Parallels: A note on the art of David Palacios

Félix Suazo

The creative work of David Palacios (Havana, 1967) concerns itself with the relation between the social and the artistic, as it seeks to transcend the illusion of a boundary separating these two areas. To that end, he draws a parallel between the production of material goods and the world of art, while adopting techniques from such varied fields as the media, ethnography, museum art and statistics in attempting to expose the mechanisms by which symbols are created and how they differ from reality. All this is handled with a sharp sense of satire, as well as a certain irony and humor.
From that point on, each work follows a specific strategy of its own, based on the expectations and possibilities of the context. For example, in the show Art porcentual (Sala Mendoza, Caracas, 2000) Palacios adds up and classifies in detail the different elements that comprise a work; while he refers in Zona de distensión (Sala Rómulo Gallegos, Caracas, 2003) to a large number of artists who have used bricks in their work and these are analyzed by the workers in a brick factory.
This constant movement between seemingly different areas acquires remarkable meaning in the series of projects titled … una extensión de … (Museo Alejandro Otero, Caracas, 2006), in which the artist installs local (or regional) versions of shows held by large museums abroad by way of a cultural extension. The idea is to hold “openings” in places more or less removed from those traditionally associated with high art (a hairdressing salon in Bogotá, a pet shop in Caracas, etc.) simultaneously with some big exhibition taking place in New York’s MoMA, London’s Tate Modern or the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, to only mention some of the museums. In all these cases, the artist exposes the way in which the great cultural events bring their influence to bear in an asymmetric world where the faraway places appear to be relegated to the role of consumers of foreign artistic fare.

Caracas, November 2006

Residual or emergent?

Residual or emergent? The art of unmasking art
Notes on art-percentual (fragments)
A statistical analysis of David Palacios’ installation: Still Life, The End

By Carmen Hernández

The work of David Palacios is marked by the desire to redirect the representational field of contemporary art, as an autonomous sphere with its own mechanisms of production and circulation, and attempts to foster a closer relationship with social reality. His work calls into question some of the artistic mechanisms that produce and reproduce knowledge, and which culminate in institutionalised models.

The analysis of the constitutive elements of this work (or still life), randomly scattered within the exhibition space, expresses itself in graphs that are –apparently—supported by an elaborate statistical study. These images, with precise colour bars, introduce the ironic overtone of an approach that is totally bereft of the characteristic artifices of the installation. An approach that not only calls into question the genre of installation’s physicality but also its capacity to communicate. By calling into question the “genre” of installation, the artist makes an ironic comment on the possible “scientific” approach or rigour associated to art history and criticism when undertaking merely material analyses, of proportions and forms.

David Palacios emphasizes the idea of chaos in order to posit a complex representational critique that includes the different modes of address in the visual arts, the transcendence of discourse and the role of the author. In this sense, he attempts to give visibility to the taxonomies employed by art, which contradictorily favour material identification over the symbolic dimension.

The supposed “analysis” that the artist undertakes, with his bars and graphs that give information about the physical traits (composition, age, processing technique, size, colour, weight) and provenance of the elements (nationality, origin), allows for the creation of various associations, simple or complex depending on the references that the spectators may be able to articulate. It is possible that there may be different levels of intensity in the perception of the spectator, some more distant, others more intimate, similar to what happens when some objects are recognized by their former owners. David Palacios is a collector whose choice isn’t biased beyond a personal attraction, and, in this sense, it not strange to discover that many elements in the work have pertained to other previous ones, somehow making it into a kind of assembly toy or certain handicrafts that are difficult to classify. The objects are valued in regard to their movements and trajectories, and not by a value that rests on their materiality (or supposed quality). Their life is thus determined by the individual or collective capacity to assign some kind of use to them.

The deconstruction of “genre” is evident in this literally “still” life, at least in terms of its capacity to communicate, since its parts do not represent associations between them other than the material aspect that is highlighted along with the other taxonomies selected by the artist. Its histories make an ironic comment on the disciplinary techniques of classification (archaeology, archival and library techniques, museology, among others) insofar as the operations chosen by the artist predominate. Even though the cards or labels correctly identify each one of the objects, brought together they cannot articulate a coherent discourse because the relations of discordance between them have been accentuated by revealing themselves as lent, received as gifts, acquired or as parts of other incomplete works of the artist. One of the few traits they have in common is the use they are given.

