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There is a group of artists
who form the rich vein of conceptual art that meanders through the
South American continent and the islands of the Caribbean. It includes
amongst others, names like Alfredo Hélio Oiticica, Jose Bedia, Félix
Gonzáles Torres, Alfredo Jaar, Cildo Meireles, Eugenio Dittborn,
and Carlos Capelán. Even though these artists have not exhibited
as a group, except perhaps under the all embracing euphemism "Art
from Latin America", but never as conceptualists, their work stands
out in the annals of the contemporary art of the Americas and more
recently the European continent. Yet those familiar with Capelán's
work know that there is a distinguishing factor that makes him both
a latecomer and a maverick in the group. Capelán, unlike the others,
did not make his career as an artist in his native Uruguay but in
the Southern Swedish town of Lund. This experience makes him more
akin to Wifredo Lam or the contemporary artist Ana Mendieta, who
made their respective careers in Paris and New York as exiles. Capelán's
work is imbued with the ideas of being out of place, or in another
place, where difference and identity matter, where you have to define
who you are or run the risk of being defined by others. What aligns
his work to the group is its conceptual dynamics. Conceptual art
of Western Europe unlike its Latin American cousin, hardly ever
addresses social or political issues to the degree that it becomes
the driving force of the work. If Eurocentric Western conceptual
art is art for the sake of art, then conceptual art in Latin America
was envisaged as an art for life's sake. It stands as a critical
prism refracting the once pure light of Western Modernity into an
array of different opinions and strategies. Art as a tool with which
to reassess what has gone before and what the artist and their audience
will face. It poses questions to both art history and to human relationships.
Capelán has, through his installations, drawings and paintings,
chosen to show us the complexity of the culture in which we live,
to view society from close up, and its art history from a slightly
different position. The aesthetic qualities and the intellectual
strategies he employs make clear that his work is not political
in any strict sense. His installations, paintings and sculptures
engage both the context and discourses of the art of our time. It
questions and reformulates issues of identity race, religion and
notions of language. His installations are special spaces which
offer viewers entry into a highly complex world where geographic
location is temporarily displaced and visual fantasy suspends time.
Each installation beholds a multiplicity of visual and literary
languages. Whether site or gallery specific, the space is set up
to engage the viewers sensory responses. One is invited to think
critically about the norms of politics, art, religion, philosophy,
etc. The viewer's critical inquiry opens a dialogue into the convoluted
complexity of our contemporary world. A world where the cardinal
points of the compass locate geographic position, instead of defining
peoples and cultures, religious and political beliefs. A world no
longer polarised into communism versus capitalism and the incommensurate
cultural differences cannot simply be described by the term Globalism.
The constellation of materials used in Capelán's installations are
designed to engage the audience in processes of thought, ritual
and memory. The viewer is left to trust his or her instincts more
than the apparent facts. One cannot explain either the individual
work, or the installation as a whole, into any logical conclusion.
The purpose is not to propose answers. Reading Capelán's installation
engages many senses in order to evaluate numerous theories and recall
aspects of human existence which a too luxurious modernity allowed
one to forget.
Capelán's exile began in Chile and later brought him to Sweden.
This has made his vision a wonderful reciprocal mixture of the issues,
strategies and languages of both regions. It also made memory an
important factor in the scheme of his ideas. When political circumstance
made exile more a matter of choice than one of health and safety,
Capelán began to move throughout the parts of the world that he
loved. For the past decade his nomadic travels have enabled him
to leave traces of his vision in many countries. His strategy has
been to show and to tell his viewers something about the world in
which they are included. To read his work with the assumption that
these installations are Latin American because the artist originates
from there, is to expect its visual quotation to be framed by ethnography
and exoticism. The work says something different. The visual quotation
is not Latin American but European, so too are the ethnographic
representations. When Capelán's ideas centre on identity, his focus
is not an essentialist representation of himself as a Uruguayan,
as a member of a zone of humanity the hegemonic mainstream called
Latin America. He has instead used both his worlds as resources,
giving the art and objects found in the geographic space of Western
Europe a revealing twist.
