fiber glass, polyester resin, stainless steel, silicone, PVC, water pump, water filter 82 × 209 × 185.5 cm | 32 1/4 × 82 1/4 × 73 in.

Courtesy Sean Kelly gallery, New York

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Pool-Pool (estudio final) Pool-Pool (final study), 2006 Diptych 66 × 204 cm | 26 × 80 1/4 in.

Private Collection / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

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Vecinos I Neighbors I, 2006 Water, fiber glass, epoxy resin, stainless steel, silicone, PVC tubes, optical fiber, pump, glass pills, cement, vinyl paint 150 × 150 × 35 cm | 59 × 59 × 13 3/4 in.

Collection of Diane and Bruce Halle, Phoenix, Arizona

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Patas de Rana, Final Flippers, final, 2009 Diptych 55 × 229 cm | 21 3/4 × 90 1/4 in.

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La Playa 16, 2006 152 × 217 cm | 59 3/4 × 85 3/8 in.

Collection of Ellen and Ed Randall, Hondo, Texas / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

Patas de Rana Flippers, 2010 Plastic ø 272 cm, each 17.5 × 115.6 × 27.3 cm ø 107 in., 6 7/8 × 45 1/2 × 10 3/4 in. each Courtesy Ivorypress, Madrid

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back to the future: los carpinteros’ watercolors helen molesworth

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Despite their moniker, the collective Los Carpinteros (The Carpenters) does at least as much drawing, if not more, as building or woodworking. Despite their self-proclaimed love of a well-made object, one is more often than not confronted with one of their beautiful watercolors. Despite their talk of the functionality of things, one frequently finds in their production a veritable encyclopedia of that which does not quite exist, making questions of function vexed at best. And despite their claim to the daily (and seemingly timeless) labor of the humble carpenter, Los Carpinteros occupy the more ambiguous role of contemporary artist, an identity marked by an internal schism: part manual laborer, part conceptualist. These contradictions are hardly exclusive to Los Carpinteros. Rather, they enumerate the tensions that run through much art of the modern period, during which questions of use and function, problems of object and image, issues of reality and representation, and the dilemma of finish versus process were the antinomies that structured the very enterprise of modernism. Looking at the overall oeuvre of Los Carpinteros, considering their prolific output of drawings in particular, one can also feel, subtending this complicated and fractured field of production, a slight hum of anxiety about the legitimacy of the labor of art. What work is it doing? Who is it for? What aims does it serve? In other words, what legitimacy does it possess? More often then not, as we will see, Los Carpinteros handle this anxiety playfully and through negation. Often the work is clearer about what it is not doing than about what it is doing, turning interpretation into a kind of cat and mouse game in which the writer (well, okay, me) is never quite convinced that she has “trapped” her prey, nor is she really sure that she wants to. So it’s interesting then to assess a decade of their work and to discover that the medium that Los Carpinteros have frequently asked to bear the weight of their investigations has consistently been watercolor, not, it must be said, a medium historically deployed to tackle the larger philosophical dynamics of modern art.

But perhaps Los Carpinteros are on to something at the level of medium specificity? Watercolor has an interesting and deeply polyphonic history, all the more

so for having been simultaneously one of the most vaunted and one of the most denigrated forms of drawing. Watercolor emerged during the Renaissance under the guise of naturalism, prized for its ability to add color to mostly monochromatic drawings. Albrecht Dürer was a highly skilled watercolorist, and he used the medium as one of the many arrows in his quiver dedicated to faithfully representing the wonders of the natural world in a manner that rivaled those natural creations. Hare of 1502 is one of the most famous examples of Dürer’s prodigious skills. This watercolor is well prized for its delicate attention to the minute details of the hare’s fur and whiskers, as well as to the overall sensitivity to the posture and shape of the hare’s anatomy. So too, the work is remarkable not only for its visual or physical likeness but also for its ability to capture the animal’s simultaneous qualities of quickness and stillness. Despite (or perhaps because of) this early example of how best to exploit the medium’s potential, watercolor did not emerge in full force until the late eighteenth century with the advent of commercially produced paints (prior to the introduction of these pans or cakes of color, artists made their own paints). In addition to commercially made paints, the paper industry expanded during this period, and by 1775 an English manufacturer was making paper especially designed for artists using watercolor.1 As the apparatus for watercolor become more readily available, the uses to which it was put expanded demonstrably. In addition to being used by artists, it was also used by naturalists (think James Audubon), largely due to the convenience of making a colored image en plein air (think Winslow Homer), and many printmakers (or their unscrupulous print dealers) used watercolor as a way to embellish the black-andwhite matrix of etchings and engravings. Even more interesting was its adoption by “surveyors, mapmakers, military officers and engineers for its usefulness in depicting properties of terrain, fortifications or geology in the field and for illustrating public works or commissioned projects.”2 Color, it seems, was thought to offer a kind of visual veracity, conducive to the task of large public works projects. The rise of watercolor’s popularity was marked by a highly heterogeneous

Albrecht Dürer Hare, 1502

john james audubon Ivory-billed Woodpecker, Campephilus principalis, 1827–1838

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through the convention of shadow, which, through a sense of its use and its possibilities—from fine art, to force of visual habit, lends the object a relationship commercial interests, to its being subsumed by industo gravity that it does not otherwise possess. Despite try. Given the extreme functionalism of the medium, it is their lack of ancillary detail, the drawings tend to somewhat ironic that its other major defining characconvey a landscape, a projective space to be imaginateristic was its highly gendered deployment. The ability tively entered by the viewer. In this way, they speak to to make a watercolor was considered part of the watercolor’s other prominent use, for the axonometric requisite skill set of upper-class British and American drawings of architecture. women in the nineteenth century, so much so that a The discipline of architecture (in the West) has history of the medium written as late as 1966 could relied on drawing since the introduction of paper in begin: “Water color has always had a special appeal the fourteenth century. According to architectural to women, and throughout the nineteenth century historian James S. Ackerman, “once an architectural hundreds of feminine artists produced their often convention is established it maintains an astonishing charming landscapes, flower studies, and sketches consistency through time.”4 One such long-standing of autumn leaves.”3 The paternalism of the language invention is the technique of axonometric drawnotwithstanding, the citation illuminates the extent to ing, developed in the seventeenth century by military which watercolor covered an extraordinary degree engineers as a means to represent three dimensions of affective ground, from the “charming” landscapes in a way that would allow for correct measurement to of bourgeois women to the putatively objective topo­ be retained in receding planes. A beneficial by-product graphies of the military surveyor, a tension that might of this device is that axonometric drawings often otherwise be described as a push-pull between the permit simultaneous interior and exterior views, an expressive and descriptive functions of the medium. attribute enjoyed by many twentieth-century artists Given this history, Los Carpinteros’ choice of who “exploited the axonometric” by adding to them watercolor as their primary medium hardly seems the “spatial possibilities of color.”5 Architects used a matter of mere chance. Rather one can see in this type of drawing as a way to reveal the shifts of their work some aspects of the medium’s polyphonic space and time in the proposed structure, and through dimensions. Their watercolors tend to concentrate on images of the built environment: we often see buildings, their rejection of single-point perspective, they could “explore the complexity and incoherence of spatial walls, swimming pools, and parks. If the image relations.”6 While Los Carpinteros’ drawings are not is of an object—a bookshelf, a bed, a charcoal grill— quite axonometric (one could not accurately fabricate it often evokes the spatial configurations of the object a bed-cum-roller-coaster from one of them), they in such a way as to imply that it is on the threshold of partake of the genre in interesting ways. Most of their realizing its fullest potential as a public site meant for drawings offer a space into which one can projectively dwelling or transit. One of the best examples is a suite enter, simulating an experience of the simultaneity of of drawings using the image of a slightly melancholic space and time. This accounts for the highly animate single bed frame, complete with an institutionally colquality of their images of inanimate things. So too ored mattress in a sick pastel blue, pink, or green. In because they never exploit the washy chance quality of these drawings the single bed (a redolent metaphor for watercolor or experiment with its impressionistic or the solitary life of the child and the equally diminished expressive qualities, their use of watercolor is quite capacity for sociality experienced by the sick and the precise. It is consistently characterized by a clean elderly) metamorphoses into a formal French garden, and straightforward application, with even strokes of a roller coaster, a scenic rolling highway, and a ludirelatively unmodulated color applied rigorously within crously complicated clover-pattern freeway exchange. a set of proscribed boundaries. Their synthesis of line Los Carpinteros’ drawings frequently situate an object and color stems from the axonometric inasmuch as against an empty background, rooting it spatially

winslow homer houghton farm, 1878

Giovanni Battista Piranesi the drawbridge, plate VII (of 16) from the series The Imaginary Prisons (Le Carceri d'Invenzione), Rome, 1761 edition (reworked from 1745).

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that color is asked to perform the task of conveying the three-dimensionality of the spaces and objects that the drawings imagine. The resulting functionalism of this aesthetic often skirts “as close to illustration as drafting.”7 As such, color offers the objects and buildings in Los Carpinteros’ drawings a kind of solidity that they might not otherwise possess; in other words, color appears to move the drawing from the realm of the sketch into the realm of the completed object.

But to say that color operates this definitively is perhaps to solidify the drawings in ways that are not quite right. Drawing has always played a dynamic role in the history of art, “regarded as both foundational and peripheral, central and marginal.” Drawing’s liminal character is derived largely from its complicated relationship to time, for “drawing takes on the status of either trace or leftover—a clue as to its formation or a remainder left behind.”8 So what exactly is the status of Los Carpinteros’ drawings? It seems clear they are more than a sketch, more than an idea-asyet-uncompleted. Certainly they present themselves as what Yve-Alain Bois would call “projective drawing,” meaning that they are a drawing of something that has already been imagined as opposed to something that is “discovered” through the process of drawing. This is why they can be described as being “close” to illustration. But as farcical, or impossible, as the drawings might sometimes appear, they do often have a companion sculptural object; for instance, El Barrio | The neighborhood (drawing 2004 [35], installation 2007 [38]), Montaña Rusa | Rollercoaster (drawing 2007 [157], object 2008 [343] ,

and Patas de rana | Flippers (drawing 2009 exist as both a drawing and an object. And tellingly, they beg the question of which came first—drawing or object. That being said, some of the drawings feel truly unfeasible: they are not illustrative (they are not made after the fact, a picture of an object already made), nor do they operate like a plan (they are not realizable in the way an architectural plan is meant to be). It would be easy, even romantic, at this juncture to claim these drawings as utopian.

There is part of me that would like to situate them in the Soviet tradition of Vladimir Tatlin’s monument or Lyubov Popova’s clothing designs, or to see them as [132], object 2010 [134/135])

mining the architectural archives of El Lissitzky or Le Corbusier. And yet somehow I can’t quite make the leap, as pleasurable and as art historically pat as such an argument might be. This is largely because I think that Los Carpinteros’ drawings don’t exist purely in relation to the temporality of an idealized futurity that signifies the utopian. Quite the contrary, I think the drawings, for all their seeming simplicity, frequently instantiate disparate and condensed versions of time.

As noted earlier, drawing traditionally signifies either that which is yet to come—the role of the preparatory sketch—or that which exists after the fact—the rendering of the completed object, building, or monument. These two versions of time in drawing were profoundly challenged by artists of the post–World War II period, when the training of artists changed dramatically. Nothing signaled this shift more completely then the decline in the instruction in drawing from the live nude.9 Drawing largely abandoned its a priori or a posteriori sense of time and was instead seen to operate primarily in the register of the indexical, in the space-time continuum of the here and now.

During this period drawing came to be seen as a form of expression directly related to the artist’s body and as such was involved in the registration of the artistic process itself. In this formulation what is insisted upon in drawing is the presentness of the artist’s hand to the paper. To be a viewer of such a drawing was an exercise in the reading of a palimpsest, as every mark was evidence of a choice made, a decision enacted, or alternatively, each mark was an indication of a force at play larger than the artist—an indication of the chance operations of the materials themselves or of the larger principles of physics, most notably gravity and entropy.

The extent to which this nearly hegemonic form of drawing is utterly absent for Los Carpinteros is remarkable. One can see the illustrative quality of their palette and their almost compulsively clean lines as a kind of deafening refusal of this modality of drawing. For instance, in Acumulación de Materiales – Ladrillos II | Accumulation of materials – bricks II, 2003 [215] ,

we encounter an allover composition of bricks jumbled together in a pile and pressed up against the picture plane. Thus we see a compositional strategy

El Lissitzky cloud iron, 1925

Liubov Popova Production Clothing for Actor no.5 in Fernand Crommelynck's play “The magnanimous Cuckold”, 1921

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that mimics process drawing, but the precision of the image is such that one humorously wonders whether there was a preparatory sketch for this watercolor, a mise en abîme of prior planning in a medium dedicated to quick studies. The turning away from process situates Los Carpinteros squarely within their generational zeitgeist. But their work furthers this refusal of the presentness or indexicality more than that of some of their peers by being manifestly devoid of people. It is as if all aspects of humanity, from its bodily traces to its physical image, have been resolutely banished from the sphere of representation. (For example, the celebrities in Elizabeth Peyton’s drawings root them to a sense of present time, and the computeresque lines of Julie Mehretu’s paintings and drawings also connote a certain temporal context.) Curiously this lends Los Carpinteros’ drawings a “timeless” quality, a characteristic only heightened by the assiduous manner in which they eschew the current commodity markers of our time. Technology is notably absent; there are no iPhones or televisions, not a single electrical outlet.

There is instead a profound quality of emptiness, as if every drawing were modeled on the convention of installation shots of minimalist sculpture or architectural publicity shots—solitary stillness prevails. The question nags: what kind of time is being offered here?

A nostalgic moment prior to our wired generation; a postapocalyptic future devoid of people and electricity; or an ironic version of humanist timelessness, in which objects and spaces stand self-contained and self-sustaining?

Even the shadows, typically a means to connote time and space, fail to secure a “proper” spatiotemporal dimension. In almost every drawing, shadows are the singular feature that establishes any solidity to the conventional figure-ground dialectic. Careful looking will establish that the shadows fall in different directions, but despite that seeming specificity, the shadows never indicate the source of light or the time of day; nor do they offer any clues as to the particularity of place. Hence the drawings offer themselves up like a contemporary (with a new and improved design) Sears, Roebuck catalog of commodity goods. (Again, the selfconscious avoidance of the photographic and the digital

put into play a kind of nostalgia that garners an allusion to something as outmoded as a Sears, Roebuck catalog, however “updated” one might imagine it to be.)

This confusing version of what we might call “static time” is perhaps best evidenced in the drawing Tres Relojes | Three Clocks, 2003 [77]. Here we see three clocks joined as if subsets in a geometry problem.

Blending and blurring into one another, these readymade clocks would seem at first to be a rejoinder to the brutal monotony of our civilization’s organization of time into the requisite eight-hour workdays. But any such utopian or idealistic fantasy is quickly checked by the simple fact that each clock tells the same time.

Despite our most radical desires for a world predicated on difference, however infinitesimal, as a way to break through the stranglehold of capitalism (think Deleuze and Guattari), this drawing offers instead an affectless account of the penetration of everyday life by the logic of the commodity. Tres relojes offers seriality without difference and presents the homogenization of time as a matter-of-fact truism.

And yet …

And yet the pulse of negation persists, for it is as difficult for me to assign Los Carpinteros’ work the position of cynical pragmatism that such a reading of Tres relojes might imply as it is to say their work traffics in the utopian. So what then is at stake in these modest watercolors? Certainly they are preoccupied with the built environment, with architecture. In this regard their work, again, is very much of our current moment, for we live in what may one day be referred to as the age of architecture. The “starchitect” has supplanted the cachet and romance that once surrounded the role of the artist. Now it is the architect who is a household name. It is the architect who steals the headlines and who is as important as the Olympic athlete. It is the architect whose name will ultimately become equivalent with the memorial for 9/11 and who is synonymous with the buildings that identify the new New York, the new Shanghai, the new Paris, the new Beijing, the new Berlin. The mega-stardom of the architect has made it inevitable that many contemporary artists have taken to dismantling and appropriating the language and concerns of architecture. They

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have often done so in a critical guise, offering art as an “unmonumental” counterpoint to architecture’s current vogue for the sweeping and seductive scale of monumentality.10 Late 1960s sculpture offered its own version of antimonumentality, specifically the entropic, that great unstoppable force of time, dedicated to the erasure of man’s intervention, an ethical check on human hubris. Without question, with works like Spiral Jetty and Partially Buried Woodshed (both 1970), ­Robert Smithson served as entropy’s leading emissary. Despite the prevalence of entropy as an anti­monumental strategy in art of the late 1960s and 1970s, it, no pun intended, has fallen into a state of disrepair and is no longer a “popular” means to counter the monumentalizing tendencies of contemporary architecture. The ruin, it seems, can be too easily fetishized by artists and critics alike. So many contemporary artists have turned to a form of sculpture that is largely additive (one thing on top of another), fashioned from the seemingly infinite array of cast-off consumer goods (and, even more precisely, the castoff wrapping and shipping materials for commodity objects); the work of Isa Genzken and Rachel Harrison is exemplary in this regard. But in its formal precision and beauty, the work of Los Carpinteros rejects this detritus-laden version of antimonumentality and also refrains from making any explicit gesture toward the forces of entropy. But we have seen that Los ­Carpinteros’ work is shot through with the problem of time—so much so that it has made me realize that all art objects are smuggling in some version of time and that part of the art historical work of interpretation might be to figure out what version of time the object has put into play. If the current antimonumental sculpture imagines the future as a kind of massive garbage heap, remnants of an archaeological dig—a jumble of late capital’s consumerist crap—then Los ­Carpinteros’ drawings function more like a set of (hilarious) hieroglyphs. It is as if the drawings are intended for a future audience. They are not, in the end, for us, the present audience; they are not, that is, a dictionary of as-yet-unrealized objects. They are a false ledger, a phony Rosetta stone for the future, supposedly showing how objects, spaces, and buildings were once used

at the end of the twentieth century. Of course watercolor is a particularly fugitive medium: overexposure to light can irrevocably fade the work, and contemporary paper is notorious for its degradability. Filled with chemicals, it is not nearly as resilient as its fifteenthand sixteenth-century ancestors. And yet perhaps if someone takes good enough care, if some curator protects the work from too much light and air, if some collector keep them covered or stored in a drawer, the drawings may ultimately serve their purpose, acting as a clue or a Baedeker to the life of things in our era, suggesting that perhaps the carpenters and not the architects will have not only the last word but also the last laugh.

Robert Smithson Partially Buried Woodshed, 1970

Robert Smithson Spiral Jetty, 1970

notes 1. Albert Ten Eyck Gardner, History of Water Color Painting in America (New York: Reinhold, 1966), 8.

2. Wikipedia, s.v. “Watercolor,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watercolor _ painting.

3. Gardner, History of Water Color, 6.

4. James S. Ackerman, “Introduction: The Conventions and Rhetoric of Architectural Drawing,” in Conventions of Architectural Drawing: Representation and Misrepresentation, ed. James S. Ackerman and Wolfgang Jung (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2000), 11.

5. Ibid., 22.

6. Ibid., 23.

7. Laura Hoptman, Drawing Now: Eight Propositions (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 49.

8. Pamela M. Lee, “Some Kinds of Duration: The Temporality of Drawing as Process Art” in Afterimage: Drawing through Process, by Cornelia H. Butler (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 31.

9. See Howard Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999).

10. Unmonumental was the name of the New Museum’s inaugural exhibition in its new building, identifying the current artistic tendency toward sculptural objects that are fashioned largely from the detritus of contemporary life yet that nonetheless mimic the forms of contemporary architecture. See Richard Flood et al., Unmonumental: The Object in the Twenty-first Century (London: Phaidon; New York: New Museum, 2007).

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Los Carpinteros have developed an iconography and a symbolism of transformation connected to the processes of liquefaction and melting of objects: a wooden floor becomes fluid and appears in the form of drops similar to quicksilver (Piso de Madera | Wooden Floor, 2003 [145] ), capitonné mattresses display the amorphous appearance of amoebas (Ameba 36-B | Amoeba 36-B [148/149] and Ameba I | Amoeba I [156], both 2008), and overturned oil lamps and ships lie in pools of spilled liquid [150–153].

Even the conga (Mucho caliente | Much Hot, 2010 [154/155] ) seemingly loses its shape and melts into a solid spill—a paradoxical effect between liquefaction and solidification.

Extensively discussed in the context of surrealist iconography, most notably Salvador Dalí’s Persistence of Memory (1931) and his psycho­ logizing theory of “softness and hardness,” melting is a powerful process of disintegration but also of activation and animation in the oeuvre of Los Carpinteros. It is a transgressive procedure invoked to describe the dynamics of movement and stasis in imagery, in which objects are endowed with the qualities of change and becoming—objects suspended between two states of being. Mueble gordo | Fat Furniture, 2003 [160] , for instance, is physically manifesting the ability to grow fat and to acquire human or animated qualities. In such a liquefied condition, objects are no longer understood as “dead matter,” but are regarded as active agents and presuppose a relational condition to the world around them. The conflicts that they engage in “confuse” the border between their inner mechanics and external reality, provoking a displacement of social relations into things. In this sense, melting blurs the protocols of subjectification and objectification and draws new boundaries between things and subjects, objects and contexts, time and space. In Estantería I–III | Shelves I–III, 2008 [162, 163], the shelf-object shows signs of inner contortion and growth and acquires a new paradoxical status between functionality and animation.

Perhaps the best explanation of how these processes are productive and how they can be understood as societal and political processes comes from the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, who proposes the concept of a “liquid modernity”: Liquids, unlike solids, cannot easily hold their shape. Fluids, so to speak, neither fix space nor bind time. While solids have clear spatial dimensions but neutralize the impact, and thus downgrade the significance, of time (effectively resist its flow or render it irrelevant), fluids do not keep to any shape for long and are constantly ready (and prone) to change it; and so for them it is the flow of time that counts, more than the space they happen to occupy: that space, after all, they fill “but for a moment.” In a sense, solids cancel time; for liquids, on the contrary, it is mostly time that matters. When describing solids, one may ignore time altogether; in describing fluids, to leave time out of account would be a grievous mistake. Descriptions of fluids are all snapshots, and they need a date at the bottom of the picture.

Fluids travel easily. They “flow,” “spill,” “run out,” “splash,” “pour over,” “leak,” “flood,” “spray,” “drip,” “seep,” “ooze”; unlike solids, they are not easily stopped—they pass

around some obstacles, dissolve some others and bore or soak their way through others still. From the meeting with solids they emerge unscathed, while the solids they have met, if they stay solid, are changed—get moist or drenched. The extraordinary mobility of fluids is what associates them with the idea of “lightness.”1

This stretching of the seeming lightness of fluids, which in some cases are physically heavier than some solids, and their ability to travel, to deny a set structure, to dissolve into other fluids and disappear in the capillary systems of solid grounds makes “fluidity” or “­liquidity,” according to Bauman, “fitting metaphors when we wish to grasp the nature of the present, in many ways novel, phase in the history of modernity. … Was not modernity a process of ‘liquefaction’ from the start? Was not ‘melting the solids’ its major pastime and prime accomp­lishment all along? In other words, has modernity not been ‘fluid’ since its inception?”2

1. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000), 2–3.

2. Ibid.

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Piso de Madera Wooden floor, 2003 205 × 204 cm | 80 3/4 × 80 1/4 in.

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

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is an installation conceived for the exhibition of the same title, which took place at the Museo de Bellas Artes in the course of the Eighth Havana Biennial in 2003.

Placed on a roofed terrace between the interior and exterior space, the fifteen sculptural objects themselves offer ambiguous readings: In the shape of drops, they appear to be heavy, but upon closer examination, we find that they are filled with air, not heavy at all, inflatable balloons that play with the expectations connected to a visual appearance and a palpable materiality. The artists connect these spill-like objects with a surprising thread of works, namely, with studies of roads from the years 2002–3. The continuity of a road leading through space and connecting geographical points within a given topography shrinks to time-bound drops, encapsulating the movement that they usually allow for within themselves, incorporating the movement in the form of a quicksilver drop. Thus, Fluido can be understood as a proto­type of one of the operations at work in Los Carpinteros’ works: that of liquefaction.

Fluido | Fluid

Fluido Fluid, 2003 Edition of 3 Urethane plastic resin Variable dimensions

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Fluido (Estudio) Fluid (Study), 2003 75.5 × 106 cm | 29 3/4 × 41 3/4 in.

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

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Ameba 36-B Amoeba 36-B, 2008 Diptych 76 × 224 cm | 29 7/8 × 88 1/4 in.

Valdemarin Collection / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

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Derrame Spill, 2007 78.5 × 107 cm | 30 7/8 × 42 1/8 in.

Private Collection / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

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Derrame Turqueza Turquoise Spill, 2007 92.5 × 140.5 cm | 36 3/8 × 55 1/4 in.

Meana-Larrucea Collection, Spain

top: Tinta azul | Blue ink, 2010 kerosene lamp, painted metal 109 × 50 × 22 cm | 43 x 19 3/4 x 8 1/2 in.

Collection of Emily and Teddy Greenspan / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

bottom:Cromo | Chrome, 2009 Kerosene lamp and chromed metal 55 × 32 × 19 cm | 21 3/4 × 12 5/8 × 7 1/2 in.

Private Collection, New York / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

top: Untitled, 2010 kerosene lamp, painted metal 107 × 42 × 22 cm42 x 16 1/2 x 8 1/2 in.

Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

bottom: Derrame Rojo | Red Spill, 2010 Kerosene lamp, wood, lacquer 78 × 126 × 11 | 30 3/4 × 49 5/8 × 4 1/4 in.

Collection Alejandro Monsalve, Medellín / Courtesy Ivorypress, Madrid

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Mucho caliente | Much hot, 2010 Wood, metal, lacquer 213 × 128 × 28 cm | 83 7/8 × 50 3/8 × 11 in.

Fundación Helga de Alvear, Cáceres / Courtesy Ivorypress, Madrid

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Taking up the thread of melting objects, spilled liquids, internal changes in an object’s structure, and its change of shape, Mucho caliente | much hot is a recent sculptural realization of this manifold method of transformation. The title refers to a grammatically incorrect expression common among beginning students of Spanish trying to express the condition of “very hot” (“muy caliente”). Understanding this mistake as a phenomenon of linguistic interference—that is, a (wrong) transfer of the grammar and syntax of one’s native language to a second language—opens up a level of understanding of not only this sculpture but also the processes at work in Los Carpinteros’ manipulations of objects.

The conga drum in Mucho caliente evokes the ever-swinging rhythm of Latin American music. As a symbol of the easygoing tropical lifestyle and of Caribbean beach life, it also refers to Cuba’s colonial history and African antecedents, from which this type of drum is derived. The corporeal sensation of heat and rhythm referenced in the title is materialized, so that the body of the drum melts into an amorphous spill. The shape of this spill recalls drawings in which mattresses take the form of an amoeba. Being one of the simplest of the unicellular protozoa (whose name, by the way, refers to the Greek god Proteus, known for being able to change his shape to escape), ­amoebae constantly change their shape as they move along on their “false feet”. All these protean and amorphous movements and processes of permeability can be understood as operations applied by Los Carpinteros aimed at macerating solid structures and dissolving hard boundaries, thus showing the precariousness and ambiguous inter­ twining and interference of interior and exterior forces, of time and history.

