a l e x s a n t a n a

latinamericanist latin@ artnerd | aspiring art historian, critic & curator | fan of politically transgressive art, redefinitions of the modernist canon, & multiple truths

[alexsantanana]

Asco (Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Willie Herrón, & Patssi Valdez)

Decoy Gang War Victim

1974

“The project was a response to the incendiary tabloid-style journalism of the two major Los Angeles newspapers, which often listed the names, addresses, workplaces, and gang affiliations of victims or their family members in an effort to maintain high levels of reciprocal gang violence, thus selling more newspapers. The desired effect of Decoy Gang War Victim was to generate a pause in the violence in order to rob the newspapers of their daily list of victims.” - Harry Gamboa Jr., Artforum, 2011

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Odires Mlászho

Martindale Hubbell Law Directory from the series Livros moles

2013

“Books of the Martindale Hubbell Law Directory are opened up and intertwined in undulating, languorous curves. In Mlászho’s hands, these dense, encyclopedic tomes are rendered tongue-tied, transformed into objects that tantalize and confound.” - Jennifer Lange, Cruzamentos: Contemporary Art in Brazil, 2014

[alexsantanana]

Adriana Varejão

Polvo Portraits I (Classic Series), 2013 Big Polvo Color Wheels, 2015 Polvo Oil Colors, 2015  Polvo Portraits I (Seascape Series), 2014

Adriana Varejão’s Polvo Portraits series are examinations of the artist’s own identity––both perceived and self-attributed. The series also work in dissolving the rigidity of racial categories in the contemporary moment. Polvo, in Portuguese, translates to octopus––a direct reference to the melanin present in octopus ink, which is the key factor in the pigmentation of human skin. In Varejão’s Polvo Portraits I (Seascape Series) and Polvo Portraits I (Classic Series), the artist’s own visage is depicted repeatedly with different skin tones. The portraits are lifeless and cold, and although they are painted in oil, still suggest images that have been reproduced by a type of distant technology like Photoshop. In both self-portrait series, Varejão incorporates pixels of color, color wheels, and color swatches along with the portraits themselves, indicating that her examinations of skin color are really just artistic experimentations with pigmented material. In the self-portraits, the differences in color are purely visual formalities, insinuating that ascribing color to race as an identifier is an exercise in social construction. 

The color swatches, color wheels, and pixels are indicative of an experimental artistic process that is intentionally incorporated into each finalized portrait. One might consider how digital images are edited in programs like Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator, where color swatches are easily accessible tools used by designers and artists alike. These visual traces of artistic experimentation with color suggest how the boundaries of constructed social identity––in this case, the boundaries of racial identity––are increasingly intangible in contemporary digital culture.

Race, in the digital sphere, can be appropriated, co-opted, and performed by actors whose racial identities in real life do not match their digital selves. This is the supposed flexibility and anonymity that the digital interface allows. In her book, Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet, communication scholar Lisa Nakamura explains––perhaps more ominously––that “the Internet facilitates identity tourism, creating a new form of digital play and ideological work that helped define an empowered and central self against an exotic and distant Other.” (Nakamura 2008) The self, as produced in the fluid state of the digital sphere, is inherently multiple. Considering this analysis, it makes sense that Varejão’s self-portrait works are actually painted by a portraitist that Varejão herself had hired––raising conceptual questions about authorship. However, the fact that each portrait is repetitive precisely accentuates its reproducibility, mimicking the way racial identity is reproduced in the digital sphere. As a series, the self-portraits function as images that exhibit barely any permutations other than the isolated change of skin color. They reflect the accuracy and precise control of a digitized system that facilitates changes in social identity categories very easily and sometimes dispassionately.

- Alex Santana, The Unreliable Image: Contemporary Art, Social Identity, & Self-Making in the Digital Age, 2016 MA Thesis, Tulane University, New Orleans

[alexsantanana]

Hito Steyerl

stills from: HOW NOT TO BE SEEN: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File

