An artist you especially like
We asked the following four writers [Miguel Antonio Chávez, Juan Villoro, Mónica Ríos, Maurice Echeverría] if they could recommend an artist they especially liked.
This is what they answered.
Miguel Antonio Chávez:
I really like a certain kind of illustration and, above all, the narratives these illustrations include in spaces as short as comic strips. As a kid, I greatly enjoyed the stories of Gary Larson’s “The Far Side”; it was one of the first referents of absurd humor in my youth and it’s possible it somehow marked me as I created my first stories, before I was fifteen (until then, I only drew comics and my friends thought I was going to go into drawing, but literature was stronger and in the end I chose that).
However, today I’d recommend the work of Joan Cornellà. That very vintage and “childish” aesthetic, combined with cruelty, is taken several steps farther than what was done on animated shows like “South Park” or “Happy Tree Friends,” because it doesn’t limit itself to the hyperbole of a fantasy world, but rather smashes the cruelty of what we see outside against our face, and which thanks to –or because of– the spectacularization of violence, today seems harmless. With these elements, Cornellà takes the best of Larson’s legacy, bringing the comic strip to the level of pop art (or absurd pop), without the need to use a single line of dialogue. Its seeming simplicity overwhelms, and even feels suspicious. Turns him into someone who’s very intelligent and perversely fun. Although I still haven’t done it, I could very well frame one of his illustrations in my library or study.
Juan Villoro:
One of the strangest places in Mexico City is the part of Polanco that seems lifted from the dynamic chaos of Seoul. In that place where money is overflowing and urban planning is lacking, the Museo Soumaya, the mall Carso, an aquarium, a group of VIP movie theaters, and Museo Jumex all deliriously coexist. To make the area even stranger, a freight train cuts across the space and horrendous Salvador Dali sculptures decorate the green areas. It is not easy to exhibit a sculpture in the midst of that kind of disorder. Damián Ortega was the first artist invited by the Museo Jumex to create a piece on its esplanade. In a somewhat accidental fashion, the result renovated that space.
“Cosmogonía doméstica” is a small astronomical system which is not made up by planets but rather by plates, cups, ears of corn, different kinds of bread: the essential elements for a fonda. In the face of the plutocratic grandiloquence of Museo Soumaya, Ortega’s work revealed the importance of small universes. There, everything is at once cosmic and cozy. The artist’s original idea would have the constellation spinning, but the mechanism got stuck. This gave the piece an accidental congruency. Nothing more domestic, more “ours,” than a broken cosmos. Technical faultiness wound up working in the artist’s favor. On more than one occasion, he has resorted to the makeshift repairs which are part of vernacular artistry. In its double evocation of the distant and the close, the sculpture that only sometimes moved lent vitality to a corner of the city with no urban meaning beyond the feverish construction with no regard to harmony.
Remedios Varo had imagined a similar solar system. What to her belonged to an oneiric dimension, dreamt up with elaborate attention to detail, acquired in Ortega’s piece the endearing condition of that which has already been used.
Octavio Paz pointed out that Mexican culture arrived late to the banquet of civilization. “Cosmogonía doméstica” breaks with any complex regarding the novelties of outer space. We find ourselves before plates which have already been eaten from, and where appetite will soon place other dishes with astronomical punctuality. If the numbers of the universe bring about a cosmic fear, Damián Ortega reveals that that immensity is not too different from our home, where the greatest mysteries are sorted out in after-dinner conversations.
Mónica Ríos:
My recommendations are separated by two weeks and a distance which is, perhaps, unbridgeable.