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Ameba I Amoeba I, 2008 Diptych 76 × 224 cm | 29 7/8 × 88 1/4 in.

Collection of Bryan Graybill & Moises Esquenazi / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

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Montaña Rusa Roller coaster, 2007 Diptych 76.5 × 224 cm | 30 1/8 × 88 1/4 in.

Cleveland Clinic Art Collection / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

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Líquido Rojo (Burros) Red liquid (Sawhorses), 2005 145 × 184 cm | 57 1/8 × 72 3/8 in.

The Mugrabi Collection

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Líquido Rojo Red liquid, 2005 144 × 185 cm | 56 3/4 × 72 3/4 in.

Colección Jumex, Mexico City

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Mueble Gordo Fat furniture, 2003 141 × 234 cm | 55 1/2 × 92 1/8 in.

The Farber Collection

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Sofá Sofa, 2004 80 × 133.5 cm | 31 1/2 × 52 5/8 in.

Victoria Ryan Lobo Private Collection

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left to right: Estantería II Shelves II, 2008 Edition of 3, 1 AP plywood with maple veneer finish 180 × 302 × 39 cm | 70 3/4 × 119 × 15 1/2 in.

Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York Estantería I Shelves I, 2008 Edition of 3, 1 AP plywood with maple veneer finish 179 × 302 × 39 cm | 70 1/2 × 119 × 15 1/2 in.

Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York Estantería III Shelves III, 2008 Edition of 3, 1 AP plywood with maple veneer finish 179 × 317 × 39 cm | 70 1/2 × 125 × 15 1/2 in.

Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

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The three shelves are finely crafted pieces of massive wooden furniture, and yet their design not only is fanciful but also shows a subtle connection to other works in the oeuvre of Los Carpinteros. All three together produce an abstract narrative of an infiltration, which animates the furniture. Seen in a line of works such as Piso de 足m adera | Wooden Floor, 2003 [145] , in which the wooden floor seemingly loses its shape and becomes liquid, and Mueble gordo | Fat Furniture, 2003 [160], in which a dresser seems to grow fat, the three pieces of furniture also provide a frozen study of the process of infiltration or infection, an operation paradigmatically to be found in Bloque infectado | Infected Block, 2003 [94]. The seemingly smooth design objects thus become a coded symbol of the interaction between the solid and the liquid.

The Contradictory Nature of Things; or, Tropical Political Los Carpinteros in conversation with Gudrun Ankele and Daniela Zyman

Daniela Zyman: I

would like to start the conversation with the question of transfor­ mation/mutation/metamorphosis, which is a central theme in your work. What are the rules that govern these processes of transformation?

The transformation happens on two levels—sometimes in the mor­ phology and physicality of an object and at other times in its meaning, interpretation, and function. So there are different strategies at work.

Los Carpinteros:

DZ: On a physical level, we have modifications in size, texture, material, and ­solidity, right? Things that are usually small become very large, solid becomes fluid, or the solid is in a state of aggregation or explosion…

LC: And

nontransparent objects are clear, solid materials morbid, or the upright is col­ lapsed or fallen… Sometimes we are producing a parody of “good design” or design in general. So our work studies quotidian objects and their functions. We are ob­ sessed with utility and the meanings that come from functionality. We are concerned with the way human beings create utilities, how companies create a huge universe of utilities and necessities, of things that people seemingly need. (In fact, they need something totally different.) Many pieces derive from the alteration or the exaggera­ tion of the use of a piece of furniture or another element that we habitually use. We have discovered that, ­hidden in the functionality of things that man fabricates, lie many fissures that betray his thoughts and conduct.

Morphing DZ: This

is what we have called material displacement or, to use the chapter’s title, “Morphing,” which picks up on the idea of a seamless transition between one physi­ cal state and another, an in-betweenness. This form of transformation can take more surreal shapes, as in the psycho-buildings or psycho-structures.

Gudrun Ankele: According to Freud, dreamwork condensates events and objects, dis­ places them, and translates them into other forms or figures. Dreams transform real­ ity, and sometimes the line between these two realms is blurred. Following that trace, the objects and drawings conceived and transformed by Los Carpinteros lead us into the realm of the night, of sleep, and of dreaming. So perhaps your objects could be understood as an inventory of dreams, an archive of dreamwork, a book of dreams?

LC: Beautiful…

yes, we have worked a lot with beds and the mirroring, doubling, and endless repetitions. We like dreaming and sleeping, but it’s not just in our ­imagination.

In Casa de tazas | House of Cups, 2005 [258], the uncanny combination of a building with teacups sticking out of the windows is actually a reference to an existing building, the Casa de las Conchas in Salamanca. And there are many more examples that relate to the everyday.

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DZ: This

is how Martin Kippenberger understood psycho-structures: a lamppost that is not straight and upright but twisted and warped acts as if there was a psychological and affective nature of the object, an animated form of indeterminacy that questions the pure functionality of things.

But in your work this idea of the animate goes even further. At times we also encounter the effect of an agent, like a biological or chemical agent, an infectious or toxic substance that creates distortions, mutations, or pathologies. Or the effect of a cell in a system that starts to mutate.

LC: In Estantería I–III | Shelves I–III, 2008 [162, 163] ,

for instance, something starts to grow from inside, an inner distortion or a certain type of pressure. We relate very much to the idea of contamination or infection. This is how ideologies work, but in Cuba the political infection is more tropical, tropical political—in the sense of a certain ­travesty or transvestism. We like things to be dressed up, colorful, vibrant, and lighter.

The chapter “Politically Infected Objects” plays with this concept. The political twist affects the meaning of things but always with a humoristic turn. When all things are aligned and point in one direction, just like the bicycles or barbecues (Gran marcha hacia la izquierda | Great March to the Left, 2006 [90] , and El gran picnic | The Great Picnic, 2008 [96/97] ), this doesn’t happen naturally. They are propelled in one direction by something…

Language and Signs DZ: So

we register a change in the semiotic field, and in fact on all its levels—that is the irritation in the relationship between signs and their referents, the signified, within their formal structures and in relation to the viewers. I would like to bring up Roland Barthes and his work on photography and art, which, according to Victor Burgin, “pays attention both to the ‘fraying’ of his text (where ‘his’ meanings ‘edge out’ into the sea of intertextuality), and to their structure (consistency of analytic ‘motifs,’ and their patterning, repetitions, transformations, across the totality of his work).” Here we have again the two levels that we have been addressing, the level of meaning and interpretation (the intertextual) and the structural or morphologic treatment of things.

LC: Most

of the time it is not one or the other, but both strategies are in effect at the same time. We work on the meaning and on the structure of objects. It is important to us that our works are not understood as fantasies or pure imagination. We think a lot about how things are made, what they are made of, and we try to realize them in three-dimensional form. Drawings are a way of thinking together, but the realized objects are just another level of reality.

DZ: Barthes

also frequently referred to the enigma of codes and, on a different level, to the nuances of the double entendre, which fractures the traditional ­conception of signification. The double entendre, or ambiguous figure of speech, and the

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­ alentendu, the misunderstanding or mishearing, are both plays on words that comm bine two ­distinct and incompatible meanings that must be entertained simultaneously.

I find these approaches in your work both on a visual but also on a textual level, in the way you chose your titles and how the titles relate to the visual images.

LC: Indeed,

our works often rely on these resonances and dissonances between verbal and visual content or phrases or plays on words, which are in fact difficult to translate.

This way we can introduce abstract concepts that are unstable or contradictory. We allow the titles to reveal something, a certain form of meaning or to subvert the official meaning that people attribute to things. For instance, the work Homenaje al Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional | Tribute to the Sandinista National Liberation Front

(FSLN), 2008 —clearly politically infected—consists of two barbecues, a red and a black one. But sometimes the titles are just descriptive, it is what it is: a bed is a bed, a wall is a wall. We create a sculptural situation, and people can interpret it. In the beginning of the avant-garde, titles were like: “A Portrait with an Apple,” very descriptive…

DZ: Another

reference: Martin Heidegger has written extensively about the thingness of things (“das Ding”) and what I remember acutely is his statement that the thingness lies in the object’s power and ability to “gather” other elements to it. And by this he did not mean the aura of the object, nor its fetishistic or idolic disposition.

This gathering, as I like to see it, is a surplus, something through which we as humans ­create a world charged with significance but nonetheless present in its materiality.

LC: The

work is still very much related to our daily experiences in Havana and the kind of realities that have been emerging there since the embargo—which was a period of extreme scarcity but at the same time has triggered the ingenuity of people—and we have been observing this very closely. So the things people produce are not just things, or commodities, but are loaded and charged with stories, realities, inventiveness.

There are two lines of change in the notion of functionality in Cuba. There is the official line, which takes the country club to convert it into an art school, or takes buildings for public use. That was an official answer to the situation, but there is also the issue of the people, the spontaneous and imaginative appropriations.

GA: So you mean that you "found" some of the methods you apply on objects in the economic and political context of Cuba, in daily life, like tactics of adaptation and camou­ flage? And it seems that by taking these tactics extremely serious and bringing it to sometimes absurd extremes, you have started to invent a reality that at that ­moment was unreal but thinkable. You construct objects of an unreal reality, a sometimes seemingly nonsensical utopia, thus posing questions about what this other world might look like, how it could work, and what it would enable.

DZ: The

reinterpretation of signs is obviously an extremely political act as well, right?

I mean, it’s political on a completely different level, and it’s a way of subverting a ­system and of appropriating it. LC: What the revolution did was to evacuate all the 167

symbols of the old regimes, the logos of the banks or the logos of the big enterprises, like Mobil Oil—all these things. And there is no trace of these. Havana is completely signless in this regard.

DZ: That’s

interesting also in historic terms because in Cuba the communist change happened relatively late compared with Europe. The European situation is an immediate postwar situation. Europe was destroyed in the war and divided up along ideological lines. It was in a completely different state of development and just entering the phase of postwar redevelopment. In the situation of Havana, there was an enormous accumulation of capital and U.S. investment during the forties and fifties. There were the banks, the casinos, large infrastructure projects, the Mafia—and excessive private wealth, the villas, the big pools.

LC: And

modernism had happened already.

DZ: Yes.

And modernism had had its impact, actually what we would call the second wave of modernism. So I think that’s actually a quite interesting point to remember.

But in Havana, just like everywhere else, gentrification has become a huge issue, right? And now a lot of these old villas and palaces, especially in Havana Vieja, are cleaned up and touristified. You were saying that just six or seven years ago the Malecón (sea promenade) was in a complete state of ruin and now it is a beautifully restored street.

LC: Yes,

but at the same time there are all the homeless in Havana, who go at night to the bus terminal. If you go the bus terminal at midnight, you will find all the old people who have nowhere else to sleep. But they are there pretending to be waiting for a bus. It’s crowded with people. And there is a very bad situation with housing.

That’s why we wanted to include in this publication photographs of the real city in Havana: to explain certain things. We want to include real documentation.

Water Objects DZ: You

have been using "water" as an element in many works—the water monuments or the pools or drawings such as those of the waterfall or water (which are of course always articulations of the recipients, the buckets or the pools in which the water is collected). But then there is also the element of "liquefaction," which is the main morphologic operation applied in the Fluidos series. Can you talk a bit about this element?

LC: The

water had and has countless significations. In our work it is very recurrent, but we approach this element from different perspectives: in its relation to the object and the game between the form of the container and the water contained, or with another approach closer to social commentary, as in the series of pools. (You have to keep in mind that in our country, surrounded by the sea, to have a pool or to have

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access to one was for many years, and still is, seen as a class privilege.) In the case of Espejos de agua | Water Mirrors, 2001 [354/355], the water substitutes for paper but also functions as a mirror with the image of the one who is looking at the tables. In the case of these tables, the water has nothing to do with the social; the water here is used as an element of connection, of reflection, of circulation, etc. This contemplative act of the lights is related to a type of projection on an intellectual level of the image of the creator himself, because creation in some sense is an act of narcissism.

DZ: The

setup of the table reminds me of the working and drafting tables that architects use, referring to the idea and role of the craftsman (before the computer began to dominate the design process) who spent incredibly long hours creating precise blueprints—huge, perfect drawings (also alluding to the drawings that you still produce—meticulous, technical, three-dimensional visualizations). Is there a connection, and if so, is there some nostalgia or some parody of nostalgia in the work?

LC: The

work in some way is quite nostalgic, considering the way of drawing in a digital era. It's not directly related to the way we draw, but to the way other people, other disciplines face creation. The piece connects itself with a creative act that is much more direct (less computerized) and, because of that, more “human.” The possible parody is much more related to the human creative act.

DZ: There

is a rather long quotation from one of the older articles on your website that I would like to use here since I think it really describes very accurately and beautifully the sense of absurdity and transgression in one key work, Fluido | Fluid, 2003 [146]:

Fluido (Fluid) … is a disturbing vision of what we tend to think of as a road. Departing from a paradoxical meaning, almost a visual wordplay, Los Carpinteros have made a synthesis of a highway and its opposite in a single structural element. … Los Carpinteros use the fluid highway (or the water-filled table, or the coffeepot plantation) to opt for a philosophical and critical commentary of things, slowly pushing their works toward a realm of visual entrapments. With overflowing ingeniousness they crumble absurdities, explore discords, test incompatibilities, rebuff arguments, suggest antipodes, and dispense multiple explanations.

In every human act, in every corner of nature, there is a paradox susceptible to analysis. The moral of Los Carpinteros is confined to a sketch note, to an outline of the contradictory nature of things, to engaging the viewers as they pass” (Corina Matamoros Tuma).

Pools GA: And

then of course, there are the pools.

LC: In

light of the processes of liquefaction and other water transformations, we developed a curiosity about swimming pools. In Cuba we have a lot crazy swimming pools. People use the swimming pool for anything: to breed animals, to grow plants, to live in. They make beautiful apartments with wooden floors. They also divide swimming pools for two families, and one raises animals, while the other is still using it as a fountain or as a pool. So there is a lot of crazy imagination.

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Actually, there is a famous swimming pool–house that was turned into a hotel, the ­Hotel Washington. It’s in the center of the city. It is accessed by ladders. And then they have a little terrace and then from this terrace people enter the rooms.

DZ: You

are talking about the sorts of transformation in the urban or architectural fabric caused by social transformation. This is related not so much to the idea of failure or dysfunction, but to the fact that the social class that used to support a certain use is no longer there. So what do you do with an object that is particularly difficult to remove? You transform its use. You basically transform its signification and make something else out of it.

LC: It’s

very easy to take a space, a house, and to mutilate it. When a certain social class moves to a new area, they leave behind a lot of empty space, which is appropriated by the new social class that moves in. This is what has happened in Cuba. And we have all these beautiful houses where people are giving new names and new functionalities to things. When the revolution took power, the rich population of Cuba fled the country and what they left behind was like a spaceship. In the fifties, Havana was a pretty sophisticated city.

Túneles populares LC: There

is a series of photographs of these structures that are called the túneles populares. In Cuba we have these tunnels that were constructed for the war that we were supposed to have with the United States. But they result from a projection, from a national trauma: there was never a declared war. You find them all around the city, in fact, the city is perforated by these structures, and every neighborhood had to build its own tunnels. So basically we all were involved in the construction of our own tunnels. And it was not clear whether it was our own tunnel or our own tomb.

But the intriguing part of the story is that the construction of the tunnels was a strategy and not really a preventive or protective measure for a war. They had no function whatsoever. It was the strategy to keep people together working on something. So after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the government created this project to build all these tunnels around the whole country for a war in which we weren’t going to participate. We were fascinated with this collective psychological situation of tunnels…

We want to publish our drawing Túneles populares | The People’s Tunnels, 2002 [44], ­together with our photographs of the túneles populares [see album 319–324]. The tunnels in our drawing are out of the ground; they are tunnels without the dirt. So we are trying to guess how these things look from the inside.

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Watchtower GA: This

is really interesting because in many of your works there is this aspect of bringing people together. Of course, it is an aspect of public housing, as, for example, in Alto parlante – Cohiba | Loudspeaker – Cohiba, 2007 [270], but also with arenas (­P iscina arena | Arena Pool, 2004 [189] ) or through sound (La gente | The People, 2008 [262] ). In other drawings you depict a panoptical situation of controlling and disciplining people, as in your takes on the Presidio Modelo, the panoptical building of the model prison in Cuba, or Torres de vigía | Watchtowers, 2002 [51]. Like the tunnels, they also relate to the situation of war and the collective.

LC: They’re

not regular watchtowers. Normally the people who occupy watchtowers are hidden from the civilian situation. You can’t see the person who is watching you…

GA: So

that you cannot attack this person, right?

LC: The

transparency of our watchtowers produces a very vulnerable situation, and it’s almost the reverse. Instead of watching people, it’s the people who watch you.

So when Watchtowers first opened at the São Paulo Biennial in 2002, a lot of people climbed up there. And it really created a very strange situation. This body of people in these high, transparent cabins questioned the very utility of the towers.

GA: So your construction somehow takes up a real watchtower but adds some transparency and a few new elements that transform the use, the function, and thus the meaning?

LC: Yes,

we bring in transparency, which allows one to observe and to be observed at the same time. And we made them in very clear green polycarbonate.

Downtown DZ: The

relationship between the collective and architecture is a topic that we can continue to explore in the series Downtown, 2002–3 [56]. This group of sculptures, consisting of six pieces, is inspired by the design of contemporary buildings. Each one of these constructions, conceived as perfectly usable furniture, erases the limits "artdesign," "art-object," "sculpture-architecture,” increasing, through this categorical confusion, the semantic content of the work.

LC: When

we showed this work in the Bienal do Mercosul in 2003, the reaction was extremely strong. People thought the piece was showing the suffering and sadness of Cubans.

GA: The LC: Not

sadness? It being a prison or something similar?

a prison, more like these crypts where you put the remains of bodies.

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DZ: A

cemetery?

LC: No,

in Havana, after two years, they burn you and put you in a box in a drawer. So there is a huge archive of dead things. And the Brazilians interpreted the work in this sense, being a huge death city. That was a beautiful interpretation.

GA: What

are the functions of these buildings? There is of course Embajada rusa [56], the Russian Embassy, but the others?

LC: We

took buildings that have these particular sculptural aspects. We chose the buildings based on their shapes.

DZ: But

the Russian Embassy is also a very important building in Havana, if not the most important building in the city for a while. They built it after the missile crisis.

It was once a formidable symbol of Soviet power in Cuba and home to hundreds of diplomats.

LC: Yes,

it is. But we also liked it because it has a very symbolic appearance, which is like a sword, the Excalibur sword in Havana. The Focsa Building is like a huge book that opens to the Malecón. It’s public housing, so it has a totally different function.

Someca [56] was inspired by the Miami Tower by I. M. Pei, which has this half-circle shape. It’s a very famous building also. And we liked it very much because on one side, it’s one thing, very flat, and the other side is totally round. And there is the building that we call Cuchillo | Knife [56] because it has this very narrow angle.

DZ: And

they all have exactly the same material and finish and so on? You have transformed some of the well-known landmarks into finely crafted chests of drawers, as in other related works with cabinets that take the shape of functional objects and structures—a grenade, a water tank, a coffee pot—so the original significance and purpose of the building are obliterated, and they become something blatantly ambivalent.

LC: In

a way we were playing with the relatively of spaces: which space contains what.

What is the container for which content? This relates to ideas of proportion, scaling, order. Everything is laid out so that something (larger) contains something (smaller).

The universe contains the systems. The solar systems, then this system contains our solar system, then the planet, and then the countries, and then the cities, and then the neighborhoods, the buildings, houses. And the houses contain furniture, and the furniture contains little things that you put in the drawer, and this little box, it contains all the jewels, and like that. It’s a very crazy idea about content. We are playing with the relatively of the content.

In this case, we put the building in a very strange situation so that it is now inside another building, inside a space. And the buildings take human size, almost. They are all about two meters, right? Almost like a human shape, and they have their own small space. And suddenly they work like pieces of furniture and wood.

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DZ: And

the single apartments become the drawers, which you can open and close…

LC: It’s

a very simple idea. I like this situation where you have a very simple idea and you really create a desire to make a reality, and you make it.

DZ: So

in some ways after this you stopped working in wood for some time until wood reappears in Sala de Lectura | Reading Room, 2010 [278–281].

Becoming Los Carpinteros GA: But your handling of wood has completely changed if you compare it with the ­period before 2003, right?

LC: At

the beginning of our collaboration, the work was really inspired by the local situation in Cuba. At the time Havana was dilapidated, and the restoration of Old Havana had not yet started. We were slowly losing this beautiful history, and the government was kind of substituting all that with Russian aesthetics. Our work represented some sort of nostalgia for the old times.

So we were playing with this idea of recuperating the skills of the craftsman. You know, the old guilds. So that’s why at the beginning we were playing as if we were three carpenters.

GA: And your work showed clear references to Cuba’s colonial history, an aspect which has now seemingly disappeared. Since 2003 the focus of your work has shifted to address issues that no longer center around the question of identity but are concerned with rather philosophical questions on the nature of meaning, the relationship of object to text, and on the expectation of this relationship. The language of subversion you applied turned into a disruptive language that seems to act more subtle but nevertheless complicates the relation between aesthetics and politics.

LC: Over

time, while working together as a group, we really melted somehow—we flattened the individual, historic aspects of our work, and it became a language and a tool. So we couldn’t tell people any more that we were recuperating the old carpentry, because that was already done. So we melted this into one single language.

I think we told you this before already: our name—no, our collaborative idea—came after a collection of poems by Borges called El otro, el mismo (The Other, the Same; 1969).

DZ: Yes,

I remember, and it’s very beautiful. But this is not a contradiction to the idea of the carpenter, the guild. The individual carpenter in a guild or in a workshop does not necessarily have his own style, but they collectively have a language, which is unified, or flattened, as you said. I think this is not a contradiction. Or the stonemasons working on a cathedral were all working on one big idea and not in an individual style.

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LC: And

it was good because the environment where we were born was contaminated with the political and a certain form of activism. And this engendered very bad art. Art that wanted only to offend or the opposite, some folklorist, Afro-Cuban production, whatever. So we kind of designed this identity in order to survive in this environment.

DZ: We

called this the subversion of the notion of the carpenter in the sense that you are doubling the identity form, you are carpenters, and you are not just carpenters, not at all. You’re sneaking inside the persona, but you’re just using a certain element of it, almost as a cover, to achieve different goals. And by doing this, you can stay out of a certain discourse, out of the political (in the sense in which you have defined it), for instance, but you are also being in it. The mask that you have chosen creates a clear identification, and it becomes very difficult to read which agency is being masked.

LC: That’s

a perfect point. The performance we delivered as being a guild was so effective that people started calling us Los Carpinteros. We didn’t call ourselves Los Carpinteros. So they thought we were Los Carpinteros.

GA: The image of the preindustrial artisan, which marked your earlier work, can also be read as a nostalgic reference to counteract the idea of alienation and to introduce a romantic aspect of authenticity. Today you seem to focus far more on constructing and inventing objects that lack historical references as visible as in your earlier objects. Those were often finely handcrafted and made of wood, while today you rather use more industrial materials like PVC in the Patas de Rana | Flippers, 2010 [134/135], or polycarbonate for the Watchtowers.

Cold Studies DZ: What

was the starting point for the Cold Studies series? Is it a reflection of a particular disaster? It seems as if it was a three-dimensional translation of a photo­ graphic image. Are you using photography in any way as working material? Or is it rather related to works such as Risk Situation or La siesta , in which you create these odd situations of precariousness, of balance, of stable instability?

LC: It

doesn’t reflect any disaster in particular. The work pretends to be the destiny of a visual registration of a dramatic event—just like a photograph or a purely aesthetic game. The possible metaphor of the work could be situated in our attitude, distant and cold in front of an enormous disastrous event—the same attitude people today have in the face of disasters.

I don’t know how this series really came about, but it was something strange that we wanted to do, to create a sort of situation in which you can see the action stopping at one point. Let’s say, to hammer a piece of marble and to represent all this powder emanating from it. We finally ended up doing the wall of Frío estudio del desastre | Cold Study of Disaster, 2005 [220/221] , which is a piece of construction. We don’t like to 174

call it the wall because it seems like the Berlin Wall. We were just doing a fragment of a house. In Cuba they make houses of cinder blocks.

DZ: It’s

important to say that it’s not the story of destruction, but it’s a representation of the frozen moment. I think all action really starts with this idea of freezing the moment almost like in photography.

LC: Yeah.

It’s more about the story than the disasters per se… We wanted the public to be in the privileged situation where you are able to analyze the situation from within, in a close-up.

DZ: It’s like those photographs of milk drops that hit a surface and then you get this crown of drops that make beautiful patterns…

LC: Yes, and there are a lot of photographs of destroyed walls as well. But the photographs are not three-dimensional. And that’s the privilege that you offer to the public, the privilege of being inside the situation, as if time stood still. I’ve seen this many times: when the public goes through this piece, that this is what they do. They try to get inside the situation of the Cold Study.

Sometimes they ask us: how do you do this? We didn’t—we have no experience with explosions. We never did one. We know how to do this because it’s in our mind. It’s in the press and the newspapers. It’s everywhere. You don’t need to invent anything— we’ve got the skills already.

LC: And

I think the chapter should be called this.

DZ: Cold

Studies.

LC: Cold

Studies.

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morphing

178

morphing

Morpheus is the name of the Greek god of dreams. Ovid, in his ­Metamorphoses, describes him as the son of Sleep; Hesiod, as son of Nyx, the goddess of the night. His name is derived from the Greek word morphe, which translates as “form, shape, beauty, outward appearance.” Morpheus is said to have the ability to take any human’s form and is understood as “shaper of dreams.” More recently, the figure of Morpheus appeared in the 1999 movie The Matrix, in which he is the leader of a team of free humans and enables the protagonist, Neo, to wake up from his "sleep" (see also Eugenio Valdés Figueroa’s text at the end of this chapter).

In Los Carpinteros’ oeuvre, several modes of shape-shifting are at work: there is the melting or liquefaction of structures, which starts a process of transformation and shows objects loosing their shape without having found a new one (yet). And then there is the rather structural process of morphing. Morphing is known as a special effect in live action and animated motion pictures in which an image changes (or morphs) into another through a seamless transition. Most often it is used to depict one person turning into another through technological means or as part of a fantasy or surreal sequence. In Los ­Carpinteros’ works, the process of morphing, of changing shape, establishes an unsettling relationship between form and function and is repeatedly applied. It results in objects and architectural or sculptural structures such as tools that become houses (as in Cuchillo de mesa | Table Knife, 2007 [179] ; Vegetales orgánicos | Organic Vegetables, 2008 [180/181] ; Casa en forma de alicate | Pliers-shaped House, 2003 [183] ), helmets that become monuments [184–187], or city maps that become sandals [204, 205]. Through this strategy of changing shapes, ­functions, and meanings, Los Carpinteros take up the “spirit of invention … displayed by ordinary Cubans in [their] daily battle for survival in the parallel social realm. … What still survives intact [after the collapse of Cuba’s Soviet-subsidized economy] is the ingenuity to make do in a time of perennial shortages.”1 Whereas in Ovid’s Metamorphoses the “original” form of those who undergo transformations is clear, in Los Carpinteros’ morphings it is not possible to say whether a bridge becomes chocolate or the other way around (Puente almendrado | Almond Bridge, 2008 [228/229] ). The process is not linear but rather circular; it is the blurring of different forms, of different functions, in which both lose their “origin” and become a gesture toward the infinite, as in Cama | Bed, 2007 [344], in which the infinite seems to function in a dreamlike poetics, or in Complejo Martí | Martí Complex, 2007 [104/105] , in which in a very literal transformation a sports stadium becomes a place for military training.

