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Carlos Capelán: The eye is looking at you, by Gerardo Mosquera |
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The work of Carlos Capelán is finally beginning to receive the acceptance it deserves. The fact that this recognition comes so late in the day is yet another example of the weak legitimizing power of the peripheral circuits, above all if the artist is not anxious to sell himself or keeps a certain distance from the luxury market predominant in Latin America. Capelán, a Uruguayan by birth, started his artistic career in Sweden, where he has worked for many years, while being virtually unknown in this Continent. He is an example of the Latin American exile, and his work typifies the current pluralities and contradictions of Latin America, as if it were a paradigm of a Latin America of diversity, and not of totalization. Capelán's work does not stem from "roots" nor from social conscience nor from the spirit of Latin American culture; it comes straight from the experience of exile, one of the great complexes of Latin America, where the ghosts of an ontologizing nationalism have made it difficult to assume transterritorialization as a cultural event. Capelán, however, exorcises the old ghosts, availing himself of' contemporary anthropological discourses on representation, building of identities and culture as a dynamic, relational space, of conflict as much as of cohesion. Some of his great "environments", such as those made during 1992 and 1993 for the presentations of the Ante América exhibit in Bogota, Caracas and New York, are true treaties which show a symbolic parallel of those discourses, from the subjectivity of a Uruguayan who has lived intensely the contemporary history of the Continent, extending from dreams to violence, from wanting to change life to accepting it, from utopia to exile, from painting in the mud to smearing with mud the painting on an easel. Capelán's work, and in particular his environments and installations, is like a chip which condenses the very diverse cultural axes interwoven at present in Latin America: the conceptualism of social incidence, the graphics of vernacular tradition, the painting of "atmosphere", the criticism of representation, the reopening of the old identity neurosis, the deconstruction of the hallowed circuits and mechanics of art and culture, a neo-tellurism, mysticism, non-Western cosmovisions... to talk about Capelán, one must always enumerate. It is significant that his work, contrary to that of other contemporary installation artists, is recognized within a Latin American visual tradition. This is a result of his imagery as well as his baroque tendencies, and possibly of a certain intimist dimension despite the concentration on propositions of a theoretical bias which rouse towards social and cultural analysis. All of Capelán's installations, whatever their size, work as if they were profuse stage-sets which the public can walk through. The spectator first receives a general sensation of great visual impact, atmosphere and space. After that, however, he will have to move closer to gradually become aware of a web of intricate details, each of telling significance in the general discourse of a work establishing multiple levels of communication. When one is almost literally submerged in one of these environments, one seems to have entered a space made sacramental, whether of the museum or of the home. The relationship between the apparently opposing environments of transhistoric sacralization and everyday intimacy is proffered for a symbolic criticism of the forming of values and identities in the social fields of art, science and culture as well as on the level of the subject. This act of making sacred leads at the same time to the temple, as paradigm of the hyerophantic space: the showcases become the altars; the collections, relics; the self-portraits, mystical images; it perfectly structures the semantic interweaving of his discourse. But one of the factors that bid Capelan's "Latin mood" is that, on the near side of this conceptual and deconstructive dimension, when penetrating into works of this type, one feels as if one has entered a Mexican church of the 17th or 18th centuries. The sensation may be a paradox, since there are no direct references to the baroque, and the whole is conceived within a certain visual aridity peculiar to conceptualism, with emphasis on ideas and within the contemporary technique of the installation. Still, it is staged with a feeling for the spectacle, and the whole concept is overloaded both in the general structure as well as in the ant-like details of minutiae, similar to the unrestrained baroque of Latin America's Colonial period. The difference is accentuated by the mystical emotivity present in Capelán's poetics. We are within very complex systems where numberless dissimilar components abound. This pluralism does not consist only of an excess of Gestalts, resources, techniques, elements and levels but, as well, of the diversity among them. It is structural pluralism as well as a language pluralism. Thus, Capelán's work combines conceptual art with art based on visuality, which is considered to be its opposite. On the one hand idea prevails, to the extreme of accentuating the textual and even the erudite, with its fabric of quotations and its discursive approach, while on the other hand it unfurls images straight out of graphic tradition, a legacy from the classical techniques of printmaking, which discipline Capelin used to teach. It is not by chance that books are almost always a fundamental component of his installations. They are evidence of the duplicity I mention: they act both through their visuality as objects and markers of space, and as sources of quotations and the highly sophisticated theoretical debate which underlies Capelán's artistic discourse. Pluralism unites all aspects of Capelan's work. It defines a poetics in which intertwine the intellectual and the mystical (in an unusual mixture of idea art and religiousness), together with the rational and the emotional, the anthropological