IXONE SÁDABA

Poètique de la Desaparition

Tortured, repressed, violated and manipulated all over this conflictive planet, the body irrefutably becomes transformed from a mere object to an everlasting bearer of speech. The very “speech of speech” urges us to speak instead of speaking about it, speak right up and out loud, speak against it, speak for it, let it speak. This is how French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy describes the sensorial and expressive omnipotence of the body in its interference with the external world, and this is how the body emerges in the work of Ixone Sábada, a young visual artist, performer and photographer based in Bilbao, Spain.

Sábada first gained notoriety in 2003 with “Ciceron”, a series of site-specific twin apparitions of herself. Further notable projects were to come in the following years. “Leviathan” (2007) suggested life’s conspicuousness in its absence from the devastated hurricane landscapes of the American West, and “Expulsion from Paradise” (2006) established duality as one of the artist’s recurrent motifs. Contrariwise, “Poètique de la Desaparition” shifts away from the clear filmic narrative construction of her previous series, in favour of a markedly abstract and introspective approach that pushes the whole work to its limits, both formally and conceptually. To use Sábada’s own words, “my new series does so much more than just bringing up a more complex, mature and tough vision of the body. It pushes the very same photographic image and all the meanings it carries towards full deconstruction”.

In the series, Sádaba, the ever performer, recurs once more to her own body to negotiate the idea of a naked body that is and is not. Somewhere before the final departure, the self and its alter ego, present or implicit in many of her previous oeuvres, are fused into one. A fading “me” emerges before our eyes, under the most tense and dramatic physical conditions. Multiple exposures and a body which cries, laughs, begs, enjoys -one and all at once- on the verge of hysteria and collapse…

Alarming and discomforting, Sádaba’s posture arguably serves as a metaphor for the condition of total expropriation, destruction and nihilism the body is subjected to today, as much as it brings into the foreground the existential right of not to be, in terms of placing oneself -in this case, Sádaba and her female being- within an alternative non-space that lies beyond codified language, politics and culture.

Sádaba’s discourse displays great affinities with the Lacanian view of femininity as a state of negativity existing outside the hermetically constructed male world. Such an interpretation allows a feminist reading of her work that the artist herself fully welcomes. “I am not a feminist in the strict sense of the term”, she explains, “but I happen to be a woman who works in a very close relationship with her body. In various occasions, I have had to reflect on how this is to be represented and where I place myself at the time of representation”.

“We perceive our bodies as the most common thing in the world, but has it ever occurred to us how socially limited the margins outside exhibitionism for a sustained engagement with the body are?” wonders Sádaba. For her, exposing one’s own body and self, speaking volumes through it, implies a fundamental political attitude as the most unmediated way to express identity. In her own words, “I try to explain that my body is face and hands, but it is also butt and vagina. I do not tend to show it off if I do not consider it essential, but if I reflect exactly on this -the body, its representation and signs- I am sorry but I just have to do it”.

“Poètique de la Desaparition” was originally performed before the camera as an unpremeditated response of personal exorcism. Yet, it could not have resulted less political. Just the presence of a suffering naked female body between the sheets of a double bed makes up for the absence of the politically and socially charged landscapes of Sádaba’s previous oeuvres. The political statement running through all this self-exposure is too explicit…

Somewhere between the material and spiritual realms, being becomes no-being, and so does representation. In Sádaba’s visceral response, movement, feeling and time are employed as tools for a wide-ranging critical analysis and formal deconstruction of the granted space that defines the photographic frame, rendering obsolete devices such as the unique still image, the representation space and the frozen time. Why all this? Is something wrong with photography, as we knew it? “To my point of view”, she explains, “the slavish dependency of photography on documentary has kept it aloof from art for such a long time that it has wasted too many of its possibilities on a conceptual level”. There is still too much purism left, there is still too much of this vain discourse of representation going on and it is a pity and it is unfair. Is there actually anything that is not representation?”

Ixone Sádaba brings an extraordinary fresh approach to the notion of time and the transcendence of the photographic medium. One of the most interesting elements in her work is the way she incessantly integrates movement, real time and performance into the still frame, as if she wished to show the movement and perturbation constantly present below the skin. Repetition, rhythm and eclipse… So many bodies, so many expressive possibilities; as if time were dilated into many parallel moments; as if time were comprised not from a unique moment but from millions of afters and befores within an eternal present in an infinite emotional and conceptual expansion.

“I have to say I don’t like Cartier Bresson. I don’t believe in the instant”, Sádaba once declared. “But I do believe in an event’s capacity to generate a different tempo, in which our perception contracts and expands”. What does narrative matter then, when everything is here, in the veins that enclose our blood, in the flesh that echoes the palpitations of our heart? Within one single frame, the manipulation of time creates a bridge between material and spiritual means, a spiral emanation of life in all its million possibilities.

