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Walking into one of Capelán's
installations is like entering a visual plasma, a zone simultaneously
enervated and silent, impossibly dense and intensely private. The
work vibrates between morphological activities, like counting and
categorizing, and enveloping assertions that are definitely outside
of logic... 1
Capelán searches to express the general nature of the self.
With 75 litres of mud slapped over the walls, 40 rocks, 300 old
books and an assortment of furniture he creates a living-room, dark
and enclosed like a womb, which is also a museum. It holds those
objects with which we surround ourselves to establish our identity.
Piles of books are weighted with stones, glass cases display personal
items. Quotations from philosophy, sociology and anthropology are
inscribed into the earth on the walls. 2
Capelán's system of work is that of counterpoint: his is
a complex and contradictory aesthetic which defies definitions and
establishes a contrast between what is physical with what is intellectual,
the natural vs. the artificial, warmth with cold, what is new with
what is old. He uses object-based resources (prints, framed painting,
books), anthropological elements (earth, ashes), conceptual material
(texts and maps), informative presentations (showcases), as well
as purely aesthetic, poetic or conceptual elements, combined with
reductive techniques (photocopying) and sensual formulations (unadorned
painting of gesture and action). There is a sense of multiple presence
and the work is conceived as the compatibility of things which are
not compatible... 3
Pluralism unites all aspects of Capelán'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. 4
Interpreters of Carlos Capelán's work have habitually described
it by listing some of the many components of his installations.
These physical elements are sometimes enumerated as though they
confirmed the active presence of the various social traditions to
which they are normally associated - philosophy, mysticism, anthropology,
and so on. What is remarkable, however, is that these descriptions
rarely venture to outline exactly what the content of these various
rites or gestures or theories might be, or how they relate to other
elements. Rather, critical discussion almost without exception stops
at the recognition of these various references, or refers them back
to his biography as the source of their meaning. Capelán's
biography is invoked to explain references to exile, to Latin American
culture, to his familiarity with ritual, or other symbols of identity:
Capelán's installations often feel like the remnants of some
ritual that has just been performed. He is well-informed about shamanistic
practice and about palaeolithic painting traditions, in which the
"art object" is literally the reminder of ceremonial practice. His
own use of ritual is a way of "reactivating paralysed languages".
Given his personal history, any such act of reclamation immediately
evokes the difficult panorama of loss which Capelán himself
has had to tolerate. 5
Yet even within descriptions that seek the essence of Capelán's
work in his personal situation, there is still a certain generality
to the descriptions, a reluctance to pin the work down, a certain
talking around it. Both inventories and biographical apologias claim
a certain interpretive defeat, a blockage that would seem to be
based in the essentialism of the personal or in the overwhelming
multiplicity of the installations. I will suggest that in fact these
failures of interpretation are anticipated by Capelán, that
his works are designed to produce glitches in their consumption,
and ultimately an impossibility of understanding them in their totality.
Instead, one is inevitably faced with the escape of the work from
interpretation.
We must first realize that the conceptual, social and political
positioning of Capelán's works, as well as their mode of
address, is strategic. We can view individual works as speech acts
calculated to produce a collection of particular reactions, and
go onto consider his work as a whole in relation to notions of rhetoricality.
Capelán is clearly involved with elaborating a symbolic vocabulary,
one in which the meaningful elements range from the images he uses
to the very forms he chooses to work in (habitually installation,
and now painting and sculpture). The various phenomena that appear
in his work -- whether physical objects, images, optical effects,
entire traditions of thought, or loaded processes -- are treated,
regardless of their traditional "category," as units of meaning
collecting together to form an idiosyncratic bank of references.
Some "read" these myriad references as assertions of what Capelán
is -- for instance, a shamanistic character, or one speaking from
the heart of Latin American (note: never Swedish) experience --
but I see them as ultimately building a complex strategy of resistance
to interpretation. His use of a wide variety of symbols is less
a confirmation that his identity is tied up with any of them than
it is a demonstration of his independence from them. Capelán
certainly recognizes the importance of both speech and discourse,
but seems to recognize that his best position is to speak in opposition
to any notion of originality. This is a strategy of escaping fixity.