The morphed object in Los Carpinteros’ oeuvre is thus dramatic and theatrical; it performs a twisted and delirious role in the repertoire

of the everyday. Not only does it allow for a cross-programming of functionalities—a bed that is a roller coaster (La montaña rusa | The Roller Coaster, 2008 [343] ) or a highway (Cama express way | Expressway Bed, 2006 [345] ), a pool as an aircraft carrier (Portaaviones | Aircraft Carrier, 2005 [119, 121] )—but it also invokes a twisted understanding of the notion of objecthood. To borrow from Rem Koolhaas, the delirious abolishes the idea of the program, the pre-edited functionality of design and planning, evoking a “mythical laboratory for the invention and testing of a revolutionary lifestyle.” The cover illustration of the first edition of Koolhaas’s Delirious New York shows the Chrysler and Empire State buildings morphed into human figures cuddling in a comfortable double bed. It is a space “where the world is completely fabricated by man, so that it absolutely coincides with his desires.”2 The craftsmen and fabricators thus are not only involved in the construction of the utilitarian but also produce the singularities in which dream, desire, and delirium infuse the everyday. The everyday is thus shaped as an oneiric space (possibly the reason why Los Carpinteros have created so many bed-sculptures) that produces utmost proximity, “proxemic” objects that create a minimum dialectic of distance and need (most immediate objects symbolizing the territory of the home, furniture, the cell, the living space). As the artists explain: “We are obsessed with utility and the meanings that come from utility. We are concerned with the way human beings create utilities, how companies create a huge universe of utilities and necessities, of things that ­people seemingly need. In fact, they need something totally different.”3

1. Marilyn Zeitlin, “Los Carpinteros Updated,” Afterall, no. 9 (2004): 76.

2. Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 242.

3. Los Carpinteros, interview with Barbara Horvath, Kunsthaus Graz, February 28, 2008.

179

Cuchillo de Mesa Table Knife, 2007 Diptych 71 × 200 cm | 28 × 78 3/4 in.

The Cleveland Museum of Art / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

180 morphing

Vegetales orgánicos Organic vegetables, 2008 Diptych 76 × 224 cm | 29 7/8 × 88 1/4 in.

Private Collection / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

181

182 morphing

estudio de Paredes de una Fábrica de Muebles Study for walls of a furniture factory, 2003 130 × 200 cm | 51 1/4 × 78 3/4 in.

Private Collection

In many of their works, Los Carpinteros infuse the shape of an object into architectural structures and vice versa. In the case of Estudio de paredes de una fábrica de muebles | Study for the Walls of a Furniture Factory the walls of the factory are ­conceived in the shape of pliers, using a tool as a symbol of the fabrication processes at work inside the structures. Casa en forma de alicate | Pliers-shaped House applies a similar shape for a family home, with the dining table and the living room placed in the pliers and the sleeping rooms in the grips, which form a patio with a swimming pool.

The architectures that emerge from this morphing can be related to the typology that Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, after “learning from Las Vegas” and its prevalent typology of the “decorated shed,” called the “Duck.”16 This type of architecture aims at representing the function of the building, at incorporating and thus symbolizing what it is: the Duck describes a building that has so reduced itself in importance in comparison to its sign that it has actually become the sign. The process of ­signification in Los Carpinteros’ buildings and objects plays exactly with this potential for a meticulous absurdity, creating a world in which forms that are at first glance so easily understandable and humorous develop the potential to alter and dismantle what we know and expect from things, percolating through every level of reality.

183

Casa en Forma de Alicate Pliers-shaped house, 2003 130 × 200 cm | 51 1/4 × 78 3/4 in.

Private collection

184 morphing

Retiro Retreat, 2008 76 × 111.5 cm 29 7/8 × 43 7/8 in.

185

Retiro, Perfil Retreat, side view, 2008 Diptych 76 × 163 cm | 29 7/8 × 64 1/4 in.

Collection of Stephen King / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

186 morphing

Edificio aerodinámico Aerodynamic building, 2008 76 × 112.5 cm | 29 7/8 × 44 1/4 in.

Private Collection, London

187

Casco de bicicleta Bicycle helmet, 2008 114.5 × 203 cm | 45 1/8 × 79 7/8 in.

Courtesy Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo

188 morphing

Anfiteatro Bermuda #2 Bermuda shorts amphitheater #2, 2004 90.5 Ă— 133 cm | 35 5/8 Ă— 52 3/8 in.

189

Piscina Arena Arena pool, 2004 158.5 × 184 cm | 62 3/8 × 72 3/8 in.

The Mugrabi Collection

190

Morphing

Within the lavish group of drawings that depict architectural structures, Pared ­escaladora | Climbing Wall , Big Cheese [192] , and Torre parmesana | Parmesan Tower [193], all 2009, take on a rather special, outlandish character. They are towers, skyscrapers of sorts, yet their hybridity—the merging of two unlikely, anomalous icono­ graphies—totally obscures their practical function and places them within the hyperreal realm of fairy tales and theme parks. An anomalous image reacts to the code of language by proposing an as yet unthought-of, fictional correlation. A climbing wall for bouldering (possibly a pun on “buildering,” the perilous practice of free climbing on architectural facades or public buildings) is prepared with blue and white canisters cast into the concrete tower as grips. These containers are typically used for the storage of chemicals but get recycled in Cuba, along with smaller jugs, as water ­reservoirs. The possible slippery surface in case of spills renders them rather strange obstacles, shifting the recreational characteristic of a climbing wall into a precarious situation of failure.

Big Cheese and Torre parmesana represent two renderings of a cheese grater tower, designed as a multistory building in which the graters function as windows and balconies. Typologically related to the fantastic Edificio tazas | Cup Building, 2005 [358] , adorned with rows of white teacups, these drawings take their inspiration from ­Plateresque decor, the flamboyant style of early Renaissance architecture later exported to the Spanish colonies in the Americas. The Casa de las Conchas in ­Salamanca, a classic example of Plateresque, is decorated with more than three hundred shells applied to the bare facade, combining straightforward symbolism (shell of the order of Santiago) with an overall capricious approach to decoration and detail.

The exuberant and even fantastic quality of these architectural designs, the passion for freely borrowed (historic) decorative motifs, places these edifices in the realm of hyperreality. Hyperreality, according to Umberto Eco, is the world of "the authentic fake," in which imitations don't merely replicate reality, but try to redesign it in ways in which "within its magic enclosure it is fantasy that is absolutely reproduced."17 ­Hyperreality has been used widely as a significant paradigm to explain current ­cultural conditions, popular culture, and the symbolic arenas that they produce. The themed environments of the hyperreal break down the ability to distinguish between real and fantasy, shifting the codes in far-fetched travesties and opening up the ­public arena for entertainment and pleasure.

Pared escaladora Climbing wall, 2009 180 × 114 cm 70 7/8 × 44 7/8 in.

Private Collection / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

191

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left: Big Cheese, 2009 180 × 114 cm 70 7/8 × 44 7/8 in.

Private Collection / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York opposite: Torre Parmesana Parmesan Tower, 2009 158.5 × 113.5 cm 62 3/8 × 44 3/4 in.

Saúl and Olga Faskha

193

194 morphing

Catedrales Cathedrals, 2005 brick, cement 3 parts, 130 × 109 × 109 cm each 51 1/4 × 42 7/8 × 42 7/8 in. each

195

Catedral II Cathedral II, 2003 240 × 140 cm | 94 1/2 × 55 1/8 in.

Private collection

Catedral #2 Cathedral #2, 2003 240 × 140 cm | 94 1/2 × 55 1/8 in.

Private collection

196 morphing

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the withdrawal of the large foreign investment that it had provided for its COMECON ally, the Cuban economy rapidly plunged into a deep depression known as the Special Period. The tightening of the U.S. trade embargo in 1992, government control over nearly every sector of the economy, food rationing, and chronic shortages as well as insufficient housing created a subsistence culture. The main features of a subsistence economy are the self-production of everything possible to satisfy one’s needs and the recycling of any scrap or remnant deemed to be potentially useful. As Luis Camnitzer has written: "Recycling was present in everything from food to buildings. With admirable ingenuity, food remnants would be presented again in meals to follow rather than going to waste. At the other extreme, buildings in a pompous style inherited from the Batista regime were redesigned internally to serve more useful purposes. A building partially constructed under Batista to house the National Bank was finished under Castro as the biggest hospital in Havana, the Hermanos Ameijeiras. This policy, while making economical sense, sacrifices the development of an official architectural language.

New government buildings are variations of the international style nicely spiced with tropical vegetation and, mostly, respectful of the human scale. Fascist wedding-cake style buildings constructed in honor of Batista's glory are now used for socially useful functions such as hospitals. The symbolic communication of architecture becomes muddled, particularly for those future generations with no memory to be used as a corrective tool. The problem does not exist because of a lack of awareness but because of a scarcity of funds."18 The concept of recycling and the inventiveness involved in making something out of nothing or giving an object a use beyond its prescribed function are well-elaborated topics in the work of Los Carpinteros. It appears in the appropriation processes inherent in the refunctioning of pools, in the hybrid compartment building–furniture pieces, and in the multilayered rescaling of bricks, which are understood as forms and elements of public housing, as in 4 sitios de quema | 4 sites for burning and more elementally in Parte de parte | Part of a Part, 2008 [216/217] and Bloque de bloques parcialmente destruido (vista 3/4) | Block of Blocks Partially Destroyed (3/4 View), 2008 [209].

It is also hauntingly portrayed in the photographic series Túneles populares | which the artists have contributed for the albums reproduced in this publication.

The P ­ eople's Tunnels, 1999 [319–324] ,

197

4 sitios de quema 4 sites for burning, 2008 130 Ă— 230 cm | 51 1/4 Ă— 90 5/8 in.

Private Collection, Panama

198 morphing

Expedit, TV Storage Unit, 2006 Diptych 102.5 × 133.5 cm | 40 3/8 × 52 5/8 in.

199

Armario Familiar Familiar shelves, 2006 Diptych 112.5 × 152 cm | 44 1/4 × 59 3/4 in.

Collection Sarah Broughton and John Rowland / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

200 morphing

Carretera de tornillos Highway of screws, 2003 75.5 × 106 cm | 29 3/4 × 41 3/4 in.

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

201

Transporte de Agua (Camión) Water transportation (truck), 2005 71 × 100 cm | 28 × 39 3/8 in.

Private Collection

202 morphing

Flip-flops, the type of sandals that are ubiquitous not only in tropical and southern regions but also throughout the world as recreational footwear, are a recurrent motif in Los Carpinteros’ works. Their simple construction—a flat sole with a Y-shaped strap—has quite a long tradition: the Japanese version (zo ¯ri) was originally made of straw or other natural materials and worn with traditional clothing. But also a letter to the editor of the New York Times from 1861, during the U.S. Civil War, mentioned poorly equipped soldiers wearing “flip-flaps”: “The men were not in uniform, but very poorly dressed,—in many cases with flip-flap shoes. The business-like air with which they marched rapidly through the deep mud of the Third Avenue was the more remarkable." Later the letter reads: “The men have not yet been supplied with shoes, and yet still march flip-flop. Why?”19 The democratizing character of flip-flops and their massive presence in countries where the cost of labor is low turn them into a captivating surface onto which to project urban formations, especially fragments of aerial views of the city of Havana.

Coco solo, 2004 [204] , represents a neighborhood in Havana, as does Fanguito, 2004 [204] (literally “Little Gutter”), named after a poverty-stricken neighborhood on the Almendares River with a population of more than five thousand living in shanties and provisional housing structures (see Márgenes del Río Almendares | Banks of the Almendares River, 2003 [205] ). Captured in a remarkable sequel of the Noticiero ICAIC Latinoamericano, the famous Cuban newsreels initiated by the Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos, directed by the Jorge Luis Sánchez (1990), El Fanguito is shown as a symbol that embodies the drastic and impoverished living conditions in Havana and constitutes the site from which the Cuban filmmaker questions the ability of the state to provide proper housing.20 The Almendares River forms the boundary between Vedado and Miramar and is part of Havana’s water supply. Although polluted by several industrial plants lining the riverbanks, the area is gradually becoming a park of great appeal (Almendares Park). Alamar, 2003 [205] is named for a district in East Havana marked by large prefab housing complexes and is considered the home of Cuban rap and hip-hop.

The edition Sandalia | Sandal, 2004, produced by the Institute for Research in Art: University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum | Graphicstudio, is the sculptural realization drawn from this series of watercolors, which fuses the form of beach sandals with relief maps. The object is produced from a rapid prototype model and cast in rubber. The right sandal depicts the neighborhood of Old Havana, the left Vedado, the low-lying land by the sea, with its classical nineteenth-century mansions.

The edition for the present monograph commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary takes up the sandals again, shifting the status of the perfectly produced model of Sandalia to wearable sandals, offering the reader special entry to the worlds of Los Carpinteros. By producing a limited edition of rubber sandals with relief maps of Havana neighborhoods on the soles, the artists adapted an ordinary object of mass production into a customized and poeticized icon that speaks of place, identity, and culture. It is the final realization of this series, which as a group maps out the various barrios, social strata, and identities of the artists’ conflicted hometown and vaguely reminds us of the obsessive mapmakers imagined by Jorge Luis Borges.

203

Sandalia sandal, 2004 Edition of 60, XXX Cast rubber 2 parts, 7 × 15 × 6.5 cm 2 3/4 × 5 3/4 × 2 1/2 in. each

204 morphing

top: Coco solo, 2004 154 × 227 cm | 60 5/8 × 89 3/8 in.

Musée national d'Art moderne – Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

bottom: Fanguito, 2004 153.5 × 228 cm | 60 3/8 × 89 3/4 in.

The Collection of Genevieve Lykes Dimmitt, On Loan to USF Contemporary Art Museum

205

top: Márgenes del Río Almendares Banks of the Almendares River, 2003 140 × 220 cm | 55 1/8 × 86 5/8 in.

The Mugrabi Collection

bottom: Alamar, 2003 140 × 220 cm 55 1/8 × 86 5/8 in.

Private collection

cold studies

208

cold studies

In the drawings and sculptural works of Los Carpinteros, operations such as changing form, morphing, or melting are applied to objects.

A contrary approach can be traced in works in which the internal structure of an object is transformed, lost, or destroyed. To borrow a concept from Adam Budak, who suggested that one can categorize these transformations on the basis of temperature, we could speak of warm and cold processes. The warm process of transformation can be seen in works in which the inner structure is lost due to a melting effect that might result from the application of heat, whereas the cold ­process is at work in breakings and blastings of objects. “Cold ­studies”—to use a term coined by the artists to refer to an unemotional, distanced, and objective mode of investigation—would thus encompass all these cold processes of destruction, complicating the notion of construction in a very specific way.

The cold processes of destruction find one realization in the breaking of materials (as in Concreto roto | Broken Concrete, 2006 [231], and Cristales verdes | Green Glass, 2005 [210/211] ), or in the breaking of objects like the bridges in Puente almendrado | Almond Bridge, 2008 [228/229] , and Puente roto | Broken Bridge, 2008 [227]. The broken cinder blocks made of cinder blocks in Bloque de bloques parcialmente destruido (vista 3/4) | Block of Blocks Partially Destroyed (3/4 View), 2008 [209] ,

and Parte de parte | Part of a Part, 2008 [216/217], additionally evoke a deserted atmosphere of archaeological ruins. Another form of cold destruction can be found in the felled towers and lighthouses that suggest a situation of powerlessness. In the case of the spills, fallen lamps, and ships, the powerless structure recalls melting processes—this bridging of cold and warm processes of destruction appears, for example, in Mucho caliente | Much Hot, 2010 [154/155]. The extreme version of a cold destruction—or possibly construction—is at work in drawings and installations such as Frío estudio del desastre, bloques | Cold Study of Disaster, Blocks, 2004 [218/219] ; Frío estudio del desastre (muebles) | Cold Study of Disaster (Furniture), 2005 [222] ; and Show room, 2008 [224, 225] that all show careful stagings of explosions.

All the precarious energies meticulously converted and visualized in the drawings of delirious morphings of objects and absurd constructions of reality are set free in the precise installation Frío estudio del desastre | Cold Study of Disaster, 2005 [220/221]. And yet the process of construction, applied in various ways in the whole world of Los Carpinteros’ objects, is also at work in this explosive moment. It is caught and frozen in this very moment of setting free all retained energies. The staged explosion does not evoke a loud ­detonation but rather produces an atmosphere of uncanny stillness, of suspended time and gravity. The description of the work in their installation manual shows the thoughts and ingredients behind that seemingly destructive moment:

A wall gets penetrated by an unknown force and shows a ballistic throw-off in one direction by attaching stone parts in a fixed position. The installation is composed of grey cinder blocks that are fixed together with mortar just in the horizontal wall joint. In the middle of the wall there is a hole, where some stones get bended out and some stone fragments even “fly out” into the room. These fragments are suspended with fishing lines and hooks from the ceiling in various positions, but in general they should follow a cone with its end at the hole of the wall. The wall has to be planar all around to strengthen the illusion of the explosion, whereas the hole and its periphery should look fragmented and like a “real explosion”. Basically in the central horizontal plane of the cone there are a lot of small stone fragments like a stardust. Bigger stones have to be fixed by up to three cords and hooks, smaller fragments can be fixed with one cord and a glue gun.1

The fragments of the exploded wall are sculpturally produced by the artists through various actions, from dropping the cinder blocks to the floor or onto one another, to cutting and chipping them with a hammer and chisel. The result should give as perfect a fiction as possible of suspended gravity and frozen time, qualities traditionally attributed to the art of photography. As T J Demos has written: The ability to play with time, to postpone it, to quicken it, is a distinctly modern ­phenomenon. … Broadly speaking, an emerging secular humanism introduced ideas of mathematical time, explored its philosophical structure and conceived the relativity of temporal experience outside of divinely orchestrated progression. Modern ­psychology soon recognized that human beings may experience time’s flow variably; that the lived sensation of duration may be manipulated. The first major rupture with traditional understandings of time occurred within visual culture arguably with the mid-nineteenth century advent of photography, which fascinated precisely because it appeared able to rescue visual appearance from the ravages of time.2

The motion of the explosion in works such as Frío estudio del ­desastre is caught in the act, whereas in drawings such as the basket­ball studies it is rendered visible, beginning with baskets ­mimicking the up-and-down dribbling movement of the ball [234–237], which is brought to an extreme in the installation Free Basket, 2010 [239]. The investigation into the time-bound movement of explosions can also find a form of a stopped-motion effect, as in Ladrillos inertes | Inert Bricks, 2004 [214] , and Tornillos | Screws, 2005 [213] , in which the objects seem to float in space and lose their relation to time and gravity. The evoked stillness, emptiness, and timelessness are taken up in the titles of drawings such as Meteoros artificiales | Artificial Meteors, 2006 [212] , ­transcending the world of Los Carpinteros to find a post–big bang universe of floating fractions.

1. Installation manual Los Carpinteros, Frío estudio del desastre, T-B A21, 2008.

2. T J Demos, “A Matter of Time,” Tate Etc., no. 9 (Spring 2007), http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue9/matteroftime.htm.

209

Bloque de Bloques Parcialmente Destruido (Vista 3/4) | Block of blocks partially destroyed (3/4 view), 2008 76 × 101.5 cm | 29 7/8 × 40 in.

Collection of Jan and Stefan Abrams / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

210 cold studies

Cristales Verdes Green glass, 2005 Diptych 71 × 200 cm | 28 × 78 3/4 in.

Courtesy Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo

211

212 cold studies

Meteoros Artificiales Artificial meteors, 2006 75.5 × 112 cm | 29 3/4 × 44 1/8 in.

Collection Vicki Satlow / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

Broken cinder blocks, bricks, pieces of glass, and screws floating in space, rendering an effect of zero gravity, are elements found within Los Carpinteros’ “cold ­studies.”

Taking up the materials used in other works for the meticulous construction of absurdly innovative objects, buildings, and architectures, these studies do not ­apply processes of merging, of infecting or infusing objects with different functions or forms, but rather bring the processes of changing shape to an extreme, evident in the operations of melting and morphing. The works focusing on a moment of suspended gravity coldly study the very moment, without time, without weight, stripped bare of seemingly all conditions and contexts. Thus we do not see what caused the explosion— whether it was an exterior force or the sudden release of internal pressure—and all that remains are pieces and splinters of material. Los Carpinteros concentrate on the aftereffect of the explosion, bringing all movement to a standstill and interrupting not only the dynamic of the blasting materials but also the dynamic of the shock waves and

213

Tornillos Screws, 2005 114 × 210 cm | 44 7/8 × 82 3/4 in.

Private Collection, Seville / Courtesy Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo

their supersonic or subsonic sounds. This paradoxical stillness is addressed in titles such as Aprovecha la calma | Make the Most of the Calm, 2004, or Ladrillos inertes | Inert Bricks, 2004 [214].

As the artists have pointed out, these works, which appear to show the aftereffect of destruction, are in fact meticulous constructions. Block by block, fragment by fragment, and detail by detail, they spare no effort in building from scratch an illusion that at no point has ever existed exactly in this form (unlike the photographic image, which mirrors reality) or has attempted to represent a reality. In this sense the “cold study” is what Charles Baudelaire called “the memory of the present,” the rendering of the fugitive, temporary, and transitory. It draws its fascination from being present, from distilling through the act of construction the accidentalness of a moment. And yet this suspended moment also implies a cosmic inertia—infinite, nearly eternal, beyond the gravitational system of terrestrial life, like debris circulating in outer space.

214 cold studies

Ladrillos Inertes Inert bricks, 2004 153 Ă— 224 cm | 60 1/4 Ă— 88 1/4 in.

Valdemarin Collection

215

Acumulación de Materiales – Ladrillos II Accumulation of materials – bricks II, 2003 75.5 × 106 cm | 29 3/4 × 41 3/4 in.

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

Parte de parte Part of a part, 2008 Triptych 200 × 343.5 cm | 78 3/4 × 135 1/4 in.

Private Collection, London

217

218 cold studies

Frío Estudio del Desastre, Bloques Cold study of disaster, blocks, 2004 Diptych 75.5 × 213 cm | 29 3/4 × 83 7/8 in.

Private Collection

219

Frío Estudio del Desastre Cold study of disaster, 2005 Cinder blocks, concrete, fishing nylon Variable dimensions Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

Los Carpinteros’ Frío estudio del desastre plays on the uncanny relationship to space as an disembodied picture of reality by presenting what appears to be a threedimensional reconstruction of a photographic image depicting an exploding wall.

Fragments from a cinder block wall and shattered household furnishings (in the more elaborate versions Estudio de muebles y bloques II | Furniture and Blocks Study II, 2006 [223] , or the apocalyptic Show Room, 2008 [224, 225] ) hang suspended in the air, while a gaping hole in the wall indicates the point of impact of the blast responsible for this domestic ground zero. The gallery visitor walks through this eerie scene as if somehow entering and navigating a two-dimensional representation, a forensic image from which we may reconstruct the specific nature of the forces unleashed by the detonation. As an image of architectural vulnerability, Frío estudio del ­desastre inevitably calls to mind pictures of the destruction of the World Trade Center, an event experienced around the world through its depictions in the media. Yet for all its evocation of a mortal disaster, Los Carpinteros’ installation conspicuously lacks any trace of human inhabitants; the space it presents is devoid of history, a frozen temporal vacuum. It hints at the way that our photographically conditioned perception limits

our experience not only of space but also of time. “With the advent of modernity time has vanished from social space,” historian Henri Lefebvre observed in his pioneering book The Production of Space (1974). "Economic space subordinates time to itself; political space expels it as threatening and dangerous (to power). … Our time, then, this most essential part of lived experience, … is no longer visible to us. … It is concealed in space, hidden under a pile of debris to be disposed of as soon as possible.”21 The installation was commissioned 2005 for the show Manipulations: On Economies of Deceit, curated by Adam Budak as part of the Prague Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2005, and were shown at 4to Salón de Arte Contemporáneo in Havana in 2005 and The Kaleidoscopic Eye: Works from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, in 2009. Budak states: “Frío Estudio del Desastre is an impressive depiction of precarious life in a state of emergency. Los Carpinteros' mise-en-scène is an ironic freeze of a critical moment, a (theatrical) ­literal explosiveness of (social) imagination and (political) urgency. Fully dramatic ­reality, on the edge of decay and confusion, wears a costume of illusion and anxiety, fully immersed in disquieting artificiality of gesture and stylistic rendering.”22

222

CHAPTER TITLE

FrĂ­o Estudio del Desastre (Muebles) Cold study of disaster (furniture), 2005 Cinder blocks, concrete, nylon fishing line, wooden dining room set Variable dimensions

223

Estudio de Muebles y Bloques II Furniture and blocks Study II, 2006 Diptych 151 × 225 cm | 59 1/2 × 88 5/8 in.

Orlando Justo Collection

224 cold studies

Show room, 2008 Cinder blocks, fishing nylon, furniture Variable dimensions Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

225

226 cold studies

The bridges in Puente roto | Broken Bridge, and Puente almendrado | Almond Bridge, 2008 [228/229] , are broken, as if shattered by an earthquake or a detonation, or maybe just broken down because they have been abandoned or are no longer maintained. In any event, they are presented at the very moment of destruction. What this destruction reveals is the inner structure of the bridges, namely, the consistency of the material used: the asphalt is full of objects, which are revealed upon closer inspection to be almonds, thus calling into question the materiality of the bridge itself. The bridges appears to be made of chocolate, a rather unsuitable material.

This idea of a material that seems to have consumed other things can be found in other works as well: the dresser that digests something that lets it grow fat (­Mueble gordo | Fat Furniture, 2003 [160] ), the shelves that take in and spit out an intruding ­bubble (Estantería I–III | Shelves I–III, 2008 [162, 163] ), the block of red bricks that is infected by black bricks (Bloque infectado | Infected Block, 2003 [94] ), and also the climbing wall made of concrete, deficiently reinforced with containers and canisters (Pared escaladora | Climbing Wall, 2009 [191] ), are examples in which materials consume other objects, changing not only their own materiality but also their ­usability.

They all show a connection to the moment of infectedness; in this twisted logic, the broken bridge can thus be understood as a symptom of an almond infection. This ­infection renders the objects dysfunctional or at least calls into question their original function and meaning. This thread connects the drawing with works like Parte de parte | Part of a Part, 2008 [216/217] and Bloque de bloques parcialmente destruido (vista 3/4) | Block of Blocks Partially Destroyed (3/4 View), 2008 [209] , in which the moment of ­destruction, of dysfunction, is also present and renders a strange Mad Max atmosphere of a ­desolate future.