On July 25, 2014, the sounds emitted by multi-percussionists installed around a swimming pool, by wind instruments which cut through the railings, by the strings hidden under branches and the by the choir with feet in the pool, harmonized with the ambulances crossing the city, the murmurs coming in from the other plaza, the gum in the mouths and the beads of a necklace rolling across the floor. Sila: The Breath of the World, by John Luther Adams –I speak of the performance in the opening of this musical piece in the plaza of the Lincoln Center in New York–, is not only a composition made for open space: Sila uses, incorporates, is structured by the porousness of resounding space and chance. As long as the public is ready to listen, the ambient noise, the breathing of the musicians and their rhythm as they interpret the score all become part of the work. During the performance everything is nature, just as expressed by the Inuit word which gives the work its title. The piece can last, depending on the interpreters’ breathing, from less than an hour to an hour and a half; its sound can change depending on where you stand; you could even move between the water and the fire to play with different kinds of listening. It’s a piece that mutates, not in its individual interpretation, but in the collaboration among the scores, the audience, the space and the ambiance sounds. In such a clean, harmonic, and pure way that you could, as I did, sit on the floor without coming into contact with anything dirty at all. My first recommendation is, therefore, that of an irreproducible performance.
Two weeks after that, I find myself in Santiago, Chile, in the cold of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Quinta Normal, to see El castillo de la pureza [The Castle of Purity], the work of Joaquín Cociña y Cristóbal León. This is the fifth part of a cycle of installations seeking to make a feature length film in stop motion about a Nazi colony in the south of Chile, to be titled La casa lobo [The Wolf House]. My second recommendation is, therefore, a work which doesn’t yet exist. What I could see is part of a process in which filth gave rise to a creative space consciously developed by artists in order to establish ironic distance from their object, racial hygiene. As in his short film Lucía, El castillo de la pureza focuses on how children’s imagination produces outlandish narratives in order to codify a sordid reality. The coincidence between horror and seduction, based on the process of metamorphosis of his technique, becomes one of the esthetic pillars of La casa lobo –at least in the scenes which are already shown on the walls of the museum and in the filming process which takes place in wooden houses made from materials left over from other stagings and works from the museum.
Perhaps in 2015 it will be possible to hear their recorded versions of these two recommended works. It may be that the distance between these performances and their records will be, as with the cultural realms which separate them, unbridgeable.
Maurice Echeverría:
To understand performance artist Regina Galindo, one must understand those who she admires. It’s evident she’s assimilated those influences very well, and that her influences perfectly reveal her personality and artistic vision. We’re talking about Gina Pane, Chris Burden, Marina Abramovic, Mona Hatoum, Ana Mendieta, among others. In each of them, one can find that soteriology of art which rejects merely descriptive statutes in order to transfer them to the realm of crude life, and where vulnerability becomes a tangible skin.
The artist works with his weaknesses, Regina says. Oftentimes absorbing for himself rejection and ridicule (solemnity always brings about its own caricature).
But Regina assumes her fragile condition stoically, without resorting to the certainties of spirit and transcendence, without the luxury of a radical self, in the mere relationship of anguish which a subject establishes with its surroundings, foreign to all kinds of comforting answers.
What’s curious is how so much vulnerability gives birth to a profound strength. Regina harbors incredible doses of inner freedom. In a country where women are seen as piñatas to be dismembered, Regina Galindo rises with a beautiful strength and her personality acquires exemplary tonalities. To do what she does, to achieve that degree of presence, a considerable degree of focus is needed, and an almost scientific neutrality: in the corporeal art of Regina Galindo, her resistance, equanimity, and courage become formal tools of her work.
That being said, Regina is not afraid to ask herself the uncomfortable questions nor to symbolize the pain she perceives. And although it’s evident that Regina Galindo does not believe in the transformative mission of art, her work is actually weighed by an indignant energy: it investigates, denounces, and modifies the public and the artistic subject, taking them to a place which is experientially more awake.
Previous entries:
A poet you especially like... [Alan Mills, Jerónimo Pimentel, Laura Wittner, Ana Merino, Leonardo Sanhueza, Luis Felipe Fabre]
A short story writer you especially like... [Antonio Ortuño, Ana María Shua, Guillermo Barquero, Sergi Pàmies, Andrea Jeftanovic, Slavko Zupcic]
Beers with a character... [Ricardo Sumalavia, Enza García, Marta Sanz, Sergio Chejfec, Mercedes Estramil, Luis López-Aliaga]
If not a writer... [Liliana Blum, Giovanna Rivero, Enrique Vila-Matas, Héctor Abad Faciolince, Jacinta Escudos, Francisco Díaz Klaassen]
This is what they answered.