Take, for example, his repertoire of images. Since about 1991 he
has limited the presence of two-dimensional images in his work to
a group of 28 rough designs that reappear throughout. While it may
be possible and tempting to interpret the content of these images
(hands holding a book or a headless crawling man, for example),
this self-imposed act of refusal complicates any notion of creativity,
answering any attempt to believe in these images, or their power,
with an insistent repetition.
It is precisely because we recognize that the references in Capelán's
works remain signs for particular traditions, that they evade being
tied to these. The references signal various practices, but are
not exactly actual manifestations of them. Rather, they are symbols
employed to other ends. Deploying these references. Capelán
calls upon codes of conduct about what one may and may not interpret.
He sets up apparent routes of explanation, but ones which return
to an interpretive impasse. For example, certain references go to
the very root of identity formation and are thus, by convention,
positioned as personal, beyond interpretation. In this way, Capelán
cannily plays (with) the role of being an outsider, an authentic
stranger to interpretation.
Since its development in classical times, the art and practice of
rhetoric has assumed that speech is fundamentally a contest of meanings.
While it has popularly been understood as an art of verbal influence,
persuasion or manipulation, or again as a label for empty verbiage,
rhetoric was first and foremost a codification of oratorical strategy
in terms of style and delivery. As one of three fundamental and
interdependent liberal arts, Rhetoric was developed as a means of
exploring sense, as distinct from Grammar and Logic. The implication
is that the construction of sense (position, attitude) is a realm
that can be studied independent of other linguistic functions.
The principles of rhetoric also entail an essential unauthenticity
at the heart of speech, and thus a distance from any idea of origins.
Rhetoric must assume that speech is fundamentally ideological, tendential
and instrumental. Yet it also implies a certain shared experience,
in that it assumes that the audience for any particular rhetorical
mode will understand the associations of the particular style of
speech, and respond appropriately. As applied to art-making, rhetoric
might assume a certain distance from the accepted meanings of the
visual or tactile forms employed, implying that these are known
symbols used for other ends.
In these terms we can see Capelán's work as an extended development
of an extensive rhetorical repertoire that draws on an awareness
of how each symbolic element communicates. The units of this vocabulary
are existing loaded elements (known styles, types and tropes) charged
by their calculated reception. Phenomena ranging from objects and
images, to processes, practices, and entire disciplines are rendered
equivalent, as existing units of meaning, floating signifiers. Thus
there might be a logic for each particular phenomenon, something
akin to a definition, whereby, for example, books might be a symbol
for received knowledge; the action of drawing might signify a personal
trace; or Coca-Cola, milk, wine, and mud might represent cardinal
social fluids.
These symbolic phenomena are recombined by Capelán, in a
calculated play of references. This play draws on the meaningfulness,
rather than any fixed meaning, of these references. That is, they
are used for their performative value. Certainly some of these elements
are idiosyncratic, in which case an aspect of their significance
is the public inability to read them. Certain parts of the performance
of interpretation fail. However, the act of trying and inevitably
failing to make full sense of these works, emphasizes that engaged
viewing is a calculated part of their enunciation. In Capelán's
work there is an awareness that the very act of speaking is tied
up with persuasion, seduction, and questions of belief, while the
effects of particular images or objects are merely its tools.
Capelán has tended to realize his work in the form of installation
-- in itself a loaded symbol as well as a vehicle for structuring
meaning. Recently, however, he has turned to a project of making
artwork in rather more classical forms: stretched semiabstract paintings
and bronze sculptures. In choosing this mode of speech, Capelán
states a new position for himself, this time as a "classical" artist.
Some of the paintings are built up in grids, using tartan-like interlaced
bands of transparent washes and varnishes. Others involve planes
of pale colour obscuring brighter organic abstract patterns, creating
almost circuit-like channels and windows over the painting surface.