An uncanny, magical process helps the body finally come to terms with itself. Body moving, body protesting, body breathing in La Poètique de la Desaparition…

© All Pictures: Ixone Sádaba

Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved

Representing Gallery:
Witzenhausen Gallery, Amsterdam

Published in Eyemazing 04/2008

MARCOS LÓPEZ

Sub-realismo criollo

An upside-down world, where everything has a slight tendency to fall off… This may be the case if you live on the northern hemisphere of this planet and mind taking a look down there. Yet, if you are raised in the underdeveloped south, you acquire a different awareness of gravity, balance and cultural resistance.

Everything is quite different in the south. Down here, right here, in Argentina, a place that could rightfully be the centre of the whole universe, Marcos López once “grasped the camera as an orphan child would grasp his nun’s skirt”. Since then and for more than two decades, a story has been unfolding about the unexpected things that occur when the south tries to get a little closer to the north and to its dream industry of hypes and prosperity formulas.

For López, the experience of living in Argentina is equivalent to inhabiting the other side of a broken mirror:

As an outcast confined in a cell, you look through the broken glass. You need to, precisely because you are the reflection. But then, your gaze comes back to the north and slaps our faces as if it were a degenerated, threatening monster, willing to devour us all for the years of post-colonial, capitalist deprivation it carries on its back.

Made out of photographs, poems and writings, the complex visual universe of Marcos López is formulated as a concise observational meta-commentary on this particular “mirror effect”, produced within a global senseless community. His glamorously kitsch aesthetic was born in the mid-nineties. Since then a series of projects and publications have appeared; among them “Urban Scenes” (1999), “Pop Latino” (2000), “The Player” (2006) or “Sub-realismo criollo”, his most recent work, in progress since 2005, all of which Lopez has won international acclaim for as one of the leading figures of Argentinean contemporary photography.

It is noon and the barrio throws over you the shadow of its old depressing walls. Not a soul in the streets. A waiter comes and asks to add your name in the reservation list. His green fluorescent T-shirt matches perfectly the turquoise walls, while the radio is on, playing the latest hits of resentment. Boredom, some bottles of Santa Fe beer left in front of a huge Coca-Cola advertising panel, the marks of red lipstick on your cup, a world swamped with traditional popular symbols and imported modernity… López could go on telling stories forever.

Highly orchestrated soap operas full of saturated colours, exaggerated gestures, bad actors and ugly settings, all imbued with a strong dose of a self-taught Argentinean surrealism. In Marcos López’s universe everything is purposely tagged as sub, under- or hyper-, in the same way that everything becomes a question of lack and excess in the absurd world that surrounds him.

What happens when the modality of “formal” bad taste, as seen, for instance, in Martin Parr´s popular iconography of burger restaurants and tourist leisure parks, is introduced in foreign cultural settings? What happens when kitsch in all its plethora is reflected onto the broken mirror? Well, then it becomes a signifying meta-kitch, i.e. an even more eloquent performative simulacrum of the original, as Marcos López suggests.

“Could resorting to jokes, masks and bright colours be just a way of distancing oneself, of not being too serious, of avoiding the intense feel of direct contact, body to body, soul to soul?”, wonders the artist. Back in the early nineties, he recalls himself passing gloriously from his black and white psychological portraits to colour. Ecstatic, he used to drink toasting to photography as a natural heir of Mexican mural art. But soon, the phantoms of the old comrades would disappear, second thoughts would take over and eventually habits would change. Marcos has learned the lesson: he hardly drinks alcohol in public gatherings of more than three people! What survives from his “revolutionary” past, are the seeds of a growing irony and scepticism towards both the ethics of underdevelopment and the medium of photography.

“The attempt to promote an illusory belief that life is worth it, is useless. The only secret for a good portrait is to create an atmosphere that can show this desolation, this nothingness”. In López’s theatrically staged pictures, the apparent shift from the real into the realm of myth -be it religion, as in “Roast in Mendiolaza” (2001), or pure flesh fiction as in “Dressing Room” (2004)- operates, paradoxically, as an ironic and painful metaphor of the mutilation of dreams. It produces a sudden landing to reality and it transforms blood, flesh and myth to enacted paraphernalia of a homeland that hurts, reminding us that the real world is the one made of annihilated hopes.