Miguel Antonio Chávez:
I really like a certain kind of illustration and, above all, the narratives these illustrations include in spaces as short as comic strips. As a kid, I greatly enjoyed the stories of Gary Larson’s “The Far Side”; it was one of the first referents of absurd humor in my youth and it’s possible it somehow marked me as I created my first stories, before I was fifteen (until then, I only drew comics and my friends thought I was going to go into drawing, but literature was stronger and in the end I chose that).
However, today I’d recommend the work of Joan Cornellà. That very vintage and “childish” aesthetic, combined with cruelty, is taken several steps farther than what was done on animated shows like “South Park” or “Happy Tree Friends,” because it doesn’t limit itself to the hyperbole of a fantasy world, but rather smashes the cruelty of what we see outside against our face, and which thanks to –or because of– the spectacularization of violence, today seems harmless. With these elements, Cornellà takes the best of Larson’s legacy, bringing the comic strip to the level of pop art (or absurd pop), without the need to use a single line of dialogue. Its seeming simplicity overwhelms, and even feels suspicious. Turns him into someone who’s very intelligent and perversely fun. Although I still haven’t done it, I could very well frame one of his illustrations in my library or study.
Imagen: Joan Cornellà
Juan Villoro:
One of the strangest places in Mexico City is the part of Polanco that seems lifted from the dynamic chaos of Seoul. In that place where money is overflowing and urban planning is lacking, the Museo Soumaya, the mall Carso, an aquarium, a group of VIP movie theaters, and Museo Jumex all deliriously coexist. To make the area even stranger, a freight train cuts across the space and horrendous Salvador Dali sculptures decorate the green areas. It is not easy to exhibit a sculpture in the midst of that kind of disorder. Damián Ortega was the first artist invited by the Museo Jumex to create a piece on its esplanade. In a somewhat accidental fashion, the result renovated that space.
“Cosmogonía doméstica” is a small astronomical system which is not made up by planets but rather by plates, cups, ears of corn, different kinds of bread: the essential elements for a fonda. In the face of the plutocratic grandiloquence of Museo Soumaya, Ortega’s work revealed the importance of small universes. There, everything is at once cosmic and cozy. The artist’s original idea would have the constellation spinning, but the mechanism got stuck. This gave the piece an accidental congruency. Nothing more domestic, more “ours,” than a broken cosmos. Technical faultiness wound up working in the artist’s favor. On more than one occasion, he has resorted to the makeshift repairs which are part of vernacular artistry. In its double evocation of the distant and the close, the sculpture that only sometimes moved lent vitality to a corner of the city with no urban meaning beyond the feverish construction with no regard to harmony.
Remedios Varo had imagined a similar solar system. What to her belonged to an oneiric dimension, dreamt up with elaborate attention to detail, acquired in Ortega’s piece the endearing condition of that which has already been used.
Octavio Paz pointed out that Mexican culture arrived late to the banquet of civilization. “Cosmogonía doméstica” breaks with any complex regarding the novelties of outer space. We find ourselves before plates which have already been eaten from, and where appetite will soon place other dishes with astronomical punctuality. If the numbers of the universe bring about a cosmic fear, Damián Ortega reveals that that immensity is not too different from our home, where the greatest mysteries are sorted out in after-dinner conversations.
Foto: Alfredo Mendoza
Mónica Ríos:
My recommendations are separated by two weeks and a distance which is, perhaps, unbridgeable.
On July 25, 2014, the sounds emitted by multi-percussionists installed around a swimming pool, by wind instruments which cut through the railings, by the strings hidden under branches and the by the choir with feet in the pool, harmonized with the ambulances crossing the city, the murmurs coming in from the other plaza, the gum in the mouths and the beads of a necklace rolling across the floor. Sila: The Breath of the World, by John Luther Adams –I speak of the performance in the opening of this musical piece in the plaza of the Lincoln Center in New York–, is not only a composition made for open space: Sila uses, incorporates, is structured by the porousness of resounding space and chance. As long as the public is ready to listen, the ambient noise, the breathing of the musicians and their rhythm as they interpret the score all become part of the work. During the performance everything is nature, just as expressed by the Inuit word which gives the work its title. The piece can last, depending on the interpreters’ breathing, from less than an hour to an hour and a half; its sound can change depending on where you stand; you could even move between the water and the fire to play with different kinds of listening. It’s a piece that mutates, not in its individual interpretation, but in the collaboration among the scores, the audience, the space and the ambiance sounds. In such a clean, harmonic, and pure way that you could, as I did, sit on the floor without coming into contact with anything dirty at all. My first recommendation is, therefore, that of an irreproducible performance.
