the devil is in the details
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the devil is in the details curated by jesús fuenmayor
KaBe Contemporary, Miami
iván argote arocha + schraenen lothar baumgarten matthew buckingham elena damiani adler guerrier jorge pedro núñez edgar orlaineta laercio redondo matheus rocha pitta sergio vega 2
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the devil is in the details jesús fuenmayor
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“God is in the details” is a proverb that has been attributed to such distinguished figures as aby warburg, mies van der rohe and michelangelo. In the case of mies, he used the saying because “what struck students of mies’s buildings was their painstaking craftsmanship, their attention to detail,” as described in his New York Times obituary. More to the point is the use of the proverb by warburg, who is widely considered the founder of modern art historiography on account of his well known Mnemosyne Atlas. “Der liebe Gott steckt im Detail” (The good God is in the detail) is warburg’s most famous motto and his intended meaning was to highlight the importance of hard labor for reaching one’s goal. On the other hand, georges didi-huberman offers a more in depth interpretation of warburg’s phrase and dialecticizes it in the following way: “a little devil always nestles in the atlas: that is, in the space of ‘intimate and secret liaisons’ between things or between figures. A devilish genie lies somewhere in the imaginative construction of the ‘correspondences’ and the ‘analogies’ between each particular detail.” 5
This book accompanies the exhibition of the same title and its partial aim is to pay tribute to those historical figures such as mies and warburg, both in terms of modern art’s sophisticated technical developments as well as our ability to order and classify humanity’s infinite past accomplishments. However, in this context I want that tribute to engage the famous proverb in its inverted sense: “The devil is in the details.” As the title of this exhibition, the phrase pretends to point towards those details’ appearances in a work of art that unexpectedly allow viewers to comprehend the work (and even history) in a different way, even when this reading betrays our expectations or completely twists a work’s initial intention. Instead of just speaking about how important the use of historiography is for this group of artists, I want to draw attention to what roland barthes used to call the “Punctum.” That is, that detail in an image (or work) that escapes its own structure, shooting out like an “arrow” towards the viewer. “The Devil is in the details” also responds to that constant power struggle artists go through in order to be heard and, as a consequence, 6
raise their voices against art historians, critics and curators who are often entitled with the glorification, magnification and idolatry of a select few. The artists selected for this exhibition have turned to the representation of history not just as material itself but also as means by which to criticize how history is constructed. They are not just interested in the past tense or simply reviving archival strategies, but in putting the past in relation to the present and the future, creating overlapping temporalities that bring disparate moments together. As it has been in the past with artists like donald judd and dan graham, louise lawler and fred wilson, waltercio caldas and fernando bryce, to assume the subject position of authority, of those empowered by the system of art, is also to declare the interchangeability of that position. With their constant recourse to montage, collage, assemblage and other politically loaded artistic gestures, the artists in this exhibition demonstrate how much room remains open for debate, dialogue and speech; sometimes we just need to pay attention to the details. 7
lothar baumgarten —10 matthew buckingham —34 elena damiani —42 jorge pedro núñez —68 adler guerrier —106 iván argote —132 arocha + schraenen —146 laercio redondo —180 edgar orlaineta —216 matheus rocha pitta —248 sergio vega —270
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lothar baumgarten
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baumgarten’s engagement with ethnography began in the late 1960s and was informed by his reading of the anthropologist claude lévi-strauss. As a principle theorist of structuralism, lévi-strauss had given himself the task of making visible “the unconscious structure[s] underlying each institution and each custom” across a number of so-called “primitive” cultures. A guiding methodological thread throughout Lévi-Strauss’ writing was the nature/culture opposition, toward which baumgarten’s work also initially turned. Rather than depart to a far off land, baumgarten explored the validity of the opposition—the seeming mutual exclusivity of its terms— in his own backyard, quite literally in a small triangle of forest located near the rhine river. Thus began baumgarten’s early (playful) artistic experiments with ephemeral material arrangements realized in outdoor settings. He found or slightly modified the existing environment, making a mimetic condition perceptible: a hose signifies a snake but also a branch in äskulap (1971); shoe trees signify mushrooms or lilies in Verlorene Früchte (1969). Due to the temporal constraint on the works’ existence, 12
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they were photographed and subsequently named Culture-Nature, Manipulated Reality (1968–1972). In this series, the formal properties of camera angle, framing, and lighting were instrumental to mimicry’s photographic visualization. About this work Baumgarten explains, “Essentially, it was the psyche of things that interested me, their mimetic energy, the doubling of their morphology and the connotations derived thereof.” With these “manipulated” realities, nature and culture are read in differential relation to one another—making visible the limits of the nature/culture opposition through a process of perceptual shifting between what we see, what we do not see, and what we want to see. This perceptual flux contrasted with baumgarten’s contemporaries who were producing land art and earthwork, in which the positivist underpinnings of Minimalism persist in gestalts captured photographically through aerial views. baumgarten’s siting of art outside the walls of the institution produces the intersection of sculptural arrangement and photographic document as a function
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of partial views—the ensuing photographic series withholds the totality of the objects’ forms. And the work, left behind, eventually disappears. These activities and the thoughts that inform them culminated in the 16mm film The Origin of the Night (1973–1978), an “exotic” tropical journey ultimately revealed to be situated along the Rhine. The film reflects the West’s fantasies of the South American rainforest in order to reveal them as projections, while its unrelenting emphasis on the materiality of film form constitutes a self-reflexive critique of naturalized modes of cinematic viewing. Eventually, however, baumgarten’s understanding that “you cannot reflect your own cultural context without knowing another one,” and “one needs to take oneself out of one’s own context in order to understand the difference,” led him to South America and to rivers other than the Rhine. * Excerpt from Kaira M. Cabañas, “Partial Views,” in LB: Autofocus retina. Barcelona: Museu de Arte Contemporani de Barcelona, 2008.
