SMOOTH & STRIATED: Hector Zamora's interior landscape.

Hector Zamora 2010 Essay about the smooth and the striated, San Francisco Art Institute.

Design is always in situ, with a budget that limits the materials or with time limits for the exhibition. That pushes us to assume the striated space, the institutionalized style of life. Hector Zamora knows it well, because of his design studies, but he also has clear that our minds work as landscapes; they have the same kind of movements between the Smooth and the Striated, and he needs to push it farther every time.

Deleuze and Guattari, studied this subject in Thousand Plateaus (1980). The Smooth places, traditionally represented like the sea, steppe, ice and desert, are just temporary occupied by intensities and Events, continuous variations of free action, no visual points of reference, tactile relations among nomads in that place. Amorphous development of form: spectators and pedestrians in our contemporary cities.

On the other hand, the Striated has been created by the sedentary agriculture and its tendency to measure, categorize and solidify the place and situations. We delineate and quantify mathematically every environment to make them comprehensible and easy to grasp. Motivated by anxiety, effects of technological mediation resulting in war machine and conquer (curatorial) impulse.

Every human institution is a striated space. The contemporary artists assuming their roles as tridimensional creatures and creators can’t escape themselves to put in on the world new materials, which work as coordinates, striates, signals to address the human reactions. Technological developments to date mark a limit; iconographic references of the preexistent objects do the same. Handmade objects that we could see with just one gaze from a comfortable point of view (at eye level) do not interact with our entire bodies, they are modernist works. The limits of contemporary art are exposed in the panoramic views of the entire spaces, where humans look just like other particles. There are two ways to reach it: fulfilling the entire space or emptying it (a combination of both is always unavoidable).




Hector Zamora’s Essay about the smooth and the striated has deal with the striated characteristics of the XXI century art scene. Sculptures that assume the entire space, related with the architectural form (the only frontier of the artwork is the institutional place itself), and it includes the slight interactivity of the pedestrians, the artwork works like a resonance in the road, a traffic signal.

Indoor Landscape, Drying racks hanging on nylon thread, all of them parallels towards three neon light tubes, in the corner between the wall and the floor (the corner is traditionally a place that offers information). Light is often associated with salvation, future life, post-apocalyptic redemption. It increases its power of attraction because of the dark walls.

Noise, harmonics in the void space, resonance of electronic devices, slight increasing of the non-music of our contemporary lives where there is always something plugged-in, always absorbing energy.

Visible and invisible at the same time, the nylon thread works as links with our gravity. And the artificial frontier above us, the limits of the art work are the limits of the space itself.

Racks that could be silhouettes of hangers, wardrobes, barbeque racks, places to put something temporary, food, banners, clothes, bicycle racks, racks to store shoes, bottles, sound devices, bodies; bed frames, places where humans sleep, it means we are temporary inhabitants. Racks are frozen places to delay the time while we travel between solar systems.

Finally, parallel objects work like wireless waves, like in Matrix (1999) where the digital world was created by parallel numbers and corridors of weapons coming one after the other in endless rows. Certain variations in the Cartesian position of the racks remind us that humans are neither fixed elements but waves in constant motion.


Humans are like particles. The importance of dethrone the human reference to measure the art works means that there is nothing more important for humans than for the other species. This was an Egoist and selfish point of view to keep us entertained. For example, we could not figurate future beings or inhabitants of other worlds entirely different than us. We put them, bigger, with more extremities, with higher sight, or stronger bodies, with powerful weapons, that comes from the same root that the knife and the spear, that comes from the sharp stones and therefore from our hands. We place the same characteristics on our own gods as humans, mythology, we made our animals talk about the same problems that we have and those are fables, etc. Megalopolis, internet and more reality shows every day, are manifestations of these proliferations of signs.


But our world resists this striation, human measure (categories) attempts, at over-coding them with natural disasters, the greatest power of removing us from our comfort zone. Our mind does it as well, with forgetfulness, the play, and the mistakes in our daily life trajectories. After the pop art, and his ethnography, the proliferation of cultural studies now is so complex that every artwork is a perpetual signal that links us with the whole. Everything is so striated that it looks like smooth for us.

We live in a spherical universe, we live in a perpetual smooth zone were the striated space arrives to us at the end, that is exactly where we started. The striated space of our thoughts are the circling return where there are many particles spread over the universe with so similar appearance and distance that we could not address ourselves towards anywhere. Our imagination has boundaries too, this is the universe itself, or to say its propriety: the universe is the size of our imagination. To become rather than to progress.