Puente Roto Broken bridge, 2008 Diptych 200 × 280 cm | 78 3/4 × 110 1/4 in.

National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

227

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Puente Almendrado Almond bridge, 2008 114.5 × 222.5 cm | 45 1/8 × 87 5/8 in.

Private Collection, Geneva

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Concrete is one of the essential materials used in the works of Los Carpinteros. Like glass, bricks, and cinder blocks—but also pools, drawers and mattresses—concrete can be used for different operations and mutations of reality. At times it provides a surface for depressions—such as Huecos en el concreto | Holes in Concrete, 2005 [301], Huecos | Holes, 2005 [300] , El camino | The Road, 2003 [306]—but it can also be used as a construction material (e.g., Túneles populares | The People’s Tunnels, 2002 [44], and Bajo costo | Low Cost, 2005 [45] ) and to build and construct things like pools or the consumptive concrete wall of Pared escaladora | Climbing Wall, 2009 [191]. In the sculpture Concreto roto | Broken Concrete, 2006, a fat block of concrete is broken, seemingly as easily as if it were made from a much more fragile material. As in the study Vidrio vitro | Vitreous glass, 2003, the concrete seems to mimic the flaws or fissures of glass in an act of material appropriation.

Vidrio vitro Vitreous glass, 2003 206 × 204 cm | 81 1/8 × 80 1/4 in.

Private Collection / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

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Concreto Roto Broken concrete, 2006 Concrete Variable dimensions

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Faro Tumbado Fallen lighthouse, 2004 133 Ă— 200 cm | 52 1/4 Ă— 78 3/4 in.

The Farber Collection

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Faro Tumbado Felled lighthouse, 2006 Metal, glass, wood 710 × 160 cm | 279 1/2 × 66 7/8 in.

Tate modern, london

This sculpture of a lighthouse is made from the same construction materials that would be used for an actual lighthouse, including a functioning light system. Placed indoors or outdoors, it has to be presented lying on the ground, suggesting what the artists call a “knock-down situation” while still retaining the potential to provide orientation through its working light. As a recurring motif referring to the insular geography of Cuba as well as to Havana’s historic lighthouse, the felled lighthouse also stands for a situation that has shifted its very coordinates, to such an extent that the idea of guidance is absurd, haunted by a light that is thus able to refer only to a different reality.

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Basquet, 2008 Diptych 76.5 × 206 cm | 30 1/8 × 81 1/8 in.

Collection Donald B. Marron – Lightyear Capital, New York / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

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Bola | Ball, 2008 140.5 × 203 cm | 55 1/4 × 79 7/8 in.

Private Collection / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

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Free Basket, 2009 114 × 200 cm | 44 7/8 × 78 3/4 in.

Collection Dr. and Mrs. JC Erro / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

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Free Basket,

Los Carpinteros’ first long-term public commission, was developed for 100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art and Nature Park, an art park adjacent to and part of the Indianapolis Museum of Art in Indiana.23 In this large-scale sitespecific installation, the artists pursue their interest in the juxtaposition of the practical and the imaginary. Free Basket draws on the form of the basketball court, ­making visible the chronology of the game, the ball’s way of crisscrossing the court, thus producing an aesthetically surprising field of action that also offers a site for visitors to engage in absurd recreational play. It materializes a space in which the “real” and the “virtual” come together to reproduce the stimulating and multilayered ­experiences that we perceive. This sculptural study of the spatio­temporal aspects of basketball has also been pursued in several watercolor drawings.

According to the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the virtual designates that which is not yet seeable, explainable, representable in terms of preexisting concepts or expectations. It engages the plane of potentiality by retaining the memory of past perceptions and the anticipation of future perceptions. Especially through art, according to Deleuze, it is possible not only to refer our sense experience to a world of experienced things but also to experience sensibility itself.

Free Basket, 2010 Site-specific installation at 100 Acres, The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park, Indianapolis Museum of Art Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

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where noise and silence meet eugenio valdĂŠs figueroa

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MORPHEUS: You’ve felt it your entire life. That there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there. Like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad… . The matrix is everywhere.

It is all around us. Even now, in this very room… . It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

NEO: What truth?

MORPHEUS: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind.

—Dialogue from the film The Matrix 1

I The very same walls that primeval man invented to provide himself with refuge, protection, and warmth were immediately used to build his own prisons.

Since his beginnings, the boundary has allowed man to alleviate the effects of infinitude by fencing off both time and space, holding their incommensurability at bay and making them palpable, creating the illusion that they are within hand’s reach. Before a horizon that moved apace with his own steps, man always felt the need to plant the flag of conquest, to grant himself a victorious truce, before continuing his onward march toward the unknown. Perhaps ever since, man has shifted between two conflicting stances: first, a suspicion of the imagination, comfortably installed in the idea that only the finite exists, thus marking the boundaries of his realm and the rules governing it, and second, a renegade drive and an imagination allergic to the static, permanently searching beyond the horizon that serves as a focal point for the paths he takes, in a dimension that starts precisely where the human one ends.

Order is close to the heart of the first, favoring a materialist pathos, in essence a censor and an inventor of the edition. On the opposite extreme, with the latter attitude, man looks on the smallest edicts of the former with niggling distrust and invests everything in the uncertain paths toward other possible truths and other neighboring universes. Contrary to those who lack in imagination and their materialist pathos, it would seem that those who adopt this other position have a suicidal drive, as they resolutely prefer to sail against the current, toward a nothingness in which they are convinced that the possible, the sublime, and the transcendent are fermenting.

The struggle between these two positions has gradually woven history with a regular and predictable weft. Unless it surrenders at an early age, each revolution that triumphs inexorably ends up accommodating with the regime of repetition, dogma, and ­absolutism.

And each order imposed by power will in turn be inevitably followed by subversion, until the guardians of repetition make their return, once and again, to reinstate their pathos and to rewrite history, to reedit with new weaves each phrase worn out by use and, paradoxically, to continue perpetuating themselves on the limit, in prohibition and in the canon. Old glories are a ductile substance in the hands of a good “editor” who periodically readjusts at will his historical alibis in each restoration of his authority and legitimacy. Yet in recomposing the past, what he is really looking for is to guarantee the predictable so that, from the ­present, he can wield power over the future, establishing in advance his official control of the meanings.

II “In fact,” Rabindranath Tagore said, “all modern civilizations have their cradles of brick and mortar… .

These walls leave their mark deep in the minds of men.

They set up a principle of ‘divide and rule’ in our mental outlook, which begets in us a habit of securing all our conquests by fortifying them and separating them from one another… . It breeds in us a strong suspicion of whatever is beyond the barriers we have built.”2 The “divide and rule,” which serves to perpetuate its reign, ends ups as its own trap. Hiding behind the walls of “external chaos” to uphold its balance and safety, it deprives itself of the inexhaustible revitalizing spring that resides beyond them, in the infinite. Ultimately a crack opens in the surface, on the frontier, of this order until a powerful implosion blows it to pieces.

According to Gilles Deleuze, the real difference is not between inside and outside. The crack is not internal nor indeed external, as it is to be found on the frontier. What happens outside and inside produces interferences and interfacings that gradually deepen the edges of the crack: “A pattern of corresponding beats over two different rhythms. Everything noisy happens at the edge of the crack and would be ­nothing

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without it. ­Conversely, the crack pursues its silent course, changes direction following the lines of least resistance, and extends its web only under the immediate influence of what happens, until sound and silence wed each other intimately and continuously in the shattering and bursting of the end.” Deleuze summed it up with a statement borrowed from F. Scott ­Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up: “Of course all life is a process of breaking down.”3 III A work by the duo of artists who make up the collective Los Carpinteros seems to reproduce exactly this moment in which noise and silence meet yet in which the explosion is interrupted and suspended in time.

For the installation Frío estudio del desastre | Cold study of disaster, 2005 [220/221] , the artists meticulously built a wall of cinder blocks, which is then frozen in the moment of flying into pieces as a result of some unknown impact. On one side, we can take a look at the hole and see some fragments frozen and in tension, which barely manage to counteract inertia and still remain attached to the broken structure. On the other, we can walk among scattered fragments of the wall, which seem to defy both time and gravity. We are not sure whether the impact came from “inside” or “outside.” Yet it does not really matter. The disaster does not lie precisely in the impact that caused the wall to explode, but rather in the suspension of its consequences—or worse still, in the fact that its fall has been stripped of the very walls of time.

Unlike Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991), the celebrated installation by the English artist Cornelia Parker,4 this one by Los Carpinteros does not pursue the path of resurrection and leaves us with the bitter sensation of an agonizing wait. Both works bear the marks of violence and destruction. Parker’s labor is similar to that of an archaeologist or crime scene investigator who recovers evidence and puts it together. She has little interest in reproducing the calm appearance of the moment just prior to the event; nor does her interest lie in the original physiognomies that the explosion has taken by surprise, sweeping them away forever. Parker does not reconstruct but

instead uses the rubble “to construct anew,” barely reviving some essence of what lay hidden in the ruins and the debris wrought by the disaster.

Yet if there is any “archaeological” drive under­ pinning the work by Los Carpinteros, it would operate with what simply is not there, an invisible, ideological area. There is also a “re-construction,” in which the evidence is confusedly compressed in the space remaining between the noise and the silence. If we were to look for some splinter, we would have to make do with inferring the place where it might have stuck. This is what it is all about: an abrupt and painful uprooting, an explosion of the “prison of the mind.” It would be terrifying to imagine Los Carpinteros’ wall being born again like the phoenix from its ashes. The image of an accident whose end has been amputated is truly overpowering, robbed of what is dearest to it: its temporality. And similarly to what happens with all mutilated beings, it has been left handicapped, useless and monstrous.

Los Carpinteros belong to the generation following the end of the cold war.5 The fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Bloc in Eastern Europe momentarily divested the hegemonic powers of arguments to maintain a power game predicated on the simulacrum of confrontation, at the same time weakening the old alibis and strategies justifying power.

Once again, outside Cuba one could corroborate the provisional nature of “walls” and their irrevocable end as “relics” with a use value as transitory as the political excuses that justified their construction in the first place. While in the rest of the world a new functional configuration of historical memory was held to be imminent—at once urgently remapping the economy and reordering the coordinates of global politics—Cubans in the wake of the cold war continued to nurture waiting as their fate, despite the successive tremors that reached us and left the scars of invisible skirmishes. Things on the island voluntarily absorbed this readiness to wait, and despite its decrepit appearance, Cubans’ most immediate and tangible universe persisted in delaying its final fall, as if everything—bodies as well as discourses—was ­losing weight, firmness, consistency.

CORNELIA PARKER Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, 1991

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IV For those born into bondage, time, space, and mobility obey highly specific laws. Everything is subject to highly limited and restrictive harmonies, which the individual adopts as routine in order to better endure his reclusion, ignoring any disturbance that might stand out as a fault. The efficacy of bondage lies in allowing ourselves to be domesticated by the universe of representation, in which we end up accepting as static everything that is given to us in motion. The world stops unfolding, or at least it unfolds so slowly that it is possible to stop and observe its most insignificant details, and every aspect of things, every sign of existence takes on excessive proportion and importance in the prison of the mind. For the prison guard the mistake must be rapidly corrected in such a way that it does not lose its transitoriness. An error not rectified in time would open uncontrollable cracks in the systems of representation set in place to handle it.

The prisoner must be a docile and patient subject, or at least behave as such, if he is forced to dissimulate in the event of discovering the devastating power of the imagination and its diachronies. By dint of learning to be patient and observant, those who are born into bondage get to know their cells in such detail that they end up identifying their tiniest little accidents.

And obviously they will lend equal importance to the minute crack opened by mistake. There is no need to deny that, for the person who knows nothing else but his cell, it is frightening to suddenly discover a beyond, a world located outside representation. The motivation to accept and take on risks is not simply to gain access to the real or to the true. The reward for running the danger would be to catch a glimpse—in that truth and in that reality—of other openings and fissures for the imagination, the subversive metaphor, and even other types of representation, which, like intervals of provisional immobility, serve as a truce for the voyeur and his restless and scrutinizing gaze.

And the light peeping though the crack will surely measure the intensity of the guilt. “I’ve seen too much to be innocent. There is too much darkness in their minds for them to be guilty,” says an indulgent Sergio, the antihero of the film Memories of ­Underdevelopment, when referring to the

“­underdeveloped.”6 The film takes place in Havana in the months leading up to the missile crisis of 1962. Sergio is a bourgeois racked by doubts and the conflicts of his insertion, both within the class from which he comes and within Cuban society post-1959, in which he has decided to stay, even as his friends and family flee in panic, suffocated by the changes on the island.

Underdevelopment brings its own peculiar kind of mental bondage. An incisive observer, cynical about himself and others, Sergio describes what he believes is the condition of the underdeveloped: “One of the things that bothers me most about people is their inability to sustain a feeling or an idea without losing their concentration. … This is one of the signs of underdevelopment—an inability to relate things, to accumulate experiences and develop. The environment is very soft. All Cuban talent is squandered in adapting to the moment; people lack consistency.”7 The war never arrived, but after October 1962 it continued to be announced as a latent threat for almost the next three decades. It would be more accurate to say that the war never arrived in the form we knew, because the prolonged waiting, plagued with alarms, wore people down just as much as the cut and thrust of a permanently negotiated battle without bullets. That said, we were all ordered to be well prepared to receive the first blow, and to return it. Trenches, refuges, and military-training camps mushroomed all over the country. Trained in a rhetoric ridden with belligerence, we were required to discipline our vocabulary and also our thoughts, repeating the same words and the same words and the same words … until the chorus managed to sound in unison like consensus and absolute truth. Perhaps deep down what really mattered was that the litany of the soldier did not allow much room “for relating things”; that it would remain unchanged, “soft,” “inconsistent,” sufficiently ductile to adapt itself to each perceived threat, to suture each new breach in the system.

V Since the end of the cold war, the island has been going through the anxiety induced by two speeds and two different rhythms sharing the same space in the

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crack. One has the feeling that something weird is happening. A strange inertia toward the interior of the island makes life seem like an impenetrable swamp of anachronies, inhabited by the agitated survivors of a shipwreck, who ineffectually flail their arms about yet without advancing or retreating, without ­getting anywhere. Inexplicably the same litanies of the soldier can be heard as a faint echo and in themselves become a way of existing that no longer distinguishes between reality and representation. Perhaps we were never so insular.

Through the crack, signals reach us from outside of no less disconcerting traps. At the threshold of the twenty-first century, walls are far from solid and most certainly not fixed once and for all, as claimed ­Zygmunt Bauman, the author of Liquid Modernity. Eminently mobile, they remind the traveler-through-life of cardboard partitions or screens meant to be repositioned over and over again after following successive changes in needs or whims. The lack of permanence extends like an epidemic: “The kind of uncertainty—of dark premonitions and fears of the future that haunt men and women in the fluid, perpetually changing social environment in which the rules of the game change in the middle of the game without warning or legible pattern—does not unite the sufferers: it splits them and sets them apart.”8 Could it be that this new liquid environment and its mobile, undulating walls, moving at will or dodging blows—the ductility of old rhetoric—play to the benefit of and bring up to date the interior of the island (and its new allies)? In short, what it is all about is amputating ends, suppressing gravity and time. And equally valid to this purpose is the persistent density of the past, or the fluidity that Bauman has detected in our era when he talked about the form of experiencing the passing of time that is neither cyclical nor linear, a time without a direction, dissipated in an infinitude of moments, each one of them episodic, closed, and short in a chaotic succession. It does not matter how much we try, we will never keep up with what is apparently offered to us. We are living in an era in which we are constantly running behind something. What nobody knows is what it is that we are running behind.9

Perhaps the lack of permanence is now more effective than the control and administration of stable meanings.

It is better to be a player wised up to all the tricks than an impartial referee of the game.

If Frío estudio del desastre alludes to a “prison of the mind,” we would have to clarify that it refers to the mind of a schizophrenic subject, one whose thinking shifts between building, maintaining, and destroying, hounded by self-censorship and materialist pathos as much as by hesitation and suspicion.

There is no better definition than that advocated by Emilio Ichikawa: “There is a kind of density, a nervousness associated with this Cuban way of surviving, giving rise to shipwrecked creatures whose genius is ­wedded to their desperation.”10 VI The works by the duo Dagoberto Rodríguez and Marco Castillo are generally inhabited by ambivalence. There is nothing clear-cut or steady about them. A calm rationality disguises a world of always-slippery edges, of scarcely reliable definitions. The spectator never manages to resolve where things begin and where they end. Doubt incites his imagination. And at once his imagination incites new uncertainties. His discernment ends up entangled in an endless chain that turns the real into a dizzying and restless substance and truth into a creature with an invariably ambiguous condition.

As it penetrates its essences, its weight on earth is snatched away; any haven of safety turns fragile, and limits become as vulnerable as freedom itself.

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NOTES 1. The Matrix (U.S., Warner Bros., 1999), written and directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski.

2. Rabindranath Tagore, Sadhana: The Realization of Life (Radford, Va.: Wilder, 2009), 8.

3. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 209.

4. Parker’s work is in the Tate Modern, London. She works with debris from—accidental or intentional—explosions of highly specific buildings, which she chooses and which have a special significance: a hut in the English countryside threatened by the building of a ­motorway, a church burned to the ground in a fire caused by lightning (exhibited shortly afterward at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco).

Parker uncovers other now-dysfunctional orders and ­reassembles the rubble or remains to reveal previously unseen forms, other possibilities of the material “after death,” its metamorphosis.

5. See Eugenio Valdés Figueroa, “Trajectories of a Rumor: Cuban Art in the Postwar Period,” in Art Cuba: The New Generation, ed. Holly Block (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 17–24.

6. Memories of Underdevelopment (Cuba, ICAIC, 1967), written and directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, based on the novel of the same title by Edmundo Desnoes.

7. Ibid.

8. Zygmunt Bauman, Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 48.

9. See Zygmunt Bauman, “Tempo, tempo—porque andamos correndo tanto?” (interview with Karla Monteiro), O Globo (Rio de Janeiro), April 26, 2009.

10. Emilio Ichikawa, “En vez de maldecirte: Roberto González Echevarria y el ensayo de la Discordia,” Encuentro de la cultura cubana, nos. 34–35 (Fall–Winter 2004–5): 129–30.

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Los Carpinteros appeared on the Cuban art scene at the beginning of the 1990s, a moment of radical transformation euphemistically named the “special period,” a transitional state linked to the repressive political climate of the years after Cuba’s loss of economic aid from the Soviet Union. This period saw the beginning of great socioeconomic reforms as well as contradiction in the country’s ideological isolation and the creation of an “artificial” poverty. But it also impressed upon the emerging generation of Cuban artists the necessity of injecting languages of subversion and appropriation, which allowed for resistive and ambiguous expression. The role of artists occupying this liminal zone was no less critical than that of the previous generation, but there was a turn to metaphor, double meaning, rumor, and fictionalization in order to dissipate mechanisms of control and censorship.

Eugenio Valdés Figueroa has described this situation and its influence on the use of language in artistic practices: “In a general sense, any characterization of Cuban art should keep in mind its semantic ambiguity, sustained by the use of metaphor, by the mixture of codes, and by the linguistic play with symbols that have been lexicologically indexed due to their reiterative use. This ambiguity is exploited in the manner in which insularity is treated. The use of tropological resources has permitted Cuban artists to enter into the field of rhetoric in poetic and linguistic terms. In this manner, for example, the image of the island of Cuba has become part of the rhetoric of Cuban art, in the same way that the concept of nation became a part of social rhetoric.”1 In Los Carpinteros’ works, the potentialities of language are used in manifold ways. In the drawing Trincheras 2 | Trenches 2, 2003 [259], for example, the negative forms that are cut into the green background have the shape of military insignia. The political association is trivialized as well as charged by the ambiguous meaning of the title, which can refer to an unspecific use as a ditch or to the military use of a trench. The letter or hieroglyph as linguistic sign appears again in two related drawings—Lenguaje | Language, 2005 [260], and La lengua de la tierra | The Language of the Earth, 2006 [261]—in which language becomes timeless and archaic, with seemingly no contemporary reference that could establish (rational or nonsensical) meaning. The nonsensical in drawings of a truck with a container in form of an ampersand—Cargo, 2004 [276/277], and Cargo grande | Big Cargo, 2004 [277]—seems to be far easier to decipher: to relate this visual construction to a logical reality reveals its absurd impossibility.

Alongside this interest in language as sign, another group of works that use loudspeakers focus on language as sound, thereby taking up the auditory aspect of language and its potential to transmit messages. In several drawings, loudspeakers take the form of houses, a morphing process realized also in the huge sculpture Altoparlante Solimar |

Loudspeaker Solimar, 2008 [272].

It is not the intersubjective communication of equals that is the focus of these works, but rather the power of language to indoctrinate people, resonating—as suggested by these works—in the aesthetic of public housing. Los Carpinteros trace their use of loudspeakers, microphones, and podiums to the omnipresence of megaphones, radios, and speakers in Cuba, which not only transmit music and messages of all sorts but also, and most spectacularly, broadcast the long speeches of political leaders. They describe the situation in Havana as one in which the citizens permanently find themselves in a situation of being addressed, of being informed and ideologized. In general, sound—be it music or speeches—has the performative potential to create a community of addressees in which the individual tends to dissolve into the mass of a collective identity. This aspect of language as a collectivizing medium can be seen at work in drawings such as Las luces del estadio del pueblo | The Lights of the People’s Stadium, 2007 [274/275] ; Surround with Sound Your Ass, 2007 [263] ; or La Gente | The People, 2008 [262]. A special take on the trans­mission of ideologically loaded sound waves is presented in the drawing Bum Bum, 2008 [266], in which loudspeakers are placed on the surface of a podium, facing inward instead of toward the audience. A speaker would hear his own sound multiplied, amplified, and resonating on itself, creating a precarious, explosive situation—as suggested by the onomatopoetic title, which might refer to a rhythmic beat of music or to the sound of an explosion. This loudness is brought to an end in the dissolving of the conga in the sculptural work Mucho caliente | Much Hot, 2010 [154/155] , in which a drum is being melted due to the great heat indicated by the title in an intentionally “wrong” expression mimicking a common mistake by beginning Spanish speakers. Again Los ­Carpinteros offer a combination of title and image that plays with semiotic interference on many levels, thus creating an atmosphere of uncertainty and suspended meaning.

1. Eugenio Valdés Figueroa, “The Key and the Keyhole in the Lock: Constructions and Utopias in Contemporary Cuban Art,” in The Way Things Are: Works from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection, exh. cat., Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu, Torun, Poland (Cologne: Walther König, 2008), 108.

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Trincheras 2 Trenches 2, 2003 75.5 Ă— 106 cm | 29 3/4 Ă— 41 3/4 in.

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

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depression

Lenguaje Language, 2005 70.5 × 100 cm | 27 3/4 × 39 3/8 in.

Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

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La Lengua de la Tierra The language of the earth, 2006 124.5 × 167.5 cm | 49 × 66 in.

Private Collection, Rome, Italy

La Gente The People, 2008 76 × 112.5 cm 29 7/8 × 44 1/4 in.

Orlando Justo Collection

The tribune in the drawing Surround with Sound Your Ass fuses the architectural form of a circular arena with rows of tiered seating made of loudspeakers. The title gives an instruction about the use and functionality of this strange combination: surround with sound your ass. This drawing stands out within the oeuvre of Los ­Carpinteros not only because of the blatant use of the colloquial term for the buttocks in the title, bringing in an otherwise absent physicality, but also because the title is in the imperative mood. Both aspects establish a reference to an addressee, evoking a humorous effect of an imagined realization of this instruction. The title also reflects the way Los Carpinteros work together as a duo and use the in­terferences produced by this dialogue: “A lot of time collaboration consists of confusion and misinterpretation. Sometimes something happens to one of us, and the other person misinterprets it, and that misinterpretation is fantastic, it’s like a story of confusion.”24 The arena as a space for collectivizing people through sports or speeches occurs repeatedly in drawings such as Piscina arena | Arena Pool, 2004 [189], and in the installation of the same title, dated 2006, in which the arena is refunctioned as a pool.

Whereas this combination can be understood in relation to the logic of the “real,” the typology of the arena is again combined with a sports stadium yet deconstructed in a very special way in the watercolor drawing Anfiteatro Bermuda #2 | Bermuda Shorts Amphitheater #2, 2004 [188]. Here the green field is divided in two, with each half having its own amphitheater, allowing only for a divided community of players who have to perform their own bread and circuses.

Surround With Sound Your Ass, 2007 110 × 136 cm 43 1/4 × 53 1/2 in.

Amy and Ronald Guttman, New York

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language

Podium, 2008 Edition of 16, 4 AP Corrugated cardboard 127 × 90 × 60 cm 50 × 35 3/8 × 23 5/8 in.

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is a sculpture made of cardboard, which can be folded to form an ordinary box. The possibilities offered by structures that can be easy dismantled and collapsed had already been explored in works such as Ciudad transportable | Transportable City, 2000 [48, 49] , and Torres de vigía | Watchtowers, 2002 [51] , in which urban structures were presented as nomadic and easily erected objects. The folding process related to cardboard objects such as the podium is made evident in the explosion study of a elemental private house (Casita de cartón y despiece | Little Cardboard House and exploded view, 2007 [39] ), in which this structure is multiplied, rendering a stacking of elements and a seemingly disordered growth and accumulation of forms. The function of the podium takes up the thread of language and sound: as a place of rhetoric, the podium marks the moment of speech. Whereas speaking from a podium is a privilege accorded only to officially sanctioned voices, the foldable podium suggests a pre­ carious yet flexible place of speaking, not bound to the restrictions of politics.

Podium

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Bum Bum, 2008 160 × 114 cm | 63 × 44 7/8 in.

Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

top: Malas noticias Bad news, 2009 114.5 × 167. 5 cm | 45 1/8 × 66 in.

Courtesy IvoryPress, Madrid

bottom:Untitled, 2009 66 × 102 cm | 26 × 40 1/4 in.

Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

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language

Alto parlante – Solimar (Variante Roja) Loudspeaker – Solimar (Red version), 2007 123 × 201 cm | 48 3/8 × 79 1/8 in.

Susana de la Puente, New York

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Alto parlante – Solimar (variante blanca) Loudspeaker – Solimar (white version), 2007 123 × 201 cm | 48 3/8 × 79 1/8 in.

Private Collection, London

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Alto parlante – Cohiba Loudspeaker – Cohiba, 2007 Diptych 153 × 112 cm | 60 1/4 × 44 1/8 in.

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

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Alto parlante – Sierra Maestra Loudspeaker – Sierra Maestra, 2007 132 × 171 cm | 52 × 67 1/4 in.