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VW do Brazil 1972
Plain, Pyramids Tetrahedron, stacked pigment 1968-69
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Eldorado, Esmeralda 1972
Psychophysik 1971
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Alterego 1969
The South of Greenland 1969
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Ă„skulap 1971
Swan 1969
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Land without Evil 1968
Gen Transfer 1968
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Obscurity of Crossed Shadows 1968
Anticipated Armadillos 1969
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Fauna - Flora 1970
Ant Society 1968
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Culture-Nature 1971
Mondstein 1968
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Tropen, Palmen 1969
Urwald, Brassica Oleracea 1968
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matthew buckingham
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Image of Absalon to Be Projected Until It Vanishes
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In the sixth decade of the twelfth century C.E., the Danish warriorbishop Absalon received a gift from his long-time friend King Valdemar I. The king’s gift was a small fishing and port village named simply Havn, or ‘Harbor,’ on the islet of Slotshomen in the straits that connect the North and Baltic seas. The gift was a gesture of thanks to Absalon for his tireless service in the protracted and bloody battles they fought together attempting to Christianize the Wends and other peoples during the crusades. Bishop Absalon used some of the wealth he confiscated in these raids, to build a castle for himself in the village of Havn. He also used some of these resources to commission the first written history of the Danish people. Having studied in Paris as a young man Absalon knew that the powers of Europe had established their identity and status partly with the help of written narratives. Absalon engaged his own secretary, Saxo, to narrate Denmark’s past. By 1208 C.E., writing in Latin under the name Saxo Grammaticus, he produced his Gesta Danorum, later translate into English as Deeds of the Danes. Not surprisingly Absalon appears as one of the main characters in the story. Eventually the village of Havn was renamed København, or Copenhagen, and became Denmark’s capital. An equestrian statue of Absalon now faces the Danish Parliament which was built on the ruins of the warrior-bishop’s castle. The Danish banker Axel
Heide who dreamed of and paid for the statue, intended to unveil it on March 21, 1901, the seven-hundredth anniversary of Absalon death. But the City of Copenhagen wished to dedicate its own smaller portrait of Absalon on that date without distraction, so city bureaucrats ‘failed’ to complete Heide’s paper work on time. When Heide’s permit was finally granted and the date for unveiling the monument grew near, a furor erupted over Heide’s invitation to radical journalist Georg Brandes to deliver a dedication speech. Higher circles of society feared that the anti-bourgeois Brandes might make impolite reference to Absalon’s merciless raiding and plundering so famously recorded by Saxo. Crown Princess Louise announced that she would withdraw her money from Heide’s bank if Brandes was allowed to speak. Heide gave in and censored Brandes. On the day following the dedication ceremony he was honored with the title of ‘Oficial Advisor to the Royal Court.’
Bibliography Adams, Julia Davis. The Swords of the Vikings. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1928. Jones, W. Glyn and Kirsten Gade. Blue Guide: Denmark. London: A & C Black, Ltd., 1997. Langkjær, Erik. The Monuments of Copenhagen. Copenhagen: Politikens Forlag, 1974. Lauirng, Palle. A History of Denmark. Copenhagen: Høst & Søn, 1995. Saxo Grammaticus. The First Nine Books of the Danish History of Saxo Grammaticus. Oliver Elton, translator. London: David Nutt & The FolkloreSociety, 1894.