Luis Alberto Mejia Clavijo
Art Consultant


Note: Some reinterpretations of these concepts in the field of art, have been intended by the exhibition The Smooth and The Striated, (2 July– 1 August; 2010) in Huize Frankendael and Nieuw Dakota, organized by, University of Amsterdam and the University of Utrecht. The main limitation of this curatorial exercise was the focus on the objects or artworks of every artist, and that means: points of reference, which decrease all the plus value of the uncertain categorization of these signals. Artists’ fair curatorial exercise.

THE ART OF BEING INVISIBLE: LIU BOLIN PHOTOGRAPHY

Liu Bolin 2008 Hiding in the City No. 69- Graffiti, Photo 118x150cm.

Liu Bolin’s work exposes how complex it is to be invisible in our society, and that means how complex our institutional mechanisms are to make us think that it is normal idea.

He is not exposing himself doing any functional performance, doesn’t sell, buy, or walk to work, neither wait for the bus staring at his watch. If most people do not realize the differences of a street in daily lives it is because we had been creating a compulsive collective behavior of mutual invisibility. To have a job, provide for your family, improve your income, buy a house, buy a vehicle to reach your place to work quickly, to return again with the enough money to let your children provide for their own family, improve their income… hopeless, pay attention to the urban landscape, your taxes do not stretch to make you satisfied: the external urban landscapes never will be as you wish.

If photography was a capture of an instant in the time, well, you have to think how much painting the society had been putting on you, and how much time spent to place you in the roles you assume in your daily life. Body as a place for painting, means, a body as an affected object by exterior influences, which does not fit easily in to modern society, which is trespassed for the advertising and institutional ideologies.

The artist becomes part of the urban landscape, it means, that organic material, could be active behind the rush hours of our days, and it is not passive, but really an active psychological creator of thoughts. Our thoughts are just reflections of the building-spaces. It is the linguistic turn. So, activate your human reaction. Let’s see your humanity emerge from the liquids societies, in which we are. Stop in middle of the movie of Ron Fricke and your relation with the eternal.

A quiet and discrete person, standing still, is among our contemporary living statues besides the store streets. You could see them dressed as robots, farmers, pharaohs, aliens and hulks. There is no movement, there are not in special positions. Although, they evoke different époques, cultures and ideologies, they all help us to realize that we, without exception, are painted by our culture, and it doesn’t matter how complex or expensive, or published in the mass media your look and your life is, you are becoming more invisible every time, creating less sensations in others until you disappear: how many centuries could you last?

Luis Alberto Mejia Clavijo
Art Consultant

FURTHER THE EYES: DANIEL BUREN ALLEGRO VIVACE

Daniel Buren 'Allegro Vivace' / February 12 – May 22, 2011 / Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany.

In the ancient Greece, Aristotle hierarchically organized the senses and let the sight as the most important of them. Of course the argument was on base of human hierarchical utility. Additionally, the tragedy of logic had started and the figures of gods on our minds, as creators, leave us with the idea of the icon that pre-exist in the world before us. But after Leroi Gourham the order of senses is inverted, because space was before objects in it; the most interest contemporary artists don’t deal with icons, but with the space.

Daniel Buren, has clear this idea in his mind, “The first obstacle as a painter that you have is the wall where you put the paintings, is that wall necessary? I am not a painter anymore, in the traditional way, the specific space is crucial to steer what I can do”1. If in the oil on canvas paintings since renaissance to the abstract expressionism, the important was the icon inside the canvas, and then, with the expanded sculpture was a dialog between the object and the space; with the aesthetical minimalism, the focus is the building it self. That’s why our contemporary buildings have these biomorphic shapes, and always demand of the artist their site related projects. The experience of art is now more of the entire bodies reacting; in this case to mirrors and colors.

Mirrors, they use to be the strategy for recognize us and think how we see ourselves. Michael Foucault, begin his book the order of things (1966), analyzing this conscious of Velazquez in Las Meninas (1656): long ago before our costume of see paintings, the art works sees us. Paleontological discoveries reveals that some Oldowan stones are 2,5 million years ago: that means, that they are before our specie emerge. Or better: probably was because of them that our specie emerged, that's why don't try to find something hanged in the walls anymore; try to think how you will make your next own walls.

Luis Alberto Mejia Clavijo


1. France 24/7 International News “Daniel Burren Allegro Vivace“ 02 March 2011.

ENVIRONMENTS: ERNESTO NETO SCULPTURES.

Helio Oiticica created Tropicalia (1964) fifty years ago, and he brought the most iconic elements from the nature, neighborhoods and houses to the art scene in Brazil. The main idea of the neo-concretism movement was the unity between the art and the persons. Ernesto Neto assumes this idea and he creates contemporary environments that go further cultural studies, because they make feel spectators just a part of an ecosystem, without care the anthropological considerations, more than humans, we are interacting just like any other specie on the world.