and the personal, the "primitive" and the scientific. This poetics, its atmosphere and its articulation of media contribute to making Capelán's personality quite different from Jonathan Borofski's and other artists' who also use environments with pluralistic structures. With this type of work, Capelán has become one of the most important contemporary artists in the field of installations. Previously he had worked in drawing and printmaking with a marked Latin American accent, within the segment which combines popular imagery with expressionistic roughness with graphic impact (let us think of José Guadalupe Posada, Carlos Gonzáles, José Luis Cuevas, Francisco Toledo...). But his inclination towards the conceptual and the 'performance" led him early to de-territorialize the field. He started to draw on stones plants, walls, texts and the printed page, and any other surface capable of containing his images, in a kind of obsessions to draw the whole world, just like that map of Borges which entirely covered the surface represented. The very title of his astonishing exhibition at the Lunds Konsthall in 1992, "Maps and Landscapes", raised this double-edged criticism of the representation and that which was being represented, of the landscape on a map and a map in a landscape. In this sense, as well as in relation to the paradigms of the baroque and the pluralism in Capelán's work, I remember one of his projects of drawing each and every single leaf on a tree. He did not conceive it as a gesture. To consider graphic art as a land art was his response to a mystical need to communicate with things by way of a graphic sensitivity closer to the East than to the West. The thought and aesthetics of Buddhism, Taoism and other Oriental religions constitute a fundamental orientation to Capelán's art work. The overflow of his graphic work beyond the customary supports led him naturally to include such work in his installations; which always include monumental drawings on the wall and work on paper. They create a strong visual impact in his environments, articulated with the use of the more traditional objects, texts and other resources of the common practice of the installation. The most effective paradoxes of Capelán's work show a very peculiar case of ease in the "outward" use of conceptualism deepening among Latin Americans. In Latin America, the art of ideas has been directed at the social, the cultural and the political, increasing the sophistication of its analytical and linguistic instruments to challenge the charged complexities of society. Capelán is a good example of this tendency which would include the names of Luis Camnitzer, Antonio Caro, Eugenio Dittborn, Félix Gonzáles-Torres, Alfredo Jaar, Jac Leirner, Cildo Meireles, Hélio Oiticica, and Doris Salcedo. During his stay in Mexico, in 1986, Capelán established a friendship, still very much alive today, with Cuban artists José Bedia, Juan Francisco Elso and Ricardo Rodríguez Brey, based on their idealistic and aesthetic affinities. Concurrently with them as well as their friend the Cuban-American Ana Mendieta, and other artists from the Island such as Luis Gómez and Carlos Estévez, Capelán shares a mystical and ritual sense which is part of a strategy towards the non-Western through certain openings in Western art. A dialectics rebounding from the methodological (art as an autonomous aesthetic and communicative creation, conceptualism, inclusivism, etc.) to the cosmovisive (Weltanschauung built out of non-Western spiritualities). This displacement, joined with the nature of his imagery, sometimes brings about in Europe to push into the discussions in vogue on "primitivism". Apart from the Eurocentric rusticity they often have, their designation would only be pertinent if this "primitivism" were focussed as the use of certain peripheral cultural tools whose complexity and subtlety make them most effective in the construction of discourses conforming to contemporary polyfocality and its many implications. To talk of artists such as Bedia, Elso or Capelán in this perspective would in any case underline the protagonism of the "primitive" in the construction of the contemporary within the processes of globalization and multi-culturalism. The "primitive" as a dynamic, transforming element, rather than essence, authenticity or tradition. In Capelán's case, moreover, the "primitive" would join in an erudite "postmodern" discussion, particularly in the field of anthropology. Capelán's post-modernism seems to come from an "unfinished" modernity which welcomes the "spirits". (Robert Farris Thompson said not long ago: "Good-bye postmodernism, welcome spirits"). This exhibit is inspired by some (pre) postmodern lines of verse by Antonio Machado: "The eyes you see are not eyes because you see them, they are eyes because they see you". These verses could be read today as a recognition of the Other as to Self. It eloquently corresponds to the perspective of reaffirmation of the subaltern, which is the most valuable characteristic of Capelán's works. It proposes a dialogic plurality between subjects, confronting the alienating hegemonism of the central look, a perspective reproduced metaphorically by the artist's work itself. The only thing is that this work leads the postcolonial criticism along mystical paths, in discussing contemporary issues from non-Western cosmovisions which look forwards to the future instead of back to the past. In his case, Machado's verses should have been complemented with the "seeing beyond" of an Afro-Cuban maxim: "There are eyes that have vision". But here, it still remains the viewpoint of a self-discoursing centre which recognizes a silent eye. Or also a mere mirror-like narcissism. The wink of that eye that makes its action visible is missing. A sign of the exchange of looks would require the almost offensive self-proclamation of the Other, written under the image of an eye in certain signs which are placed at the entrance to Cuban homes (more frequently in New Jersey than in Havana): "I am looking at you". Gerardo Mosquera Translation by Hanka de Rhodes / Alfredo Pernin Text information |