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elena damiani
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image archive archaeology Ancient ruins Modern ruins architecture Shading structures Modern interiors General Architecture Construction sites Architectural details art Installation On paper Other Sculpture botany & flora General Herbarium of Taiwan cartography The World A Historical Atlas 1830 Pergamon World Atlas 1967 The Victory Atlas 1920 Unclassified The Universe The Sun design exhibition displays Art Natural history
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geology & landscape Aerial views Deserted Erratic boulders Experiments Geologists Geysers human presence Constructions Hammers Instruments & Objects Rock arrangements Unclassified journeys Landscape panoramas Landscapes of disaster Micro/Macro Close-ups Photomicrographs Mountains Polar regions Quarries & Mining Rock formations Specimens Time fractures Volcanoes Waterfalls Unclassified instruments Berkeley Lab General libraries scanned pages Empty & backsides Marbled bookend pages Noise
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image archive Subject 1. Archaeology a) Ancient ruins 26 b) Modern ruins 5 2. Architecture a) Architectural details 18 b) Construction sites 7 c) General architecture 70 d) Modern interiors 32 e) Shading structures 19 3. Art Installation 11 On paper 21 Other 5 Sculpture 3 3 4. Botany / Flora a) General 80 b) Herbarium of Taiwan 49 5. Cartography a) The Sun 3 b) The Universe 8 c) The World c.1) A Historical Atlas 1830 21 c.2) Pergamon World Atlas 1967 22 c.3) The Victory Atlas 1920 15 c.4) Unclassified 20 6. Design 18 7. Exhibition displays a) Art 16 b) Natural history 6 8. Geology & Landscape a) Aerial views 74 b) Deserted 43 c) Erratic boulders 85 d) Experiments 15
e) Geologists 48 f) Geysers 32 g) Human presence g.1) Constructions 24 g.2) Hammers 41 g.3) Instruments & objects 33 g.4) Other 9 g.5) Rock arrangements 10 h) Journeys 39 i) Landscape panoramas 29 j) Landscapes of disaster 78 k) Micro/Macro 24 k.1) Close-ups 6 k.2) Photomicrographs 18 l) Mountains 240 m) Polar regions 40 n) Quarries & Mining 19 o) Rock formations 114 p) Specimens 90 q) Time fractures 23 r) Volcanoes 94 s) Waterfalls 27 t) Unclassified 143 9. Instruments a) Berkeley lab 9 b) General 4 10. Libraries 18 11. References a) Herbert Bayer 7 b) Jean Prouvé 4 c) Robert Smithson 19 12. Scanned pages a) Empty & backsides 4 b) Marble bookend pages 90 c) Noise 9
referential online archives USGS Photographic Library Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library Smithsonian Institution Archives British Geological Survey – GeoScenic BLM Photo Database NOAA Photo Library Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum Museum of the White Mountains - Plymouth State University U.S National Library of Medicine State Library of North Carolina New York Public Library U.S Library of Congress Herbarium of Taiwan Forest Research Institute Octavo Rare Book Room David Rumsey Map Collection Netherlands National Archive Berkeley Lab Photo Archive University of Washington Library U.S. Antarctic Program Photo Library Digital Public Library of America UNCG Digital Collections British Library BLR Antique Maps Cranbrook Archives Charles Darwin’s Beagle Library Metropolitan Museum of Art Prelinger Archives Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa Goethe University Frankfurt Biblioteca Digital Hispanica The Digital Scriptorium 47
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01. A view of a broad river, clouds wreathing distant cliffs A view of a broad river, clouds wreathing distant cliffs. From: Frederick Samuel Dellenbaugh collection of photographs and drawings of the Colorado River region. Frederick Samuel Dellenbaugh. 1871 – 1934.
02. Andesite porphyry dike, Alaska, 1912 Andesite porphyry dike about 1 foot thick cutting marble beds on west side of Vermont Marble Co.’s quarry, Tokeen. Wales district, Southeastern Alaska region, Alaska. 1912. Plate 11-A in U.S. Geological Survey. Bulletin 682. 1920.
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03. Backside photographic print, 1902 A Cactus Garden in California. no. 53904. From: Photographic views of North America. Backside photographic print 17 x 23 cm. c1902.
04. Burning gases from the orifices of a hornito, Paricutin Volcano. Mexico, 1944 Burning gases from the orifices of a hornito. These flames are pale blue and only visible at dusk and night. The vents are lined with fused lava. Paricutin Volcano. Michoacan, Mexico. March 22, 1944. Published as plate 37-A in U. S. Geological Survey. Bulletin 965-D. 1956.
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05. Contact of granulite (left) and banded gneiss (right), Tenmile Range, Colorado, 1963 Contact of granulite (left) and banded gneiss (right), Tenmile Range. Contact is gradational through 2-foot interval in vicinity of hammer. Summit County, Colorado. Circa 1963. Published in US Geological Survey Professional Paper 652, figure 4. 1971.
06. Copper. Bureau of Mines, Mineral Specimens C1785 No more info available
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07. Dawn to dusk activity in the crater is monitored at Vancouver, 1980 Dawn to dusk activity in the crater is monitored at Vancouver via a television camera located on a ridge 5 miles north of the crater. Clark County, Washington. 1980. Published on p. 224, upper photo, in U.S. Geological Survey. Earthquake information bulletin, v. 12, no.6. November-December 1980.
08. Equivalent, Alfred Stieglitz / Georgia O’Keeffe archive, 1930 Black and white photographic print
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09. Experiment formation of craters by impact, 1891 Experiments illustrating the formation of craters by impact. ca. 1891.
10. Explosive burst, Seismic Geyser in Upper Geyser Basin, Yellowstone National Park, 1966 Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming. Explosive burst just breaking the surface pool of Seismic Geyser in Upper Geyser Basin with the water level below the level of discharge. Photo by G.D. Maher, May 30, 1966.