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Ernesto assumes completely the space and not just a part. He is not interested in show something in particular, there is no a painting or sculpture that we could handle or see at the same time that we are calm down. No, there is nothing with the same height that us, there is a complex ecosystem and we are just a little part inside.

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Participants complete the art work; interaction is the most important part of these pieces. If there is a couch or a balloon in the floor, or if there are holes in the fabrics, then some participants could appear there and dialogue with their friends who are in the other hole or couch, meanwhile another spectator, outside the environment, is seeing the new relations between the bodies and the sculpture as a whole.

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The cheap materials, fabric, lycra, styrofoam, stockings, stones, are not displayed on the floor, or hanging covering any wall, but they are crossing the space in circles: there are not straight or perpendicular lines in these environments, but they are always like organic material: like the ancient life of corals in the sea or like the bacteria and microscopic animals inside us.

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Now, we are feeling inside a rhetorical question: where are we spending our time? And although we get fun playing in these art works, we are also able to think something important behind: the most human consideration that we could take is not the advocacy of the humanity, but the defense every form of life on the world.

Luis Alberto Mejia Clavijo
Art Critic.

DARKNESS: MIROSLAW BALKA CTRL EXPERIENCE

Miroslaw Balka is exposing his artwork ‘Ctrl’ inside the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid. It is in the -1 floor and there is just one way to reach it, downstairs. White colored walls disappear in the Sabatini building. It was and ancient hospital in which the low rooms were originally designated to psychotic patients, it is like a dungeon. It has ancient brick walls, and a gray cement surface.

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Then, in the first room, there are three geometric sculptures. Brown boxes tight with metal, like armories, are as big as to cover the doors and let the spectator note the relation between them and the arches of the doors. Behind one of the boxes there is the entrance towards another room.
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There is a threshold of darkness in the door to the second room and the noise of electric fans inside. And there is a question for your will: how far can you let yourself go in this place where you cannot see anything? Just few people enjoy standing alone in the darkness. After few minutes, the door’s borders let you see enough to walk carefully. Then start to feel the black color filling the eyes. Darkness is not a space phenomenon but an eye’s affection, a matter of time. Slowly, objects and distance appear front you. We are going through our origins, like every night going to sleep or like when we were in the womb and had not our eyes wide open.

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It is a necessary transition sometimes see the dark side, like in a change of clothes. “Key to viewers’ responses to the uncanny duo is their participation in a rite of passage. In order to return to the mundane world outside the monastery, they must re-negotiate the threshold marked by the wardrobe”1. We are changing our clothes everyday and that’s a kind of control.
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Ctrl. The international well knows key used to make the main instructions in the computer, and the only way to do it if you have not the pleasant mouse. This is how you select, cut, paste, save and close your works: Everything starts with Control. But this is not self control but orthodox control, the violence control from the concentration camps and darkness. Every human in the world belongs to the Adam origin. He was the most successful stone killer, the hunter-gatherer who destroyed the skulls of the other twelve hominids in their way to survive.

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The majority of people just stop in the edge of the illuminated space, and then, yet in the (comfortable) light zone they think ‘there is not an art work here’, and then, return to the de-lightful world of the white-neutral walls, where the modern artwork pieces are obviously exposed to the tourists, to be photographed, and sometimes, hidey recorded, because there are watchmen always praying for ‘no photos’. A world where everything is illuminated is a world where everything is controlled.

Luis Alberto Mejia Clavijo
Art critic

1= Lynne Cooke. “Miroslaw Balka Ctrl”. Museo Reina Sofia. Madrid. 26 November 2010 – 25 April 2011.

COLLECTIVE WORK: Ai Weiwei Sunflower's Seeds

Ai Weiwei – Sunflower’s seeds 2010-11, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London.

Since six years ago, Ai Weiwei had been thinking in how to recreate the porcelain, traditional export from china, in a contemporary language. Then, he exposes one hundred million of hand painted porcelain "sunflower’s seeds". This work is clearly a reflection about the collective work.
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In the town of Jingdezhen around 1,600 Chinese people were involved in the production process: it demands at least 30 stages. Almost everybody there knows somebody in the town who was working in the sunflower’s project.
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Deep in the mines, people are digging the stone to take up the porcelain to the surface. They put the stones in a wheelbarrow, and pull it through the railway until reach the sunlight. Then they drop down the stones and demolish it with hammers (some of them work with the natural energy, ,by the force and movement of a water mill. It creates the dust of porcelain. When the dust is distilled in a mixer it is get liquid. Fortunately, all kind of clays gets vitrify in high temperatures and the porcelain fill the patterns of sunflower’s seeds. Hundreds of people inside the shop paint one by one the seeds. The most skillful people takes like three strokes per each side of the seed, the beginners, do it with fourth or five strokes. They weight the seeds in bags and carry them to the kiln. All the seeds are packet in boxes, and travel from Jingdezhen to London, where finally they are dropped and carefully distributed through the floor in the Turbine’s hall like a carpet.

