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Department of Studio Arts

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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14078/3024

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Browsing Department of Studio Arts by Author "Vergara-Vargas, Erandy"

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    Erick Meyenberg: race discourse in present continuous
    (2013) Vergara-Vargas, Erandy
    This essay discusses two immersive installations by Mexican artist Erick Meyenberg. I argue that both Return to the Present (2011), and Étude taxonomique et comparative entre les castes de la Nouvelle Espagne et celles du Mexique contemporain (2010) provide critical insights into the historical roots of the racial constructs that still prevail in contemporary societies.
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    I have weight: Rejane Cantoni and Leonardo Crescenti’s Tunnel
    (2018) Vergara-Vargas, Erandy
    In their installation Tunnel (2010), Brazilian artists Rejane Cantoni and Leonardo Crescenti invite people to walk through a six-meter long passageway that moves and requires people to adjust their balance to compensate for that motion. Spectators can interact individually or collectively; in both cases, the experience of the piece varies from one individual to another, because the weight and particular forms of body comportment of each subject imbue its motion with unique qualities. In every case, the embodied encounter with Tunnel produces metallic sounds that can be delicate, chaotic, or harsh, depending on people’s interactions. Questions of embodiment and movement lie at the heart of Cantoni and Crescenti’s work. Since 2007, the artists have produced a series of human-scale structures that adapt and distort themselves in response to people’s movement and weight. As an extension of this research, they developed Tunnel, which was driven by one central idea: to create a passageway that would move differently when different kinds of bodies walked on it—light and heavy, small and big. Cantoni and Crescenti took two years to accomplish the precision required by the piece to enable different qualities of movement. So why this rationale behind this piece? When I walked through Tunnel and saw other people interacting with it, it became clear to me that the simple logic of the apparatus—a movable passageway—drove attention towards my body by challenging my sense of balance.
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    Remixing the plague of images: video art from Latin America in a transnational context
    (2015) Vergara-Vargas, Erandy
    There has been a strong production of video art in Latin American countries in the last four decades, and an equally strong tradition of appropriation and remixing pre-recorded materials, particularly images from popular culture. Remix in video art encompasses reusing, recycling, referencing, and redirecting audio-visual materials towards orientations distinct from the original source. Since the raw materials of many video remixes include imagery that comes from advertising, cinema, magazines and television, apart from formal experimentation, critiques to those systems of representation are common and bold. The aim of numerous artists is to re-evaluate the elements constituting visual culture and to articulate resistance to hegemonic images and discourses in a transnational context. In contemporary video art from Latin America there is a significant body of work dealing with questions of memory mixing past and present. Other pieces connected to the lineage of the avant-garde in Latin America explore questions of modernity through citations and remix. This chapter focuses on four videos deploying remix strategies as metacommentaries on remix itself. As I explain, such works cannot be separated from the troubling genesis of the source materials and the wider context of circulation and reception, yet at the same time they function on various levels as self-reflexive cases of the practice of remix. Concretely, this chapter focuses on four case studies which use remix to revise the smooth flowing or the unsteady flickering of the plague of images circulating online and offline on a daily basis. There is the bitter criticism of transnational capitalism and diverse forms of invasion in Ximena Cuevas’ Cinepolis (2003); the appropriation of images about protection and surveillance in Graciela Fuentes’ To Protect (2003); the re-vision of fifteen years of Colombian television in José Alejandro Restrepo’s Viacrucis (2004); and the scratching of a speech by Fidel Castro in José Toirac’s Opus (2005). Despite their differences, these artists complicate remix as a contemporary aesthetics in works privileging contrast and noise to draw attention to the smoothness and/or fragmentation of mainstream media, to re-orient the reading of known sounds and images, as well as to expose the relationship between the appropriated elements and what Slavoj Žižek calls the “material traces of ideology.”