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11. Fishing cave in the thumb of Yellowstone Lake, 1921 Yellowstone Park. Fishing cave in the thumb of Yellowstone Lake. The hot water has built up a cone in the cold water of the lake. Wyoming. 1921.
12. Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, 1970 Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. 1969-1971 Mauna Ulu eruption of Kilauea Volcano. Sulfurous vents. Photo by D.A. Swanson, May 21, 1970.
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13. Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Drill core, 1968 Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Drill core from hole 68-2 drilled at Makaopuhi lava lake between November 6, 1968, and January 31, 1969. Depth is 0 to 17.0 feet. 1968. Figure 25-A, U.S. Geological Survey Professional paper 1004.
14. Imperial Valley, California, Earthquake October 15, 1979 Imperial Valley, California, Earthquake October 15, 1979. Furrows in a plowed field were offset about 11 inches by the magnitude 6.5 earthquake. Photo by D. Cavit. Back cover, Earthquake Information Bulletin, v. 13, no.3.
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15. Myles salt mine, Weeks Island, 1919 Myles salt mine, Weeks Island. Almost perpendicular strata or bands of salt lying in closely compressed folds. Iberia Parish, Louisiana. C. 1911. Plate 11-B in U.S. Geological Survey. Bulletin 669. 1919.
16. Pergamon World Atlas, Constitution of the Earth, 1968
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17. Photomicrograph between these two minerals occur narrow bands of an unidentified transition mineral Replacement of galena by polybasite; between these two minerals occur narrow bands of an unidentified transition mineral (not visible in the picture), and the very narrow light colored bands that mark the initiation of the replacement process along the contacts between galena crystals consist of this mineral. Photomicrograph of polished surface of ore from Favorite vein, Tonopah-Belmont mine, depth uncertain. Nye County, Nevada. 1915. Plate 7-B, with graphics, in U.S. Geological Survey. Professional paper 104. 1918.
18. Polished specimen of brecciated calcite and dolomite marble from Dyer quarry, Sawn specimen of graphitic. calcite marble from Albertson quarry, 1900. left to right: Polished specimen of brecciated calcite and dolomite marble from Dyer quarry, Manchester. The cement is bright reddish and the fragments are bluish gray or cream-colored. The dark one with light vein is dull reddish brown. Sawn specimen of graphitic calcite marble from Albertson quarry, west Rutland, showing plicated bedding planes running lengthwise, crossed by planes of slip cleavage inclined to the right, both laden with graphite. Vermont. C. 1900. Plate 8-B in U.S. Geological Survey. Bulletin 521. 1912.
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19. Seismograph on the east flank of the volcano. Skamania County 1980 Intermittent harmonic tremor recorded in September on a seismograph on the east flank of the volcano. Skamania County, Washington. September 1980. Portion published on p. 225, upper left photo, in U.S. Geological Survey. Earthquake information bulletin, v. 12, no.6. NovemberDecember 1980.
20. Skylight in lava tube feeding Kaena Point flow, Hawai, 1972 Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. 1972-1974 eruption of Kilauea Volcano. Skylight in lava tube feeding Kaena Point flow. Photo by D.W. Peterson, September 1, 1972.
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jorge pedro núùez
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David Lincoln Rowland was born on February 12, 1924, in Los Angeles.
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In 1936 he moved with his parents to Stockton, California where his father became director of The Haggin Museum.
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Albert Bierstadt,Yosemite Valley, 1963-75 Oil on Canvas
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In the summer of 1940, when he was only 16, he took a course with L谩szl贸 Moholy-Nagy
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He forever after called it “the best summer of my life!”
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Left: László Moholy-Nagy, Untitled, 1940-44 Fujicolor Crystal Archive print Right: László Moholy-Nagy, Chairs at Margate, 1935 Gelatin silver print diptych
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In 1942, he studied drafting, and worked as a draftsman for the Rheem Manufacturing Co.
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At the Rheem Manufacturing Co., he works drawing plans for war munitions, before entering military service in World War II.
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From 1943 through 1945 Rowland served in WWII in the United States Army Air Corps, the 8th Air Force, 94th Bomb Group, (“Flying Fortress”) as a pilot.
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It was during those long, sometimes 12 hour missions, sitting in beastly uncomfortable seats, Rowland said, that “I resolved to do something about that if I ever returned home safely�
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After the war he went on to study industrial design at the University of South California and afterwards at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where he earned his Masters Degree in Industrial Design in 1951.
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Rowland headed for New York City. There he rented a $40 a month room and started applying to industrial design firms for a job. Each design firm he applied to required he sign a form saying that anything he thought of during his employment that they wanted to get a patent on, he would give them the rights for one dollar. When he wouldn’t sign the form, he didn’t get the job. He opted instead to work three jobs outside of the design field while working on his own designs in his spare time.
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Later, he took a job as head draftsman doing architectural renderings for Norman Bel Geddes, the noted theatrical and industrial designer, the only one who did not require that he sign a form.
