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| In the Place of the Other |
Solo Show
Rosana Palazyan
ArtNexus #64 - Arte en Colombia #110
Apr - Jun 2007
São Paulo, Brazil
| Institution: |
| Galería Leme |
| Claudia Laudanno |
For Rosana Palazyan (born 1963, Rio de Janeiro) the
contemporary work of art is always in a provisional and ephemeral relationship
with time. From the most recent decade of her artistic trajectory, it is
possible to identify the presence of a canon, but it is never the same as it
varies according to the ‘situations’ she generates. These are governed by a
dominant theme that traverses her works in sculpture, performance, and
installation: her bet on an aesthetic value that goes beyond time and above all
locates itself beyond the present. A canon and its deconstruction, then, appear
as the two fundamental axes of her prolific career.
In this sense, Palazyan is very conscious of the
fact that we live in a ‘post-’ culture. But it is well known that Nietzsche already
critiqued the narcissism of the present with great foresight. Thus, with her
recent individual exhibition, Palazyan demonstrates that both art and culture
find themselves in a situation of extreme fragility. The interaction with the
public and the public’s interpretive cooperation along various degrees of
empathy are decisive in this exhibition. Here, experimentation is the constant
reflection of bewilderment, and it tirelessly seeks a horizon of reception in
which ‘interventions’ take place ‘between’ us’that is to say, along an
expansive reticular grid that encompasses subjects, objects, and the
surrounding world. What does it mean for Palazyan to find that ‘small gap’
through which the identification of the ‘other’ circulates and thus to
understand her site-specific, process-oriented works? It means, first of all,
to transform the artistic experience into an aesthetic, ethical, and
anthropological experience, in a more radical version of the ‘linguistic turn’
in contemporary thought, in order to point out, ‘Facts and events already are
language.’If facts themselves, or what our senses present to us as facts, are mediated by language, then everything is rendered infinitely interpretable. In this context, for Palazyan, truth and certitude belong wholly in the realm of language and not in the realm of events or spaces, which she ‘appropriates’ and modifies on a temporary basis. This implies a critical awareness of the increasingly more noticeable presence of the colossal process of loss of meaning that has evolved from the destruction of all histories, references, and univocal finalities.
Palazyan’s events and performances possess a script or plot subject to modification and the participation of several people, without distinction between authors, interpreters, and the public. This fits with an idea shared by Rauschenberg and Cage: creating works and acts without attributing importance to the artist as author. By negotiating the obstacle of authorship, Palazyan allows herself to work with a heterogeneous and anonymous mass of ‘performing agents,’ to shape a minimal and delicate platform from which to bring together the ‘others’ in order not only to ‘experiment with’ but also to analyze, catalogue, test, and codify the actions and behaviors of others who are for an ephemeral moment put in a ‘collective work situation.’
In a recent work, the spectacle was the experimentation with the body and the subject’s transit, in a symbolic exchange with 250 textile cocoons distributed by the artist around the gallery walls, each containing the name of the one of the participants. Meanwhile, twelve plants were placed in well-defined points on the cement floor. These plants needed to be replaced and watered on a daily basis. As Palazyan suggests, ‘Harmful plants do not have a beauty-related use; these are works in which we find a different kind of beauty, without commercial value.’ For one month, both the walls and the floor of the central gallery were transformed into a kind of secret garden, where the organic and the post-organic flowered. An ephemeral, metamorphic work of disturbing beauty, it conjugated elements of great creativity with the indicia of hopelessness.
But it should also be noted that on Planet Palazyan, the work of art as idea, as a concept independent of its final formalization, forms the structure of its visual language.
From this ‘mannerist’ overflowing of the languages of art’mixing process art, behavior art, body art, performance, situations, the sociology of the object, and a particular branch of land art’there emerges an aesthetic experience of minimal physicality, even though Palazyan uses the actions of other bodies in an effort toward a ‘language’ that would consume itself furtively, as a work of art, in the transactional flow of time. In the gallery, a video documented the action and the materially subtle works were left as a testimony: on an immaculate white cloth, the artist with great care embroidered the hand lines of each anonymous actor extracted from the cocoons. In this simple way, the disturbing power of beauty encapsulated in objects that appear empty but exist as plural forms of identity was brought to the fore. Such artisanal objects correspond to a new category of three-dimensional art that flirts with the memory of a defrauded utility, with the principle of transparency, and the sordidness of everyday life.
april, 2007
http://www.artnexus.com/Notice_View.aspx?DocumentID=18046