The objects received as gifts from friends and other acquaintances, are decontextualized and useless, they indicate a sort of banality and introduce the spectator into “the sense of nonsense”. This can be interpreted as a jab at art, which bestows upon itself a role of transcendence.

Differently from other positions taken by artists, in which they try to re-examine the value system of art through a reflection on aesthetics, Palacios points towards the value given by a social imaginary. The production of the real meaning of artistic or aesthetic experience –with its constant interaction of residual and emergent forces—lies in the exchange between individual experience and collective acknowledgement. In this process, use value can take on many functions such the pleasure of play, which has a privileged place here because it marks in great measure the transit of representations, their state-of-the-art quality or obsoleteness. Face to the transcendence of an authorship that is so much stigmatised by the “licence” of gesture, David Palacios, opposes to this notion the role of the author as an intelligent provocateur who extends the trace of art over to the social sphere and is, at the same time, capable of introducing use value in the field of art in order to destabilize established models and to favour provisional judgements.

Museums of the world

by Gerardo Zavarce

A major Venezuelan channel is presenting the television series “The Museums of the World.”1 The promotional material for the program states, “Great museums of the world. Since man’s beginnings, he has seen the need to preserve his treasures, protecting them from their surroundings and other elements. . . . In this way, the publicity with its intended transparency and pragmatism gives us a short explanation about the reason for the existence of museums: “a shelter for treasures.” Nevertheless, the audiovisual message shows images suggesting and reinforcing codes that place the viewer within a context of the kind of world it seeks to promote. It’s plain who shelters the treasures of the world and it’s plain who “the world”—that is to say, the first world—and therefore the owners of the treasures, is considered to be.

Among the varied programming are also other interesting educational and cultural programs you can enjoy, suitable for the general public: Savage Africa, Columbus and the Discovery of America, The Conquistadors, Savage South America, Ferocious Planet, In Search of the Afghan Girl and Survival of the Fittest. An attentive and sensitive television producer would probably consider it pertinent to add to this unequal imaginary, or imagined, world a program titled Savage Museums and/or Museums of the Other World, with reference to those museums located a ways south of the fascinating ‘museums of the world.’”

It’s important to point out, by using this example, that the programs explaining the so-called globalization process (Mato, 2001) are many and varied. On the one hand are the arguments and practices that take the idea of the global to be a homogenous whole, without any differences or rivalries. This view is characterized by regarding the idea of globalization as a monolith. Globalization as a fetish. Its speech used the singular and its premises are the multicultural and, of course, the politically correct. The world is seen in terms of information flow, financial markets and other aspects such as inequality and differences are considered to be outdated. Its image is epitomized in the popular advertisements of Benetton sports wear, where one sees the “heterogeneous balance” of representatives of different ethnic groups under the slogan of “United Colors of Benetton.”

On the other hand, there are different approaches that take into account the diverse, complex and contextualized aspects of so-called globalization processes (in the plural). Looked at thus, a different analytical perspective is put on the way the modern world works and it is not regarded as a homogeneous bloc. The contextualized character and the interrelation between the actors who produce the economic, political, social and cultural changes are essential in order to understand and produce these dynamics that emerge in the intense negotiation processes, resistances and conflicts. Looking at it from this point of view, culture has its roots in the intercultural and the image defining it is based in the struggle of social movements; for example, that of the Mapuches in Argentina’s Patagonia who resisti expropriation of their lands by the international sports wear firm Benetton.2

The zones of silence

Gerardo Mosquera, a critic and art curator, describes the experience of trying to travel by air between different African countries. Paradoxically, he says, the best way to do it is via Paris. For Mosquera, this fact constitutes the “zones of silence” experience and represents a clear example of how our modernity, characterized by the globalization phenomenon, depends on having “decentralized centers” forming part of the unequal relations as regards centers of power/periphery (Mosquera, 1996).

However, this new flux in relations comprises both a dubious supposition: that everything will change so that everything stays the same, and an opportunity for redefinition by way of dispersal, pollution and resistance, in the relations between the power centers and marginal regions. In this way, the efforts of Western culture to establish itself as the global norm are subverted.

Progressive globalization of European industrial capitalism since the end of the 18th century, with its colonial and neocolonial positions, has up to the present spread Western culture as the norm for modernity, and even as the culture that defines institutions and functions of contemporary life. But every process of large-scale homogeneity, even if it manages to remove differences, generates new differences within itself, like Latin that engenders the Romance languages. This is seen both in how the peripheral regions adapt the dominant culture and in the heterogeneity produced by immigrants in the contemporary megalopolis. (Mosquera, Gerardo. The World of Difference. Notes on Art, Globalization and the Periphery. On line: http://universes-in-universe.de/magazin/marco-polo/s-mosquera.htm 4/5 1995).

