Denarrations in Contemporary Art - Seven artists at Pan American Art Projects

Aernout Mik, Osmosis and Excess, Edition of 4 & 2 APs, 2005, Video installation, Variable dimensions, Courtesy of carlier|gebauer. On view at “Denarrations,”Pan American Art Projects, Miami, through January 2, 2010, photo Florian Braun

By Ernesto Menéndez-Conde

Big Bang, the Cristina Lucas video installation, which is currently being shown at the Pan American Art Projects in Miami, could be read from its allusions to some landmarks taken from Art History tradition. I will mention three of these images. Since the projection is unusually placed on the ceiling of the gallery, Lucas’ representation of the firmament could recall the cosmological view of mural paintings in Romanesque apses. The model’s posture, with her legs wide open, exhibiting her sex, might be immediately associated with Courbet’s painting, The Origin of the World; and the words written with a brush, which the performer has inserted into her vagina, evoke Shigeko Kubota’s Vagina Painting (1965). But Lucas’ installation works as a subversion of these narratives. Seen against the Romanesque wall paintings, the naked female body takes the place of the Christ Pantocrator. The reference to Courbet’s canvas (which was devoted to pleasing the male gaze) seems subverted by the gesture of writing with a brush attached to the vulva. Finally, in a sort of unexpected ending, the words Big Bang, light up as if somehow they were a constellation, like an advertisement made with neon lights, indicating that the feminist perspective contains a little bit of spectacle and consumerism. In Lucas’ video installation, there is not only a subversive use of a phallocentric discourse, or a Christian icon, but also the exposure of the feminist perspective as another narrative which could – and should – be subverted, or at least deconstructed. This sequence – which is a narration in itself – has to do with Gerardo Mosquera’s definition of “denarration.” As the curator has asserted, this term is related to “works that use a narrative structure, and simultaneously discuss, deconstruct, or even subvert narrative conventions.”

In Cristina Lucas’ video, the word “denarration” could bring to mind the strategic uses of Derrida’s “deconstruction.” Since there might be many conjunctions between the two terms, it is worth trying to differentiate them. Whereas deconstruction deals with language, and binary oppositions as bearers of semantic inequalities¹, in denarrations, the act of analyzing, subverting, or even deconstructing narratives is an intrinsic part of the structure of storytelling. Denarrations are, therefore, paradoxical means of constructing narrations while dissecting, erasing or destroying them. If deconstruction is, above all, a tool for questioning the nature of philosophical discourses, denarration is primarily a tool for storytelling and structuring representation. That might help to understand why in some of the artists included in the show –like Vibeke Tandberg, Nina Yuen, Rodrigo Facundo and Tracey Snelling – there is an existential dimension, which is more related to storytelling and tends to be absent in deconstructionist practices. (The latter have been systematically part of the verbiage for the decentralization of hegemonic discourses, and the vindication of sexually and politically marginalized narratives).

The way Mosquera uses the term differs from the definitions developed by narratologists ². Denarration, as he has presented it, is an open, inclusive, and rather experimental concept, which includes artists, who are working in very different, apparently unrelated, poetics. Gerardo Mosquera has curated a very plural show, in which the artworks are intended to produce meanings not only by themselves, but also by dialoguing among themselves, and insinuating the creative possibilities that could be considered within the horizon of “denarration.” By choosing seven artists, who are so different from each other, Mosquera has applied the term in a suggestive and flexible manner.

Aernout Mik, one of the creators included in the exhibition, avoids calling himself a video artist. He actually conceives his works as site-specific installations, since he adapts the sizes and formats of the screens he uses to the architectonic peculiarities of the place in which the videos are shown. The images displayed by the projector are therefore integrated into the space in which the projection takes place. Through this procedure, viewers inside the gallery become part of the artwork. Their own bodies and their own movements interfere with what is seen on the screen, in the same way that the environmental noise replaces the video’s lack of sound. The moment of projection denarrates the filmed images. In Mik’s installations, the actual gallery space subverts, or negates, the space of the representation.

