TM Sisters: Toward an Aesthetic of the Trivial

TM Sisters. WHIRL CRASH GO!, multimedia live performance, Locust Project-Miami, 2009, Photo: Jipsy. Courtesy of the artists

By Janet Batet

The duo comprised of Tasha López De Victoria and Mónica López De Victoria, 26 and 28 years old respectively, aka the TM Sisters, has been achieving a series of successes that have caused the couple, in the short lapse of four years, to become two of the most fussed over artistic figures of South Florida, the chouchous of the art scene.

Without a doubt the critical turning point in the career of the TM Sisters was being spotted by the watchful eye of the renowned Swiss critic and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, known for his dedication to the search for and promotion of emerging artists. That is how in 2005, the video-installation Superpowers, exhibited locally at the Bas Fisher Invitational as part of the group show “Co-operate,” was quickly unveiled in Europe, achieving visibility in Great Britain, Poland, Denmark, Norway and Russia.

The subsequent inclusion of the TM Sisters in “Uncertain States of America: American Art in the 3rd Millennium,” a traveling mega exposition curated by Daniel Birnbaum and Gunnar B. Kvaran along with –once again- Hans Ulrich Obrist, placed the TM Sisters among the forty most innovative –and promising- offerings of emergent art (artists born after 1970) in the United States. 

Since then, the carefree sisters have made the cover of ARTnews under the heading “25 trendsetters” and their work has traveled throughout the United States and Europe, participating in competitions, such as, the Second Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art; and ”PERFORMA 07.” Among recent solo expositions, of note are “(((sparks))),” at the Hedreen Gallery at Seattle University, Seattle, WA; “IDEALTONIGHT,” Hollywood Art and Culture Center, Hollywood, FL and, most recently, “WHIRL CRASH GO!” at Locust Projects, Miami, FL, the latter conceived as an ongoing site-specific performance during which the sisters showed off their artistic and sportive talents (synchronized swimming and figure skating) creating a motley pastiche, both a spatial and temporal display, thus presenting us with a show worthy of the Society of the Spectacle so heralded by Guy Debord.

“WHIRL CRASH GO!” constitutes the most ambitious production undertaken by the TM Sisters to date. An all-inclusive spirit prevails, where urban culture, music, design, synthesized images and sports converge under the aesthetic of bricolage that so marks the work of this creative duo. Their field of action trifles with shifting authorship and the ever exciting risk implied in all collective spectacles. In any event, risk is part of the game and even one of its most exciting components, if not the most.

In this sense, we could affirm that the work of the TM Sisters shares in the notion of the “art coefficient” introduced by Duchamp, which seeks to retrace the elusive link within the chain reaction that accompanies the creative act: “This gap,” asserts Duchamp, “representing the inability of the artist to express fully his intention, this difference between what he intended to realize and did realize, is the personal ‘art coefficient’ contained in the work.”

And yes, without a doubt, this gap becomes essential when decoding the sui generis production of the TM Sisters, characterized by the continual flow of sensations with no evident commentary. A succession and juxtaposition of impressions, without any apparent hierarchy, coexist like heterogeneous meanings –a kind of suburban palimpsest- that comprise a formal, graceful universe, overflowing with glitter and flashes of light, and where –from a conceptual standpoint- the informed participant will have to contribute substantially if he wishes to make sense of anything beyond the excitement of the show, the spotlights and the drop curtains.

From a formal point of view, the oeuvre of the TM Sisters shares in the D.I.Y. (Do-it-yourself) ethic so typical of the punk subculture of the seventies. Tasha and Monica were educated in that spirit. Home-schooled by their parents, the sisters grew up in an atmosphere propitious for creation, in which their mother imbued them with knowledge through arts and crafts activities, while their father, a psychotherapist, initiated them into the esoteric and metaphysical world, instilling in them spiritual principles like notions of spiritual energy or the free flow of expression. As of a very early age, the two sisters became passionate about the local punk-rock culture, making homemade flyers whose design was one hundred percent handcrafted.