Looking at it from this point of view, Mosquera points out, nurturing tastes in the field of aesthetics and the strategies of subversion of the periphery are brought about by the appearances of new analytical perspectives in the field of the human and social sciences: studies on subordination, cultural studies, theories about frontiers, complex thought, etc. Points of view that operate within areas involving the convergence, cross, conflict and accord between different cultures, that is, the intercultural. This way one can discern a new form of making and understanding contemporary art, which would provide a response in relation to dialogue and inclusion, where the elements of convergence with regard to centers-peripheries become established all at the same time, and where cultural cannibalism serves as a process critical of the designs of Western hegemony.3

However, he warns, the emphasis placed on alternative projects advocated by multiculturalism seems to turn into a new form of centralized control of the peripheral. “Western hegemony is always the I, the rest of us are the Other.” (Mosquera, 1996, p. 17) Nevertheless, the cross-cultural tendencies between the regional and the global lead us to highly contradictory and problematic situations. Accordingly, from this standpoint one seeks not only to communicate the discursive referents of the tensions existing between center and periphery, but also to produce a break in one of the links in the logic by which Western meta-culture operates in pursuing a strategy for domination: an authority using mono-logic, or a single line of reasoning.4

Armando and Pablo joined together in modernity

In an article published in the daily El Nacional on November 14, 2004, titled “Armando and Pablo together in MOMA,” the Venezuelan art critic and curator Luis Enrique Pérez Oramas expressed his enthusiasm about Armando Reverón’s La mujer del río (The Woman of the River, 1939) being included in the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). Beyond the good intentions and the happiness expressed by Pérez-Oramas, the piece speaks volumes about some cultural practices in the era of globalization.

In the first place, Luís Enrique Pérez-Oramas defines and establishes the space that gives legitimacy to and therefore “glorifies” that which should be considered to be “modern,” expressing it thus: “Since then, the MOMA has contributed, as no other contemporary institution, to establishing the glory of Picasso. How many of us have learned in the classroom that modernity and Picasso are one and the same?” He hastens to note the importance of the place where the work of the artist Armando Reverón has been consigned, the MOMA of course: “At last in the company of his equals, at last housed where lay his hopes as an artist, at last the fulfillment of his destiny.” In this context it is surprising that the author does not reflect critically on the “indeterminate determinism” that establishes that Armando Reverón’s work is destined for the MOMA. So much joy and happiness leaves no space for questioning the idea of modernity characterized by the notion of linear time and progression (defined by the ideal of superseding the past) that comprises an essential dichotomy, which made it possible to divide the world into primitive and modern, savage and civilized, developed and underdeveloped, excluded and included.

Pérez-Oramas’ piece illustrates the manner by which an ethnocentric position is created and reinforced in the cultural process. It assumes a condescending and neocolonial attitude that uncritically presupposes the deep inequalities within the processes of interchange on a global scale. They are not innocent words. Reality is viewed as sterilized and apart from the differences, gaps and inequalities, he tries to unify the various contexts. In conclusion, he indicates: “The luminous presence of Reverón in the MOMA’s permanent collection—a fundamental step in definitively establishing the reputation of our artist in the Western canon of modern art—has been the work of many people; but it owes that presence to, more than anybody, two persons whose sensibility is marked by generosity and intelligence: Patricia Phelps de Cisneros and John Elderfield.” Therefore, “Reverón’s reputation in the Western canon of modern art” is sealed and determined by his arrival at one of the “Great Museums of the World,” and this is brought off thanks to an alliance of expertise (which defines and sanctions) and capital—which defines, sanctions and regularly finances expertise—that is, between the chief curator of the MOMA and the wife of the self-styled “global businessman.”