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Norman Bel Geddes, Manhattan Cocktail Set, 1937
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During this time Rowland also designed commercial interiors while developing his own designs and inventions, which included lighting, his Transparent Chair for the No-Sag Spring Co. that was exhibited in La Triennale di Milano in 1957.
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Lucio Fontana, Struttura al neon, 1951 IX Triennale di Milano
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In 1957 his patented Drain Dry Cushion, licensed to Lee Woodard & Sons.
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The royalty income from the Drain Dry Cushion allowed Rowland to move from his $40 a month room to an apartment and to open his own office.
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Off and on for eight years, Rowland worked on and perfected a design for a revolutionary new stacking chair with a wire frame and sculpted seat and back in plywood.
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David Rowland’s 40/4 stacking chair created in 1964
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World War II was a proving ground for plywood. The product was declared an essential war material and production and distribution came under strict controls. With the war ended, the industry geared up to meet growing demand in the booming post-war economy.
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The precursor to modern molded wood furniture design, this leg splint was commissioned from Charles and Ray Eames by the United States Navy in World War II. Access to military technology and manufacturing facilities allowed the Eameses to perfect their technique for molding plywood, which they had been working on for several years.
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Charles and Ray Eames, Molded Plywood Leg Splint, 1942
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David Rowland is famous for his 40/4 chair, so named because it stacks 40 chairs in 4 feet (120 cm) high. The chair was the first compactly stackable chair invented. The 40/4 chair has been called “the most universally useful chair ever made and accomplished with the least expenditure of material and labor�
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David Rowland 40/4 stacking chair, 1964 Louvre museum, 2015
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adler guerrier
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ivรกn argote
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history of humanity i. homo sapiens ii. first agricultural societies iii. first civilizations iv. wars v. love and hate vi. colonization and post colonization vii. nation states viii. uncertain future
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arocha + schraenen
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kathy acker giorgio agamben josef & anni albers comte de lautrĂŠamont marcel duchamp rainer werner fassbinder chris farley michel foucault ellsworth kelly anne marsily piet mondrian violeta monasterios giorgio moroder gloria swanson erich von stroheim orson welles
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kathy acker
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giorgio agamben
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josef & anni albers
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comte de lautrĂŠamont
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marcel duchamp
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rainer werner fassbinder
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chris farley
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michel foucault
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ellsworth kelly
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anne marsily
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piet mondrian
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violeta monasterios
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giorgio moroder
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gloria swanson
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erich von stroheim
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orson welles
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laercio redondo
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The Gustavo Capanema building, the former Ministry of Education and Culture in Rio de Janeiro, is a milestone in Brazilian modern architecture. Constructed between 1936-1945, it was designed by a team of architects, including Lucio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer, Eduardo Reidy, Carlos Leão, Ernani Vasconcellos and Jorge Machado Moreira with the assistance of the French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier; the landscape was designed by Roberto Burle Marx. The building also features collaborations with artists, who each created work for the interior and exterior areas. Most notable are the mural tiles outside and large wall paintings inside by Cândido Portinari. Paradoxically, however, these left-leaning architects and artists conceived the building in the midst of Getúlio Vargas’s regime (1930-1945), which established the Estado Novo in 1937, initially of fascist inclination. Thus the building embodies a contradiction: the architecture represented a system based on democratic values and at once responded to the regime’s vision of a modern nation.
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edgar orlaineta
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With the eye in the hand /with the hand in the eye, after Alvin Lustig’s “Incantation” is a project that departs from a fabric pattern design made by Alvin Lustig in 1947.
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sergio b. martins interviews matheus rocha pitta sbm. Nau seems to be one of many instances in which your work refuses to engage directly with official imagery – and by official I mean not only monuments, icons and landmarks, but also with the very hierarchical logic that drives the circulation of images in mass media, for example. This is explicit already in the Project for a new illumination of the Paço Imperial, but it also informs choices such as the interruption of the regular circulation of Paço Imperial at Dois Reais and the obsessive amassing of iconographical motifs both in Drive-In and in the Steles. I would like you to comment on this oblique relationship you developed with the image, especially given that you began your career as a photographer. Nau is not simply a “return” to traditional photography, is it?
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mrp. Maybe it’s a disguised return: I started to take pictures from the Perimetral Highway once I knew it was going to be demolished. During almost three years, every time I used the highway (be it on a bus, a car, or running), I would try to catch the exact moment when the mast of the boat would align with the center of the image. So there were these two key elements of traditional photography: the decisive moment and the man behind the camera “hunting” the image. It was indeed a pleasure to return to such simplicity of means. But, unlike street photography, we don’t have a moment of grace where everything seems suspended. No, the grace comes from the fact that these images became impossible today, after the demolition of the highway, it’s a posthumous grace. You can still see the boat in the same place, but it’s actually just a funny and sad replica, made to celebrate the 500 years of Brazil’s discovery. I believe to have found a perspective where the mast of the replica can point to something else.