Once they became artists, the characteristic universe of the TM Sisters incorporated this inheritance and adopted the use of different media, such as, video, synthesized images, performance, VJing, installations, music, clothing design and interactive video, among others, which all shared the idea of collective authorship and the frivolous image typifying Miami’s glamorous night life.  The two projects presented by the TM Sisters so far this year are symptomatic in this sense.

For “IDEALTONIGHT,” the sisters started with a simple idea: colors that synthesize Miami. Soon pink, purple, black and gold –symbols of glamour and nightlife- appeared as a reverse symbol, an unexpected pun. These very same colors represented the struggle, the effort and even the fall –the colors of bruises and scratches- in the pursuit of an ideal: the golden dream. The show then played on the antitheses established in the very title of the exposition: Ideal-tonight and I-deal-tonight.  

A homage to Miami not devoid of humor, the exposition recreated the ambience of nightclubs where shrill music and intermittent flashes of color reaffirmed the idea of a disruptive atmosphere that, adapted with collages and fluorescent lights, served as a framework for the duo’s main performance, which presented a kind of biography of their generation. “IDEALTONIGHT” is, in my opinion, the most successful offering to date by the TM Sisters.

In the case of “WHIRL CRASH GO!” we witnessed an ostentatious mise en scène where the performance arose as the central nucleus modulating and merging other facets of everyday life, among them, sports, music, communication, friendship, triviality. The presence of mirrors that fragment, multiply and distort the flow of images from the ceiling of the gallery acted as an interesting simile of the fragmentary notion of the spectacle so dear to contemporary society and to the discourse of the TM Sisters.

Inheritor of the notion of relational aesthetics developed by Bourriaud, “WHIRL CRASH GO!” denies the traditional and false aristocratic notion of layout and placement of a work of art. It instead favors an “encounter” through the temporal axis; the show is conceived as an ongoing performance lasting six weeks. The collective -and definitive- elaboration of final meanings depends on this relationship or “encounter.” 

The grandiloquent enterprise, nevertheless, at times introduces doubt. We do not know for certain if we witness a conscious gesture on the part of its creators or merely a pretentious elongation of the need –to a certain degree compulsive- acquired during childhood to produce artifacts, “stuff.” Whether they are “flat works,” interactive videos, or performances, their creators seem not to be very conscious of their purpose beyond the cathartic act of creation and the egocentric action of artistic placement…or perhaps not.  It is also possible that we witness a sophisticated ironic construction that at times laughs at us. Ingenuous, cynical or trivial, the polysemic offering fits perfectly into the framework of the Society of the Spectacle in which it is both a participant and an exponent and in which the collective act of creation authenticates the magnification of the “gap” –that lapse so skillfully defined by Duchamp – that can always be filled in by the observer, the physically and mentally active participant.

The production of the TM Sisters fits into the logic of Louis Althusser’s “materialism of encounter,” where the contingency becomes a critical element of the human nature defined as trans-individual. The playful and the trivial thus become the hub elements of social and generational relationships, as well as typical features of the Society of the Spectacle that our contemporaneity increasingly fashions.

A carefree and histrionic gesture, the mise en scène is praiseworthy; it is friendly, amusing, and trivial in appearance, just like each of the “friendly interfaces” that mediate our day-to-day social relationships, full of cuts, overlaps and misunderstandings. At least in the offering of the TM Sisters, human contact –even when mediated- is still central and is accentuated by the mental effort that the spectator is at liberty to undertake or not. The profuse superposition of meaningful layers that unceasingly parade before our ecstatic eyes is there, within the grasp of one’s hand. It is up to you if are satisfied with mere poudre aux yeux.

Janet Batet: Independent Art critic and curator. MA in Multimedia (UQAM University, Montreal); BA in Art History (University of Havana).