Eugenio Espinoza
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Eugenio Espinoza currently showing at CIFO...
November 30, 2011 - March 04, 2012
Curated by Jesús Fuenmayor + Philippe Pirotte for CIFO
Frames and Documents: Conceptualist Practices. Selections from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection curated by Jesús Fuenmayor and Philippe Pirotte will be on view from November 30, 2011 – March 4, 2012 and includes over 60 pieces by 41 artists from different generations and latitudes, who share a common experience of promoting and transforming conceptualist practices, which have resulted in becoming an ever-present and driving force in contemporary art today. The exhibition overlaps geographically and chronologically several times, highlighting coincidences regarding the artist's journey as historian both through an institutional critique (Frames) and through their capacity to question the ways in which we relate to memory (Documents). Because it is a selection of notable works from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection—more than expressing or reflecting the historical canons that frame the study of conceptualist practices—this exhibition encourages multiple views and interpretations from which may uncover new ties within contemporary artistic production. The works included in the exhibition highlight three distinct instances within the trajectory of conceptual art between the 1960’s and the late 1980’s. One group of artists included in the exhibition are those associated with the birth of conceptualism: Vito Acconci, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Luis Camnitzer, Joseph Kosuth, David Lamelas and Ed Ruscha, for instance. Another group consists of artists like Marina Ambramović, Lothar Baumgarten, Juan Downey, Eugenio Espinoza, Anna Maria Maiolino, Gordon Matta-Clark, Ana Mendieta, John Smith and Francesca Woodman who, mainly working in the seventies, participated in the dissemination of conceptualist practices across geographical and cultural boundaries. The third group of artists seen in Frames and Documents are those that worked in the 1980s such as Ricardo Brey, Sophie Calle, Eugenio Dittborn, Louise Lawler, Claudio Perna, and Allan McCollum, among others.
Geometric Abstraction and the Remake
Geometric abstraction, dreadfully serious purists may argue, is besieged territory. Design sweeps right in, the plunderer’s ruthless lust in its eye, whenever it needs a ready-made language that gives off the whiff of sleek smartness without demanding an actual investment of thought in return. In this way, what was once the militant visual wing of progressive lines of political thought has been reduced to the lowest common denominator of showrooms, trade fair stalls, boutiques, corporate lobbies, websites and easy-to-digest graphics. But geometric abstractionists, incorrigible and determined, continue to organize pockets of resistance. They search on for strategies through which they can re-insert a level of criticality into their practices. In recent years one of the most effective of these has been the remake.
The remake is the name that has been given to one of Hollywood’s most disliked products: the film that simply copies an earlier one. Even hardcore movie geeks look down on it, when they don’t neglect it altogether. In its poverty, however, it provided an interesting vehicle for a slew of cinephilic video and filmic artists who came of age in the 1990s. As Sven Lutticken has proposed, artist such as Stan Douglas, Douglas Gordon and Pierre Huyghe initiated an alternative form of the remake as a critical practice which “sees the first film not as an original to be followed, if only for its storyline, but as something which is to be questioned, and which in turn questions the present.”1 The original—and the context from which it emerges—is an object that should be interrogated, and that should be used to interrogate present historical circumstances, the context of the remake.
Although the remake entered art production through video and filmic installation, in recent years it has found a warm reception among certain painters. It should be pointed out that in its transition from the moving-image context to that of painting’s static and flat plane, it has undergone necessary readjustments. At the Musee de la Ville de Paris in 2007, Francois Morellet exhibited a series of paintings that “copied” eleven tiny works he produced in 1952. The only difference was that the size of the remakes was calculated so that they would be exactly four times as large as the originals. Morellet titled the exhibition Blow-Up. In this way he not only addressed the governing process of production employed and called up the ghost of Antonioni, already spooking things up a bit, but invoked Brian De Palma and the economy of remake. After all, one should remember that Blow-Up was “remade” in 1981as Blow-Out, a haunted house of a movie, populated by all the dead who spook the scene of American politics; a movie that perhaps even signals the death of the scene itself as something independent from the Big Interests that now fund it. Being haunted by lost possibilities was precisely what animated Morellet’s cleverly playful show.
Between drawing on the notion of the remake and staying within the bounds of the systems-aesthetics/geometric abstraction that has characterized his practice, Morellet invited a number of questions. Is he enlarging the repertoire of systems-aesthetics through the remake or is there an ulterior motive? Is he enlarging the work so that it can participate in our attention economies? (The original paintings would obviously make too small a splash in the sites of spectacle, which include both galleries and museums these days.) Is he adjusting to market demands—not in some vulgar sense of trying to cash in, but by acknowl
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From the turn of the millennium on, Espinoza has been engaged in a kind of self-archeological project. He has been mining, rethinking and reproducing his own work from the 1970s and 1980s. Objects and proposals that have already lived a public life have been reappearing, creating a kind of parade of doppelgangers. In 2005, Espinoza remade his original “Impenetrable” at Locust Projects in Miami. Instead of blocking off the entire exhibition space, however, he divided it—and blocked access to only one part. This gave the work an almost specimen-like quality. Rather than the “Impenetrable” itself, we got the staged model of it. Literally doubled, it was doubled as a stage-set of itself, which meant that more than the reproduction of a previously existing object what we got was a proposal regarding the roles that have been closed to a painting that wants to function critically.
As it is always the case with the remake, comparison is what is at stake—the then of the original, the context in which it came to light, is compared to the now of the remake. The then of Morellet’s originals was one in which certain narratives uploaded into the work a utopian potential. Mid-century geometrical abstraction sought to produce new concrete visual facts, sidestepping representation, anthropomorphism, and authorial presence. It sought to be the plastic analogue to the coming socioeconomic facts that progressive programs of distributive justice promised. The then of Espinoza, on the other hand, involved the move toward a more radicalized use of art production in relation to political causes. The “Impenetrable” emerged at a time when studio practices are morphing into political praxis.
The now of both of these remakes—our now—involves a spectacularizaton of social relations, as it’s registered in both design/architecture and in art itself. Geometric abstraction now signals ‘successful corporate structure’ and/or ‘quaint historical effort’ more readily than ‘progressive alternative aesthetics.’ Whatever animating power this sort of abstraction may have once drawn from the experiments of Russian constructivism and concrete art, and later from a politicized conceptual art, it now finds itself sterilized as it is transmuted into decorative element/historical specimen. Although both Morellet and Espinoza, in some sense, remake their work in order to line up with the demands of our attention economies and historical amnesias, they also cast out into the world works that subtly drag an original referent that complicates any reading. Their remakes pull an original that refuses us any interpretations that don’t involved historical comparison. As much as these remakes “bend” to contemporary demands, they also make us aware of the way that these demands become determining factors in art production and how they are bound to the larger material conditions of our existing neo-liberalism.
1. Lutticken, Sven, “Planet of the Remakes” in Secret Publicity: Essays on Contemporary Art, NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, p. 133
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