Courtesy Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo

takes up one of the most daring buildings in Havana, a typical example of the Streamline Moderne style, which favored rounded corners and a sense of aerodynamic movement. Built in 1944 to a design by Manuel Copado, the Solimar building “stands out among the neighboring structures not only on account of its height, but also for the powerful expressiveness of is ­sinuous balconies, like stacks of curving ribbons. The effect, faintly reminiscent of Erich Mendelsohn, also suggests the waves of the sea, reinforced by the proximity to the Caribbean and the name of the building itself (Sun and Sea). The site is an elongated trapezoid, a shape that encouraged optimal light and ventilation in each apartment.”25 The sculpture is a hybrid between speaker and architectural structure, a piece of ­urban furniture resembling the compartment-buildings of Downtown yet filling the form of public housing not with dressers but with sound: speakers replace the apartments, bringing the noise of the streets of Havana into the private spaces of the people. Suggesting the private as a sound space, the status of the subject or object of information and ideologizing is complicated. Nevertheless the stuffing of the space evokes the uncanny feeling of imposing the sound on the structure and the subjects. Resonating and reproducing the noise from outside, the ideological slogans and ­rhetoric of consumerism and the state, it seems a failed hope to be heard. The Altoparlante Solimar | Loudspeaker Solimar

Altoparlante Solimar Loudspeaker Solimar, 2008 Loudspeakers, ebony wood 237 × 350 × 120 cm 93 1/4 × 137 3/4 × 47 1/4 in.

Courtesy Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo

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足differentiation between noise and sound, conceived by Aristotle to describe pre足 conditions of political participation, for a claim to be heard and understood and not to be dismissed as nonsensical noise, needs to be questioned confronting a reality that is governed by an economics of attention, in which the need to be heard results in a comparative pro足cess of becoming louder and louder, thus suspending the need for sense.

But the speakers also stand for the omnipresence in Cuba of music, which is almost a ubiquitous feature of any public space in the country. At the airport, in each bar, resonating from private homes, cars, and outdoor speaker landscapes, the music of Havana is always present, most of the time blaringly loud, rhythmic, and tropical. As a consequence, loudspeakers happen to be a common feature of public spaces. Tall, black, massive speakers, often stacked in rows and columns, guarantee the fullest and most massive dissemination of music and speeches.

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Las luces del estadio del pueblo The lights of the people’s stadium, 2007 Diptych 74.5 × 210 cm | 29 1/4 × 82 3/4 in.

Collection Fortes d’Aloia, São Paulo

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Cargo, 2004 114 × 144 cm | 44 7/8 × 56 3/4 in.

Private collection

Cargo grande | Big cargo, 2004 177.5 × 250.5 cm | 69 7/8 × 98 5/8 in.

Private collection, Richmond, Virginia

The combination of sign and object is a rare but evocative occurrence in the oeuvre of Los Carpinteros. In Cargo and Cargo grande | Big Cargo a truck takes the shape of a supersize ampersand, the logogram representing the word and. The intriguing aspect of a logogram is that it is derived from a pictographic system representing a concept or word, rather than a phoneme. The ampersand joins together two things that can be very different in nature and substance without diminishing their individual significance. The apparently “natural” connection of two or more elements makes the notion of conjunction an important aspect in the work of Los Carpinteros. As discussed in the chapter “Morphing,” the interrelation, fusion, and conjunction of two autonomous elements (for example, “house” and “pliers”) invoke totally new meanings and activate the symbolicimaginary registers of representation. The new meaning is not, however, a result of the object’s context but is related to the interior and exterior realities that it produces.

Charles Merewether links the drawings of Los Carpinteros to the planning and programming of every aspect in life within a postrevolutionary communist system. In his short text about their drawings, he connects this analysis with the observation that “central to the group’s conceptual framework is the deconstruction of architectural and design practice. To Los Carpinteros, these concepts are reduced to the point of non-functionality, thus evoking an outmoded, obsolete craft practice or an aesthetic gesture of little or no value. Drawing becomes then a utopian act that, while proposing a blueprint for the future, loses its power through the process of its realization.”26 And Laura Hoptman observes a certain transformation and maybe also a loss of power in the realized objects, noting that “what is drawn so carefully turns out not to be the thing at all, but something completely different.”27 Whereas for the craftsman the realization of drawn objects reduces the drawings to the status of sketches with no autonomous meaning, in the oeuvre of the artists Los Carpinteros, drawings hold a unmistakable significance, especially in the programmed failure of their realization, thus pointing to the precarious relationship between the visionary and the utopian, caught between the desire to conceptualize a new logic for a new community, to produce impetus for change, and the nonsensical, the failure of sense and future.

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Sala de Lectura Reading Room, 2010 Wood 450 × 450 × 300 cm 177 1/4 × 177 1/4 × 118 1/8 in. courtesy ivorypress, madrid

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sala de lectura (prototipo) Reading Room (prototype), 2010 edition of 5 wood 80 × 80 × 53,5 cm 31 1/2 × 31 1/2 × 21 in. courtesy ivorypress, madrid

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Biblioteca Modelo Model Library, 1997 Ink on paper 75.5 × 106 cm | 29 3/4 × 41 3/4 in.

Courtesy of Contemporary Art Museum, University of South Florida, Tampa, USA

Sala de lectura was realized in 2010 on the occasion of the exhibition Drama turquesa at Ivorypress in Madrid. Taking up studies of panoptical buildings such as the Presidio Modelo in Cuba this construction merges the forms of a bookcase and a building, ex­ ploring the transformation of a simple piece of furniture into a spacious object and vice versa. An enclosed reading room with an aperture to the surrounding social space brings up all the pertinent discourses of social relations and exchange of knowledge.

With the opening to the outside, the architectural space, as well as its character as an island of knowledge, is immediately extended to the social space, alluding to the relationship between the reader and the people outside. The consciousness of social forces and the moment of visibility characterize the structure's fascination. Referring to a long tradition of rotundas, the work adopts the immanent dynamic of inside and outside, of closed and open form, of functional and fictional possibilities. Due to its dimension, the structure, on the one hand, removes itself from the idea of a real object and takes the shape of an object of experimentation and research, an analysis also of the relationship between the body and the knowledge assembled therein. After all, the reading room ­remains empty and ultimately does not transcend the status of a model.

On the other hand, it shows the potential of the idea of converting a simple bookshelf into an auto­nomous reading room—the attempt to transform an idea into three-dimensional reality. In doing so, it points again to the utopian imagination of Los Carpinteros, for whom it is also possible to construct a town out of furniture (Downtown, 2002–3 [56] ).

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Sala de Lectura Reading Room, 2010 Construction drawings

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language

The work consists of three parts, each composed of a group of tape measures that, once extended, show text fragments from books. In the case of Biblioteca II, the books are Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Resistance by Victor Serge, Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, poetry by Miklós Radnóti, Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, Beloved by Toni Morrison, Fanny Hill by John Cleland, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The Joy of Gay Sex

by Charles Silverstein, The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy, poetry by Ariel Dorfman, Antes que anochezca by Reinaldo Arenas, The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud, The Open Sore of a Continent by Wole Soyinka, Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences by Galileo Galilei, Kamasutra by Vatsyayana, Hamlet by William ­Shakespeare, A ­Simple Lust by Dennis Brutus, The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis, Das Kapital by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Empire of the Senseless by Kathy Acker, The Ecstasy of Owen Muir by Ring Lardner, The Satanic Verses by Salman ­Rushdie, Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein, Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, poetry by Salvatore Quasimodo, The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Qur’an, and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. These are all writings that were censored at sometime in history and were available only to readers who took the risk of being revealed as enemies of the ruling ideology. The method of printing these books on ubiquitous and ordinary tape measures can be seen as a moment of transvestism—wearing the clothes of the other gender. In Los ­Carpinteros’ oeuvre, this cross-dressing is appropriated in works such as Alto parlante – ­Sierra Maestra | Loudspeaker – Sierra Maestra, 2007 [271] ; 4 sitios de quema | 4 Sites for Burning, 2008 [197] ; Casa en forma de alicate | Pliers-shaped House, 2003 [183] ; and Sub Oficial Grill, 2008 [78]. Biblioteca evokes the notion of hiding something secretly, a practice also applied in certain forms of transvestism, in which the clothing or even just the name of the other gender guarantees higher security. The artists refer with this installation also to the idea of knowledge as an instrument of conformity and measure of "reality."

Biblioteca I, II y III Library I, II, and III, 2001 Edition of 2 Tape measure, paint Variable dimensions

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Librero Bookshelf, 2003 75.5 × 106 cm | 29 3/4 × 41 3/4 in.

Collection Lily Schmutter, Miami / Courtesy Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo

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Cuatro Ciudades Four Cities, 2007 Painted PVC 122 × 163 × 35.5 cm 48 × 64 1/4 × 14 in.

the language of objects rochelle steiner

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Throughout their collaborative career, Los Carpinteros have focused their attention and their work on imagery and themes associated with ­construction, building, and architecture in ways that express humor as well as political commentary. Appropriate to their collective profile as art world “carpenters,” Marco Castillo and Dagoberto Rodríguez—along with ­Alexandre Arrechea, with whom they worked from 1991 to 20031—have created shelving units, ­cabinetry, scale versions of modern buildings, and a range of other related objects, all of which could be, and in many cases have been, constructed by the artists themselves. Like professional carpenters who build and repair utilitarian structures and furniture, Los Carpinteros have included references to labor and production in their work: screws, pliers, and a variety of other hardware and tools have been prevalent objects and imagery throughout their practice.

In addition to items associated with construction, Los Carpinteros have also been inspired by a diverse array of quotidian objects, including beds, bicycle helmets, clocks, stereo speakers, and swimming pools.

Such elements are transformed through the artists’ imaginations, in turn provoking reconsiderations of the nature and function of the objects themselves. Los Carpinteros have taken great pride in their ability to provide, from within their own ranks, the skills and labor necessary to build their works of art. They have described themselves as “avid readers of publications like Popular Mechanics, which circulated a lot in Cuba during the 1950’s at a time when you could build anything that occurred to you.”2 At the root of this “do-it-yourself” approach is the attitude that, in terms of both subject matter and raw materials, everything around them might be considered, adopted, used, reused, shaped, altered, combined, and remade with an economy of means and simplicity of production.

What is apparent and is one of the most consistent qualities of Los Carpinteros’ work is the centrality of recurring utilitarian objects in their threedimensional pieces, as well as images of such objects in their many drawings. Also fundamental to their art, however, though largely overlooked amid the focus on construction and on their collaborative art-making

process, is the role language plays as a subtext, structuring element, and communication device within their overall practice. Even though their individual works generally do not include letters, words, or text other than the titles—which themselves provide insight into the interplay between objects and images in their art—Los Carpinteros have embedded facets of language in their work in a number of ways.

Books, Libraries, Podiums, and Speakers Los Carpinteros have repeatedly turned to objects that are suggestive of, related to, or thematically linked to texts and speech. Books, loudspeakers, and various objects that serve to house, contain, or amplify words, ideas, and thoughts play a role in their many works of art, whether three-dimensional constructions or twodimensional drawings. For example, the sculptures Estantería I-III | Shelves I-III, 2008 [162, 163] , take the form of modular shelving units typically used to hold books. The artists call attention to the functionality of these bookshelves—or the lack thereof—by inserting curved and morphing shelves among the horizontal and vertical planks, in turn subverting the structures’ ability to hold content. The result of these insertions is a fun-house effect in which objects do not appear as we expect or know them to be, exemplifying Los Carpinteros’ sense of humor and penchant for visual puns.

In the earlier watercolor Armario familiar | ­Familiar Shelves, 2006 [199] , the shelves of a similar piece of furniture are shaped as puzzle pieces, perhaps a comment on the IKEA-type designs with interlocking parts that promise ease of assembly but can be as challenging to put together as jigsaw puzzles for those lacking the skills of a carpenter.

Similar in theme is Cuatro ciudades | Four ­C ities, 2007 [285] , modeled after a traditional wooden bookshelf.

It is partially filled with built-in though generic representations of groups of book forms that are suggestive of blank placeholders for the printed word. This piece, as well as their drawing Librero | ­Bookshelf, 2003 [284], recalls British artist Rachel White­read’s cast bookshelves that materialize the negative spaces “behind” individual books—in other words, the empty void between the books’ unbound edges and the backs of

Rachel Whiteread Untitled, 2000

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the shelves on which they sit. Los Carpinteros have also made reference to books in Sala de Lectura | Reading Room, 2010 [278–281]. This structure exemplifies the artists’ interest in social spaces, and they have created other temporary, nonfunctioning buildings, including a ten-part village titled Ciudad transportable | Transportable City, 2000 [48, 49] and the cardboard installation El Barrio | The Neighborhood, 2007 [38].

Libraries are not only spaces whose purpose is to collect and house books but also places where people interact with an array of words, ideas, thoughts, and knowledge to gain or share information. Sala de ­Lectura’s design allows it to be transported to different locations and serve various populations; as with the three versions of Estantería , however, the functionality of Los Carpinteros’ library is challenged by its form. Technically, circular shelves could hold books but impractically so. Further, the design suggests the panoptical layout that was developed for prisons in the eighteenth century to observe and control individuals through surveillance. While Sala de Lectura offers a reading room for the people, the work also controls the use of its contents.

Within Los Carpinteros’ diverse and multifaceted practice, it is not only the printed word but also the spoken word and its sonic projection to an audience or potential audience that is referenced in their sculptures and drawings. Podium, 2008 [264, 265], for example, takes the form of a lectern, a structure from which speeches—whether conveying political, intellectual, religious, or spiritual messages—are delivered and ideas are communicated to others. Although made of cardboard, the podium itself is actual size and invites a speaker to stand before it and address an audience.

Similarly focused on the projection of sound and information are Los Carpinteros’ many works that incorporate groupings of functional audio speakers and sound systems, including three-dimensional sculptures such as Altoparlante Solimar | Loudspeaker Solimar, 2008 [272] and two-dimensional drawings such as ­Surround with Sound Your Ass, 2007 [263]. Here loudspeakers have been stacked to resemble apartment blocks, stadiums, and other communal structures, and they give the im­­ pression of sound, voice, or music emanating into space.

Vocabulary, Sentences, and Non Sequiturs Los Carpinteros have returned again and again in their work to particular objects (and images of them), which form the building blocks of their visual vocabulary. These elements have been configured and reconfigured in various arrangements to convey different messages. For example, the artists’ iconic single bed, styled to resemble a bed from a hospital or asylum, has been a recurring motif since the beginning of their career, starting with a drawing of a bed that resembles a wooden pushcart. In recent works, including the sculpture Dos camas | Two Beds, 2008 [342], and the 2007 drawings Dos camas (vista superior) | Two Beds (View from Above) [341] and Tres almohadas | Three Pillows [341] , Los Carpinteros have depicted adjacent, anthropomorphized, single beds—in pink and blue—with one stretching over another to imply entangled limbs. These beds can be seen as standing in for the individual: coupled and grouped in social units, interwoven and contorted.

Similar bed imagery has also been repeated, altered, and merged with a range of other everyday objects. For example, the beds have been elongated and morphed into a highway interchange in the sculpture Cama | Bed, 2007 [344] and in several 2006 drawings, e.g. Cama Express Way | Express way Bed [345].

The form has been stretched further to suggest the rising, falling, and twisting curves of a roller-coaster track in the sculpture La montaña rusa | The Rollercoaster, 2008 [343] and many related drawings, including Cama interminable | Endless Bed, 2008 [346/347].

Whereas the smaller single beds can be interpreted as surrogates for the individual, these pieces seem

Redrawing of the first transformed bed, May 2010

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to suggest ­collective experiences within the flow or journey of life.

Los Carpinteros repeat and unite the objects that make up their visual vocabulary, composing meaning­ ful though often absurd visual ”sentences” and incongruous visual non sequiturs. Their combinations of otherwise unrelated objects, joined through creative associations, seem to draw inspiration from the surrealists, who famously joined surprisingly unrelated elements, perhaps none more convincingly than Meret Oppenheim in Object (1936), in which an ordinary teacup, saucer, and teaspoon are covered in fur. Los ­Carpinteros’ disjunctive imagery includes Casco de bicicleta | Bicycle Helmet [187] and E ­ dificio aerodinámico | Aerodynamic Building [186], both 2008, in which a bicycle helmet is merged with an architectural structure. While this juxtaposition may seem intrinsically nonsensical, in the artists’ hands the resulting visual form is not far from some of the fantastic early twenty-first-century building designs developed worldwide, especially for art museums and other internationally recognized cultural institutions.

Viewers might be led to ask: is this a whimsical non sequitur, a proposal by Los Carpinteros for a new type of architecture, or a comment on the absurdity of design carried too far?

Another iconic group of works by Los ­Carpinteros presents maps and models of various Havana neighborhoods superimposed on flip-flops, the ­ubiquitous sandals worn across the globe. The sculptures ­Sandalia, 2004 [203], as well as the drawings fanguito, 2004 [204] and Márgenes del Río Almendares | Banks of the Almendares River, 2003 [205] , are among their many works that also take up this subject. They may offer an iconoclastic view of the artists’ native country displayed on flimsy footwear or a proposal for a practical cartography for tourists walking through their city, which they have described as a “primeval idea of a GPS.”3 Here we see glimpses of the artists’ visual language used to offer political commentary, despite their somewhat cloaked and covert approach. According to curator Tumelo Mosaka, “forced by the political conditions in Cuba, the artists find subtle ways to critique the status quo, bringing to attention the poverty and

inequality that has been underplayed by the government.”4 Los Carpinteros have been masters at making socio­political commentary in an allusive fashion while remaining below the radar. By positioning themselves as craftspeople rather than as fine artists, and by avoiding attributing the work to a single author, they have further disguised their practice in a way that offered protection, when necessary, from the censorship prevalent in Cuba in the 1990s.

Communicating with Each Other and with Viewers Now, as well as when there were three members of Los Carpinteros, images have served as the artists’ way of exploring ideas and relaying them to each other.5 Both Castillo and Rodriquez have suggested that their ideas come to mind visually, rather than in words,6 and according to Castillo, “the drawings, in a sense, are the letters we write each other.”7 In other words, images are the basis of the language by which the artists transmit the ideas that emerge from their imaginations. Typically one of the artists begins with a general concept or mental image and makes a drawing through which the idea is communicated; this often results in a response to the drawing by the other, a collaborative process not unlike the surrealist method known as exquisite corpse. One or both of the ­artists might be involved in creating a particular image, depending on who is better suited to execute the illustration; likewise, they may work on a drawing together when their combined skills are needed to articulate an idea.8 The final artwork—whether a drawing, sculpture, or installation—is produced without distinction as to which of them came up with the idea or who drew it; rather, the entire collaborative creative process, which may be the result of years of ongoing dialogue, constitutes the making of their art.

As ideas are developed visually, Castillo and Rodriquez take turns in the roles of conveyor and receiver of information—or of speaker and listener, writer and reader, artist and viewer. As Rodríguez has commented: “We are the first who view our own work, that is, we act as the first ‘show,’ the first gallery. When the sculpture passes through our process of consensus, it’s been modified, changed, or left intact

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for thus or such reason.”9 At the heart of Los Carpinteros’ collaboration is the understanding that works of art are not autonomous and that their meaning is generated through the interaction between artist and viewer. This applies not only to the roles they play within their collaborative process but also to their audiences, who are the ultimate “readers” of their art.

In 1968 literary and cultural theorist Roland Barthes foregrounded the role of the “reader,” or the receiver, in relation to a de-emphasis on an autonomous creator—what he referred to as “the death of the author”: “A text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination… . We know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”10 In further developing his ideas, Barthes identified what he saw as a shift "from work to text"— or the movement from considering meaning as inherent and embedded within an autonomous "work" to the production of meaning through a network surrounding it, or a "text." This concept of a text also came to encompass other forms of cultural production, including visual art, film, fashion, and advertising.11 The integral role of the viewer—as reader—in the work of Los Carpinteros is exemplified by their drawings Cargo [276/277] and Cargo grande | Big Cargo [277], both 2004. Here the artists depict the cab of a truck pulling a trailer that, shown from above, is in the shape of a supersized ampersand. In these works the ampersand may stand in for the combination of ideas or the building process through which visual sentences are assembled and meaning is formed in their art. But it is also an invitation to the viewer to participate in bringing meaning to the pieces. Los Carpinteros don’t tell us, “and what.” Instead they leave this to be filled in by viewers, who must connect the dots and fill in the blanks between and among elements that are

otherwise unrelated and often disjunctive, taking an active role in the decoding process.

Language, Semiotics, and Hieroglyphs Language has been central to the work of Los Carpinteros, which often challenges, contorts, and subverts the alignment of words, images, objects, and ­concepts, or, in semiotic terms, the relationships between signifiers and signifieds. The conflation of elements is apparent in Pool, 2002 [309], and Pool-Pool, 2006 [130] two drawings that visually link swimming pools and pool tables. Here the two otherwise unrelated elements referenced in these works are connected through the wordplay between these homonyms. The swimming pool, whether domestic or public, is a symbol of wealth in Cuba, as in many parts of the world, and Los Carpinteros have depicted many both on their own and also morphing into stadiums and arenas, locations where masses of people gather to watch swimming as a public sport. But in Pool and Pool-Pool , they demonstrate the possibility that one word can connect more than one concept and the arbitrariness of the bond between signifier and signified—a novel visualization of one of the fundamental linguistic principles of semiotics.12 In addition to their use of wordplay—and beyond their references to words, books, and sound and their creation of visual statements composed from a vocabulary of objects—Los Carpinteros’ imagery has been suggestive of language itself. Their watercolor La lengua de la tierra | The Language of the Earth, 2006 [261] is one of a number of drawings that feature a section of the earth’s surface marked by deep depressions or receding voids, like an ancient ruin or a modern earthwork seen from above. Most of their related works depict depressions that are generally geometric in shape, as in the drawing ­Trincheras 2 | Trenches 2, 2003 [259]; in La lengua de la tierra , ­however, as well as Lenguaje | Language, 2005 [260] , the depressions are suggestive of characters from a non-Western alphabet or bits of computer code. The individual marks are embedded deeply in the ground and are as illegible as encrypted hieroglyphs, but they nevertheless suggest the presence of meaning lodged beneath the surface, in need of decoding and left open to interpretation.

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*** Although words do not explicitly appear in Los ­Carpinteros’ art, their practice is nonetheless steeped in language. Words, texts, and speech are suggested thematically through their choices of objects such as books, bookshelves, libraries, and podiums. They have created a visual vocabulary and have repeated and combined key elements in both two- and threedimensional “sentences,” highlighting the interplay of the language of their titles with their objects and images. Many of their works are structured around an invented logic of wordplay and visual puns that is often articulated through relationships between objects and images and the titles of the works. Los Carpinteros communicate not only with each other but also with viewers through a shared language in such a way that they, as artists, join viewers of their work in assuming the role of “readers.” And, they have proposed the possibility of a universal “language of the earth” with a nod to forms of communication resembling hieroglyphs that, perhaps because of their pictorial nature, may appear more widely accessible. Even if it is not immediately apparent, language, in its various aspects, permeates their work.

Notes 1. There are many examples of collaborative teams in contemporary art, including, perhaps most famously, Gilbert and George, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Claes Oldenburg and the late Coosje van Bruggen, Christo and the late Jeanne-Claude, and Elmgreen & Dragset. In each case, the terms of the partnership and the roles of the individual artists differ. The three artists who originally formed Los Carpinteros met in 1990 as students at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana and soon after positioned themselves as a collective, adopting the name Los Carpinteros, about which Castillo has commented: “We were looking for a name and … in the end, Los Carpinteros seemed perfect for us because we wanted to investigate issues of the way art is made, the way that an object is fabricated. To speak of a carpenter is to speak of the way something is made” (Rosa Lowinger, “The Object as Protagonist: An Interview with Los Carpinteros—Alexandre Arrechea, Marco Castillo, and Dagoberto Rodríguez,” Sculpture Magazine 18 [December 1999]. (Online: http://www.sculpture.org/ documents/scmag99/dec99/carp/carp.shtml.) Although the artists sign their artworks under the collective name Los Carpinteros, some interviewers, including Lowinger in the above-cited text, have attributed quotations to the individual members. In those cases, the artists’ names have been retained in this essay for consistency with the source texts.

Los Carpinteros’ collaborative approach has been compared with that of a guild—an affiliation based on shared interests and skills.

About guilds, Castillo has commented: “The guild is something that has always existed in all social contexts. It’s a practical necessity and something that happens when there are people with the same interests. We wanted to recreate a guild with all of its operations; it didn’t necessarily have to be a carpenters’ guild, in fact, we were also inspired by shipbuilders, masons, railroad workers, cigar workers and many other kinds of guilds. … So—we created a strategy— a guild of carpenters, labor, not ideas” (Margaret Miller and Noel Smith, “Conversation/Interview with Los Carpinteros [Alexandre Arrechea, Marco Castillo, and Dagoberto Rodríguez],” in Los ­Carpinteros, ed. Alexa Favata and Noel Smith, published in conjunction with the exhibition Fluid, Eighth Havana Bienal, National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana, Cuba [Tampa: Institute for Research in Art, University of South Florida, 2003], 122–23).

2. Miller and Smith, “Conversation/Interview,” 123.

3. Interview with Los Carpinteros, in Tart magazine, 2005, 25.

4. Tumelo Mosaka, “Los Carpinteros,” in Psycho Buildings: Artists Take on Architecture, by Ralph Rugoff et al. (London: Hayward Publishing, 2008), p. 87. For discussion of the impact of working on Cuba on their art, see also Jorge Reynoso Pohlenz, “Los Carpinteros: Utopian Model Makers,” and Marilyn Zeitlin, “Los Carpinteros Updated,” both published in Afterall, no. 9 (2004), and Lowinger, “Object as Protagonist.”

5. Marco Castillo and Dagoberto Rodríguez, interview with the author, Tokyo, April 2009. On this subject, in 1999 Arrechea commented: “In order to be able to converse, we need a drawing in front of us.

At times a verbal dialogue is not sufficient. But this does not mean that each and every drawing ends up as a piece of sculpture.” ­C astillo added: “In our case, the drawings are part of a working methodology. Since we are three, we need a way to communicate; and the drawings, in a sense, are the letters we write each other” (Lowinger, “Object as Protagonist”).

6. Los Carpinteros, interview with the author, Tokyo, April 2009.

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7. Lowinger, “Object as Protagonist.” Most of their drawings are watercolors on paper; for a discussion of Los Carpinteros’ drawing practice, see Laura Hoptman, “Working Drawing,” in Favata and Smith, Los Carpinteros, 32–38.

8. Their creative process was described in an interview with the author, Tokyo, April 2009.

9. Lowinger, “Object as Protagonist.”

10. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image—Music—Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press, 1977), 148.

11. See Barthes, “From Work to Text” (1971), in Image—Music—Text, 155–64. On the broader definition of the text, see Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill & Wang, 1972); Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982); and Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983).

12. See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed.

Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, in collaboration with Albert Riedlinger, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 67–70.

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Depressions or holes are a recurring topos in Los Carpinteros’ works.

A number of their drawings feature flat surfaces that are broken, excavated, or sculpted so that subterranean or negative spaces emerge, sometimes suggesting an imprint of an object or form. In these works the artists explore relationships between positive and negative form and the effects of displacement. As “sculptures in reverse,”1 the voids depicted in their works play with the absence of the object or its submerging and sinking into the ground, vaguely recalling the role of land art in “mapping the empty.”2 Within Los Carpinteros’ oeuvre, these works are unusual both in their emphasis on elemental vocabularies of form—squares, rectangles, and simple geometric cutouts—and in their incorporation of what could be considered a landscape in the form of brown, earthlike backgrounds that sometimes appear as deserted wastelands.