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sbm. But there is a simplicity of means of sorts operating in the Steles as well, especially given the anecdote you recount about their origin as a make-do procedure in popular cemeteries. They do involve some hard work, I am sure, but I mean it technically and also materially. In way – a rather literal way – they are also a form of capturing images. And this gets inter esting once you compare their artisanal simplicity with the misleading, or rather fetishist simplicity of the cellphone snapshot, which involves an illusion of instantaneity that is absent from much artistic photography (with its emphasis on working the image in the studio). So this is actually a question about your relationship to the technical dimension of art making, and to the ideological underpinnings of those techniques (as in the gestural engineering of smartphones). Even with small sample in this exhibition we can have a sense of the technical diversity of your work, which is clearly no mere eclecticism – you have a history of investing in certain technical methods procedure.
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mrp. I think every project requires its own method. When I began to work as a photographer Irealized that, while adopting a certain method (street photography, for example), your work would be the same thing, good or bad, but its nature would be essentially the same. So I decided not to photograph and postponethis moment until the work took its form in my mind – and demanded its own method. Slowly I developed a certain vocabulary of ‘methods’, but I always tried to listen to the specific exigency of each project. This is the meaning of form for me: it’s not something you apply to a substance, but rather something that comes within it. The steles and slabs: between the first stele and the second there’s an interval of eight years, I only came back to it when it was a demand of the work. Coming back to Nau, using a mobile to photograph it was not only praising a precarious, common and widely available use of photography,
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Stela # 7 (amarildo) Amarildo was a brick layer in Rocinha, whose body disapperead after being tortured by police. His family decided to denounce it and soon he’s name was on the streets, where is amarildo? became a slogan in protests. He was famous because he could carry on his back two bags of cement (100 kg), the same weight of my steles. The one I made for him is actually half of a project: another twin stela would be made to be placed in Rocinha, as a temporary monument. Every time one was showed in a museum, the other should be shown in public space in Rocinha. The project have not found much interested among curators and authorities and remains unrealized.
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but also working in invisibility, as a spy: nobody in the buses I took noticed what I was doing. Once the work was ready there’s were also certain sneaking meanings that only a more attentive viewer could see. They are absent in the image, but they are still there, marked as absent. Its more about stopping and suspending the movement of images (and things) than exactly capturing them. Some people see my work and tell me: “oh you would do it differently if you had more money”. There’s a certain pattern of quality that says what should contemporary art be: immediately consumable, not only in appearance, but mainly in its economy of signs, it has to signify very fast, so we have time for the next, please. In this functioning there’s no room for ambiguity, hesitation, thought. I guess this is what you mean by ideological underpinnings, this pervasive idea of quality.
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sbm. Does this idea of absence somehow plays into you use of a Stele in order to commemorate Amarildo? It is curious because the Stele, in this case, also returns to a function that is closer to its original one. Amarildo’s case is striking also because of all the politics of visibility that were part of it coming to the fore – if I remember well, the newspapers were generally ignoring the case, as usual with poor victims of police violence, and especially considering how the UPPs are media-backed. The Rocinha protests were crucial in keeping his death visible and forcing it intothe mainstream circulation of news and images, which is where you reclaim his image from. In addition to that, I also wanted to ask you about your recourse to very explicit political signs in the Steles – Amarildo is one, but politician and civil rights activist Marcelo Freixo is another. How do you envisage your work contributing to political reflection, and especially in relation to other kinds of artworks especially invested in activism that also use images such as these? 264
mrp. The decision to make a stele for Amarildo – a tombstone for his absent body – was made when I realized he had become a myth, a cypher. Thru language his status was changed. This is something art share with protests, its potential to subvert and claim a meaning other than the official narrative. Amarildo became a hero, by creating a sort of monument to him I wanted to address more this spectral afterlife than anything else. Besides his physical death, there is this specific linguistic violence that denies his death, it is this violence of language that I want to address. The political signs I use might be explicit, but they are at the edge of visibility: Amarildo’s portrait in his tombstone is a 3 x 4 cm image, it is a sign that demands attention and care. Most of the political art I know wants to heal, to solve the problem by giving a face for the excluded, so the artist became a representative of black, indigenous, gay, or whatsoever minority whose visibility he guarantees. It’s a compensatory logic. I think this is a palliative solution, the mechanism of exclusion is left untouched and by localizing the victims of it, it signify it, it stops reflection. Any reflection on language is interrupted by a moralistic demand for representation.
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sbm. We are discussing monuments, historical narratives and images that are either collected from newspapers or taken in a given situation. And yet, from what I understand, you oppose your work to a widespread tendency in contemporary art to privilege research itself as an artist product, which usually aims both at refusing the aestheticization of politics (and of art, actually) and also to counter hegemonic narratives, am I correct?
mrp. You’re right. I am not a researcher. I am a user. The Nau project began because I was using the Perimetral Highway, not because I went to the library to research. Art is nor information neither communication. Art is experience. And you can’t measure that in numbers, in information. What I call the “researchism” is this pedagogical trend where art (with political ambitions) gives up poetry and form in the name of a pretentious political content, whose ultimate value is information, that will educate the public. Again we are in the terrain of compensations: your work is not good, but it is politically correct, it’s a moral matter. I prefer instead to position myself as a user, as someone who has an experience without necessarily possessing a certain knowledge. I find my images in my daily life, from the newspaper I buy (and not the ones archived in libraries!), from the nearby newsstand. Of course they come from a certain specific context, but I want exactly to break this immediate reference an image can have, what you can call hegemonic narrative, in order to create a certain critical distance. This distance from meaning to image you don’t find in ‘researchism’, where an image is reduced to information.