Using this argument, we surely could justify, for example, the Ethnological Museum of Vienna as the rightful place for Montezuma’s penacho—plumed headdress—and not the Anthropological Museum of Mexico City.5 We could likewise applaud the fact that in the cool, aseptic and well-guarded halls of the “Great Museums of the World,” the great lopsidedness of the world and the egotistic nature of power, as if it were no big deal, are on display. How else could we justify that the archeological treasures of the ancient Greek and Egyptian civilizations are neither in Greece nor in Egypt but in London and in Paris? The logic of power imposes a strategy of domination and control on everything that goes against or subverts the set of values and the patterns of conduct. Given their critical stance and potential for transformation, the arts are normally the target of those who hold power, to exhibit its trophies like the large mounted heads of wild animals in the mansions of the English aristocracy at the end of the 19th century. That is, they are completely removed from their place of origin, depriving them of their critical force and power to transform. In this scheme of things there are no obstacles to controlling and numbing the forces of change, nor any constraints on the capital that only seeks profit, accumulation of wealth and legitimacy as a value in itself giving one status. For the holders of that capital, nothing is impossible. Only this way can one understand that apart from the formal qualities of Armando Reverón’s art, his work hangs on the walls of the MOMA along with that of Pablo Picasso—the criteria for definitively establishing Reverón’s reputation. Fortunately, the work of the master of Macuto has long spoken for itself, even before the MOMA was inaugurated. Armondo Reverón speaks to us about the possibility of mutual understanding and of being in harmony with ourselves and with our surroundings. A transparent landscape that lays bare man’s material and spiritual condition. Basically, Armando Reverón speaks to us, through his experience as an artist and his life, about the possibility of being and of the responsibility and risk that this implies as an exercise of freedom.

Reflection and extension: Dialogue between knowledge and experience

Artist David Palacios’ planned Extension is in line with the way today’s economic, political, social and cultural interrelations work. Operations that some writers have called “globalization processes” and others just “globalization.” Plainly, the term refers to a complex phenomenon and many specialists are endlessly struggling to delimit its meaning. For many people, one of the important defining characteristics of the so-called globalization processes is defined by the accelerated spread of new communications and information technology. For them, the Internet, wireless communications, cable television and the recent development of cultural industries, among others, are giving shape to a new reality on a global scale.
In this regard, Palacios’ strategy has consisted in first establishing a link with the so-called Great Museums through the Internet by accessing their Websites. Then he checks out a chosen museum’s programming to determine a) its upcoming exhibits and b) the date when it opens. Next, he copies the museum’s logo and the image publicizing the show, employing them to carry out its inauguration program at a local site and relating his exhibit to that mounted by the foreign institution. Using this scheme, he has opened several of his shows: Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments held at London’s Tate Modern was “extended” to Avícola Petare S.R.I. in Caracas; The Aztec Empire held at Bilbao’s Guggenheim was likewise transferred to the Kiosco Artesanía Wuayúu, located on the capital’s Sabana Grande boulevard; Africa Remix: L´Arte Contemporain held at the Paris’ Pompidou Center had its extension at the Peluquería Black and White in Bogotá; Pioneers of Modern Painting: Cézanne and Pissarro 1865-1885 held at the MOMA was reproduced at the Plaza de los Pintores on Av. Casanova in Caracas; and Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance, 1972-85 at Miami Art Museum was represented at the Evanyelin & Pizarro clothes store in Lima.

Each Extension provides a platform for art experts and/or curators to air their views about aspects dealing with the “extended” shows. Finally, the event is recorded on videotape and photographed and sent to the curator in charge of the exhibit to which it refers. Now, one might ask, what does one achieve with this reworking of cultural processes? In the first place, I think it is important to note that Palacios produces his work from the standpoint of globalization as a process and does not exemplify globalization itself. So the intention is to lay bare the global processes of production, dissemination and consumption in relation to the visual arts today in terms of criticism and not of apologia, leading him to produce a documentary record that becomes a piece of information, which in turn allows him to explain and typify a particular cultural reality, not only from the point of view of inter-subjective (symbolic) interchange but also as a reference of historic and contingent political experience.
In this connection, we can make the following assertion: that the activities of daily life and those of specialized knowledge are dialectically intertwined. To put it another way: no text exists without context. So we can affirm that the globalization process has bearing on the areas of specialized knowledge and also finds expression in everyday life through the practice and experience of creative art.

Accordingly, the Extension project, as a living experience in an everyday setting, is implicitly related to recent changes in certain fields of knowledge: a) emphasis on alternatives by dissolution of the subject/object relationship; b) dissolution of boundaries with respect to branches of learning and the emergence of new approaches characterized by a trans-disciplinary methodology; c) including space and time as subjects of analysis in cultural processes (center-periphery, past-present). Just as with the different fields of study, a sharp critical stance characterizes the events creative artist David Palacios has staged, in this case with his own chosen field, the visual arts. That is why his project is not connected with formal artistic creation but offers a critical analysis of the apparatus that makes possible the production, dissemination, acceptance and certification of the visual arts today. It is what we could call d) an exercise in self-reflection in relation to art.