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Ai Weiwei pay to all this persons for their work, and they used to say: we have not much more to do, can you give us more work? Ai Weiwei think: “do you feel that you need to make more, to make another project to meet they needs”. In 2007, he brought 1001 people from china to the Kassel (part of the Fairytale project for the Documenta 12). The participants were divided into five groups that each stayed in Kassel for eight days. In both projects, it is hard to determinate when the art work ends, and also it is impossible to say why the artist position is different from any social commitment.

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Although the Tate Modern has two requirements for the Turbine Hall commissions: the art work must be site related and be interactive. Sunflower seeds, was a sculpture that last open to the public interaction just 48 hours. In that time, every step was like a harvest sound, and the people created castles and rested over the seeds, include, some of them stole seeds. But their steps crash the porcelain and the dust could be dangerous for the long periods of breathing nearby, and then the exhibition was limited to be a contemplative traditional art object (it will stay until May 2th). But, like this, his image is still evident: The seeds are not open, they will never face any sun-leader. Mass population and mass production have the opposite side in the massive compulsive consume-consumption.

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The work of Ai Weiwei is completely contemporary, in the sense that we can not draw a line and say when the art finish. “I can be a failure here and there. But my intention is always to reach people who don’t need to know anything about art to care about their feelings, or to protect those basic values of self-expression and the right to life, dignity and opportunities”1. His art is not a matter of create an object of art, but a question of how to join the majority of people with every project. How many people have changed his life because of you?
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Luis Alberto Mejia Clavijo
Art Critic
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1- The Irish Times - Saturday, February 5, 2011. “They always say there is silence before the storm”.
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Note: Sotheby’s auction a sack with sunflower’s seeds, more or less £ 1 pound each. (120 000 seeds means an auction up to £ 120 000 = finally sold in £349,250).

BACKSIDE: THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF NATALIE BOTHUR

Natalie Bothur – People series– Ruchsight (04)

Martin Heidegger used to say that things to be thought have not the dignity to be thought yet. But this thought was just a continuation of metaphysics, an illusion from those who divide the soul of the body, the phenomenon of the nomenon, the earth of the paradise. Today we know that just bodies exist, we are kinetic sculptures in movement, the partial reveal objects. The essential is just series of superficial faces over added.

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Natalie Bothur studies the backside, that is not front us, take photographs of backsides. She seems against the traditional definition of Kant, possibly the only one definition we have, “the fundamental aspect about to think is the representation. In the representation it is displayed the perception. The representation it self is re-presentation (put-on-front)”1. In this sense, there is not front, there is not face, just trace.
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The fashion magazines uses to put in the cover expensive faces of models like hook to sell their pages to the companies of beauty and to catch their customers always expecting to stay ‘at day’. But the majority of people over the earth do not (even don’t want) live like this, with this kind of paranoia. We are the backside of the modernity project that continues offering bright faces.

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Baselitz, another German artist, used to paint upside down. It is not that he turns down the paintings to show them to the people, but, this huge strokes, that are better studs, like wanting to erase some traditional painting, they got their sense just looking them upside down. If you turn right the frame you hardly could recognize the objects. In both cases, the photography and the painting, the idea of re-presentation is questioned. There is just partial vision fronts our senses, there are not objects behind, neither spirits; we live within the uncertainty principle. Just remain for us to stay front to front between those who no appear sophist-icatedly facing the camera, no to con-front us, but to go unfolding our misfortunes of our daily life.
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In the astrophysical terms, we live in a universe in which all the things are connected but that have at the same time a boundary: we can not see all the universe, we can see just those objects that are enough near to us and the light that they are sending (actually that sent thousand years ago) reach us. The space is faster than light.

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IT: that do not give us the face, that hide of us, that is in the other side, that let us see just a shadow or a distorted reflection, that is turning corner, that is always running away, that run faster than us, that we could see just a fragment, that we couldn’t understand completely: that is everything that exist. We are just going from a backside to another, inevitably.

Luis Alberto Mejia Clavijo
Crítico de Arte

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1 – HEIDDEGER, Martin. ¿Qué quiere decir pensar? En: Revista Colombiana de psicología. N° 5-6 1997. Universidad nacional de Colombia. Bogotá. Página 17.