The History of Art: A Garden of Strange Flowers
A little less than a century ago, when children got bored, they were given tasks to keep them occupied for as long as possible. Roberto Obregón’s grandmother would ask him to sit in front of a mountain of rice to clean it of countless little stones and all sorts of impurities. It was a repetitive task that suited a boy with a natural inclination toward fixed ideas. This activity entertained him, especially because the rice brought seeds from other plants. His grandmother had a garden with all kinds of flowers, including some rose bushes he could not reach. Tired of the unreachable roses, Roberto Obregón planted his own garden with the discarded seeds from the rice, a garden of wild seeds that, with the passage of time, grew like unexpected beings. Years later, a few months before his death, Roberto Obregón recalled this anecdote in an interview. Throughout his life he dedicated himself to sowing wild gardens with impossible roses of desiccated petals. Petals turned into stains. Shadows. The artwork and history of Roberto Obregón have made me understand the history of art as a garden of strange, wild flowers. The method is maniacal in nature, but no less natural for that: take the rose, separate its petals, prepare them, dissect them, preserve them, lose them, trace them, draw them, turn them into murals, into an alphabet of failed signs.
Page from a notebook of real dissections by Roberto Obregón with the dissections Placita de Museo and Eliseo Sierra (1975-1981). Petals and leaves glued to cardboard; ink on petals; ink and graphite on cardboard. 30 x 415 cm (open notebook). Photo by Carlos Uzcátegui. Source: Revista Estilo.
Writing about Roberto Obregón’s roses has taught me that the method, when confronted with the fresh soil of history, with the mud of time, must embrace losses and play, chance and error, unreachable distances. Roberto Obregón dissected roses and painted their petals with watercolors, on a minimal scale of intimacy and delicacy that led to ephemeral and clandestine murals; while living an underground life, he explored his sexuality outside the norm and escaped the visibility of the State, the market, and the institutions.
On the other hand, Latin American cities were filled with large-scale public art; in Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil, they were infected by a developmentalist optimism that was open to industry and progress. In Venezuela, an exploration of abstraction was being cultivated, it spoke about energy, power. Carlos-Cruz Diez, after a stay in Paris during the years of the military dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, worked on the main projects of the nascent Venezuelan democracy, among them, Ambientación Cromática of Machine Rooms 1 and 2 of the Guri Hydroelectric Plant. This work was installed in the heart that fed the growth of the country: the energy that extracted the oil, that lit up the classrooms of the schools, the new Caracas Subway inaugurated together with the monumental Teresa Carreño Theater in 1983, was driven from there. A country with a culture mobilized by the abstract energy of color as a sublime experience of progress.
Ambientación Cromática (1977-1986), Additive Color Mural (17 x 245 m) Machine Rooms 1 and 2 Simón Bolívar Hydroelectric Plant, Guri, Venezuela. Source: Fundación Cruz-Diez
The country I am writing about is another, just as Latin America is another. I do it, moreover, from a distance, with ten years residing in Mexico City, reconciling myself with my own failed signs, with the garden of strange flowers that is planted in my memory, with the dissected flowers of my own history. It will take us several more years to understand what happened with that imagined community we call a country that led us to leave the territory en masse. We are approaching 10 million Venezuelans outside, many lives reconfiguring themselves, facing a new narrative for themselves, disassembling and reassembling, putting down roots that suddenly settle in soils we never imagined. In my case, in volcanic soil more than two thousand meters above sea level. It is a common history of Latin America, of Mexicans, Argentines, Colombians, who have migrated from their countries and no longer fit within the restricted histories of borders.
What use does the history of art have for us then? What use is it to think about the classifications in large-scale urban art of the years of optimism, in the murals of epic independence narratives in buildings that today struggle to stay standing? I would like to move away from the confrontation between narratives and counter-narratives, giving us the freedom to be suspicious of both: they need each other so much that I prefer to look for another place. That is the place of the roses I have learned from Roberto Obregón. His work has been for me a paradoxical compass, a vector that deviates from its axis to show me where the dark spaces are (and not to illuminate them). Those shadowy corners are places where curiosity and fear appear, where stories fail. They are dirty places where we must feel the ground before taking a step before we sink into mud. They are gardens of nocturnal flowers that that avoid the slogan and the easy judgement because they have discovered that it is not enough to name the enemy to defeat him.
Agua de mar, by Roberto Obregón, 1976. Photocopy on paper. 33 x 216 cm. Photo by Laura Morales. Source: Revista Estilo
Working with rose dissections has made me rethink the method for art history. Roses teach us nothing but their mistakes, their openings without closure, how to survive without a center. Seeking how to read signs at fault has taught me that working with art history does not allow us to explain the present. We ask something else of the image. It means taking root in failure. Joan Copjec explains it in a lesson of complex beauty when she explores the mechanism of representation from Lacan. She reminds us that the subject finds its foundation, its ground— to keep the resonance with “to ground”, in English —in a failure that infects the mechanism of representation and the subject itself with suspicion. From that lack, desire is born, which fixes us in the place of conflict.
Roberto Obregón, You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch) (1975). Collage of photographic contacts and ink on paper 217 x 279 cm. Roberto Obregón Archive C&FE Collection Caracas. Photo: Isabela Eseverri. Source: Revista Estilo
In the garden of strange flowers that is the history of art, I seek to make visible the flora that has taken root in the failure to remember where desire is born. Rather than finding in representation a narrative that challenges a supposedly hegemonic narrative, I prefer to anchor myself in the fracture. As subjects we are bound by those failed signifiers, the decayed petals, the errors in classification. That is why, as a historian, I seek the nocturnal flowers that arise from the dark, the desiccated roses that become the record of an impudence. These fractures make art history the place to speak, at the same time, of the country of energy, but also of the wild gardens where discarded seeds grow, a history that is anchored in conflict to point out the spaces of the dark where fear is transformed into desire.
Torrivilla