So David Palacios, to carry all this out, draws on a combination of different areas of knowledge and practices: politics, anthropology, ethnography, the Internet, graphic design, art history, social movements, museology, curating. He spares no effort to different people to participate: curators, dealers in handicrafts and in products for animals, workers, mariachi musicians, leaders of social groups, anthropologists, sidewalk painters. By his taking this approach, any method has the potential to set forth a cultural reality that evidently transcends the conventional notion of art.

By mounting his project, David Palacios devises a method that allows him to open a dialogue with what some have called the “Great Museums.” That is, with those institutions supporting the project that promotes Western cultural hegemony. He takes no complacent view of this dialogue, however. It becomes a criticism of the lines and practices of a reductive and ethnocentric character that seeks to represent the world according to its interests, its image and likeness. Each of his events points up an alternate reality that critically addresses a cultural authority. In each of them, one notes different historical periods, different structural approaches, different concepts of the body, of the spirit, of rhythm, of collective and everyday life.

The Extension project does not endorse the Great Museums’ idea of promoting and supporting their branches. On the contrary, Palacios inverts the rationale behind the so-called cultural franchises (Guggenheim). In this regard, the museums’ operation is used by him to underscore differences, from the economical and sociological point of view, as well as that of communications, all of which are key factors in understanding and describing intercultural processes that derive from the so-called globalization processes and that involve diverse relationships between people, practices and institutions (García Canclini, 2004).

Curators (subjects) at such museums (institutions) as the Tate Modern of London; the MOMA of New York, the Pompidou Center of Paris; the Guggenheim Bilbao; the Miami Art Museum have all received the documentary record of each one of the openings that comprise the Extensions experience (practices). This way leads to dialogue. They (the “great museums”) have a chance to break the silence and fill the void by representing the diverse through the channel of the univocal and monologue. That is, take the risk of including other artistic expressions. The difference from the other is revealed to be in experience. This opening to dialogue and exchange is a key element in Palacios’ work, since it is opposed to the idea of an essentialism that seeks to reevaluate peripheral cultures through a kind of inverse ethnocentrism. That is, it is not a matter of approaching dialogue through an endogenous and dichotomous view based on the idea of a false essentialism regarding identity. So that David Palacios centers his work on a relationship with the other; forms part of, has an exchange with, pollutes the other as well as polluting itself.

The Extension project is a space for dialogue: a neutral zone where one sees different realities not covered with their usual garb. This dialogue is based on the notion to expose the contradictions that define and constitute our sociocultural environment and seeks to develop a sensibility whereby we can interpret the different relationships of our world.

Perhaps we will be able to travel from Nairobi to Ivory Coast very soon without having to cross the zones of silence that develop when we fly via Frankfurt or Paris. Perhaps Montezuma’s plumed headdress will very soon not be displayed in the Ethnological Museum of Austria anymore, as a monument to expropriation and domination. Perhaps, very soon, Armando Reverón, used to the Caribbean sun and unaccustomed to the cold walls of northern museums, will decide to come a little farther south to find—alongside his friends—his true destiny.

References

García Canclini, Nestor, Diferentes, desiguales y desconectados. Mapas de la interculturalidad. Editorial Gedisa, Barcelona, 2004:
Mato, Daniel, “Estudios y Otras Prácticas Latinoamericanas en Cultura y Poder.” Revista Latinoamericana de Estudios Avanzados-RELEA No. 14, 2001.
Mosquera, Gerardo, “El mundo de la diferencia. Notas sobre arte, globalización y periferia.” Online: http://universes-in-universe.de/magazin/marco-polo/s-mosquera.htm, 1995.
Pérez-Orama, Luis, “Armando y Pablo juntos en el MOMA.” El Nacional, Caracas, Venezuela, Nov. 14, 2004, Section B, p. 18.

Notes

1 VALE TV.

2 http://benetton.linefeed.org/

3 The term “cultural cannibalism” came into use in aesthetics with the appearance of Cannibalistic Manifesto by Brazilian intellectual Oswald de Andrade in 1928. On the basis of cannibalistic rites practices by some Brazilian indigenous groups, Andrade proposed a new set of terms with reference to Western avant-garde movements. In this regard, the term refers to a redefinition of what would become a new artistic expression created in a synergy of Western art and that of indigenous inspiration, and this strategy should be adopted as a way of resisting the hegemonic designs of Western art.