Within the geometric subdivisions created by these blocks and layers
are inserted other small abstract compositions, pictures within
pictures that disrupt the otherwise seductive unity of the canvases,
and which thus can be seen as a caution against believing in the
latter. Both the paintings and the sculptures include figures based
on Capelán's image repertoire. In the sculptures, these figures
are cast from models created by other artists, thus producing a
second renunciation of authorship (authority), but at the same time
a confirmation of the individuality and particularity of interpretation.
In this way the project maintains a crucial distinction between
individuality and originality, privileging the former over the latter.
The paintings have all the marks of an authentic, sustained exploration
of modernist painting idioms: a sense that a formal language is
being elaborated, in which the geometric plays against the organic,
saturated colour against tones and tints, transparency with obscurity,
and figuration against abstraction. In the context of Capelán's
previous work, with its loaded references to identity and location,
this apparently formal research might seem surprising
Even clinging to a strictly biographical interpretation of Capelán's
enterprise, one could make several hypotheses about his move from
installation to painting and sculpture. If installation can be thought
of as the current lingua franca of a globalized art world, such
that it serves in part to signal participation in an international
dialogue, then perhaps to return to painting is, in rhetorical terms,
to adopt a consciously local mode, and a now-marginal style of speech.
Perhaps, in an age when there is a generalized understanding that
painting is ideological, it no longer is burdened with any assumption
of neutrality or purity, and little sense of power, while carrying
all these associations as persistent memories. Thus, traditional
forms of painting and sculpture can again be understood to be viable
arenas for contesting the construction of meaning. Or, perhaps it
is Capelán's situation that has changed significantly enough
that he is ready to stage a return to classic forms of art. His
previous works have made a point of controlling their context, creating
enveloping spaces that deliberately grated against their institutional
contexts by emphasizing living processes, and thereby have claimed
a distance from traditional structures. Now, confirmed in his reputation
as an outsider, perhaps the most oppositional thing for Capelán
to do now, is paint.
Thus I view Capelán as fundamentally sceptical of notions
of authenticity and originality, though not of individuality. I
also see his work as deliberately rhetorical, in that it adopts
certain forms of expression with an awareness of their likely effect.
That effect includes a certain interpretive failure. It is the points
of impasse and friction rather than of easy communication that are
most revealing of the way that Capelán ultimately positions
himself. Effectively, he succeeds in complicating the process of
signification by focussing on the moments in which sense is made:
that is, in the "reading" of the work. This establishes a relationship
of complexity that ensures that the meeting between art proposition
and viewer is fraught with specific potential. His work values a
principle of actual exchange and engagement, in the form of reckoning
between individuals and moments of apperception between viewer and
art work, for instance.
Capelán's use of rhetorical strategies reveals an awareness
that to speak is to claim power, while at the same time he refuses
the authority of that position, instead acknowledging the tendentiality
of his own enunciations. Thus the work effects a return to a concrete
and complex and individual relationship between work and viewer,
artist and audience, in which it is less a matter of interpretation,
and thus of fixity, than of negotiating points of difference.
Germaine Koh
Text information
"Seeing between the lines", by Germaine Koh, Fecit,
San José 1999. CD-R publication. (back
to top)
Notes
1.
Rachel Weiss, "In the world with Carlos Capelán,"
Carlos Capelán: Kartor och landskap (Lund, Sweden:
Lunds konsthalI, 1992), p.42. (back
to text)
2.
Sarah Boseley, "Strategy of the self," The Guardian,
25 February 1993. (back
to text)
3.
Alicia Haber, "Carlos Capelán: An Anthroplogical Formulation",
Art Nexus, January-March 1993, p.213. (back
to text)
4.
Gerardo Mosquera. "Carlos Capelán: The eye is looking at
you," trans. Hanka de Rhodes. José Bedia, Carlos Capelán,
Saint-Clair Cemin (Bogotá: Galería Fernando Quintana,
1995), p.29. (back
to text)
5.
Rachel
Weiss, "In the world with Carlos Capelán," Carlos Capelán:
Kartor och landskap (Lund, Sweden: Lunds konsthalI, 1992),
pp.42-43 (back
to text)
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