Kiss Me in the Shadow of a Doubt Víctor Albarracín Llanos
I’m gonna try to sweep the shadows of my memory to talk about something I actually ignore at the moment. I hope that this “something” will be defined by itself as I change the path of this writing. I remember this now cheesy – then magical Taschen book, with the most creative title ever: Contemporary Art. It was 1992, and, right before that monster, I was into Letters to Theo. Such a big leap was to discover those Sigmar Polke's paintings of socks, the Paul McCarthy's Hot Dog, the orange knit creatures from a fresh and young Mike Kelley. Every time I opened that book I got high on only art (ok, sometimes it wasn't only art). Every time I went to see my friend Juan, I devoted a long part of the visit just to check and discuss the images in the book while listening and re-copying our new bootlegged tapes of Wire, Tuxedomoon, Royal Trux, Throbbing Gristle, Fugazi and whatever else that constituted the self awareness of our privileged marginality. At a certain point, I had the need to copy, not only third generation tapes of obscured bands bootlegged into the country by only God knows who, but also this basic German corporative colonial art book that I adored at the time. I was reading also, by those days, an anthology of writings by and about John Cage, edited by Richard Kostelanetz, entitled, following the same creative path of Taschen's Contemporary Art. For sure you'd never figure out the title of that book: John Cage. An Anthology. It was as if the 90's weren't a place for ambiguity. It was a time when Contemporary Art was Contemporary Art, and John Cage was John Cage. But, even if true, my consideration is false: I was reading photocopies, I was listening to pirate recordings, and I was missing a lot of information during these processes of analogic copying. Yes, I copied the Kostelanetz book from a teacher; I copied the contemporary art book from Juan, both (like everything else I read by those days) at this shitty Xerox machine in the basement of my program's building. Sometimes this pachyderm was heavy loaded and sometimes it was running out of ink, so my copies were always too dark or too pale, if not half page dark and half pale. The music I listened to was copied on stolen/found cassettes of
rancheras, of self-help teachings or even of New Kids on the Block's shit, so once the demo of, let’s say, Deception Bay, a post-punk Australian band finished, the sound of Vicente Fernández or the second half of the popular anthem Desiderata remained intact on tape to talk about the palimpsest, the crime of stealing mom’s tapes or, sometimes, the realm of cultural appropriation that could be here better defined as colonial expropriation. By 1992, I didn't know a single word of English. Well, I knew some, but not the ones required to read an essay about Cage's Indeterminacy. So I translated it word by word with the unvaluable help of a crappy pocket dictionary. I recently found that translation, and it’s hilarious, but that’s another story. Everything by then was an interpretation, every single thing a reconstruction of something never seen. When I started reading Rosalind Krauss or Douglas Crimp stuff it resulted magical to be absorbed by those long dissertations on pieces I’d never seen, not even in Taschen's Contemporary Art. Not only the argumentation but also the substances of those articles required a huge invention of my mind. Years after, when I could start seeing some of those pieces in museums, galleries and art venues abroad, I was disappointed, since nothing was as it existed in my head. Three months ago, I moved from Bogotá to Cali to take position as Artistic Director at Lugar a Dudas, a place that resulted fundamental to position Cali, one decade ago, as The city you had to go if you wanted to colonize, I mean, to curate the freshest and badassest art in the Americas. One of the reasons that I had to move there was, in addition to art and artists, the sensation that Cali was a paradise of light and shadows, totally different to Bogotá’s grey foggy flatty city landscapes of beautifully homogeneous conceptual decoration produced by hordes of artists in order to satisfy the wealthy. Horrified by the perspective of a city taken over by the rich and cultivated snob, I packed and happily move to the city that, you probably know, invented the notion of “Tropical Gothic.” So, I’m currently based in Cali. It’s not perfect, for sure I romanticized for decades the place in the same way I also idealized all those artworks I only saw in dark or washed photocopies during the 90’s but, at least, I can say, in Cali, I feel the space to stay under the brutal sunlight of the noon to see the sharp contrast of my own shadow projected against the sidewalk or, later, to mix my blurry shade with those of the trees agitated by the breeze of the sunset.
Under my perception, contemporary culture suffers of “enlightmentitis,” there’s a lot of light everywhere, from the screens of our Iphones, Ipads, MacBooks and every other device we are attached to, to a wide set of colonial notions about the role of culture that we incorporate in our practices and discourses to make a construct based on elitism and exclusion. This excess of light, when absorbed by dark surfaces, produce a game of densities, similar to that one described by Tanizaki on his canonical essay, when he reflects on the brights and contrasts of Indian dark lacquers. In one word, exoticism. Exotic is something shiny and sharp, something with vivid colors that makes you feel amazed and amused, out of reach, and safe from risk. A Hawaiian beach, a Nigerian Safari, a Latin American artist community working on their own thing without any expectation to be seen by your eyes. Exoticism naturalize a broad set of cultural issues, tensions and resistances, so you might believe that you’re receiving the full thing in detail, as if you were watching a Nat Geo documentary projected on 4k. But reality is not, and never was, about high definition and homogeneous brightness. Reality is elusive, umbrageous, dim, vague, is always protected by several layers of ambiguity, by encoded information, by historical oblivion, by cultural brainwashing, by the corruption and degradation of its source materials, by shadows. It’s never clear, it’s not transparent, and it’s not well defined. The construction of reality requires criticality, if you really want to know what’s the what of whatever, you have to start by putting yourself in front of the thing and see how your own shadow covers sections of what you’re looking at. To stare at something doesn’t bring light. Forget all the shit about Enlightment, we’re not Diderot creating the encyclopedia of the world. German Idealism was better at reality production. Just as an example, we have Schiller’s ideas of Vorstellung and Einbildungskraft: Vorstellung is translated as “idea”, but an idea that implies that you step firmly and take a particular position to look the horizon ahead, and Einbildungskraft, the word for “imagination”, but an imagination in which you build yourself into the situation, every single time. We have to take position to see what kind of world is being created and destroyed every single moment right before our eyes and then, be able to imagine what could be done to change it. We have to stare at the shadows, we have to protect the shadows, we have to learn what kind of shadows to praise and also the ones to deviate, to remove, to light up. Is not about bringing the light but more to understand what the coefficient of
light is necessary to balance specific densities of darkness on every situation, at every place we go, and so on. Milennials don’t seem to appreciate grey zones. Everything’s Hi-Fi, Hi-Res, HD. Everything’s here and now. There’s no distance, there’s no ambiguity, there’s no curiosity that takes a while to be satisfied. I wonder what art is going to turn into. No, I don’t wonder, I already searched on Google and EFlux, and Artfacts, so it’s clear, but I worry about the brilliant future of all those artists from Colombia, or Central America, or Iran. People who used to live in protected environments now transformed into sets for artfairs and cultural tours. I hope they all can become darker, tougher, confusing. I hope they can hide behind the trees, among other shadows. I hope they can walk their own pathways and create other places and other worlds different to this one. I hope they can have their own ideas and imagine their own realities before they got burned under the excess of light exposure. Keep walking, nothing to see here. I loved my tape of Throbbing Gristle. It was recorded over an old cassette of Javier Solis on a crappy stereo. The quality of the sound was awful. At certain point, after continued and careful examination, you realized that Javier Solis was still there, singing “Sombras nada más entre tu vida y mi vida, sombras nada más entre tu amor y mi amor,” while Genesis P.O’rridge chanted “You and I, You and I, Living together, Loving together, At our distance, Another for instance United, United.”