4 For Russian linguist Mikhail Bakthin, the mono-logical line is the expression of a set of rules, a regulatory and unitary system, that through the dynamics of centripetal forces conveys a rationale, a language and a center that acts in detriment of variety and difference. The mono-logical creates a dichotomy regarding language and the reality it expresses; that is, on the one hand, a system with regard to language and, on the other, a group of people who act in accordance with this system.

5 The headdress of Emperor Montezuma Xocoyotzin (1455-1520) is made of quetzal feathers adorned with gold and precious stones, and is in Austria’s Ethnological Museum of Vienna; it supposedly was a symbol of power of the Aztec ruler. It forms part of in the museum’s collection “Treasures of Old Mexico.”

NOS/OTROS

por jaime cerón

La vocación para construir a otro es una clara herencia cultural de la modernidad, en donde se apeló a la otredad expresada, tanto en la preeminencia del inconsciente como en la proyección de un otro cultural. La importancia del psicoanálisis y el primitivismo para el siglo XX, parecen corroborar esta situación. Para Frantz Fanon, existen tres fases de renovación de las culturas nacionales, la primera de las cuales emerge cuando los intelectuales locales asimilaron la cultura colonizadora. Luego sobrevinó la recuperación de las culturas nativas mediante un proceso de auto exotización y finalmente se produjo la construcción de una identidad nacional que se resiste al poder colonial, pero que también recodifica las tradiciones locales. Esta última fase requiere de interponer una “distancia correcta” tanto al poder colonial como a las tradiciones nativas. Se trata de no ser neocolonial pero tampoco autoprimitivista. En la modernidad el otro cultural puso en crisis la identidad occidental, lo que llevó a su represión y posterior retorno en el mundo posmoderno como diferencia.

El proyecto Nos / otros de David Palacios, analiza desde una perspectiva cultural los métodos, estrategias y mecanismos con los cuales las prácticas artísticas en América Latina toman una distancia frente a sus respectivos objetos de estudio, para convertirlos en su otro cultural. El interés de Palacios es desnaturalizar esa relación de poder entre el arte y lo real para evidenciar la contingencia y particularidad de la actividad artística cuando se examina por fuera de los transfondos institucionales que legimitiman su aproximación a hechos externos a su campo. De esta forma, David Palacios propone examinar la propia distancia que separa el campo social de las prácticas artísticas para cuyos miembros el mundo del arte es “el otro”.

The Politics of Synesthesia

The Politics of Synesthesia

by Jesús Fuenmayor

I
A bit of the same old story

In the breakdown of ideologies of large sectors of modern life furthered by advanced capitalism, modernist art has provided one of the most illustrious chapters. Néstor García Canclini affirms that “art contributes to doubly reinforcing the oppressive structure of capitalist societies; besides communicating ideological representation that legitimizes the division of society in classes, it metacommunicates, as it were, in the way the message is fashioned, what the relations of the classes ought to be, who makes history and who suffers because of it.”

If nowadays one still tends to think of advertising as ideologically innocuous, despite the fact that it is one of the activities where we can observe with greatest clarity how the promotion of consumerism works, being the sector the majority of people turn to when looking at the innards of capitalism, then we will have to make an extra effort not to minimize the crucial role of latter-day modern art in the predominant social relations, because in it there are not many clear solutions to those attempts at ideological destabilization.

One of the models with this ideological background against which the high art of modernism reacted most frequently and which continues to be the target of criticism today – like that expressed by so-called cultural studies – is the Greenbergian. For Clement Greenberg, the American critic who embodied the modern ideal of creating a historic continuum according to which an authentic, perceptive eye could judge both a Chinese vase and an aerosol painting – an indictment of all human artistic achievement in a quick look out of the corner of one’s eye – what the true work of art had to reveal was only the work itself. This model, which served and serves to sum up American Abstract Expressionism and which gave it its preeminent place in the history of art, overshadowed somewhat another model no less ambitious and purist.