2013                   In Steyerl’s work, system errors like glitches are not just revealing of an inherently fallible and imperfect system, but are also the products of processes of image circulation in digital space. The tone and use of language throughout her essay, “A Thing Like You and Me”, implies the violence of a transaction that is never equal or horizontal, and emphasizes how violence is manifested within the image itself. Images, hypervisible within the sophisticated––yet fallible––surveillance apparatus, are reflections of terror and control.                  Steyerl’s emphasis on image resolution and the relentless gaze indicts a global system that attempts to colonize the geographies of the globe through surveillance for the sake of accumulation of information and control. Her reliance on image quality, and her insistence on pixelation and glitch, is telling of her position on the matter. Aesthetic manifestations of error––like glitch, jam, noise, and arguably, low resolution––are described by Tim Barker in his essay “Aesthetics of the Error: Media Art, the Machine, the Unforeseen, and the Errant” as: “...software [that] may articulate a link to the field of potential––in this case a field of potential errors––in order to generate unforeseen, and perhaps unwanted, information. [...] We can think of the error as just this potential that may or may not become actualized. The system that seeks the actualization of unforeseen potential is also a system that has the capacity to become errant; it is a system that is surrounded by a cloud of potential errors. (Barker 45)”.                     What is most revealing about this passage in relation to the work Steyerl is the notion of the errant, fallible system. HOW NOT TO BE SEEN (2013) situates images as unreliable, even the images generated through the supposedly errorless system of surveillance that strives for completeness and perfection. Even Steyerl’s inclusion of the U.S. Air Force’s dilapidated, decaying, and outdated resolution targets within the “California desert” indicates that state tools for measurement used to calibrate aerial photographs and videos of the landscape are still susceptible to the forces of nature, time, and the rapid changes of technology.                     In addition to the analysis of the physical remnants of the futile exercise in surveillance precision, it is productive to consider how Steyerl herself conceptualizes the glitch. She states: “The bruises of the images are its glitches and artifacts, the traces of its rips and transfers. Images are violated, ripped apart, subjected to interrogation and probing. They are stolen, cropped, edited, and re-appropriated. They are bought, sold, leased. Manipulated and adulated. Reviled and revered. To participate in the image means to take part in all of this.” (Steyerl 53).

Alex Santana, The Unreliable Image: Contemporary Art, Social Identity, & Self-Making in the Digital Age, 2016 MA Thesis, Tulane University, New Orleans

[alexsantanana]

Joan Mitchell

City Landscape

1954-1955 “On numerous occasions throughout her career Mitchell has said that the memory of a feeling may start things off, but then the painting process takes over: ‘What makes me want to squeeze the paint in the first place, so that the brush is out, is a memory of a feeling. It might be of a dead dog, it might be of a lake, but once I start painting, I’m painting a picture.’ Her goal is ‘lack of consciousness of self,’ total involvement in the act of painting and letting the canvas tell her what to do: ‘I have to be without myself to do something...When you are really involved in writing or painting you are someone else...You are the what I call ‘no hands,’ the riding a bicycle. You do not exist.’” - Judith E. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell, 1988

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Pepón Osorio

En la barberí­a no se llora

1994

“Osorio’s careful attention to our lived environments, both public and private, drew me to his elaborate, surreal yet realist art installations. The life-size re-creations he constructs of everyday spaces, vaguely reminiscent of Edward Kienholz’s tableaux, are never literal reproductions. In their attention to detail, they act as carefully staged scenes exaggerating the psychological effects of social spaces. For En la barbería no se llora (No crying in the barbershop), 1994, the artist addressed the reproduction of masculinity and machismo in the context of a faux barbershop complete with ornate, thematically decorated barber’s chairs, video images of grown men crying, and free haircuts for visitors off the street.”  - Jennifer González, BOMB Magazine, 2003

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Ana Mendieta

Untitled (from Silueta series)

1973-1977

“All these siluetas resemble a rough outline of something that was once present and is now absent or entombed but nonetheless partially unconcealed and lingering, like a visual echo. If we take the artist at her word in various artist statements and consider the siluetas a mode of self-portraiture, what may the work tell us about the self and/in the world? These siluetas are the evidence of expired life that nonetheless hints at return or Prometheus-like regeneration. Mendieta’s work insists on a kind of mysterious understanding of life and death-in-life as something like mystical force. She was certainly drawn to the metaphorics of magic and spirituality. But one need not simply know the intensities performed by Mendieta as spiritualist escapism. It is clear that Mendieta partially invested in a kind of vitalism or e´lan vital that many would dismiss as irrational.” - José Muñoz, Vitalism’s After-Burn: The Sense of Ana Mendieta, 2011

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Rashid Johnson

Long Distance

2010

“In the 1930s, Aimé Césaire, Léon-Gontran Damas, and Léopold Sédar Senghor started the literary and artistic movement Negritude to liberate and revalorize the history and identity of people of the African diaspora. Rashid Johnson’s use of Black arcana may seem pure fabrication to those less informed with the annals of undisclosed African-American contributions conveniently overlooked by history. I, however, believe this charge is not dissimilar to that of the Negritude founders. Johnson elevates, negates, and complicates normative notions of ‘Blackness.’ Interestingly enough, criticism of Negritude came from those who believed it defined Blackness by a white aesthetic standard and not an independently Black one. It is somewhere in the nexus of this conundrum that Johnson’s Eshu [Elegba] dances.” - Sanford Biggers, BOMB Magazine, 2009