...to accept any idea of ourselves as the
subject matter of our art is potentially a trap. I refuse to do
a description of my ethnic self or to represent myself according
to the rules of a hegemonic structure in order to be myself. I work
with the identity of the art object, and if I have to refer the
identity of these books, carpets, drawings and paintings it would
be to Marcel Duchamp, because that's the reference we have. We're
talking about art. Contemporary art has always been related to identity,
since the Impressionists, since the Renaissance. Now, suddenly,
identity is an issue of ethnicity. Well no, if you want ethnicity
I give you back what you have. These are your chairs, carpets, and
lamps, have them. Today the identity of the work should be referred
to Marcel Duchamp, Christo or to installation art.1
Capelán's conceptual concerns with anthropology, with how one constructs
or deconstructs contexts, lay the foundation of his installations.
He wants the viewer to make sense of what the eyes see and the body
responds to in the installation space. Capelán also wants to unbuckle
the visual experience from Eurocentric notions of authorship and
originality.
I don't pay any attention to originality.
I'm not trying to be original and I don't give so much for the artwork.
For me the process is the main thing. I'm trying to re-organise
things which are already there. I am offering us a chance to re-write
history, to re-read history, to re-interpret history, to relate
ourselves to this context. The periphery is not only the geographical
periphery, it's not just about coming all the way from Latin America
or wherever it is, it's also about belonging to the tradition of
Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Baudelaire and Kafka, who worked within these
kind of margins.2
Carlos Capelán began making art in the popular tradition of prints
and drawings. He had the great graphic tradition of José Guadalupe
Posada and Carlos Gonzáles to inspire him but his engagement with
the contemporary ideas of minimalism, conceptual art and alternative
practices such as installation, made him use his graphic skills
in a unique and challenging manner. Capelán loves drawing for its
simplicity and immediacy. A picture can tell a thousand words and
this is what he likes doing. He wants to show and tell us about
the world we live in. Drawing to Capelán is a form of map making,
a way to describe reality using icons, symbols and other more detailed
forms of representation. His drawings have become paintings, installations
and more recently sculptures. His early drawings were made in ink,
the primary medium in communicative mark making, from calligraphy
to the computer printer. The invention of ink allowed images and
texts to travel and appear on a great variety of surfaces. This
gave a certain logic to Capelán's search for new ways of telling
through the medium of drawing. He made stones, leaves, and other
found objects the supports for his drawing. This search eventually
led him to installation where the gallery space became a support
for his drawings. Capelán was however conscious that an art gallery
is inscribed with a context even when it's empty. He has often covered
the gallery walls with local mud, to wipe away this invisible, historic
inscription before drawing onto the gallery walls. This strategy
allowed him to make his mark on a "neutral" ground, where the Eurocentric
history of Western modernism could not dominate or underwrite his
images. The drawings vary in size from the minute to the gigantic
and he uses them as trace elements, or floating signifiers in the
larger composition of his paintings or installations. They depict
dismembered hands holding a book, heads, eyes and crawling headless
torsos. These he repeats across the space making them lose their
association with authenticity and originality. The drawings are
sometimes layered, each new drawing allowing what was there before
to have a presence. They speak of another history, a pre-history
perhaps when information was passed on via images rather than words.
More recently these drawings have been given another twist. They
are anamorphic. Their perspectives are altered making some images
appear as abstract marks. When drawing directly onto the interior
walls of a space, the distortion comments on the architectural space,
on the vistas and vantage points the space provides. Moreover, the
viewer is drawn into finding the correct viewing position. These
drawings suggest that there is never one view or reading of art.
Instead a multiplicity of views is proposed, each different, each
dependent on the viewers location. Anamorphic distortion links to
ideas of spatial illusion that run from the Renaissance through
Pop Art to computer generated works. These ideas fascinated Leonardo
Da Vinci and Holbein because they collapsed the theory of perspective
and the manner the human eye reads space. Capelán is also referring
to our distorted world view taken from the Mercator World map and
its alternative, the Peters Projection.3
The inherent metaphor of Capelán's recent drawings is that we cannot
hold an intransigent world view in a culture that thrives on change.
Lately Capelán has begun to draw with very different substances;
paint, Coca Cola, mother's milk and wine. Using these as a medium
for drawing equates them with the importance of ink in the dissemination
of texts. He uses these materials both for the marks they make and
for their metaphoric potential. Their plural meaning makes poignant
his desire to place subject and process above authorship and originality.
