|
Carlos Capelán's A Painting Representing
Space is an example of installation art as
a totality. The term Gesamtkunstwerk
(total work of art) would be innappropiate because of the
modest scale and pretensions of the piece. Yet it could be called
encyclopedic in its determination to mirror reality in something
like its fullness, combining paining and sculpture, sound and image,
image and text, high culture and low culture, presence and
representation. It could also be described as a "Glass Bead Game"
installation, a practice described in Herman Hesse's 1943 novel Magister
Ludi.1 In that fantasy tale of the
future, one of several masters, after long rumination and
reflection, presents to his colleagues an intricate symbolic
proposal, issued as a series of clues in various media. (Hesse chose
not to be realistically precise in the rendering of the proposal.)
This Glass Bead Game, as it is called, leads the other masters into
attunement with the mind of the presenter and culminates with a
sense that totality has been clarified. The Glass Bead Game does not
offer a universal totality but rather a totality with a particular
slant and persepctive based on a personal history and equipped witha
a symbolic mediation through which that history is adjusted into a
totalizing lens. Hesse's fictional concept was a prescient intuition
of installation art, a genre that could hardly have been foreseen a
generation or so ago but that has quickly become the first
conspicuously international medium of the postmodern or
multicultural era.
In the Glass Bead Game type of installation,
the elements may be anything at all. But that inclusiveness does not
make their selection random; each element is a meaningful hint or
clue that the viewer may or may not explore for its inner meaning
and ots contribution to the totality. At the risk of rendering the
spoor difficult or challenging to follow, such works often become
obscure. To compensate, the artist may leave verbal guidance in some
external form. The fact that many of the details of such a piece,
often very significan ones, cannot be understood without this
guidance corresponds to Hesse's fantasy that the maker of the Glass
Bead Game presents it, with some degree of explanation, to his or
her viewers.
Capelán chooses not to provide the viewer with
guidance through his architectonically constructed piece. In order
to locate the work within the realm of contingency, the artist
incorporates autobiography, albeit with a reluctance that causes him
to present only unexplained glimpses of his personal history. The
largest and most promininet element in the piiee is the long facing
wall that greets the visitor with nineteenth-century-style
wainscoting and a swirling texture applied to the brown surface to
give it a formal and familiar appearance. Five traditionally framed
pictures are hung on this wall as if in a an early-modern picture
gallery. These pictures were made by Capelán's father, Líber
Capelán, also an artist, and all refer to Carlos Capelán's life or
heritage: there is a portrait of Capelán's grandfather, a
self-portrait by his father, a composite series of sketches of
Carlos Capelán and his father out riding in their native Uruguay, a
drawing based on a forced entry by Uruguayan soldier into the
Capelán home in search of Carlos, and a self-portrait of Líber
sketched on the back of a letter he wrote to Carlos in exile.
Stressing his sense of continuity with his father, Capel'an installs
the letter so that both sides of it can be seen, including the
handwritten discussion of Dr. Grachet's provision of art materials
to Vincent van Gogh, and of Líber Capelán's own distrust, as an
artist, of the gallery system. Capelán's heritage, his quasi
inherited profession, his exile, and the links between his life
abroad and his home are all represented.
An element of
site-specificity is added by the swirling textured brown on the
wall, created with Florida clay that Capelán smeared on with his
bare hands. This unmediated involvement with the pigment substance
is yet another element of the work's conceptual architecture,
echoing both ancient and modern models, from the hand marks and
fingerpainting in Paleolithic caves to the drippings, hand marks,
and fingerpainting of Action Painting.
Although it initially
appears to be a traditional cultural element, the caly surround is
in fact an element of nature, waiting like a receptacle for
proximate cultural moments that transpire to dissolve into it. At
first the viewer is overpowered by the traditional feeling of this
massive exhibition wall, and seems to be in a slightly archaic
cultural setting.. But the viewer is actually witnessing the frailty
of culture, isolated before the inevitable overtaking of nature. In
terms of the theme of identity, this wall not only specifies,
through the wall hangings, who and what Capelán is. It also
presages, through the clay ground, his eventual return into the
indefinite swirling manifold from which difference briefly arises
ina a moment of seemingly triumphant self-assertion.
Walking
farther into the installation and turning around 180 degrees, the
viewer now sees, to both left and right, wall-drawings that look at
first like wood-grain patterns. Finding (perhaps with some help from
an attendant) the right poin from which to view them, one sees that
they are in fact anamorphic renderings of a drawing of a male human
head and face, one upside down, both grotesquely elongated laterally
by the oblique angle at wich the images were projected. Again the
iconographic message involves the uncertain edge between culture
(facial expression) and nature (wood grain) upon which human life
transpires.
In front of each of the five pictures mounted on
the facing wall hangs a microphone, positioned to catch viewer's
voices as they react. Following the wires, one traces the into a
small side room, where the comments of those in the larger outside
world are amplified through speakers. This room represents a kind of
inside world, an internal space, in contrast to the more public
arena of the larger room. Once the viewer has found the room, it is
as if he or she has penetrated the entrails of the life involved.
The walls of this small, rather hard to reach room were painted
first with milk, then Coca-Cola, then red wine, reprensting three
ages - infant, child, adult - or three aspects of life: nourishment,
sociality, sacramentality. The room is like a digestive area inside
the body, the sounds from outside entering like visitations from
another world. The bottles and containers from which three coats of
"paint" were drawn hang in untidy strands of rope and tape from the
ceiling; no material has been omitted or discarded from this
enclosed metabolic system. Around the walls of this secretive inner
space are painted small images with which Capelán has worked as
recurring motifs for several years -- the male head againg, but not
anamorphic this time; a crawiling man, suggesting helplessness or
woundedness; a headless man, other things. Dim suggestions about the
possibilities and deficiencies of life ina a human body and a human
desire system are implied.
Six small business-card holder are
mounted here and there around the walls of the two spaces. On each
business card a small text is printed with a name appended as
author or utterer. These author names are no correct but, in a
comical way, mix the high cultural venues of the quotations with
false attributions to so-called low-cultural auhtors. The
observation, for example, that "The Other is not a mystery to the
Self; the Other is a mystery of the Self," is
attributed to the actress Sharon Stone. Viewers chuckle upon seeing
the obviously unlikely attribution, but the point is not simply to
ridicule low culture from a high-culture viewpoint. Rather, the
crossing of cultural lines suggests the underlying unities of issues
as selfhood, identity, and transformation that knit the
installation, and the human situation around it, into a shifting
composite whole.
Capelán's title, A Painting Representing
Space, describes the entire piece, which
can be viewed, in part, as a large composite painting made up of the
hand-painted wall, the painting hung on it, and the apintings made
directly on the walls of both the exterior and interior rooms.
The painitng has opened up into three dimensions and included the
viewer within it. Occupying this fictive space, the viewer also
becomes like a figure in a painting, a headless or crawling man,
perhaps, uttering (to quote William Butler Yeats) "high nonsensical
words." Meanwhile the digestive process goes on, secretly,
within.
Text information
Thomas McEvilley, "Carlos Capelán's A Painting
Representing Space". In: Converge (vol
1), Miami Art Museum, Miami 2000.
ISBN 0-9705005-0-5, ISSN
1531-5142 (series number)
(back to top)
Notes
1.
Herman Hesse,
Magister Ludi, trans. Mervyn Savill (New York: Frederick Ungar,
1949). The main description of the Glass Bead Game is on pp. 107-14
of this edition. The novel was first published in German in 1943 and
entitled Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead
Game). (back to text)
|