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rio de janeiro, july 2015
sergio vega
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half plus half equals not 1, but two different halves
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A new housing settlement close to the center of ItaĂşba featured a peculiar looking structure. Although more than one house, it only looked like half a house. The sharp incline of the roof gave the impression that the other half was missing. In the late afternoon sun, a parabolic satellite dish cast a shadow along the west wall, its silhouette inching the rough surface seemed the ghost of a gargantuan basketball. The occupants were probably young: a) two satellite antennas, b) clothes with stamped lettering hanging on a line, c) a chaotic scenario of neglected belongings. A bed of modernist design lay tilted, thrown over a pile of wood. A dotted silver tie twisted in the dirt like a crawling snake. Behind the house, not a private yard but bare land, left alone, a chair contemplated vast emptiness. Construction debris and the imprint of tractor tires marked the clumps of crumbling, recently turned red dirt. It was the virgin soil of the new continent, once again surrendering to the improvised will of newcomers. Leaning on the ledge of the roof, there was a ladder of triangular design, the steps narrowing on the way up to vanish into the infinity of the sky. As I took the photograph, I noticed a distant 287
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plane coming into the frame in a perpendicular course of collision with the ascending ladder. I wondered why any moment would be more decisive than another when capturing a photographic image. After all, seizing chance in an unexpected intersection of distinct realms only reiterates the uncanny sense of surprise of news and art as novelty. I decided to step back further into the terrain and get a frontal and more panoramic view of the back of the house as it fits into the surrounding landscape. I attempted a more neutral, if not objective, at least more formal depiction of the house. The lateral sunrays accentuated the details in the texture of the brick wall. I realized that this sun was not just the sun, but that afternoon sun from the poetic prose of Juan Ramón Jiménez. A passage of his book “Platero y yo” (Platero and I) portrays the afternoon sun projecting the silhouettes of plants onto a wall. Since I read it in fourth grade, his sun tinted the afternoons I spent in the patio of my house as a child. As the sun would set, those long shadows of the plants transformed into shapes that no longer resembled them. Crawling on the rugged wall of the patio they became characters in a crepuscular theater of silhouettes.
How could anybody ever know that by looking at these photographs? However convincing, the indexical nature of the photographic medium barely conceals the pitfalls of reducing the vast materiality of the world, and the elusiveness of time and life to a mere scaled down, flat, still resemblance. I wonder if it could ever exist a medium able to convey with any approximation the overwhelming specificity of sensorial perceptions, memories, and thoughts, which seamlessly converge into the mere act of being. I wonder if that complexity could ever be faithfully recorded, organized, and represented so that it can be experienced by others in all its fluidity and vastness. However, total memory of unambiguous exactitude may not only be a blessing. It may also be a curse. Borges’ character “Funes the Memorious”1 portrays perhaps the only truly lucid man 1 Extracts from in history, a precursor of the superman, “an untamed and jorge luis vernacular Zarathustra” from a provincial town of Uruguay. borges, funes “He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at dawn the memorious on the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare them in his (1942), translated recollection with the marbled grain in the design of a leatherby anthony kerrigan, bound book he had seen only once... He could reconstruct grove press, 1962, 83-91
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all his dreams, all his fancies. Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day… In effect, Funes not only remembered every leaf on every tree of every wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it… He was the solitary and lucid spectator of a multiform world that was instantaneously and almost intolerably exact… It was not only difficult for him to understand that the generic term dog embraced so many unlike specimens of differing sizes and different forms; he was disturbed by the fact that a dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog at three-fifteen (seen from the front).” The rudimentary inadequacy of language to name the complexity of the world as experienced in space and time finds no redemption in the way we choose to order visual knowledge. The most efficient tool for visually organizing the world is arguably the nineteenth-century artifact known as the archive. An anachronism derived from dictionary illustrations, the archive presumes the ability to convey a range of representations 290
as signifiers of a reality outside of themselves that it not only names, but also manages to classify, order and transmit. The downside is that with potential enlightenment through detailed information comes the endorsement of a taste for the clinical as a literal signifier of “science” and “reason”, as well as the pretense of authority founded on the rather prosaic notion of organizing typologies according to genus and species. A primitive tool for someone like Funes, the archive still remains the best civilization has to offer… “He determined to reduce all of his past experience to some seventy thousand recollections, which he would later define numerically. Two considerations dissuaded him: the thought that the task was interminable and the thought that it was useless. He knew that at the hour of his death he would scarcely have finished classifying even all the memories of his childhood… I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract.
