“Complex and bewildering pieces, like a dream can be,” are those gathered by Jazmín López in Ivanka, the exhibition that will be open to the public starting Monday, November 23 at Ruth Benzacar Art Gallery, as part of PANORAMA 2020, Art Galleries Week in Argentina.
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You can read the memorandum HERE before coming.
Fragments from Ivanka
In the first room of Ivanka, two objects occupy the place of an absent body: a funeral wreath and a digital totem — those monoliths with video screens that emerged some years ago to replace doormen and security staff in certain depressing urban buildings. Someone is missing. The wreath mourns them with a heart of flowers. The monolith perversely restores them in the form of a servile, vigilant, and above all useless ghost. That this ghost is the artist herself is no surprise in these times when restrictions on movement have cast doubt on the physical presence of people in exhibition spaces and multiplied the oppressive ubiquity of pixelated faces on digital screens claiming to be “live.” Through the figure of a virtual guard, Jazmín welcomes visitors to the gallery from the screen, evoking the dimensions of specter, spectacle, and 24/7 worker (everything artists can be today). In this vigilant specter there is an apparent calming function (“we are here”) in a context where the co-presence of viewers and artworks is in crisis and has thus become a slogan of pro-normality activism in the creative industries. But the gesture also echoes Anne M. Wagner’s writings on video art in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s: its supposed narcissism was less an obsession with the artists’ “selves” than a desperation to ensure there was still someone watching them.
Is there someone on the other side?
The function of the digital totem is purely deterrent: to detect or respond to a security incident it offers no advantage over CCTV cameras, alarms, etc. (the “real” surveillance). But the totem expresses the company’s identity: its presence as a brand lies in its exaggerated activity of watching, of being seen watching. This resembles the phenomenon of optical commitment, when a cultural institution wants to be seen as engaged in a noble cause. Both optical commitment and deterrence are publicity policies, purely communicational acts with real consequences. (Deterrence strategies throughout military history have relied on exhibiting weaponry or the destruction it can cause.) The relationship between deterrence and stealth can be constructive, although they seem tactically opposed. Stealth is the instrument that escapes the surveillance system it faces, generating within the adversary’s field a suspicion of latent, widespread threat. Returning to optical commitment, the “wanting to be seen as being…” that institutions cultivate defines much of their public presence and allows them to appear sensitive to socially repudiated events at minimal cost. If a racist crime shocks public opinion, institutions express concern (through posts). There is also a private version among the dominant class, equally political and equally inexpensive: showing the home online, “art on the balcony,” etc. If public circulation becomes contested (and the street undesirable), the bourgeois idyll of home becomes a sanitized PR tool, whether live or remote. An asymmetrical strategy could be posed thus: How to undermine this self-promotional capacity—or better, show it as already undermined?
The confrontation between the wreath and the digital sentinel at the gallery entrance also highlights other themes, such as mourning—what we do with the material and emotional remains of something or someone no longer present—and the idea of thresholds, arising from the unceasing desire to know what lies on the other side: of the painting, of the wall, of the screen, and also of the reality of this era, from which Ivanka longs to shoot off into a romantic and suprematist cosmos like the character in Ilya Kabakov’s escape device that is recreated here.
Just as the floral heart is a symbolic marker between life and death and the monolith the boundary of a domestic space (as well as a contact point between the real and the virtual), the exhibition is filled with objects typically meant to contain, close, wrap, frame, bind, or distinguish an inside from an outside, and which here are displaced, inverted, or outright broken: door, screen, wreath, window, curtain, frame, stretcher, bag, backdrop, knot, bow, mirror, ribbon, garment, shell, dome, box, book cover. Beyond filtering what enters and exits, these membranes act as veils, surfaces on which fantasies are projected—from the skin painted with a hammer and sickle, to curtains on which posters of a gorilla, Indigenous ruins, and a female model hang, lives exoticized and rendered kitsch phantoms for the sad and lustful gaze of the domesticated animal that is the human being. Another curtain Ivanka draws is the Iron Curtain, spying the worlds and catastrophes (to quote Susan Buck-Morss) dreamed on either side, with a curiosity that finds Maoist doctrine inside a package of Christian Dior stockings, or Marxist books mounted with appliqués on a mirrored dresser. The works cross the porous boundary between painting and installation, between objects we judge from outside and those that surround us and urge us to look outward through them, attempting to imaginatively transcend one’s own space and recover a glimmer of unreality.
The task the eyes assign to the psyche (and vice versa) resembles that required by mourning and dreams (Freud called it “work”). In every corner, between Pompeii’s cottolengo and the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition, trinkets and petit-bourgeois furniture fallen into disuse act as daytime remnants displaced and condensed to compose the stage set of a disconcerting dream drama. They also evoke the unsettling experience of entering the home of someone who has died and examining the objects they left behind. Like Ivanka’s lock-clock, attempting to capture time by moving its hands backward, the mind goes to the past, remembering or imagining what may have occurred to produce the present condition:
How did the TV and chandelier end up on the floor? What was she planning to do with the black painting leaning on the railing? Why were the crutches tied with bows?
Liberation Painting
Is there always a “normal” body behind painting, one that does not need criticism, that has always been and will always be there? Is a large-scale painting based on controlled gestures inherently white and ableist? Behind vacations, nights out, discos, tourism, boat outings, snorkeling off a yacht near Aruba or Cancún—what body is there?
Does painting not want to de-bourgeoisify itself once again? A painting that controls the protective domestic cocoon in which it was raised like a baby in a cradle—does it not grow bored of the false stability of intact objects, of “feelings” understood as promotional jingles? Is costumbrismo not ableist? Is comfort not reactionary? Is there not always an imaginary whole body—small or large, comfortable or repressed, childish or supposedly adult? Crip liberation begins with bodily organization; it rises above dysfunction not through amusement at the poorly done but through urgency. Liberation painting begins with the props of direct action, the toy weapons that break into the interiorist politics of withdrawal (Radioescopeta). The uncomfortable painting becomes cinema; it violates the décor norms that restored the nineteenth-century interior in the form of the television living room (Klemm, Raúl Taibo, Marta Lynch, etc., all children of a bastard nineteenth century). The bourgeois idyll is both the point of departure and the point of arrival for a generational attack. In both directions, idyll turns into trauma, and the accumulation of possessions into the imaginary restoration of normality or the phantom limb of a life of comfort impossible on its own terms. The question is not whether an artist is more or less childish, but whether they are bourgeois childish or revolutionary childish.
Claudio Iglesias and Patricio Orellana