The materials are liquefied leitmotifs for contemporary culture,
commerce, anthropology, mythology, painting, American imperialism
and ecology. At a time when many still assumed all good art to be
made with paint, that Coke is the real thing, (as refreshment and
brand name), when breast feeding is more than physical nourishment,
these recent drawings reverberate with all sorts of possible meanings.
The marks made with mother's milk and Coca Cola will disappear over
time as their material nature changes. Paint as a metaphor for the
history of European Modernism underlines how impervious to change
this history has been.
To emphasise a connection to calligraphy Capelán uses a brush to
make his wall drawings and the numerous literary quotations used
in the installations. Some texts are his words but most are those
of cultural philosophers, anthropologists, art critics, writers
and artists. These originate from different cultures, each speaks
its original tongue and Capelán conducts this polyphony of languages
and philosophical ideas like a world orchestra playing an ever changing
composition. Its ambience quietly fills the space. It displaces
previous contexts by halting the hum of their history.
Capelán's installations work like the opening curtain to a grand
enigmatic opera. They are designed to impact on viewers and to avoid
fixed reading. The scale and overall look holds one's attention
while its complexity and detail draws one into a web of issues that
requires the full concentration of its audience. If the venture
into this theatrical setting is to evoke all its possible meaning,
the audience has to follow their instincts into each subsequent
act, the next conceptual scene. A sculpture on a plinth or in a
vitrine full of carefully displayed fingernail clippings are not
props in this open ended environment. Like the drawings they are
floating signifiers, linked to the wall drawings or stacks of stone-weighted
books through an umbilical cord of meaning the viewer has to construct.
His sculptures are the clearest challenge to the notion of authorship.
They have been made by asking young art students to translate one
of his stock drawings. To these sculptures he adds objects from
the tourist market place. The sculptural works tell part of their
story through the materials from which they are made. Plastic and
bronze for a replica Coca Cola bottle. Patinated bronze and aluminium
straps and wood for the figurative sculptures. Capelan's sculptures
construct dialogues about coexistence, and interrelationships, kitsch
and classicism, authorship and individuality originality and replica.
What I'm very tired of is this old hegemonic
project of the mainstream artist creating one object which contains
the whole creation, the whole universe, and there is only one way
of interpreting this object. I'm working with several levels of
information, the emotional, the intellectual, small details like
b-scale drawings. I have several hooks in this strategy because
I can't imagine having one kind of public, one kind of spectator
for my work. I'm trying to address different kinds of people with
different kinds of experiences and information. There are layers
of information in these installations that are against authoritarianism.
Up to a certain point it's like a movie set. But I work with real
objects and this is another tension which interests me. What is
fake and what is real?4
Capelán points to notions of individuality taken from life and art.
A work of art does not enter into history through its style or its
acceptance into given canons of practice. Just as installation has
become the ubiquitous vehicle for a post modern art focussed on
identity, he challenges its newly found orthodoxy. He is painting
and sculpting in a "classical" style, making work whose discursive
logic offers new meaning. Nothing is sacred, change is the only
constant. Innovative thinking seems more relevant to him than smart
answers. The questions the work poses and the viewer's experience
of it as enlightment, remain paramount.
Gavin Jantjes
Text information
"Carlos Capelán", by Gavin Jantjes, in
Carlos Capelán - Jet Lag
Mambo, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Hovikodden 2000. Exhibition
catalogue (back
to top)
Notes
1.
Carlos Capelán in conversation with Gavin
Jantjes. In A fruitful incoherence, InIVA, London 1987. (back
to text)
2.
Carlos
Capelán in conversation with Gavin Jantjes. In A fruitful
incoherence, InIVA, London 1987.
(back to text)
3.
The Peters World Map uses an equal area grid and shows the continents
of the world in their correct proportions to each other. It was
first published by the Evangelisches Welt Mission in Hamburg in
1974. It contradicts the Mercator map's view (1569) that shows the
Northern half to be greater in size. (back
to text)
4.
Carlos
Capelán in conversation with Gavin Jantjes. In A fruitful
incoherence, InIVA, London 1987.
(back
to text)
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