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In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details…” I have to concur with Borges, that such an approach to knowledge can only engender a monstrous institution, a motionless museum of Platonic archetypes: “I don’t know if mortal eyes ever saw it (outside of oracular vision or nightmare), or if the remote Greek who devised it ever made its acquaintance…” I vividly envision the sterilized corridors, the polished vitrines, the chilling silence in which everything that ever was is preserved, made into a model replica, named, defined, measured, dead. That hermetic, airless museum of ashes and stillness may be the one invoked as a cognitive model by adventurous lunatics eager to disclose the dark side of the moon. Some believe I used to be one of them. They don’t know that the very idea of plotting a total proliferation of the archive has always horrified me. Now, I only wonder if that rapturous revelation of the archive could eclipse
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the traumatic awareness that absolutely everything in the world is perishable, vanishing as we speak, soon to be lost. The limits of what can (or should) be known are not easy to accept. The desire to see things portrayed in photographs proves a mere consolation for our failed attempts to control the world and our desire to avoid the intrinsic loss of time’s passage. The contingencies and the arbitrariness of photographic evidence only confirm the fact that reality is beyond control, inherently unclassifiable. Over the years I have developed a taste for randomness and absurdity, chaos and entropy, for that which can be known but not measured or priced, for images without form but with history and humor, precisely because they remind me of that. sergio vega
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exhibition credits curator jesús fuenmayor installation design jesús fuenmayor installation andrés michelena elena damiani’s work was produced by kayuwoodwork workshop under the guidance of architect germán domínguez.
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This publication was published by KaBe Contemporary as a non-profit edition to accompany the eponymous exhibition curated by jesús fuenmayor. The exhibition was held at the gallery space in miami between september 17 and october 31, 2015. The exhibition and this publication have been possible thanks to the artists and the following galleries: marian goodman gallery (new york) mendes wood dm (são paulo) gallerie perrotin (paris) silvia cintra+box 4 (rio de janeiro) murray guy gallery (new york) and david castillo gallery (miami)
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book credits
photo credits
editor jesús fuenmayor graphic design teresa mulet
pages 16 to 33 all images are courtesy of lothar baumgarten and marian goodman gallery copyright: lothar baumgarten
texts jesús fuenmayor, kaira m. cabañas, mathew buckingham, elena damiani, jorge pedro núñez, sérgio b. martins, matheus rocha pitta, sergio vega.
pages 37 and 41 images are courtesy of mathew buckingham and murray guy gallery copyright: mathew buckingham
typeset in eureka sans
pages 48 to 67 courtesy elena damiani. all the pictures sources are indicated in the credit line at the bottom of each image
printed in caracas, venezuela grupo la galaxia
pages 71, 73, 75, 77, 79, 81, 83, 85, 89, 91, 93, 95, 97, 99, 101, 103, 105 courtesy of jorge pedro núñez pages 111, 113, 115, 117, 119, 121, 123, 125, 127, 129, 131 courtesy adler guerrier and david castillo gallery. copyright: adler guerrier. pages 135, 137, 139, 141, 143, 145 courtesy of iván argote and gallerie perrotin, paris. copyright: iván argote. pages 149, 151, 153, 155, 157, 159, 161, 163, 165, 167, 169, 171, 173, 175, 177, 179 courtesy of the artists. pages 184 to 215 courtesy of laercio redondo. copyright: laercio redondo.
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pages 219 to 247 courtesy of edgar orlaineta. pages 250, 251, 254, 255, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 266, 267 courtesy of matheus rocha pitta and mendes wood dm. copyright: matheus rocha pitta. pages 272, 273, 275, 277, 279, 281,283, 285 courtesy of sergio vega. copyright: sergio vega. Every reasonable attempt has been made to locate the owner or owners of copyright in this book and to ensure the supplied credit information is accurate. Errors or omissions will be corrected in future editions.
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gallery credits KaBe Contemporary Gallery director karina belilty assistant andrés michelena KaBe Contemporary 223 NW 26 Street Miami, FL 33127 news@kabecontemporary.com tel: 305.573.8142 fax: 305.573.8144
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Founded in December 2009, KaBe Contemporary has been at the vanguard of Miami’s growing contemporary art scene. Located in the burgeoning Wynwood Arts District, KaBe has showcased a variety of emerging and established international contemporary artists. Under the direction of karina belilty, KaBe has produced shows featuring diverse practices such as painting, photography, video, sculpture and installation. acknowledgements During the process of organizing this exhibition, a few individuals have participated in ways that might seem unfairly invisible. We thus want to thank them for accompanying us in so many ways and so many times, providing encouragement, ideas and essential information. First, we thank kaira cabañas, for her key presence during the entire process. To all the artists, thank you for always opening the doors of your studios. Our most sincere thanks go to sérgio b. martins for his collaboration with matheus rocha pitta. His insight and knowledge are always welcome. Finally, we would also like to thank all of the individuals that helped us bring together this exhibition and this book.