Two weeks after that, I find myself in Santiago, Chile, in the cold of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Quinta Normal, to see El castillo de la pureza [The Castle of Purity], the work of Joaquín Cociña y Cristóbal León. This is the fifth part of a cycle of installations seeking to make a feature length film in stop motion about a Nazi colony in the south of Chile, to be titled La casa lobo [The Wolf House]. My second recommendation is, therefore, a work which doesn’t yet exist. What I could see is part of a process in which filth gave rise to a creative space consciously developed by artists in order to establish ironic distance from their object, racial hygiene. As in his short film Lucía, El castillo de la pureza focuses on how children’s imagination produces outlandish narratives in order to codify a sordid reality. The coincidence between horror and seduction, based on the process of metamorphosis of his technique, becomes one of the esthetic pillars of La casa lobo –at least in the scenes which are already shown on the walls of the museum and in the filming process which takes place in wooden houses made from materials left over from other stagings and works from the museum.
Perhaps in 2015 it will be possible to hear their recorded versions of these two recommended works. It may be that the distance between these performances and their records will be, as with the cultural realms which separate them, unbridgeable.
Foto: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Facultad de Artes Universidad de Chile)
Maurice Echeverría:
To understand performance artist Regina Galindo, one must understand those who she admires. It’s evident she’s assimilated those influences very well, and that her influences perfectly reveal her personality and artistic vision. We’re talking about Gina Pane, Chris Burden, Marina Abramovic, Mona Hatoum, Ana Mendieta, among others. In each of them, one can find that soteriology of art which rejects merely descriptive statutes in order to transfer them to the realm of crude life, and where vulnerability becomes a tangible skin.
The artist works with his weaknesses, Regina says. Oftentimes absorbing for himself rejection and ridicule (solemnity always brings about its own caricature).
But Regina assumes her fragile condition stoically, without resorting to the certainties of spirit and transcendence, without the luxury of a radical self, in the mere relationship of anguish which a subject establishes with its surroundings, foreign to all kinds of comforting answers.
What’s curious is how so much vulnerability gives birth to a profound strength. Regina harbors incredible doses of inner freedom. In a country where women are seen as piñatas to be dismembered, Regina Galindo rises with a beautiful strength and her personality acquires exemplary tonalities. To do what she does, to achieve that degree of presence, a considerable degree of focus is needed, and an almost scientific neutrality: in the corporeal art of Regina Galindo, her resistance, equanimity, and courage become formal tools of her work.
That being said, Regina is not afraid to ask herself the uncomfortable questions nor to symbolize the pain she perceives. And although it’s evident that Regina Galindo does not believe in the transformative mission of art, her work is actually weighed by an indignant energy: it investigates, denounces, and modifies the public and the artistic subject, taking them to a place which is experientially more awake.
Foto: Bertrand Huet
Previous entries:
A poet you especially like... [Alan Mills, Jerónimo Pimentel, Laura Wittner, Ana Merino, Leonardo Sanhueza, Luis Felipe Fabre]
A short story writer you especially like... [Antonio Ortuño, Ana María Shua, Guillermo Barquero, Sergi Pàmies, Andrea Jeftanovic, Slavko Zupcic]
Beers with a character... [Ricardo Sumalavia, Enza García, Marta Sanz, Sergio Chejfec, Mercedes Estramil, Luis López-Aliaga]
If not a writer... [Liliana Blum, Giovanna Rivero, Enrique Vila-Matas, Héctor Abad Faciolince, Jacinta Escudos, Francisco Díaz Klaassen]