It is a well-known fact that, following the heyday of Abstract Expressionism in the fifties, other movements, such as Pop Art, Minimalism and Conceptualism, for the most part based in New York, from the start of the sixties held in check other movements that were being acclaimed. At that time the new figurative art, informalism, the new realism, arte povera were the center of attention, as well as a group of artists interested in incorporating this last movement’s ideas into their own work – called kinetic art, in a undertaking that concerns us here because of it is bound up with the theories of relativity, the uncertainty principle and the scientific concepts dealing with quantum mechanics and particle physics.
Summed up crudely but succinctly, the leading story that still prevails devised an Anglo-American genealogy for art, which was pushing aside the story of the movement of European-based artists and soon displaced it. According to Mark Nash, among the group of artists who we tend to identify as kinetic there were some who were very interested in conducting scientific research, especially in the area of “cosmic speculation,” or, to put it another way, in cosmogony, given that they shared an interest in the exact and natural sciences as they searched for an explanation of the laws that govern the physical world.

This interest is expressed in passionate words that from the start attempt to equate art with science. In what is considered to be the first kinetic manifesto, “The Realist Manifesto” of 1920, for example, Gabo and Pevsner already employed this language: “We create our works like the universe creates itself, like the engineer builds bridges, like the mathematician his orbital formulas.” So, on reaching the summit of their art, it was practically impossible to be a kinetic artist and not having put forward a methodology equating creative with scientific work. What these artists tended to push into the background were the advances made in the other sciences, those not concerned with the world in its infinite and unfathomable, but rather in the deep muddle of social concerns, which we know as the social sciences.
These works, with their focus on the optical instead of the retinal, had to be addressed to a viewer capable of suppressing any anecdotal content and thus realize the dream of making it comprehensible, regardless of the personal experience of that viewer.

Very little specific criticism that deals with the ideological sources of those artists who are members of the movements eclipsed by the mainstream has been directed at them, perhaps because, in an ironic turn, in recent years we have seen how, with the introduction of a multicultural spin in curatorial discourse and consequently the inclusion of the other (that is, that which is different), the kinetic artists have come to form part of the group that composes the so-called peripheral movements.

II
Resounding solitude, loud green
Visual symphonies, musical theater, abstract film, concerts in images, verbal geometries, choreographic architecture – these could be the art forms that make up the discourse that is not just an alternative to colorfully complement the correspondence of science and art. One could make out in this language an intention to overcome an approach to the study of art according to the differences existing in that world. To follow the Romantics, the arts would have to be defined according to what the art of painting lacks in poetry, or what poetry lacks in music, and what the last lacks in order to be dance or theater, that is, according to the specificity of the medium; at last we would have a methodological tool to arrive at a self-sufficiency of art, And on this point concerning autonomy, no matter how hard the avant-garde artists try to set themselves apart from the modernists, they basically aspire to the same thing.

The cross in art forms is a cross in the sense of perception, explicit in the aspiration of the modernists associated with integrating the movement into the artwork, which is what I venture to call “the politics of synesthesia” – to give a name to this search for a synthesis of the arts, in which the kinetic artists have been the promoters and protagonists.
David Palacios’ recent work also could be included in this politics of synesthesia. Only that the word “politics” possesses in the context of this exhibition a very special resonance, and the “synesthesia” is more than the transfer of the modalities of the senses. He calls them Infographs and they are works that, besides following the methodology that Carlos Cruz Díez invented for producing his series of “physiochromes” (and other works related to the perception of color), at that same time exhibit the statistical results of the state of human rights in Venezuela, according to reports published by the Venezuelan Program for Education-Action for Human Rights (PROVEA), one of the organizations that, in this field, has tremendous credibility in our country.

“Politically correct kinetic art?” could be the first question that comes to the mind of the viewer of these recent works by Palacios. So that what the politics of synesthesia assume in this context is not only a form of naming and promoting a cross of art forms but also underline in the discourse of scientific kineticism an absence of another order of things. Without putting aside the associations that anyone could make about Venezuela’s current situation, the political commentary in “The Politics of Synesthesia,” to say it as it is, suggests that Palacios’ work is immersed in a scrutiny of the forms in which the everyday or one’s immediate surroundings – the world that’s out there beyond the world of art – is transformed into symbolic material.

Let’s take it one by one. Politics, beyond indicating given power relationships, denotes the city, the public realm. To practice politics employing synesthesia would not only imply, then, an understanding of what the relationships are that determine the cross between the different art forms (in the case of Infographs, the cross between graphic and kinetic art, representing a historical contradiction between mass and cult art) but would also demand an understanding of the relationships that this mixture of art forms has in the social sphere in which it was created.

