Subsistence, eroticism and memory… these are some of the movements that can be perceived when going through the exhibition “Imágenes de mi pan” by Carlos Herrera & Colectivo Ave Miseria, at Ruth Benzacar Galería de Arte.
With text by Silvio Lang, the exhibition can be seen at the gallery until June 15.
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Sustenance, eroticism and memory
By Silvio Lang
Bread: what feeds, nourishes, and sustains us. “Bread as what we make, kneading, splitting, in need of binding our lives together,” Sara Ahmed proposes. Dough that sustains us but bread also as what we have achieved. We earn our daily bread. “I, with my body in me, with my soul, whole/ knew how to earn my bread with my two hands,” reads the poem by José Portogalo, which gives its name to this exhibition. Images of my bread: images of my (self-)sustenance. The work we have to do to exist/subsist could be understood as a project of configuration, where imagination and invention become involved with the world’s contingency.
Carlos Herrera & the collective Ave Miseria invite us to connect, through a network of objects, with figurations of sustenance. A face to face with necessity. Knowing what we need in order to exist confronts us with the thought of things’ utility, what they are for and the uses we give them. We can think of how the elites have distanced themselves from utility, ignoring or hiding the extractivist and oppressive practices that they carry out in order to maintain and renew their own lifestyles. Practical life with its techniques of subsistence is the (infra)structure that elites cannot see. A sensitive consciousness of the use of materiality = an intensification of class consciousness.
When we walk through the soft fence of black straps, we enter the world of use. Uses are concrete, polyvalent, and changing material processes. To name these iron carts “Self-portraits” -these chastity cages of sorts, enclosing hand-sculpted 5’6” penises and surrounded by multiple everyday objects- suggests that the self is nothing more than a configuration of used objects. Or even better, a fiction of “transitional objects” (D.W. Winnicott) that operate as emotional prostheses to negotiate with the not-self that is the world. “How is the fiction of a self produced?” asks McKenzie Wark. To call a sculpture of objects, in which we lack the overcoding of the face, a “self-portrait” -an operation that Herrera has done in several of his earlier works- is to assume that the self is but a created object just like any other. How do our selves come into being? With “practical prudence”, Herrera seems to reply through the making of his works, in tandem with the Ave Miseria collective.
Meanwhile, that idea of a reified self is emphasized by the emergence of this collective that, as of now, is only integrated by Herrera and which bears the name of a previous performatic installation he made and of his Instagram profile. More than a collective of people, Ave Miseria is a collection of sculpture-objects that put us in relation to the uses of things that mediate between the selves and the rhythm of the world. Sculptural art is intertwined here with a technical operation that puts the self on par with a way of life.
The plasticity of the self brings together hybrid objects recruited from reality, full of virtuality and of the past. Work objects, heavily used, domestic, floricultural, funerary, sexual and religious, collected for a long time and thought of as conductors of desire that are left here to rest, like erotic props in a shed or, perhaps, even like hearses at the end of the procession. A network of objects that evoke what Elizabeth Freeman has called “erotohistoriography”. A joyful carnal contact with objects or materialities that write (one’s) history. The seven giant penises do not figure eroticism as much in their symbolic quality as sovereign guarantors of sexual desire and as the arbitrary origin of sexual difference but, more so, through their portable use, they become dildos. “The dildo is movement,” says Paul Preciado. A prosthetic object of the body, the dildo does not imitate sex; it transforms it. It opens the body to other organic and inorganic relations. It is an alternative flesh; a strangely intimate flesh. The dildo transfigures the penis and signals a sexual plasticity of the body in which the organic is not the only erotic context of sexuality. Any accessory, utensil, body part or object can become a dildo.
Both these portable cages in the form of street carts and the bicycle wheels that hang like wreaths of flowers are objects of movement, even if they stand still. They are now suspended between the mental space of their potential movement and the time of walking around the installation. Static sculptural art and performative movement. Marching and stopping. “Images of my bread” is an erect configuration pregnant with tensions: between lost past/used objects and something that is happening at this very moment, or that could happen at any moment. Portable memories where the body engages in participatory and affective relationships that nurture life stories as (author)portraits. This presentation of self before others can be considered a form of drag, a kind of practice that Herrera already tried in his work “Tonto huérfano” (2015-2016) -made in collaboration with Flavia Da Rin- by turning himself into a deconstructed evocation of the clowns created by the painter Enrique de Larrañaga. Drag is not conceived so much as a practice of crossing female/male genders but as an act of dragging into the present old-fashioned accessories or past attributes to cover the body.
Collecting and mixing fragments from the interstices of his childhood in the countryside -as if they were objects rescued from the suburban floods of his hometown- implies an affective record that rubs up against objects, finding pasts and speculating futures. Herrera practices a mentalism of objects linked to the particular places and modes of an affective history. Drawing on the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, he retrospectively fabricates in idiosyncratic assemblages – or forms of deviating through disproportionate and unnatural sizes – the homoerotic passages and adobe shelters of his childhood on the farm. These residual assemblages suggest -from the delayed temporality of installation and sculpture- an intimate reading of the self. Herrera is not landscaping the countryside. He is producing an erotohistoriography of himself and his surroundings. Reimagining the past transforms the present. To desocialize oneself from the here and now, by using objects as energetic conductors of erased or unfinished pasts, is a way of resocializing, that is, of creating new magnetic forces in the social field.