[alexsantanana]

Ayrson Heráclito

Divider II

2001

“In Divider II, Heráclito highlights social divisions and the history of slavery. He nearly fills the large aquariums to the top with palm oil and salt water. He uses the ‘heterogeneity’ of water to underscore the ‘disparate character’ of different groups’ roles and experiences during the era of slavery. During that period in history, the sea held enslaved Africans captive, carrying them further and further away from their homelands. However, in an ‘arbitrary inversion’, here the ‘black’ oil floats above the sea, the salt water, as a sign of resistance and survival.”  - Black Art in Brazil (2013), by Kimberly L. Cleveland

[alexsantanana]

Juliana Huxtable

Untitled in the Rage (Nibiru Cataclysm)

2015

"Huxtable revisions herself as a self-described ‘cyborg, cunt, priestess, witch, Nuwaubian princess.’ For the unacquainted, the Nuwaubian Nation is a sect of the Nation of Islam that, according to Huxtable, ‘believes black people are the descendants of lizard aliens and created white people.’ In the portrait, Huxtable presents herself in a futuristic world, which is far removed from the trauma and self-loathing of her childhood.

Like so much of her work, the photograph opens up alternative ways to think about the fluidity of sexuality and gender in a heteronormative society. As her best friend Christopher Udemezue says, it's these kinds of offerings from Huxtable that explore ‘what it means to be queer, a person of color, living the grind in New York City.’”  - Antwaun Sargent, Vice (2015)

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Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari

Untitled (from Toilet Paper magazine, 2010)

2012

"Like an illusionistic trick performed by a magician, the eerie image highlights the deceptive power of photography, sketching an ambiguous visual tableau reminiscent of Surrealism. Like a Man Ray photograph, the image conjures a dreamlike atmosphere of a film noir, while at the same time it speaks of the city as a projection of dreams of opulence." - photo by Austin Kennedy

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Nan Goldin

Nan and Brian in Bed

1983

"Like Diane Arbus and Larry Clark, to whom she is often compared, Goldin expands and embellishes on the informal, content-driven esthetic of the snapshot. Her style is one of sensuous immediacy, fueled by a potent fusion of opulent, saturated colors and artificial light. Her preferred settings are the interior spaces in which private dramas get played out: cluttered kitchens and bathrooms, downtown bars and rumpled beds. And her eye is acutely attuned to the intricate negotiations between people and their surroundings: women scrutinize their images in bathroom mirrors, men gaze pensively out of car windows, couples colonize the intimate geography of the bedroom.

Among Goldin's greatest strengths is her use of color as a catalyst for amplifying the emotional tenor of the moment. In one of her better-known images, Nan and Brian in Bed, NYC, 1983, the scene is suffused with a crepuscular orange glow that palpably captures the lugubrious mood of a dying relationship. Brian, her lover at the time, sits naked on the edge of the bed, smoking a cigarette; Goldin lies behind him, her face an ambivalent mixture of affection, vulnerability and weariness. The relationship ended in a storm of abusive violence, as the next image, Nan One Month after Being Battered, NYC, 1984, dramatically bears out. Here color is pressed into the service of expressive melodrama, with Goldin's scarlet lipstick vividly echoing the blood-red stain of her injured eye." - Mia Fineman, the nan goldin story, artnet

[alexsantanana]

Trevor Paglen

They Watch the Moon

2010 

"Everything in the world--whether it's a secret airplane or secret satellite--has to intersect the visible world at some point," says Paglen. "With photographing the invisible, it's about identifying where those boundaries and intersections may be." Taking photographs of covert government institutions like the NSA and military bases may be Paglen's way of highlighting that democracy is abstract, while invisible privacy invasion and mysterious organizations are concrete. Through exhausting research and patience (taking a photograph from many miles away is no easy task), Paglen finds those boundaries and intersections and makes them... beautiful. Or, at least, he makes extremely abstract concepts more digestible. His long-distance, blurry photos of secret military bases have been compared to impressionistic paintings.   - From the creators project (2013)

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Laurel Nakadate

Exorcism in January

2009

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Jenny Holzer

Inflammatory Essays series

1979-82

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Claire Fontaine

Reminder:

2009

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Guillermo Mora

Entre tú y yo

2012