In the video Alison by Nina Yuen, the author tells the story of what seems to be her own suicide. But Yuen is actually both the main character and the narrator who, as an outsider, is constructing the plot. In Alison, the author becomes a character, whose role is introducing uncommon ways of narrating the personal drama the viewer is watching. We see her inside the narration, telling the story by making drawings over some printed images, or burning and manipulating pictures of the protagonist. Yuen turns the act of storytelling into a fiction, which is integrated into the narration.

Tracey Snelling’s installations can be enjoyed through their countless small, and sometimes hilarious, details. Rear doors and windows take the viewer into inner spaces, in which there are very individualized stories. Snelling alters the proportionality of what she sees. Her use of the space is more poetic than realist. She introduces unexpected, imaginative associations, in miniatures that have the appearances of being very accurate copies of the real world. In her installations, there is a juxtaposition of imagination over everyday life. Still, in her complex artifacts that include neon lights, written words –sometimes as graffiti, painted sculptures, pictures, and images in motion- there seems to be nostalgia, and even a sense of alienation, which is negated by the impression of being in front of a playful, almost naïve, set design.

In a series of pictures, the Norwegian artist Vibeke Tandberg represents an absurd story of intimacy. In Princess goes to bed with a mountain bike, there is a woman with a small, carnivalesque crown. She wears a bathing suit and sneakers. She enters a messy space, which looks like a sort of atelier. Then she goes for a mountain bike and takes it to a bed, in which both woman and bike lie together. The images are vertically divided into two, and the right side is repeated in the following picture. Through this segmentation, the images follow a cinematic displacement in both time and space. Vibeke stresses the way the narration is conducted, combining stillness and motion, and using time as a dimension of space, while subverting fairy tales and pointing to an existential anguish in the everyday life.

The Colombian artist Rodrigo Facundo exhibits a series of drawings made in encaustic over wood. In his works, characters perform some gestures (like fighting each other). By overlapping the figures, Facundo suggests a sense of movement; however, the actions seem frozen. Facundo adds geometric lines, cubic forms, axes, and the letters x, y, and z (as if he were dealing with variables and geometric problems). These lines cluster the movements of the characters in claustrophobic spaces, and, at the same time, simulate analytical measures or sketches of unfinished projects.

In Perianes’ pieces, the handcrafted images of plants, landscapes, houses and trees are subverted by the introduction of simulated accidents that alter the traditional objectual character of the medium he uses. However, this opposition – between the conventional motives he represents and the unconventional breaks in the frames, holes in the surfaces, unexpected cuts, and assemblies – is somehow integrated in the representation, producing visual harmonies, and even keeping the sense of handcrafted labor. Perianes’ denarrations are hedonistic and, to a certain extent, formalistic ones.

Generally speaking, I would say that the display of the installations or the formal treatments of the pieces tend to denarrate the contents of the images. In the context of contemporary art, in which installations stress the objectual character of the artwork, and, as Boris Groys has said, there is a “re-auratization” of the object (2008, 80), the show “Denarrations” somehow goes against the tide. It calls attention to unconventional approaches to storytelling, ways of representing, and the subverting of narration in a self-reflective manner.

NOTES

1. Culler, Jonathan. “La crítica postestructuralista.” Criterios. [La Habana] No 21/24. Jan. 1987-Dec. 1988: 40.

2. “Denarration occurs when events or aspects of a fictional world are negated or cancelled. It is an ontological rather than epistemological alteration: the narrator does not simply correct a misremembered fact or revise an incorrect judgment, but rather changes some part of the fictional world.” (Richardson, 2006). In http://www.nordisk.au.dk/forskningscentre/nrl/undictionary/#DENARRATION, Dictionary of Unnatural Narratology, Compiled and Edited by Jan Alber, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson.

WORKS CITED

Groys, Boris. “Topology of Contemporary Art.”Antinomies of Art and Culture. Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity. Duke University Press, 2008. 80.

Ernesto Menéndez-Conde. PhD in Latin American Literature from Duke University (2009). His field of research is related to Aesthetic Ideologies, and Theories of the Image.