Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla. Leer el territorio / Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla. Reading the territory

La obra ligaba de este modo el ámbito performativo del activismo político a tradiciones artísticas tales como el grabado. Land Mark se explica semánticamente como un instrumento de lectura de marcas territoriales ( land marks ) más que como un simple punto de orientación espacial (en inglés, landmark ). Al desencantamiento de la obra minimalista, la ruptura de su tautología, le acompaña un reencantamiento del espacio cotidiano. Leer el territorio significa también rearticularlo. Una forma profunda de comprenderlo es hablar a través de él.

Manuel Cirauqui

Carl Andre asserted that art, "what we do," is opposed to culture, "what is done to us." His words have had to be reconsidered historically to the extent that the minimalist discourse has not only become part of culture, but also a powerful symbol of the ineffable artistic merchandise. The works created by the afo reme ntioned Andre, and his fellows, considered Duchamp's principle of selection as the norm, although it was soon discovered that the operation inverted Duchamp's intention and turned it into an affirmative discourse, that is, into a defence of art. The change that takes a formally liberating gesture (negative) to become a rigid formalist norm (affirmative) is now a cliché of our modernist past. In view of this historical scheme, minimalism is a difficult enemy for any artistic discourse to battle: any attempt to question a pure unnameable objectuality to bring to light the conflicts that structure an object ends up influencing said attempts and transforms the results into minimalist works. Art by Jennifer Allora (Philadelphia, 1974) and Guillermo Calzadilla (Havana, 1971) can be inscribed in this two-directional path that leads from post-minimalist criticism to social commitment and from there to the production of a post- (or anti-) minimalist artistic discourse. The dialogue with Andre's work (author of famous metallic floors) was already approached explicitly in the first of his exhibitions, entitled Charcoal Dance Floor at the Marozzini gallery in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1997. In order for us to grasp the idea of the violent contrast between the different states of the installation, we could start describing it from the end. Imagine a late visit to the show, at the gallery's closing time: what we find is nothing but a floor smeared with charcoal and dirty black footsteps all over the place. A historical reflection forces us to establish the predictable connections with plastic interventions with a minimal air, aggravated by materials that are constituently ephemeral and fragile like charcoal. Actually, the audience's footsteps had deleted the face of the initial installation: what appeared originally on the floor were t reme ndously realistic human figures, drawn delicately with charcoal on the wooden flooring, to be contemplated from a zenithal perspective. Since the material was not fixed to the surface, its fate was in hands of the audience and the final aspect denoted its use, an allegory of the public exchange whereby the work acquires full meaning. This acquisition of meaning was formed, in Charcoal Dance Floor , by disappearance. A similar abandonment or immolation, although perhaps somewhat more violent, took place in 2004 with the exhibition entitled Ciclonismo , at the Chantal Crousel Gallery in Paris: in this case, a pool of water and engine oil spread like a dangerous carpet at the entrance to the hall. The pool, which had to be "watered" everyday, merged the languages of threat and fragility: at the same time as it evoked -barely without symbolic mediation- the ecologic aggressiveness of human development, as a work, the black pool required the same care as a household plant.

Carrying out a reinterpretation of the artistic work to elicit its contradictions -as an object that is inseparable from infinite mundane connections- is, in the case of Allora and Calzadilla, a whole work programme. Puerto Rican Light is an example of the deconstructive treatment of the notion of artistic autonomy, that nevertheless attempts to avoid the easy vulgar criticism of the pre-eminence of the market and of stereotypes about its ideological essence. The work, created in 2003 for the Americas Society, was conceived as a complement to Dan Flavin's homonymous installation ( Puerto Rican Light [to Jeanie Blake] ), from 1965. For the occasion, Allora and Calzadilla created a transformer that turned solar energy into electric energy capable of powering Flavin's installation, consisting in a combination of different fluorescent lamps that created an atmospheric result that evoked the light of the Caribbean country. By loading their generator with real Puerto Rican light, Allora and Calzadilla introduced a conflict of servitude in Flavin's installation. A trick using fictional clarification revealed the silenced relation of dependence between cultural production and political hegemony, between the spiritual elevation of the work and the material repression of its context. Furthermore, the work inserted in Flavin's installation the actual principle of disruption that he had advocated on the subject of exhibition spaces. Insisting on the topos of the light and the reference to the minimal discourse, in 2003 Allora and Calzadilla produced the installation Traffic Patterns , also as a manipulation or détournement of luminous atmospheres with historical connotations, like those constructed by James Turrell. The installation consisted of a room flooded with changing light: now red, now yellow, now green. The light system did not only evoke the operation of a traffic light: it actually followed its pulse, since the system was connected to a genuine device located in a street in Puerto Rico (the exhibition was also staged at the Americas Society in New York). The installation actually was a traffic light, that extracted all its aesthetic potential from the (un-covered) abstraction of a device that governed social order. This trick made contemplating the work synonymous with an act of obedience.