One paradigmatic work in this group is Depresión | Depression, 2003 [297], a seemingly unspectacular image. We actually see no object, only a plane in one color—or even a noncolor, a beige-ocher—covering almost the entire sheet of paper, and in the upper part of the drawing there is an impression, a hole in the plane, perhaps an excavation or construction pit. It is hard to decide whether it is a casting mold or preparation for building: the color suggests that we are looking at ground, land, earth, something that can be dug into or built upon.

The depression can be traced through various forms and functions.

There are holes in the ground that serve (as the title of Drenaje | Drain, 2003 [316] suggests) as drains. Others resemble marks or casts of tools in the ground, as in Huecos en el concreto | Holes in Concrete, 2005 [301]; Reflejo | Reflection, 2006 [304]; and Estuche para taladro | Drill Case, 2005 [304/305]. Some suggest strange hieroglyphic signs of an archaic, forgotten language, for example, La lengua de la tierra | The Language of the Earth, 2006 [261], and Lenguaje | Language, 2005 [260]. And then one also finds holes in a concretelike surface arranged in the form of a dining table with chairs, objects that defy functionality. In this drawing, as in many of Los Carpinteros’ works, another turn is suggested by the title, Parapeto para juego de comedor | Parapet for Dining Room Set, 2003 [305]. A parapet is usually a small, wall-like barrier to prevent people from falling off a roof or platform, whereas here one can only fall into the holes. How to deal with holes in the ground is suggested by drawings like Salón de reuniones | Meeting Room, 2003 [307], in which the negative spaces are adapted and used as small cells in which a single chair allows one person to sit—a quietly cynical take on the concept of meeting. And the cinemascope diptych Tendido eléctrico | Power Line, 2008 [298/299], presents a desert with precisely cut holes in the ground crossed by power lines, which appear to be timeless parts of the landscape, in between untouched nature and man-made culture.

This makes evident another hole, another aspect of nonpresence, to be found in the world constructed by Los Carpinteros: as much as this world could be discussed under the rubric of the utopian, the revolutionary, but also as a construction of craft, there is something missing, namely the people for whom these things are constructed, the ones who will use them, and the ones who give the object its dimensions, its proportions, its measurement by establishing a relation. These indivi­ duals, this community, is absent. Even in the drawings with titles that refer to “the people”—Las luces del estadio del pueblo | The Lights of the People’s Stadium, 2007 [274/275], or La gente | The People, 2008 [262]—the missing people transform the object into an uncanny sign of emptiness, an empty signifier, a sign of the absent. It is an empty podium and—like Jacques Derrida’s concept of the “vacant throne,” the “place left vacant for who is to come”3—can be read as a marker for a “meaning in waiting,” a “concept to come,”4 a position of absence that has to be acknowledged but that must not be incorporated or filled and that must not be named.

As such we might think of the depressions in Los Carpinteros’ works not as cynical comments on realpolitik, but more as melancholic stating and staging of that which cannot be real, which cannot be incorporated into an object, which can only leave a trace as an imprint, an impression, a marker of the absent. In this way, Los Carpinteros’ work relates to the political with a far subtler and more undecidable gesture.

1. See the exhibition catalog by Julia Brown et al., Michael Heizer: Sculpture in Reverse (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984).

2. William L. Foxx, Mapping the Empty: Eight Artists and Nevada (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1999).

3. Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, ed. Giacomo Donis and David Webb, trans. Giacomo Donis, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 31.

4. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 8.

297

Depresión Depression, 2003 202 × 204 cm | 79 1/2 × 80 3/8 in.

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

298

depressions

Tendido Eléctrico Power line, 2008 Diptych 76 × 225 cm | 29 7/8 × 88 5/8 in.

Paul and Sheri Siegel Family Collection / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

299

300

depressions

Huecos Holes, 2005 181 × 132 cm | 71 1/4 × 52 in.

Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

301

Huecos en el concreto Holes in concrete, 2005 70 × 100 cm | 27 5/8 × 39 3/8 in.

Private Collection, São Paulo

302

depressions

Reflejo Reflection, 2006 152 × 162 cm | 59 3/4 × 63 3/4 in.

Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

Estuche para Taladro Drill case, 2005 145 × 184 cm | 57 1/8 × 72 3/8 in.

Clarke Family Collection New Haven, Connecticut, USA / Courtesy Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo

303

Parapeto para Juego de Comedor Parapet for Dining Room Set, 2003 205 Ă— 204 cm | 80 3/4 Ă— 80 1/4 in.

Miller Meigs Collection

304

depressions

Piscina con reflejo (Aérea) Swimming pool with reflection (aerial), 2006 65 × 102 cm | 25 5/8 × 40 1/4 in.

Private Collection, Lima

305

306

depressions

El Camino The road, 2003 230 × 204 cm | 90 5/8 × 80 1/4 in.

The Mugrabi Collection

307

Salón de Reuniones Meeting room, 2003 205 × 204 cm | 80 3/4 × 80 1/4 in.

308

depressions

Piscina Bloque Cinder block pool, 2002 75.5 × 106 cm | 29 3/4 × 41 3/4 in.

The Farber Collection

Triangular tray with movile side walls convertido en piscina, 2002 75.5 × 106 cm | 29 3/4 × 41 3/4 in.

Private Collection

309

Pool, 2002 75.5 × 106 cm | 29 3/4 × 41 3/4 in.

Private Collection

310

depressions

Piscina infinita Infinite pool, 2002 106 Ă— 75.5 cm | 41 3/4 Ă— 29 3/4 in.

Valdemarin Collection

311

New Balance, 2002 75.5 × 106 cm | 29 3/4 × 41 3/4 in.

Private Collection

312

depressions

Piscina Infinita III Endless Pool III, 2006 75.5 × 112 cm | 29 3/4 × 44 1/8 in.

Valdemarin Collection / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

313

Huella Adidas Adidas footprint, 2005 Edition of 3 water, fiber glass, epoxy resin, stainless steel, PVC tubes, optical fiber, water pump, glass pills 80 × 212 × 44 cm | 31 1/2 × 83 1/2 × 17 1/4 in.

Courtesy Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo

314

depressions

Tragante Drain cover, 2009 80 Ă— 114 cm | 31 1/2 Ă— 44 7/8 in.

Private Collection, Spain

315

Juego de tragantes Set of drain covers, 2009 80 Ă— 114 cm | 31 1/2 Ă— 44 7/8 in.

Private Collection, Spain

316

depressions

Drenaje Drain, 2003 207 × 204 cm | 81 1/2 × 80 1/4 in.

The Mugrabi Collection

During the 1980s, in part as a reaction to the Republican administration of Ronald Reagan, the Cuban government proclaimed “La guerra de todo el pueblo” (the war of the whole people). As part of this national defense strategy, it ordained that the people should build tunnels throughout the country for evacuation of the population in the event of a war. Even though there was not a real declaration of war against Cuba, this strategy created a psychological disposition toward war. These spaces have never been used for evacuation and remain anachronistic structures in the center of cities.

The photo series Túneles populares | The People’s Tunnels, 1999, consists of ten large-scale photographs that document this very particular project in Cuban history, taken by Los Carpinteros in 1999. The tunnels were the biggest construction project realized in Cuba in that decade, and they changed the appearance of the urban and architectonic environment in a drastic way. They also affected individual living space by transforming public life into “life in the trenches,” facing a time of imaginary yet very present war. The unused tunnels remain as interventions into the societal fabric, not only creating a sense of community in and through war but also developing very specific “faces” and “personalities.”

Túneles Populares The People's Tunnels, 1999 Series of 10 Photographs, Edition of 3 Silver gelatine print each 127 × 182 cm 50 × 71 3/4 in.

318

319

320

321

322

323

324

psycho spaces

326

psycho spaces

Psycho Buildings is the title of an exhibition presented at London’s Hayward Gallery in 2008, which featured Los Carpinteros’ exuberant postapocalyptic installation Show room, 2008 [224, 225]. The term was borrowed from the German artist Martin Kippenberger and his body of work and book titled Psychobuildings,1 in which he juxtaposed images of his own work with photographs of various buildings and structures that “could be loosely considered psychotic—the psychiatric term for a mental state involving a rupture with reality—inasmuch as they constituted breaks in the overly regulated fabric of the modern cityscape,” as Ralph Rugoff explains in his introduction to the exhibition catalog.2 The concept of psycho spaces thus alludes to habitat-like structures and architectural spaces that are mental and perceptual spaces as much as physical ones, offering one means to approach the twisted urban and domestic architectures in Los Carpinteros’ oeuvre.

The most remarkable parallel between Los Carpinteros’ work and Kippenberger’s—especially the latter’s iconic Street Lamp for Drunks (1988) or the imaginary global network of misplaced and deformed subway entrances subsumed under the title Metro-Net World Connection (1993–97) —is the reference system that they both establish. In the aforementioned works, as well as in his seemingly endless series of “hotel drawings,” Kippenberger mixed functions, allusions, symbols, and iconographies—permanent or temporary, proposed or actualized, imagined and lived—in a parody of imaginaries and realities with an "exuberant unpredictability.” As Rugoff explains, “A Psychobuilding, then, is not a symptom of disorder but a welcome deviation from the rationalization and abstraction of space that, historically, was one of the great projects of modernist architecture and urban planning.”3 The rupture with conventional forms of architectural thinking; the affinity for eccentric, delirious, and irrational spatial formations (as discussed in the chapter “Morphing”); and the physical extension of the architectural vocabulary beyond the structural or the symbolic are condensed in the works assembled under the heading “Psycho Spaces.” Los Carpinteros’ series of drawings of interiors, which show cuts in the walls that resemble three-dimensional windows and doors—as seen in two untitled drawings of 2009 [334, 335] and P ­ uertas y ventanas | Doors and Windows, 2009 [332/333]—generate a reversal, an unsettling spatial ambiguity, between inside and outside, light and dark, interior and exterior. These cuts not only produce sources for dramatic and even psychotic light and shadow effects but also create a trompe l’oeil effect with their formal evocation of three-dimensionality. As Los Carpinteros often refer to modernist layouts or facades, these drawings appear as models of an artistic extension, deviation, and critical revisitation of the principles of the modern movement and its social agenda, as suggested by Rugoff. Whereas in other works

the titles often play with double entendres and multiple connotations, here they provide factual and functional descriptions—Dos puertas | Two doors, 2008 [329] and Una puerta y dos ventanas | One Door and Two Windows, 2008 [327] )—avoiding references to the uncanny feelings that they produce.

In many of Los Carpinteros’ spaces, an as-if strategy is at work, in which the spectator can never be sure of seeing “reality”—for example, when the walls of a house are made out of a capitonné mattress, thus staging a Casa suave | Soft house, 2008 [338]. The methods of archi­ tectural drawing applied in bird’s-eye views of domestic structures are taken to an absurd extreme in Escorzo | Foreshortening, 2003 [356], a study of a chair in which the multiplication of legs in different lengths renders an impossible object, studied in the most precise geometrical fashion. The question of perspective is taken up in the many drawings in which mirrors are combined with architectural elements. In Casa y espejo | House and Mirror, 2007 [350/351] , the situation is staged as a one-to-one: one house is reflected by one mirror, thus rendering a single mirror image. At the same time the mirror serves to anthropo­ morphize the architecture so that it becomes the subject that sees, admires, and questions its reflected image. The situation is brought to a psychotic extreme in the drawing Distrito verde | Green District, 2007 [352] , in which a row of model-like housing structures is reflected by a row of mirrors so that the possibility of perceiving one image is subverted, dissolving in an infinite multiplication of reflections. The narcissistic production of desires is thus not just a form of self-­ contemplation but the means for breaking away from personal, social, and political restrictions and for questioning conditions between repression and liberation.

Mirrors as means of infusing subjectivity and “life” into an object point to the psycho-strategy of manipulating objects, with beds growing into Möbius strip–like highways [344, 345] from which there is no escape, or being braided together into meshes, as in Tres almohadas | Three Pillows, 2007 [341]. Elemental materials and objects such as bricks and walls are also incorporated into dreamlike images, as are both domestic spaces and urban architecture. In fact, oneiric spaces and strategies are to be found throughout Los Carpinteros’ oeuvre, complicating relations between the real and the imaginary and highlighting the power of the fictional over reality and their mutual intertwining.

1. Martin Kippenberger, Psychobuildings (Cologne: Walther König, 1988).

2. Ralph Rugoff, “Psycho Buildings,” in Psycho Buildings: Artists Take on Architecture (London: Hayward Gallery, 2008), 17.

3. Ibid.

327

Una puerta y dos ventanas One door and two windows, 2008 76 × 112.2 cm | 29 7/8 × 44 1/4 in.

Private Collection / Courtesy IvoryPress, Madrid

328 psycho spaces

Cuarto oscuro I Dark room I, 2008 75.5 × 112.2 cm | 29 3/4 × 44 1/4 in.

Courtesy Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo

329

Dos puertas Two doors, 2008 75.7 × 112 cm | 29 3/4 × 44 1/8 in.

Courtesy IvoryPress, Madrid

330 psycho spaces

The moment of repetition in many of the drawings does not manifest itself on the level of the material, but quite on the contrary in the form of shadows and reflections.

Changing between material and nonmaterial, real and absent, positive and negative, these works deal with the definition of the object on multiple levels. The ­reduplication in the molding of shadows infuses "everyday objects" such as shopping bags (La Gran Compra | The Great Shopping, 2006 [90] ), bicycles (Gran marcha hacia la izquierda | Great March to the Left, 2006 [90] ), or barbecues (El gran picnic | The Great Picnic, 2006 [96/97] ) with a three-dimensional reality and at the same time brings them back to the plane. But the plane in this case means also the unreal, the illusory, that which is vanishing but in some sense still present, and thereby refers to the moment of utopia in the work of Los Carpinteros. The series of dark rooms from 2008–9 assume this utopian, almost transcendent moment by expanding the idea of casting a cloud with its inversion, which is the incidence of light. The cuts in the wall connect the dark and the light, the physical and its shape by bringing the spatial pattern from one room into the other. Using the effect of trompe l'oeil, these images further provide the prospect into another reality by simulating three-dimensionality with half-open doors or windows but in fact at the same time fetch us back to illusion and to “what appears to be.”

The shadows jell in a more material form when looking at Derrame turqueza | ­Turquoise Spill, 2007 [151] , or Cromo | Chrome, 2009 [152] , from the melting series. By bringing into equation a material plane of reflection in the form of undefined substances and puddles, here the shadows lose their intangible character by evoking the appearance of leaving marks or fragmented imprints on the surface. The mimesis undergoes a development from disembodied reflections to melting hints and spacious depressions.

Whereas the objects mentioned earlier, like shopping bags or bicycles, are lined up in groups, varying between regulated systems and loose arrangements, other ­drawings concentrate on the interplay between the object and its trace, reinforcing the dialectic of reality and unreality and producing a pool of possibilities inside, between, or beyond these. In Piscina con reflejo | Pool with Reflection, 2004 [42], as well as in Piscina con reflejo (aérea) | Swimming Pool with Reflection (Aerial), 2006 [302/303] , it seems that even the drawings intentionally use feints like "false fronts" and elements from stage settings, such as walls or facades, to assure the dynamic of positive and negative portraiture.

331

Cuarto oscuro II Dark room II, 2008 75.5 × 112.2 cm | 29 3/4 × 44 1/4 in.

Collection Fortes d'Aloia, São Paulo

332

CHAPTER TITLE

333

Puertas y ventanas Doors and windows, 2009 114 × 200 cm 44 7/8 × 78 3/4 in.

Legacy Fine Art Collection, Panama

334

PSYCHO SPACES

Untitled, 2009 65 × 114 cm | 25 5/8 × 44 7/8 in.

Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

335

Untitled, 2009 65 × 114 cm | 25 5/8 × 44 7/8 in.

Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

336 psycho spaces

“Más surrealista que socialista” (more surrealist than socialist) is how architect Ricardo Porro labeled the revolutionary years in Cuba, “the moment common to every revolution, during which the marvelous becomes the everyday.”28 In Los Carpinteros’ postrevolutionary practice, the everyday seems to remain in this awkward, arguably less emphatic, suspension between surrealist and socialist forces. No estamos solos | We Are Not Alone, 2008, plays with this idea on a textual as well as a representational level. The house of mirrors, a bedroom of endless reflections, a mise en abîme, creates a situation of vertigo, the fall, but also a condition in which the potential inhabitant is never alone but is in the company of his mirrored alter egos. In a society based on the ideal of the collective but also on the reality of surveillance and control, the individual cannot be certain of being alone, because someone can always potentially be watching or listening.

The "metamorphoses of space” as a primary source of counterrealism performed by mirroring also links Los Carpinteros’ artistic practice to Alejo Carpentier's influential discussion of lo real maravilloso, or the marvelous real. The pairing of real and ­maravilloso may sound like a contradictory combination, but as David Mikics has pointed out, “In literary history … the two terms seem to exist in oxymoronic or paradoxical cohesion, rather than antithesis.”29 The blending of magical elements and a plausible, realistic setting is taken even further in the literary genre labeled magical realism. While maintaining strong roots in a complex social praxis, these writers use hybridity, fantastic elements, metatextual structure, and a sense of mystery to elaborate on the complexities of the everyday.

Repetition as a narrative principle, in conjunction with mirrors or their analogues used symbolically or structurally, creates a magic of shifting references in many examples of Latin American literature subsumed under magical realism. Jorge Luis Borges’s Aleph symbolizes the point that includes all the times and all the spaces of the universe, an abstract and at the same time concrete sphere in which they are contained: “Structure en abîme belongs to Borges’s preferred visual arrangements of images: as a narrative structure, a trope and a spatial model, it poses a philosophical question about infinity or infinite periodic repetitions. According to a principle of endless inclusion, it modifies our belief in the truth of our perceptions. Like a welldrawn labyrinth, it is endless and, like a labyrinth, it sets up against the order of the world, which is impossible to discern, the conceptual order of the trope that corrects the imperfect notions that ‘realistic’ thought has fostered. The notion of endless circularity is present in labyrinths as well as in mirrors and in dreams that include other dreams or the dreamer.”30 The breaking through the mirror, or the doubling of characters following a literary mirroring principle, is a frequent motif in the fiction of Borges, Julio Cortázar ("­Axolotl," "The Night Face Up"), Carlos Fuentes (Distant Relations), and Gabriel García Márquez. As one critic has noted, “the magic realist text can be read as reflecting in its language of narration real conditions of speech and cognition within the social relations of a postcolonial culture, a reflection García Márquez thematizes … as a ‘speaking mirror.’”31

337

No estamos solos We are not alone, 2008 140.5 × 200 cm | 55 1/4 × 78 3/4 in.

Private Collection, Ribeirão Preto, Brazil

338 psycho spaces

Casa suave Soft house, 2008 76 × 112.1 cm | 29 7/8 × 44 1/8 in.

Private Collection

The model of a house or spacious apartment is completely executed in seemingly soft capitonné mattress. The floor plan and the bird’s-eye view are recurrent motifs in Los Carpinteros’ drawings (Puertas y ventanas | Doors and Windows, 2009 [332/333] and Untitled, 2009 [334] ). Casa suave | Soft House combines this layout with the ­common material of the mattress, to be found in drawings and sculptures using beds such as Cama express way | Expressway Bed, 2006 [345] ; Cama interminable | Endless Bed, 2008 [346/347] ; and La montaña rusa | The Roller Coaster, 2008 [343] , yet its use is not restricted to the more obvious subject matter of beds, but also extends to amoebas (Ameba 36-B | Amoeba 36-B, 2008 [148/149] and Ameba I | Amoeba I, 2008 [156] ). The unconscious substream relating to the bed and dreams is metonymically transposed to the soft surface and materiality of the mattress, though Soft House also takes on connotations of the cushioned walls and floors of the padded cells used in mental hospitals to protect patients from self-harm or suicide. The cozy and comfortable-looking house thus also possesses the uncanny aspect of a psycho space.

339

Mi camita My little bed, 2007 132 × 199 cm | 52 × 78 3/8 in.

Private Collection / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

340 psycho spaces

Jardín francés French garden, 2007 152 × 313 cm | 59 3/4 × 123 1/4 in.

Private Collection / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

341

top: Dos Camas (Vista Superior) Two beds (view from above), 2007 130.5 × 200 cm | 51 3/8 × 78 3/4 in.

Jacqueline Perla Shor

bottom: Tres Almohadas | Three pillows, 2007 131 × 199 cm | 51 5/8 × 78 3/8 in.

Collection of Ricardo and Muriel Briceno / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

342 psycho spaces

Dos Camas Two beds, 2008 Mattress, pillow, pillowcase, iron 90 × 240 × 280 cm | 35 3/8 × 94 1/2 × 110 1/4 in.

Courtesy Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo

343

La Montaña Rusa The roller coaster, 2008 Mixed media 248.9 × 800.1 × 431.8 cm | 98 × 315 × 162 7/8 in.

Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

344 psycho spaces

is an installation realized after a series of watercolors studying the ­spatial potential of stretching and twisting a bed. From the bed growing up the wall in Mi ­c amita | My Little Bed, 2007 [339] , and the intertwining of two or more beds in Dos camas | Two Beds, 2007 [342] , and Tres almohadas | Three Pillows, 2007 [341] , the expansion of the bed seems driven by the subconscious stream of nightly visions, with the mattress imagined as a labyrinthine highway of dreams. This manipulation is brought to extremes in Cama interminable | Endless Bed, 2008 [346/347] , and finally in the installation La montaña rusa | The Roller Coaster, 2008 [343]. On the level of materials the bed brings along with it the mattress, with its soft and cozy associations, which infects other structures in Los Carpinteros’ world, such as the walls of a house in Casa suave | Soft House, 2008 [338], or the ever-changing organic form of the amoeba (Ameba I | Amoeba I, 2008 [156], and Ameba 36-B | Amoeba 36-B, 2008 [148/149] ), also made from capitonné mattresses.

Cama | Bed

Cama | Bed, 2007 Foam, fabric, metal, stainless, epoxy paint 505 × 330 × 125 cm 198 3/4 × 129 7/8 × 49 1/4 in.

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

345

Cama express way Expressway bed, 2006 185.5 × 114 cm | 73 × 44 7/8 in.

Property of CIAC / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

346 psycho spaces

Cama interminable Endless bed, 2008 diptych 76 × 225 cm | 29 7/8 × 88 5/8 in.

IP Collection / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

347

Tejido de Carreteras Roof of roads, 2006 66 × 102 cm | 26 × 40 1/4 in.

Private Collection, France

In Tejido de carreteras | Roof of Roads Los Carpinteros once again take up the topos of the street: roads that coagulate and become quicksilver-like drops, incorporating the movement that they allow for within themselves (Fluido (estudio) | Fluid (Study), 2003 [147] , and the installation Fluido | Fluid, 2003 [146] ), and roads that obstruct this movement because they appear destroyed (Puente almendrado | Almond Bridge, 2008 [228/229] , and Puente roto | Broken Bridge, 2008 [227] ) or because they are made of objects that do not allow for smooth passage over the road, as in Carretera de ­tornillos | Highway of Screws, 2003 [200]. These obstructions are transferred into the infinite Möbius strip of Cama express way | Expressway Bed, 2006 [345], in which even the road of dreams is presented as an accelerated highway. The metaphorical meaning of the road as a path to (self-)awareness is extended ad absurdum, sabotaging not only time and space but also the notion of a sovereign subject. Deconstructed roads that do not lead anywhere, as in El Camino | The Road, 2003 [306], point toward a psycho­ tic twist, which can be seen at work in the three drawings Tejido de ­c arreteras, ­Tsunami, and untitled. The road, which usually guarantees a clear connection ­between two geographic locations, is multiplied, losing its point of departure as well as its point of destination. These reimaginings of the road feature convex and concave distortions of the asphalt, respectively, so that in one drawing the inter­ woven roads resemble a roof, while in the other two the roads take on the movement of breaking waves, alluding to security, on the one hand, and the precariousness of being, on the other.

top: Tsunami, 2008 140.5 × 203 cm | 55 1/4 × 79 7/8 in.

Private Collection, São Paulo / Courtesy Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo

bottom: Untitled, 2009 114 × 175 cm 44 7/8 × 68 7/8 in.

Jacqueline Perla Shor

350 psycho spaces

Casa y espejo House and mirror, 2007 Diptych 78.5 × 214 cm | 30 7/8 × 84 1/4 in.

Private collection / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

351

352 psycho spaces

Distrito Verde Green District, 2007 Diptych 78.5 × 214 cm | 30 7/8 × 84 1/4 in.

Collection Patrice de Camaret, London

353

visualizes a district composed of identical green modernist houses seen through the entrapments of mirror walls. Rather than focusing the vision onto a single object, the mirror walls tends to disorganize and diffuse it, ­re­composing the perceived images of our surroundings by reflecting complex patterns and rotational symmetries. Thus the drawing generates a certain sense of failure or partial failure, suggesting a breakdown of our ordinary categories for designating objects and spaces, meaning and materiality, reality and reflection.

In the installation Espejos de agua | Water Mirrors, 2001 [354/355], the six wooden drafting tables—each encircled by six black desk lamps—appear quite ordinary at first glance. Upon closer inspection one realizes that the water substitutes for paper and that the lights reflect not on a piece of glass, but on a shallow pool of water, subverting the usual function of the table as a place to make drawings. The work juxtaposes materials that are incongruous and incompatible, such as wood and water, and water and electricity. This—as well as the water’s qualities of flatness, borderlessness, and expansiveness—creates shifts between multiple planes of functionality and symbolism, in which “water is used as an element of connection, of reflection, of circulation, etc.”32 Each table alludes to the nature of the artistic process and mirrors the difficulty and even impossibility of rendering, of “drawing” upon ideas and intervening in the realm of the sensible. “The contemplative act of the lights is related to a type of ­projection on an intellectual level of the image of the creator himself, because creation in some sense is an act of narcissism.”33 Seeing oneself mirrored in water and being drawn into the abyss of self-reflection revives the ancient myth of hubris, of losing touch with one’s sense of reality. But it also allows for the development of narrative relation­ships, lines of subjectivization and processes of deidentification, essential for strategies of duplicity, of phenomenological disruption.

Using reflection, duplication, and mirrors—as in many drawings by Los Carpinteros (Casa y espejo | House and Mirror, 2007 [350/351]; Reflejo | Reflection, 2006 [304]; Piscina con reflejo | Pool with Reflection, 2004 [42] ; Piscina con reflejo (aérea) | Swimming pool with reflection (aerial), 2006 [302/303] )—is thus an important strategy to make room for the viewer’s own imagination and participation in the aesthetic process. These devices create a kind of ambiguity in which the visible cannot be reduced to its physicality, cannot be grasped by the total gaze or collapsed into an all-encompassing reading.

In the words of Stéphane Mallarmé: “To name an object is to suppress three-­ quarters of the enjoyment … which derives from the pleasure of step-by-step ­discovery; to suggest, that is the dream. It is the perfect use of this mystery that constitutes the symbol: to evoke an object little by little.”34 Distrito verde | Green District

354 psycho spaces

Espejos de Agua Water mirrors, 2001 Wood, water, flexo lamps Variable dimensions Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

355

356 psycho spaces

Psycho Hayward, 2008 141 × 200 cm | 55 1/2 × 78 3/4 in.