In a previous exhibition of Palacios’ work, Zona de distensión, (Neutral Zone, Sala Rómulo Gallegos, 2002), we can see a development of this idea that gives us a better understanding of his work. According to Felix Suazo, in both Neutral Zone and other works, there is a common denominator of the “parallel between the symbolic world and the material universe.” . On that occasion, Palacios worked with a group of laborers, technicians, and managers employed in a brick factory on the outskirts of Caracas. The installation in the exhibition hall consisted of a kind of reports on the workings of the factory, where one could study, by way of an statistical analysis of the use of bricks in artworks, the different ways the factory’s products are used, now symbolically and in contrast to its value as a practical object, its value, as Suazo says, “in depreciation of the normative esthetic.”

In Infographs, one can also find a contradiction of this kind, when statistics on human rights are used in the service of a strictly personal experience of perception of pure art. To this material universe of the violation of rights, the Infographs add the artistic delight of the symbolic world.

Perhaps here we should note the most significant feature that distinguishes Palacios’ latest work from his previous efforts. Although both deal with a series of works in which statistics are the element that invests them ultimately with meaning, in Infographs the artist fuses his own artistic concepts with those of Cruz-Díez’s physiochromes, effecting a radical change because, to use Palacios’ own words: the use of statistics, instead of “complementing other mechanisms, are here used to develop their own language that attempts to put greater emphasis on the contrast of a formal nature and that of the content of the work of art.”

That is to say, the statistics are crossed synesthetically with the kinetic operation and generate a short circuit. The Spanish Dictionary of the Royal Academy defines synesthesia as “1. Physiol. Secondary sensation or an associated one that is produced in one part of the body as a result of a stimulus applied on another part of it. 2. Psychol. Images or subjective sensation produced in one modality, or sense, when a stimulus is applied to another modality. 3. Rhet. Trope that consists in uniting two images or sensations originating from different sensory organs. Resounding solitude, loud green.”

If in order to appreciate the kinetic art of Cruz-Díez we have to change positions before the artwork, so that by our movement the desired mutation, or change, and associated explosion of colors is produced, so the statistics on human rights cited in Infographs don’t change: the stats on repression of street demonstrations, on the violations regarding personal safety, on the death of police and civilians in shootouts; the numbers on police involved in homicides, on the deaths by torture, on the excessive or indiscriminate use of force, on deaths through negligence or the victims of executions; figures on the number of oil spills or the responsibility of the security forces in cases of violations of the right to life or the growth of the prison population. The statistics remain, for all the viewer’s esthetic delight in the kinetic experience, fixed and monolithic. Resounding solitudes, a loud green color.

There is another significant difference. In her text on Neutral Zone, Carmen Hernández says that “this project attempts to activate this Neutral Zone – or an area that represents flexibility – that is situated between “art” and the social fabric ... and that functions more like a metaphor of the inner workings of the system because, in practice, it maintains a uncompromising tension between the artistic and the extra-artistic.”

So that there is a body of work that goes from contemplation to reception, which in the series of Infographs that comprise this exhibition is reiterated, but instead of representing a solution (artistically), this body of work is produced in two senses at once. Therefore the world of art is recognized as a social phenomenon in itself. The idea of a critique of the realm of institutions is given priority (the “normative esthetic”), above that of a work that considers the validity of the differences between the world outside and the inner world of art. It is a double sieve where the critical eye attempts to find a solution to the trap of going on producing institutional art as something separate from the social sphere.


NASH, Mark, “The Art of Movement,” in the catalog of the exhibition Force Fields, Phases of the kinetic art, Hayward Gallery, London and Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona, 2000, p. 313.

SUAZO, Félix, “Territorios en Reclamación, Sobre la obra de David Palacios”, in the exhibition catalog of David Palacios’ Inventory and Statistics of an Exhibition in Experiences in Dialogue, Sala RG, Fundación Celarg, Caracas, 2003, p. 6.
Ibid.

Taken from the artist’s project for the exhibition “Infographs, Exercises in Physiochromes and Reports on Human Rights,” prepared by the artist, David Palacios.

HERNÁNDEZ, Carmen, “Some Notes on Neutral Zone,” in the exhibition catalog of David Palacios’ Neutral Zone, Inventory and Statistics of an Exhibition in Experiences in Dialogue, Sala RG, Fundación Celarg, Caracas, 2003, p. 24.