Tiqui Atencio Collection / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

This work was created on the occasion of the exhibition Psycho Buildings at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2008, which focused on artistic takes on architecture.

The exhibition took as its point of departure Martin Kippenberger’s artistic investigations into architectural urban structures and buildings, published in an artist’s book titled Psychobuildings. The Hayward Gallery is part of the Southbank Centre, a large complex devoted to the arts, which opened in 1968. Designed by the Greater London Council's Department of Architecture and Civic Design, led by Geoffrey Horsefall, the gallery is a massive concrete construction with interlaced spaces and a raw concrete facade, rendering a distinctive modern architectural intervention into London’s skyline. Psycho Hayward takes up the thread within Los Carpinteros’ oeuvre of buildings that become furniture, such as the sculptures of Downtown, 2002–3 [56], or ­G avetero – Solimar | Dresser – Solimar, 2007 [101] , in which iconic buildings from Havana and elsewhere are translated into dressers and similar wooden furniture. The Hayward’s modern concrete building lends itself to this treatment, as the structure itself offers many different levels and arrangements of spaces.

357

Escorzo Foreshortening, 2003 116 × 229.9 cm | 45 3/4 × 90 1/2 in.

Denver Art Museum Collection / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

Estantería Comunicada Connected shelves, 2005 134 × 70 cm | 52 3/4 × 27 5/8 in.

Andreas Hecker Collection

358 psycho spaces

Edificio Tazas Cup building, 2005 71 × 100 cm | 28 × 39 3/8 in.

Private Collection, San Jose

The public housing in Casa de tazas | House of Cups and Edificio Tazas | Cup building is inspired by the famous Casa de las Conchas in Salamanca, Spain, which is embellished with hundreds of stone scallop shells, spread across the facade like chicken pox. The structure, built around 1500, was designed by an architect who was a knight of the Order of Santiago de Compostela. The shell is a symbol of the order and can also be found along the pilgrimage route to the cathedral in Santiago. Los ­Carpinteros’ interpretation of the Casa de las Conchas plays on the absurd appearance of the shells on the facade as well as their ability to contain liquid, transforming the shells into cups.

Casa de tazas House of cups, 2005 156 × 185 cm | 61 3/8 × 72 3/4 in.

Collection of Patrick Wallace, New York

360 psycho spaces

Casa Roja Red house, 2008 Diptych 199.5 × 280 cm | 47 × 110 1/4 in.

Courtesy Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo

361

Untitled, 2009 75.5 × 112 cm | 29 3/4 × 44 1/8 in.

Collection of Diane and Bruce Halle, Phoenix, Arizona / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

notes to short texts Pages 38–352

EL BARRIO – BUILDING THE CITY

COLD STUDIES

1. From Adam Budak, “With,” in Volksgarten: Die Politik der Zugehörigkeit / The Politics of Belonging (Graz: Kunsthaus Graz 2008), 21–22.

2. Smithson, quoted in Neville Wakefield, “Yucatan Is Elsewhere: On Robert Smithson's Hotel Palenque,” Parkett, no. 43 (1995): 134.

3. Ibid.

4. Jorge Reynoso Pohlenz, “Los Carpinteros: Utopian Model Makers,” Afterall, no. 9 (Spring–Summer 2004): 69.

5. Marilyn Zeitlin, “Los Carpinteros Updated,” in Afterall, no. 9 (Spring–Summer 2004): 77.

6. Conversation between Eugenio Valdés Figueroa and Los Carpinteros, Havana, February 2005, quoted in Eugenio Valdés Figueroa, “Los Carpinteros,” in Las Horas: Visual Arts of Contemporary Latin America (Zurich: Daros-Latinamerica Collection; Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2005), 75–76.

7. Ibid., 76.

8. Ibid.

9. Los Carpinteros, conversation with the editors, May 2010.

10. Ibid.

21. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson Smith (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991), 95–96.

22. Adam Budak, Manipulations: On Economies of Deceit: Prague Biennale II (Prague: National Gallery, 2005), 25.

23. The park seeks to bring together art, culture, and sports, providing an interactive platform for visitors. Completed in June 2010, it opened to the public with eight newly commissioned inaugural works by international artists Kendall Buster, Los Carpinteros, Jeppe Hein, Alfredo Jaar, Tea Mäkipää, Type A, Atelier Van Lieshout, and Andrea Zittel.

POLITICALLY INFECTED OBJECTS 11. Los Carpinteros, conversation with the editors, May 2010.

12. Ibid.

13. Luis Camnitzer, New Art of Cuba, rev. ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), xxv.

14. Los Carpinteros, conversation with the editors, May 2010.

15. José Martí, “El poema del Niágara,” cited in Eugenio Valdés Figueroa, “Los Carpinteros,” in Las Horas: Visual Arts of Contemporary Latin America (Zurich: Daros-Latinamerica Collection; Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2005), 76.

MORPHING

16. See Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972).

17. Umberto Eco, Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality (London: Secker & Warburg, 1986), 43.

18. Luis Camnitzer, New Art of Cuba, rev. ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), xxv.

19. “A Word in Season on an Important Subject” (letter to the editors), New York Times, May 16, 1861, http://www.nytimes. com/1861/05/16/news/a-word-in-season-on-an-importantsubject.html.

20. See Michael T. Martin, New Latin American Cinema, vol. 1, Theory, Practices, and Transcontinental Articulations (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 155–57.

LANGUAGE

24. Conversation between the artists, in Los Carpinteros, ed. Helena Ochoa Foster (Madrid: Ivorypress, 2010), 32.

25. Eduardo Luis Rodríguez, The Havana Guide: Modern Architecture, 1925–1965, trans. Lorna Scott Fox (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000), 189.

26. Charles Merewether, “Los Carpinteros,” in Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing (New York: Phaidon, 2005), 56.

27. Laura Hoptman, “Working Drawing,” in Los Carpinteros, ed. Alexa Favata and Noel Smith, published in conjunction with the exhibition Fluid, Eighth Havana Biennial, National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana (Tampa: Institute for Research in Art, University of South Florida, 2003), 36.

PSYCHO SPACES 28. Quoted in John A. Loomis, Revolution of Forms: Cuba's Forgotten Art Schools (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), 22.

29. David Mikics, “Derek Walcott and Alejo Carpentier: Nature, History, and the Caribbean Writer,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 372.

30. Adam Budak and Daniela Zyman, press release for Collection as Aleph, organized by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary and Kunsthaus Graz, 2008.

31. Stephen Slemon, “Magical Realism as Postcolonial Discourse,” in Magical Realism, 411.

32. Interview with the artists, Torun, Poland, 2008.

33. “Stéphane Mallarmé: Poet of the French Symbolist Movement,” Midnight Equinox, http://unequivocalhorizon.wordpress. com/2010/05/17/stephane-mallarme-poet-of-the-frenchsymbolist-movement/.

34. Quoted in Jules Huret, “Interview with Stéphane Mallarmé,” in Symbolist Art Theories: A Critical Anthology, ed. Henri Dorra (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 141.

appendix

Exhibitions

Los Carpinteros Marco Antonio Castillo Valdés Born Cuba, 1971 Graduated from the Instituto Superior de Arte, Havana, 1995 Dagoberto Rodríguez Sánchez Born Cuba, 1969 Graduated from the Instituto Superior de Arte, Havana, 1994 Alexandre Arrechea (member of Los Carpinteros 1991– 2003) Born Cuba, 1970 Graduated from the Instituto Superior de Arte, Havana, 1994

365

2001 Túneles populares, Palacio de Abrahante, Salamanca, Spain Galeria Camargo Vilaça, São Paulo, Brazil Ciudad transportable, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art Grant Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles San Francisco Art Institute 2000 Grant Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles 1999 Tania Bruguera /Los Carpinteros, Vera Van Laer Galerie, Antwerp, Belgium

Los Carpinteros live and work in Havana.

Selected Solo Exhibitions 2010 Opener 19: Los Carpinteros, Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York Drama turquesa, Ivorypress Art and Books, Madrid 2008 La montaña rusa, Sean Kelly Gallery, New York Sub-urbano, Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo, Brazil 2006 Sel et poivre, Galerie in SITU, Paris Faro tumbado, Galería Habana, Havana, during Dinámicas de la cultura urbana, Ninth Havana Biennial Contemporaneamente, Milan Unosunove and IILA, Rome 2005 Los Carpinteros: Inventing the World /Inventar el mundo, Contemporary Art Museum, University of South Florida, Tampa; Chicago Cultural Center; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Museum London, London, Ontario En el jardín, Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo, Brazil 2004 Downtown, Anthony Grant Inc., New York Manual de trabajo, dibujos: Esculturas recientes, Galería Servando Cabrera, Havana 2003 Novos desenhos, Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo, Brazil Fluido, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana 2002 Ciudad transportable, Contemporary Art Museum of Hawaii, Honolulu Intervention at B.Open, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, England

1998 Project Room, Feria Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo ARCO 1998, Parque Ferial Juan Carlos I, Madrid Mecánica popular, Galería Habana, Havana Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany; Kunsthalle, Berlin Bili Bidjocka /Los Carpinteros/Rivane Neuenschwander, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York Iturralde Gallery, Los Angeles 1997 Construimos el puente para que cruce la gente, construimos paredes para que el sol no llegue, Galería Angel Romero, Madrid Viejos métodos para nuevas deudas, Convento de San Francisco de Asís, Havana Los Carpinteros/Carlos Estévez /Offill Industrial, Galería Nina Menocal, Mexico City 1996 Todo ha sido reducido a la mitad del original, Castillo de los Tres Reyes del Morro, Havana 1995 Los Carpinteros: Obra reciente, Galería Angel Romero, Madrid Se vende tierra de Cuba, Entrepôt pour Matériel Pharmaceutique, Nantes, France; exhibition not shown due to cancellation of Les allumées: Nantes–La Havanne festival Ingeniería Civil, Galería Habana, Havana 1992 Arte sano [Fernando Rodríguez Falcón/Alexandre Arrechea / Dagoberto Rodríguez], Casa del Joven Creador, Havana No sitios pintados, Galería Arte 7, Complejo Cultural Cinematográfico Yara, Havana, Cuba Pintura de caballete, Centro de Arte 23 y 12, Havana 1991 Para usted, Fábrica de Tabacos Partagás, Havana

366

exhibitions

Selected Group Exhibitions 2010 Pasajes – Viajes por el híper-espacio. Obras de la colección ­Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijón, Spain Al calor del pensamiento: Obras de la Daros-Latinamerica Collection, Sala de Arte Ciudad Grupo Santander, Madrid New Décor, Hayward Gallery, London 100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art and Nature Park, Indianapolis Museum of Art 2009 HB Arte Contemporáneo Cubano, Pabexpo, Havana, in conjunction with Tenth Havana Biennial The Kaleidoscopic Eye: Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo Confluencias: Inside Arte Cubano Contemporáneo, National Hispanic Cultural Center, Albuquerque, New Mexico Automatic Cities: The Architectural Imaginary in Contemporary Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego 2008 Cuba: Art et histoire, de 1868 à nos jours, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal in collaboration with Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes and Fototeca de Cuba, Pavillon Jean-Noel Desmarais, Montreal Surrounded by Water: Contemporary Cuban Art, Boston University Art Gallery Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary: Collection as Aleph, Kunsthaus Graz, Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, Austria Psycho Buildings: Artists Take On Architecture, Hayward Gallery, London The Way Things Are… Works from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art ­Contemporary Collection, Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu, Torun, Poland 2007 New Dimensions, Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco Luz ao Sul, Bienal de São Paulo-Valencia, Centre del Carme, Valencia, Spain Estuaire Nantes–Saint-Nazaire, Escall’atlantic, Saint-Nazaire, France New Economy, Artists Space, New York Espacios multiplicados, Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales, Havana The Eclectic Eye: Pop and Illusion: Selections from the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Colorado Springs Art Center, Colorado Springs, Colorado Double Vision, Deutsche Bank, New York Volksgarten: Politics of Belonging, Kunsthaus Graz, Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, Austria Homing Devices, Contemporary Art Museum, University of South Florida, Tampa 2006 Arte de Cuba, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, São Paulo; Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Río de Janeiro; Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Brasilia, Brazil

La huella múltiple, Convento San Francisco de Asís, Havana, in con­ junction with Dinámicas de la cultura urbana, Ninth Havana Biennial Nuit Blanche, Paris Havana Factory, Á Chocolatería, Santiago de Compostela, Spain 2005 4to Salón de Arte Contemporáneo, Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales, Havana Feria Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo ARCO 2005, Madrid Contradicciones y convivencias: Arte de América Latina, 1981–2000, Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, Bogotá, Colombia Armory Show, New York, Galeria Fortes Vilaça booth Monuments for the USA, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; White Columns, New York Escultura transeúnte: XX Aniversario de CODEMA, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana 51st Venice Biennale, IILA Pavilion, Palazzo Franchetti Manipulations on Economies of Deceit, Prague Biennale of Contemporary Art 2005; Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdan´sk, Poland Arte Américas, UPAEP/União Postal das Américas, Spain and Portugal, Río de Janeiro Deseos fluidos: Positions between Reality and Fantasy in Cuban and Brazilian Art, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, The Hours: Visual Arts of Contemporary Latin America, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 2004 Paper, Barbara Mathes Gallery, New York Ahora es el futuro/The Future Is Now: Contemporary Cuban Artists, Part 1, Durst Organization with Paul Sharpe Contemporary Art, New York MOMA at El Museo: Latin American and Caribbean Art from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art and El Museo del Barrio Just on Time, Galería Habana, Havana Islands, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence Art and Architecture, 1900–2000, Palazzo Ducale, Padua Recent Acquisitions: Contemporary Sculpture, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York Update and Download, Casa Benito Juárez, Havana Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami 2003 Rest in Space, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin Dreamspaces – Entresueños, Deutsche Bank Lobby Gallery, New York Sentido común, Galería Habana, Havana Kaap Helder, Oude Rijkswerf Willemsoord, Den Helder, Holland Stretch, Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto 4ta Bienal de Artes Visuales de Mercosur, Porto Alegre, Brazil 2002 25th Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil Rest in Space, Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo Dwelling Project, Gallery Optica, Montreal With Eyes of Stone and Water, Helsinki Art Museum Drawing Now: Eight Propositions, Museum of Modern Art, New York Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai Art Museum

367

2000 Playgrounds and Toys for Refugee Children, an international project for Art for the World, Geneva 1999 Seventh Havana Biennial, Fortaleza de la Cabaña Arte cubano: Obra sobre papel, Centro Cultural Conde Duque, Madrid 1998 Trasatlántico, Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM), Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain The Garden of Forking Paths, Kunstforeningen, Copenhagen; Nordjyllands Kunstmuseum, Aalborg, Denmark; Edsvik Konst & Kultur, Sollentuna, Sweden; Helsinki City Art Museum The Edge of Awareness, WHO Headquarters, Geneva, Switzerland; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York; SESC de Pompeia, São Paulo, Brazil; New Delhi, India; Triennale di Milano, Milan CRIA's Latin Art Sale, Generous Miracles Gallery, New York Caribe insular: Exclusión, fragmentación y paraíso, Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo, Badajoz, Spain; Casa de América, Madrid III Bienal Barro de América, Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, Venezuela La dirección de la mirada, Stadthaus, Zurich; Musée de Beaux Arts, La Chaux-des-Fonds, Switzerland Contemporary Art from Cuba: Irony and Survival on the Utopian Island, ASU Art Museum, Arizona State University, Tempe; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco 1997 Feria Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo ARCO 1997, Parque Ferial Juan Carlos I, Madrid New Art from Cuba: Utopian Territories, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, National Gallery, Vancouver The Rest of the World, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin Zona vedada, private residence, Calle 8 y 13, Vedado, Havana Arte y ciudad: Festival internacional de arte, Museo de Arte Moderno, Medellín, Colombia Así está la cosa: Instalación y arte objeto en América Latina, Centro Cultural Arte Contemporáneo A.C., Mexico City Trade Routes: History and Geography, Second Johannesburg Biennale, Africus Institute for Contemporary Art, Johannesburg, South Africa El arte que no cesa, Centro Wifredo Lam, Havana 1996 Feria Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo ARCO 1996, Pabellón de Cristal, Madrid Mundo soñado: Joven plástica cubana, Casa de América, Madrid Río Almendares: Ni fresa, ni chocolate, Centro de Conservación, Restauración y Museología, Havana Domestic Partnerships: New Impulses in Decorative Arts from the Americas, Art in General, New York A Dentro/A Fuera: New Work from Cuba, Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for the Arts, Alberta, Canada El cine por la plástica, Galería Juan David, Complejo Cultural Yara, Havana Family Nation Tribe Community SHIFT: Zeitgenössische künstlerische Konzepte, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin

1995 New Art from Cuba, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London; Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery, Carlisle, Cumbria, England Havanna /São Paulo: Junge Kunst aus Lateinamerika, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin Una de cada clase: Fundación Ludwig de Cuba, Centro de Conservación, Restauración y Museología, Havana Novísimos artistas cubanos: Jornadas culturales de Cuba en México, Casa del Lago, Antiguo Bosque de Chapultepec, Mexico City El oficio del arte, Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales, Havana 1994 Paisajes, Galería La Acacia, Havana Utopía, Galería Espada, Casa del Joven Creador, Havana Artistas cubanos invitados a la Quinta Bienal de La Habana 1994, Centro Wifredo Lam, Havana Multimedios (in conjunction with the Fifth Havana Biennial), Galería Plaza Vieja, Fondo Cubano de Bienes Culturales, Havana Fifth Havana Biennial, Museo de la Educación, Havana Die 5. Biennale von Havana (Fifth Biennial of Havana: Selection), Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany Nuevas adquisiones, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana Subasta, Centro Wifredo Lam, Havana XI Bienal Internacional de Arte Valparaíso, Galería Municipal de Arte, Valparaíso, Chile 1993 Las metáforas del templo, Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales, Havana Nacido en Cuba, Centro Cultural Mexiquense, Ex Hacienda La Pila, Toluca, Mexico 1992 Cambio de Bola, Galería Habana, Havana 1991 Miss Expo, Galería "El Pasillo," Instituto Superior de Arte, Havana Si TIM tiene TIM vale (in conjunction with Fourth Havana Biennial), Galería "El Pasillo," Instituto Superior de Arte, Havana Expreso ISA, Galería de la Escuela Nacional de Arte, Havana Gala del ISA, Teatro Nacional de Cuba, Havana 1990 El objeto esculturado, Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales, Havana

Special Interventions 2008 Scenery for the ballet Rhapsody, Morphoses/ The Wheeldon Company, New York

368

exhibitions

Awards 2002 Medalla por la Cultura Nacional, Ministerio de Cultura, Havana 2000 Premio Fomento de las Artes, UNESCO, Seventh Havana Biennial, Cuba 1997 Premio de encuesta popular, Revista El Mundo, Feria ARCO, Madrid Endowment, Departamento de Exposiciones y Colecciones, Ministerio de Cultura Español, Madrid

Collections ASU Art Museum, Arizona State University, Tempe Blanton Museum, University of Texas, Austin Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris Centro Cultural Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City Cincinnati Museum of Contemporary Art Cisneros Foundation, Miami Cleveland Museum of Art Coral Capital Art Collection, Panama City, Panama Daros Foundation, Zurich Farber Collection of Contemporary Cuban Art, Miami Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Beverly Hills, California Fundación ARCO, Museo Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago de Compostela, Spain Harn Museum, Gainesville, Florida Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. Indianapolis Museum of Art Los Angeles County Museum of Art Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany LVMH Louis Vuitton/Moët Hennessy, Paris Madeira Corporate Services Collection, Funchal, Portugal Microsoft Art Collection, Seattle Musée des Beaux Arts, Montreal Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo MEIAC, Badajoz, Spain Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles The Museum of Modern Art, New York National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky Tate Modern, London Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna Ulrich Museum, Wichita State University, Wichita, Kansas University Art Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

contributors

369

Paulo Herkenhoff is an independent curator and critic based in Rio de Janeiro. He was ­adjunct curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, for three years, where he curated such exhibitions as TEMPO (2002) and The Marriage of Reason and Squalor (2000). Prior to his appointment at MoMA, Herkenhoff was artistic ­director of the XXIV Bienal de São Paulo (1997–99) and chief curator of the Museu de Arte Moderna of Rio de Janeiro (1985–90).

In 1997 he curated the Brazilian Pavilion of the XLVII Venice Biennale.

In addition to his curatorial activities, Herkenhoff writes extensively on ­artists both from and outside of Brazil.

Gudrun Ankele is assistant curator at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna.

From 2002 to 2006 she set up and managed the archive of Franz West, with a research focus on his early oeuvre and his writings. She studied literature and art history in Graz, Vienna, and Berlin and completed her PhD in 2008 at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. She has taught and lectured at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, and the Academy of Arts, Berlin, as well as at KFU Graz. As a freelance writer and curator, she has addressed questions of aesthetics and politics, with a special focus on identity issues.

Her writings have been published in springerin and n.paradoxa, and she is the editor of the anthology Absolute Feminismus (2010).

Helen Molesworth is the chief curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Previously she was head of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art and the Houghton Curator of Contemporary Art at the Harvard Art Museums. From 2002 to 2006 she was the chief curator of exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts, where she organized the first U.S. survey exhibitions of the work of Louise Lawler and Luc Tuymans, as well as Part Object Part Sculpture, which charted a genealogy of transatlantic sculpture produced in the wake of Marcel Duchamp’s erotic objects and his handmade readymades of the 1960s. From 2000 to 2002 she was the curator of contemporary art at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where she organized Work Ethic, which traced the problem of artistic labor in post1960s art. She is the author of numerous articles, and her writing has appeared in publications such as Artforum, Art Journal, Documents, and October. Her research is concentrated largely within and around the problems of feminism, the reception of Duchamp, and the sociohistorical frameworks of contemporary art. She is currently at work on a survey exhibition of the work of Amy Sillman and a large group exhibition about art of the 1980s.

Daniela Zyman is chief curator at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, ­founded by Francesca von Habsburg in 2002. The foundation is committed to supporting the production of contemporary art and is actively engaged in commissioning and disseminating projects that defy traditional disciplinary categories. Before joining T-B A21, Zyman was chief curator at the MAK—Austrian Museum for Contemporary Art in Vienna and a founding member of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House in Los Angeles, which she directed for several years.

Rochelle Steiner is dean of the University of Southern California Roski School of Fine Arts.

In 2006 she became director of the Public Art Fund, where she initiated public art projects in New York with Anish Kapoor, Sarah Sze, Sarah Morris, Damian Ortega, and others as well as Olafur Eliasson’s New York City Waterfalls (2008). As chief curator at the Serpentine Gallery in London (2001–6), she curated numerous one-person and group exhibitions with internationally acclaimed artists, including Ellsworth Kelly, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Monika Sosnowska, Hiroshi ­Sugimoto, John Currin, Cindy Sherman, and Takashi Murakami. Steiner has produced or contributed texts to more than fifty exhibition catalogs and books, and her essays and interviews with artists have appeared in such publications as Parkett, Art Review, and Modern Painters.

Eugenio Valdés Figueroa is a curator, critic, and historian of art. Former cocurator of the Havana Biennials, he is currently chief art manager and curator at Casa Daros (Botafogo, Rio de Janeiro). Casa Daros was created to serve as a platform for promoting and showing contemporary art in general, with a special focus on Latin American production. It is an independent forum, open to all lines of thinking. In keeping with this aim, Casa Daros will exhibit the Daros-Latinamerica collection (Europe’s largest collection of Latin American art), located in Zurich, which houses more than a thousand artworks from almost every country in Latin America, including works by Los Carpinteros.

index of works

4 sitios de quema | 4 sites for burning, 2008.......................88, 196, 197, 282

Cama | Bed, 2007.............................................................................................. 289, 344

Acumulación de Materiales – Ladrillos II Accumulation of materials – bricks II, 2003...................................62, 140, 215

Cama express way Expressway bed, 2006.......................................... 178, 289, 326, 338, 344, 345, 348

Alamar, 2003.................................................................................... 34, 178, 202, 205

Cama interminable | Endless bed, 2008...................... 290, 338, 344, 346/347

Alto parlante – Cohiba Loudspeaker – Cohiba, 2007.................................................................171, 270, 375

Cargo grande | Big cargo, 2004.................................................. 14, 258, 277, 291 Cargo, 2004..................................................................................... 258, 276/277, 291

Alto parlante – Sierra Maestra Loudspeaker – Sierra Maestra, 2007.................................................34, 271, 282 Alto parlante – Solimar (variante blanca) Loudspeaker – Solimar (white version), 2007...............................................269

Carretera de tornillos Highway of screws, 2003........................................................................ 16, 200, 348 Casa con piscina House with swimming pool, 2005.............................. 106, 118, 124, 126/127, 128

Alto parlante – Solimar (Variante Roja) Loudspeaker – Solimar (Red version), 2007...................................................268

Casa de tazas | House of cups, 2005........................................................166, 258

Altoparlante Solimar Loudspeaker Solimar, 2008.......................................................... 34, 258, 272, 289

Casa en Forma de Alicate Pliers-shaped house, 2003................................................... 20, 178, 182, 183, 282

Ameba I | Amoeba I, 2008......................................................... 22, 144, 156, 338, 344

Casa Roja | Red house, 2008...............................................................................360

Ameba 36-B | Amoeba 36-B, 2008......................................... 144, 148/149, 338, 344

Casa suave | Soft house, 2008.................................................... 15, 326, 338, 344

Anfiteatro Bermuda #2 Bermuda shorts amphitheater #2, 2004............................................18, 188, 262

Casa y espejo | House and mirror, 2007................................326, 350/351, 353 Casco de bicicleta | Bicycle helmet, 2008..................................... 178, 187, 290

Armario Familiar | Familiar shelves, 2006.........................................199, 288 Bajo costo | Low cost, 2005....................................................................45, 88, 230 Barricada de tornillos Barricade of screws, 2008..............................................................................86/87

Casita de cartón y despiece Little cardboard house and exploded view, 2007.................................39, 265 Catedral #2 | Cathedral #2, 2003......................................................................195 Catedral II | Cathedral II, 2003.........................................................................195

Basquet, 2008...................................................................................28, 208, 234/235 Catedrales | Cathedrals, 2005..........................................................................194 Biblioteca I, II y III | Library I, II, and III, 2001............................ 16, 282, 283 Ciudad Perfecta | Perfect city, 2005........................................22, 34, 36/37, 54 Biblioteca Modelo | Model Library, 1997......................................................280 Big Cheese, 2009.............................................................................................190, 192

Ciudad Transportable Transportable city, 2000.............................................. 21, 34, 38, 48, 49, 265, 289 Coco solo, 2004............................................................................... 34, 178, 202, 204

Bloque de Bloques Parcialmente Destruido (Vista 3/4) | Block of blocks partially destroyed (3/4 view), 2008....................................... 196, 208, 209, 226

Complejo Martí | Marti Complex, 2007............88, 104/105, 106, 118, 128, 178

Bloque infectado | Infected block, 2003........................................94, 163, 226

Concreto Roto | Broken concrete, 2006....................................... 208, 230, 231

Bloque negro al lado de un bloque blanco Black block beside a white block, 2003............................................................. 95

Counter Party, 2005...................................................................................76, 88, 89 Cristales Verdes | Green glass, 2005 ........................................ 208, 210/211

Bola | Ball, 2008............................................................................................ 208, 236 Cromo | Chrome, 2009 ...........................................................................144, 152, 330 Bombas de Agua | Water hydrants, 2006............................................76, 85, 118 Cuarto oscuro I | Dark room I, 2008 ....................................................... 16, 328 Bum Bum, 2008..................................................................................................258, 266 Cuarto oscuro II | Dark room II, 2008 .................................................... 16, 331

371

Cuatro Ciudades | Four Cities, 2007 ................................................17, 285, 288

Estuche para Taladro | Drill case, 2005 . ................................. 296, 304/305

Cuchillo | Knife (Part of Downtown), 2003........................................ 56, 57, 172

Estudio de Muebles y Bloques II Furniture and blocks Study II, 2006 .......................................................220, 223

Cuchillo de Mesa | Table Knife, 2007 ............................................ 178, 179, 375 Depresión | Depression, 2003 .................................................................. 296, 297

Estudio de Paredes de una Fábrica de Muebles Study for walls of a furniture factory, 2003 ............................................ 182

Derrame | Spill, 2007 ...................................................................................144, 150

Fanguito, 2004 ....................................................................... 34, 178, 202, 204, 290

Derrame Rojo | Red Spill, 2010 ................................................................144, 153

Faro Tumbado | Fallen lighthouse, 2004 ....................................... 50, 54, 232

Derrame Turqueza | Turquoise Spill, 2007 .................................144, 151, 330

Faro Tumbado | Felled lighthouse, 2006 . .............................. 50, 54, 233, 375

Distrito Verde | Green District, 2007 ......................................... 326, 352, 353

Fluido | Fluid, 2003 .............................................................................. 146, 169, 348

DKNY Bota | DKNY boot, 2004 ................................................................................. 21

Fluido (Estudio) | Fluid (Study), 2003 ................................................... 147, 348

Dos Camas | Two beds, 2008 ............................................................. 289, 342, 344

Focsa (Part of Downtown), 2002.......................................................................... 56

Dos Camas (Vista Superior) Two beds (view from above), 2007 . .......................................................... 289, 341

Foso | Moat, 2003 ..................................................................................................... 42 Free Basket, 2009 ................................................................................. 29, 208, 237

Dos puertas | Two doors, 2008 ............................................................... 326 , 329 Free Basket, 2010 . ........................................................................... 7, 208, 238, 239 Downtown, 2002–3 .................................................... 21, 56, 62, 171, 272, 280, 356 Drenaje | Drain, 2003 . ................................................................................ 296, 316 Edificio aerodinámico | Aerodynamic building, 2008 ........... 178, 186, 290

Frío Estudio del Desastre Cold study of disaster, 2005 ............................... 7, 175, 208, 243, 245, 220/221 Frío Estudio del Desastre (Muebles) Cold study of disaster (furniture), 2005 ..................................... 28, 208, 222

Edificio Hueco | Hole building, 2002 .............................................................. 60 Edificio Jerez | Jerez Building (Part of Downtown), 2003...............................................................................56, 375

Frío Estudio del Desastre, Bloques Cold study of disaster, blocks, 2004 . .......................................... 208, 218/219 Garage (Bread Bin), 2002 ....................................................................... 20, 34, 46

Edificio Tazas | Cup building, 2005 ....................................................... 190, 358 Gavetero – Solimar | Dresser – Solimar, 2007 .......................... 34, 101, 356 El Barrio | The neighborhood, 2004 .................................................. 34, 35, 140 El Barrio | The neighborhood, 2007 .......................................... 34, 38, 140, 289

Gran Marcha hacia la izquierda Great march to the left, 2006 . ..................................................... 76, 90, 166, 330

El Camino | The road, 2003 . ........................................................ 26, 230, 306, 348

Home Pool, 2006 .................................................................. 106, 118, 124, 128, 129

El Gran Picnic | The great picnic, 2008 ....................... 19, 76, 96/97, 166, 330

Huecos | Holes, 2005 . .................................................................................. 230, 300

Embajada Rusa | Russian embassy, 2002 ....................................................... 58

Huecos en el concreto | Holes in concrete, 2005 . ................. 230, 296, 301

Embajada Rusa Russian embassy (Part of Downtown), 2003.......................................20, 56, 172

Huella Adidas | Adidas footprint, 2005 . ..................................... 106, 118, 313 Jardín francés | French garden, 2007 .................................................. 27, 340

escorzo | Foreshortening, 2003..............................................................326, 356 Juego de tragantes | Set of drain covers, 2009 . .................................... 315 Espejos de Agua | Water mirrors, 2001 .......................... 6, 169, 353, 354/355 La Gente | The People, 2008 ................................................ 29, 171, 258, 262, 296 Estantería Comunicada | Connected shelves, 2005 . .............................. 357 La Gran Compra | The great shopping, 2006 ............................. 76, 80, 90, 330 Estantería I-III Shelves I-III, 2008 ......................................... 18, 144, 162, 163, 166, 226, 288, 289

372

index of Works

La Lengua de la Tierra The language of the earth, 2006 .............................. COVER, 258, 261, 291, 296

Parapeto para Juego de Comedor Parapet for Dining Room Set, 2003 ........................................................ 296, 305

La Montaña Rusa The roller coaster, 2008 ...............................18, 28, 140, 178, 290, 338, 343, 344

Pared escaladora | Climbing wall, 2009 ........................... 190, 191, 226, 230 Parte de parte | Part of a part, 2008 ..................... 88, 196, 208, 216/217, 226

La Playa 16, 2006 .................................................................................................. 134 Patas de Rana | Flippers, 2010 ....................................... 118, 134/135, 140, 174 Ladrillos Inertes | Inert bricks, 2004 ................................ 62, 208, 213, 214 Patas de Rana, Final | Flippers, final, 2009 . ........................ 16, 17, 132, 140 Las luces del estadio del pueblo The lights of the people's stadium, 2007 ................ 23, 28, 258, 274/275, 296

Piscina Arena | Arena pool, 2004 . ...................... 15, 20, 25, 118, 171, 189, 262

Lenguaje | Language, 2005 ........................................................ 258, 260, 291, 296

Piscina Bloque | Cinder block pool, 2002 ................................................... 308

Librero | Bookshelf, 2003 ......................................................................... 284, 289

Piscina compartida | Shared swimming pool, 2007 .....................25, 40, 118

Líquido Rojo | Red liquid, 2005 ....................................................................... 159

Piscina con Reflejo Pool with reflection, 2004 .............................................. 23, 25, 42, 54, 330, 353

Líquido Rojo (Burros) Red liquid (Sawhorses), 2005 ............................................................................ 158

Piscina con reflejo (Aérea) Swimming pool with reflection (aerial), 2006 .................. 302/303, 330, 353

Malas noticias | Bad news, 2009 . .................................................................. 267 Piscina infinita | Infinite pool, 2002 .............................................. 25, 26, 310 Mancha de Bolsas Rojas | Patch of red bags, 2006 ............................ 80, 85 Piscina Infinita III | Infinite Pool III, 2006 ........................................ 25, 312 Marea Roja | Red tide, 2008 ................................................................................ 99 Piscina Llena | Full pool, 2004 . ............................................................. 106, 107 Marea Verde | Green tide, 2008 ......................................................................... 98 Piscina Olímpica | Olympic pool, 2004 ......................................................... 122 Márgenes del Río Almendares Banks of the Almendares River, 2003 .............................. 34, 178, 202, 205, 290

Piscina Olímpica | Olympic pool, 2005 . ............................................... 124, 125

Meteoros Artificiales | Artificial meteors, 2006 ........................ 208, 212

Piscina para ambos | Pool for both, 2008 ..................... 40/41, 118, 124, 128

Mi camita | My little bed, 2007 ............................................................... 344, 339

Piso de Madera | Wooden floor, 2003 ................................... 144, 145, 163, 375

Montaña Rusa | Roller coaster, 2007 .................................................. 140, 157

Podium, 2008 ......................................................................................... 264, 265, 289

Movimiento de Liberación Nacional National Liberation Movement, 2010 . .............................................................. 79

Pool, 2002 ....................................................................................................... 291, 309 Pool-Pool (estudio final) | Pool-Pool (final study), 2006 . ......... 130, 291

Mucho caliente | Much hot, 2010 ................................... 144, 154/155, 208, 258 Portaaviones | Aircraft carrier, 2005 .... 22, 25, 29, 118, 119, 121, 124, 178 Mueble Gordo | Fat furniture, 2003 ..................................... 144, 160, 163, 226 Portaviones | Aircraft carrier, 2004 . ........................................................ 120 Mundo de Faros | World of lighthouses, 2003 .......................................54, 55 New Balance, 2002 ............................................................................................... 311 No estamos solos | We are not alone, 2008 ........................................336, 337

Proyecto para vaso cerámico "Francia" Project for ceramic vase "Francia", 2007 ...................................................... 92 Proyecto para vaso cerámico "Germany" Project for ceramic vase "Germany", 2007 . ................................................... 93

Objeto y Esencia | Object and Essence, 2007 ..........................................88, 91 Psycho Hayward, 2008 ................................................................................. 29, 356 Panera | Breadbox, 2004 .........................................................................80, 88, 103 Papel Reciclable | Recyclable paper, 2005 ............................................ 76, 84

Puente almendrado Almond bridge, 2008 . ............................................ 23, 178, 208, 226, 228/229, 348 Puente roto | Broken bridge, 2008 ....................................... 208, 226, 227, 348

373

Puertas y ventanas | Doors and windows, 2009 .............. 326, 332/333, 338 Rediseño de Cárcel con Comedor Central Redesign of jail with central canteen, 2007 . ................................... 24, 28, 47

Transporte de Agua (Camión) Water transportation (truck), 2005 . ..................................................... 118, 201 Trash Shopping Cart (Versión Grande) Trash shopping cart (Large version), 2007 ............................................. 80, 82

Reflejo | Reflection, 2006 ............................................................... 296, 304, 353 Trash Shopping Cart, 2007 ......................................................................... 80, 82 Retiro | Retreat, 2008 . ................................................................................178, 184 Trash Shopping Cart, 2008 ....................................................... 22, 54, 76, 80, 81 Retiro Médico | Medical retreat (Part of Downtown), 2003...................... 56 Tres Almohadas | Three pillows, 2007 ................................ 289, 326, 341, 344 Retiro, Perfil | Retreat, side view, 2008 ..............................................178, 185 Tres Relojes | Three Clocks, 2003 ...................................................... 76, 77, 141 Sal y Pimienta | Salt and pepper, 2004 ................................................... 83, 375 Sala de Lectura | Reading Room, 2010 . ....................... 173, 278, 280, 281, 289 sala de lectura (prototipo) Reading Room (prototype), 2010.........................................................................279

Triangular tray with movile side walls convertido en piscina, 2002 . ........................................ 308/309 Trincheras 2 | Trenches 2, 2003 .................................................... 258, 259, 291 Tsunami, 2008 .......................................................................................... 21, 348, 349

Salón de Reuniones | Meeting room, 2003 ............................. 26, 54, 296, 307 Sandalia | Sandal, 2004 . .................................................................. 202, 203, 290

Túneles Populares The People’s Tunnels, 1999 ................................ 34, 170, 171, 196, 318, 319–324

Shelf building, 2002 ............................................................................................ 61

Túneles Populares | The People’s tunnels, 2002 ....................... 44, 170, 230

Show room, 2008 ..................................................................208, 220, 224, 225, 326

Una puerta y dos ventanas One door and two windows, 2008 ...................................................... 16, 326, 327

Sistema | System, 2006 ................................................................ 23, 50, 52/53, 54 Untitled, 2009.....................................................................................................34, 63 Sofá | Sofa, 2004 ................................................................................................... 161 Untitled, 2009.............................................................................................34, 64, 375 Someca (Part of Downtown), 2003................................................... 21, 56, 57, 172 Untitled, 2009.....................................................................................................34, 64 Someca II, 2002 ....................................................................................................... 59 Untitled, 2009.....................................................................................................34, 65 Sub Oficial Grill, 2008 . ................................................................. 76, 78, 80, 282 Untitled, 2009........................................................................................................ 267 Surround With Sound Your Ass, 2007 ............................... 258, 262, 263, 289 Untitled, 2009....................................................................................... 326, 334, 338 Tejido de Carreteras | Roof of roads, 2006 ............................................. 348 Untitled, 2009................................................................................................ 326, 335 Tendido Eléctrico | Power line, 2008 . ........................................ 296, 298/299 Untitled, 2009................................................................................................ 348, 349 Tinta azul | Blue ink, 2010 ......................................................................... 144, 152 Untitled, 2009........................................................................................................ 361 Tornillos | Screws, 2005 .......................................................................... 208, 213 Untitled, 2010................................................................................................ 144, 153 Torre Acostada | Reclining Tower, 2006 . ............................ 15, 23, 50, 53, 54 Vecinos | Neighbors, 2004 ........................................................................... 43, 118 Torre Parmesana | Parmesan Tower, 2009 ..........................................190, 193 Vecinos I | Neighbors I, 2006 ............................................................ 118, 124, 131 Torres de vigía | Watchtowers, 2002 . ........................ 50, 51, 54, 171, 174, 265 Vegetales orgánicos | Organic vegetables, 2008 ................. 178, 180/181 Tragante | Drain cover, 2009 .......................................................................... 314 Transformación de Comedor del Presidio Modelo en Gavetero | Transformation of the Canteen of the "Modelo" Jail into a Dresser, 2007 . .............................................34, 48, 100

Versión negra abierta / Versión negra cerrada Black version open / Black version closed, 2008 . .............................. 80, 102 Vidrio vitro | Vitreous glass, 2003 . ............................................................ 230

photo credits

All images published with the kind permission of the copyright holders.

Although every effort was made to obtain proper credit information and permission to reproduce images, the publishers would be grateful to receive information from any copyright holder not credited herein.

Omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.

Images Artworks Los Carpinteros Courtesy the artists 6, 34, 38 (installation view: Volksgarten – Politics of Belonging, Kunsthaus Graz am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, Austria 2007), 40/41, 42/43, 45, 48 (installation view: Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai Art Museum 2001), 55, 56 (installation view: 4th Bienal de Artes Visuales de Mercosul, Porto Alegre, Brazil 2003), 58–61, 78, 90, 98, 102, 103, 109–115 top, 116, 120, 122–125, 132/133, 146 (installation view: Fluido, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana 2003), 152 bottom, 161, 182, 183, 188, 191, 193, 194 (installation view: Escultura Transeúnte. XX Aniversario de CODEMA, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana 2005), 195–198, 204 bottom, 205, 214, 218/219, 223, 227, 231 (installation view: Faro Tumbado, Galería Habana, Havana 2006, in course of Dinámicas de la Cultura Urbana, 9th Havana Biennial), 232, 233 (installation view: Faro Tumbado, Galería Habana, Havana 2006, in course of Dinámicas de la Cultura Urbana, 9th Havana Biennial), 266, 267 top, 271, 274/275, 276, 279, 285, 289, 300, 305–307, 308/309, 311, 313–316, 318–324, 327–333, 341, 349 bottom, 352/353, 357, 359 Photo: Alain Pino/Courtesy the artists 86/87, 148/149, 156, 180/181, 184–186, 209, 216/217, 234/235, 262, 298/299, 337, 338, 346/347, 356, 360 Photo: Francisco Monteagudo Riojas/Courtesy the artists 40, 101, 104/105

Courtesy Ivorypress, Madrid 134/135, 153 bottom, 154/155, 278, 281 (all installation views: Drama Turquesa, Ivorypress, Madrid 2010) Photo: Marc Domage, Paris/Courtesy Galerie in Situ, Paris 95, 159, 212, 222, 312 Courtesy USF Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa 49 and 51 (installation view: Los Carpinteros – Inventing the World / Inventar el mundo, USF Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa 2005), 203, 280 The Museum of Modern Art, New York / Scala, Florence © 2009.

Digital image 83, 145, 297 Photo: Watanabe Osamu/Mori Art Museum 220 and 221 (installation view: The Kaleidoscopic Eye. Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary ­C ollection, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo 2009) Photo: Riccardo Ragazzi/Courtesy Unosunove Gallery, Rome 52/53, 261 Photo: Pavel Acosta 64 top, 79 Courtesy Private Collection, Panama 92, 93 Courtesy The Farber Collection 160, 308 Courtesy Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita 282, 283 Photo: Wojtek Olech/CoCA, Torun 354–355 (installation views: The Way Things Are… Works from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection, Centre of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu, Torun, Poland 2008) Courtesy Collection of Diane and Bruce Halle, Phoenix, Arizona 131

Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York 25 bottom, 39, 43, 46, 53, 82 left, 85, 91, 99, 129, 130, 134, 150, 157, 179, 199, 224 and 225 (installation view: Psycho Buildings – Artists Take on Architecture, Hayward Gallery, London 2008), 230, 277, 304, 339, 340, 345, 350/351 Photo: Jason Wyche, New York/Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York 63, 64 bottom, 65, 81, 152 top, 153 top, 192, 236, 237, 260, 267 bottom, 334, 335, 361 Photo: Stephen P. Harris/Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York 162–163 Photo: Arthur Evans/Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York 343 Courtesy Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo 36/37, 44, 47, 84, 89, 107, 158, 189, 201, 210/211, 213, 284, 302/303, 304/305, 358 Photo: Eduardo Ortega Studio/Courtesy Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo 82 right, 96/97, 100, 119 and 121 (installation view: En el Jardin, Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo, 2005), 151, 187, 228/229, 263–265, 268, 269, 272, 273, 301, 342, 349 top Photo: Michael Strasser/T-B A21 77, 94, 126/127, 147, 200, 215, 259

Photo: Jean-Claude Planchet/Courtesy Collection Centre ­Pompidou, Dist. RMN 204 top Photo: Hadley Fruits 239 (installation view 100 Acres, The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park, Indianapolis Museum of Art, 2010) Photo: Lee Stalsworth/Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden 270 Photo: Niki Lackner/Landesmuseum Joanneum 344 (installation view: Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary – Collection as Aleph, Kunsthaus Graz, 2008) Courtesy Private Collection, France 348

additional collection credits

Reference images Images on the same page are listed top-down, separated by a semicolon.

Images Louise Bourgeois, Robert Smithson and El Lissitzky: © VBK, Vienna 2010 Page 6 Courtesy Los Carpinteros 14 Courtesy “The World of Lygia Clark” Cultural Association; Richard-Max Tremblay/Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York; © Generali Foundation/Werner Kaligofsky, Vienna 15 Wilton Montenegro/Courtesy Cildo Meireles; Pedro Oswaldo Cruz/Courtesy Cildo Meireles 16 top and middle Wilton Montenegro/Courtesy Cildo Meireles; Pedro Motta/Inhotim Centro de Arte Contemporânea, Minas Gerais, Brazil/Courtesy Cildo Meireles 17 top and middle Wilton Montenegro/Courtesy Cildo Meireles; Filmstill: Courtesy Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor 18 Filmstill: © The Estate of Ana Mendieta/Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York; Courtesy Marta Maria Pérez Bravo; Courtesy Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 20 Wikipedia 21 Courtesy Glexis Novoa and David Castillo Gallery, Miami; Collection of PTM, Portugal/Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, Photo: Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York 24 Luiz Alphonsus/Courtesy Cildo Meireles; Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York 25 top and middle © Federico Herrero/Courtesy Sies + Höke Galerie, Düsseldorf; Courtesy César and Claudio Oiticica Collection, Rio de Janeiro 26 © VBK Vienna 2010/Tate, London 2010 27 http://blog.art21.org/2010/02/17/the-puppy-wars/ 29 Achim Kukulies, Dusseldorf/Courtesy: neugerriemschneider, Berlin/© Jorge Pardo 115 bottom Wikipedia 138 Courtesy Grafische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna 140 © VBK Vienna 2010/Peter Cox/Courtesy Collection Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands 142 top and bottom © VBK Vienna 2010/ Courtesy Robert Smithson/James Cohan Gallery 243 Courtesy Cornelia Parker and Frith Street Gallery London 288 Courtesy Rachel Whiteread, Luhring Augustine, New York and Gagosian Gallery 289 Courtesy Los Carpinteros

Page 56 Edificio Jerez Jerez Building (Part of Downtown), 2003 Collection of the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky Purchased with funds from the New Art Collectors and the Alice Speed Stoll Accessions Trust 64 bottom Untitled, 2009 Denver Art Museum Collection. Gift of the Eleanor and Henry Hitchcock Foundation / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York 83 Sal y Pimienta Salt and pepper, 2004 The Museum of Modern Art, New York The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection Gift. Acc. n.: TR12112.329 145 Piso de Madera Wooden floor, 2003 The Museum of Modern Art, New York The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection Gift. Acc. n.: TR12112.328 179 Cuchillo de Mesa Table Knife, 2007 The Cleveland Museum of Art. Dudley P. Allen Fund.

2009.275 / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York 233 Faro Tumbado Felled lighthouse, 2006 Tate Gallery of Millbank, London / Tate Modern Lent by the American Fund for the Tate Gallery, courtesy of the Latin American Acquisitions Committee 2006 270 Alto parlante – Cohiba Loudspeaker – Cohiba, 2007 Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Museum purchase through the contributions of members of the Contemporary Acquisitions Council and the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 2009 / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York 357 Escorzo Foreshortening, 2003 Denver Art Museum Collection Gift of the Eleanor and Henry Hitchcock Foundation / Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

Unless otherwise stated, all works by Los Carpinteros reproduced in this book are in the artists’ collection.

375

Acknowledgements

Los Carpinteros and T-B A21 want to thank the following individuals and institutions for their contributions and support during the work on the book: Paulo Herkenhoff, Helen Molesworth, Rochelle Steiner, and Eugenio Valdés Figueroa Verónica Sedano, Meyken Barreto, and Anelys Alvarez of the Los Carpinteros studio Yoel Alegre and Lizbett Villegas Sean Kelly, Cécile Panzieri, Maureen Bray, Lauren Kelly, and the staff of Sean Kelly Gallery Alessandra d'Aloia, Márcia Fortes, and Alexandre Gabriel of Galeria Fortes Vilaça Marcia de Moraes Hayden Dunbar, Madeline Hurst, and all the people who helped with the image research The many sources of inspiration, especially Ralph Rugoff and Adam Budak Anthony Grant, Marc Selwyn; Luis Miret at Galería Habana; Monica de Sario from Unosunove, Rome; Graphicstudio | University of South Florida; Ivorypress, Madrid All the institutions and collectors who supported this endeavor with their valuable cooperation

Los Carpinteros wish to thank Francesca von Habsburg, Daniela Zyman, Gudrun Ankele, and Christian Schienerl as well as the staff of T-B A21 for their enthusiasm in creating this monograph. A big thank-you also goes out to all the institutions and private collectors who have believed in our work over these many years, as well as to Alexandre Arrechea (Jaca).

The artists would like to dedicate this book to the memory of Dagoberto Nicolás Rodríguez Calero, and to their families, who have provided constant ­support.

thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary

Founded in Vienna in 2002 by Francesca von Habsburg, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary represents the fourth generation of the Thyssen family’s dedication to the arts. Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary is committed to supporting the production of contemporary art and is actively engaged in commissioning and disseminating unconventional projects that defy traditional disciplinary categorizations.

The foundation sustains a far-reaching regional and international orientation, has an ongoing institutional commitment to the growing importance of art made in different parts of the world and explores modes of presentation that are intended to provoke and broaden the way viewers perceive and experience art.

Exhibitions drawn from the foundation’s collection are regularly presented to the public.

377

Boardmembers T-B A21 Francesca von Habsburg, Chairwoman Udo Kittelmann, Berlin Istvan Nagy, Geneva Advisory Board Iara Boubnova, Sofia Simon de Pury, New York Olafur Eliasson, Copenhagen/Berlin Alanna Heiss, New York Samuel Keller, Riehen/Basel José Lebrero Stals, Malaga Farshid Moussavi, London Hans Ulrich Obrist, London Sir Norman Rosenthal, London Peter Weibel, Karslruhe Mark Wigley, New York Paul Windle, London Curator Daniela Zyman

The Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary exhibition program is generously supported by

Colophon

Los Carpinteros: Handwork – Constructing the World © 2010 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, and Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln © of reproduced works: the artists or collections as indicated © of reproduced photographs: as indicated in the photocredits © of texts: the authors and translators All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or used in any form of media, neither technical nor electronic, including photocopies and digital storage, etc.

Edited by: Gudrun Ankele and Daniela Zyman Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Himmelpfortgasse 13 1010 Vienna, Austria www.tba21.org Research: Gudrun Ankele in collaboration with Veronica Sedano and Meyken Barreto/Los Carpinteros, Havana, Madrid; Maureen Bray/ Sean Kelly Gallery, New York; and Galería Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo

Published by: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln Ehrenstraße 4 50672 Köln, Germany T. +49 (0)221 / 20 59 6-53 F. +49 (0)221 / 20 59 6-60 verlag@buchhandlung-walther-könig.de Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available at http://dnd.d-nb.de.

Distribution: Switzerland Buch 2000 c/o AVA Verlagsauslieferungen AG Centralweg 16 CH-8910 Affoltern a.A. Tel. +41 (0) 44 762 42 00 Fax +41 (0) 44 762 42 10 a.koll@ava.ch

Editorial assistance: Verena Platzgummer Photo research: Markus Schlüter, Susanne Wagner, David Weidinger Editing and proof reading: Karen Jacobson Translations: Text by Paulo Herkenhoff translated from Portugese

by Steve Berg, text by Eugenio Valdés Figueroa translated from Spanish by Brendan Lambe/ Translations Lambe & Nieto

UK & Eire Cornerhouse Publications 70 Oxford Street GB-Manchester M1 5NH Tel. +44 (0) 161 200 15 03 Fax +44 (0) 161 200 15 04 publications@cornerhouse.org

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ISBN 978-3-86560-808-6

Graphic design: Christian Schienerl, assisted by Eva Hebenstreit and Susanne Wagner/ SCHiENERL /ppfmd, Vienna

thyssen-bornemisza art contemporary

with contributions by Paulo Herkenhoff, Helen Molesworth, Rochelle Steiner, and Eugenio Valdés Figueroa

verlag der buchhandlung walther könig, köln ISBN 978-3-86560-808-6

los carpinteros

The Havana-based collective Los Carpinteros (The Carpenters), consisting of Marco Castillo and Dagoberto Rodríguez, has created some of the most nuanced work to emerge from Cuba in recent decades. Their enigmatic and mordantly humorous sculptures, watercolor drawings, and installations take inspiration from the physical world, particularly that of architec­ture and urban structures, furniture and design objects, tools and construction materials. Expressing latent political implications and ideological twists, the carefully crafted works exploit a visual syntax that dwells on the contradictions between object and functionality, art and the everyday, practicality and uselessness, autonomy and social meaning.

tb A21

los carpinteros handwork — constructing the world