Though clearly “fabricated in Argentina” and for Argentineans, López’s psychological penetration of the grotesque transgresses universal territories. His underdeveloped, deformed Warhol aesthetics is charged with the bittersweet flavour that inevitably any critical observation produced in the south inherits. Namely, this “curse” and “blessing” of belonging in the so-called “periphery” is what attributes to his sseemingly hilarious and hyperbolic imagery a documentary aura that captures the spirit of his reality. Down here, on the other side of the mirror, photography becomes an “autopsy of failure”, exposing in all its glory the act of “performing” stuffed illusions and slippery identities, just before the lights faint, just before identity surrenders to nothingness…

Pessimist, nihilist, more sceptical than ever? Lopez’s whole artistic practice critically questions the paramount role of imitation and repetition within the contemporary context of the imported cultural and consumerism models. “It is not necessary to take two hundred portraits in the American South, as Richard Avedon once did, in order to say what is left to be said”, reflects the artist in his writings. After more than two decades of commitment to his medium, he confesses being a bit overwhelmed by digital excess and by the pressure implied when belonging to the contemporary art “set”. “To tell the truth, I feel like it is time to retire, the way boxers do. I would like to go towards religion. I would like to have more faith…”

©All pictures: Marcos López

Text by Natasha Christia
All Rights Reserved

Published in Eyemazing 04/2008

CHAMBLISS GIOBBI

Catalogue texts published in the event of the solo exhibition of Chambliss Giobbi at the MiTO gallery, Barcrelona (20/11/2008)

original version_ Spanish (scroll down for the English version)
Los collages sonoros de Chambliss Giobbi

Al contemplar los fotocollages de Chambliss Giobbi, uno no puede evitar establecer una especie de paralelismo con el universo decadente, grotesco y emocionalmente turbulento de artistas como George Grosz, Francis Bacon y Lucian Freud. Hay algo desolador en todos esos cuerpos ásperos y fragmentados en mil piezas y ángulos, algo que lleva en sí toda la locura cotidiana y el frenesí mediático, como si se tratase de una recolección al azar de aquellas imágenes procedentes del ciberespacio con las que Joan Fontcuberta construye sus “Googlegramas”. Sin embargo, no sería ni mucho menos preciso describir a Chambliss Giobbi como fotógrafo o pintor en el sentido convencional de la palabra. Tanto las múltiples capas de sus composiciones como las cualidades pictóricas de sus personajes delatan nuestros ojos. El hibridismo de sus imágenes es lo que nos lleva un paso más allá de lo que se supone que es lo figurativo, la fotografía y la representación en sí.

Puede ser que todo haya tenido su raíz en aquel instante decisivo de 1998 que produjo la repentina rendición a las artes visuales de quien fue durante años un distinguido compositor de música clásica. Todo sucedió rápidamente: el encuentro con aquel grueso libro que yacía olvidado y polvoriento en el rincón de la librería de Manhattan, la vuelta al estudio, la necesidad obsesiva de recortar, pegar y plasmar minuciosamente nuevos personajes a partir de centenares de rostros en blanco y negro, y, después, la fuga definitiva hacia la fotografía, hacia exhaustivas y largas sesiones con el fin de recopilar más rostros y más ángulos. Rompiendo a trozos y encolando fotografías, dando luz a mutaciones antropomórficas errantes, tapando las fisuras de estos nuevos cuerpos con cera, observando cómo esta última se diluye generando masas y ríos de color… A medio camino entre lo analógico y lo digital, la obra de Chambliss Giobbi vuelve a los orígenes recuperando el collage en sus propiedades más físicas y artesanas.

Si bien han sido muchos los impulsos que han guiado este desfile orgiástico, uno de ellos es especialmente destacable: en la obra de Chambliss Giobbi no hay nada en manos de la suerte. Es más, cada uno de estos retratos está sustentado en un proceso de diálogo e interacción entre el artista y sus modelos. Algunos de ellos son familiares, amigos, incluso Giobbi mismo. Otros (Fisher Stevens, Gina De Palma, Indian Larry, Enigma) son actores, performers, leyendas urbanas de la escena underground de Nueva York, encarnaciones de mitos fabricados por la cultura mediática. Ya sean una cosa u otra, al posar ante su cámara, todos estos seres se revelan como personificaciones de identidad escenificada, puros espectáculos en movimiento. El cruce entre la emotividad y la paranoia mediática convierte el proceso de fotografiar estos personajes —un proceso invisible tal vez para el espectador, pero absolutamente fundamental para la concepción de la composición final— en un estado de éxtasis dionisíaco. Desde luego, la extrema variedad de poses y de ángulos satisface la obsesión insaciable del fotógrafo-voyeur por el cuerpo ajeno, pero también incita al exhibicionismo entre los retratados. De ahí que no sería incorrecto afirmar que el resultado final, la pieza acabada, proporciona el marco para la interpretación performativa de dicha frustración y tensión. Es el artista quien finalmente se ve sometido a la ávida necesidad que tienen estos personajes de exponerse bajo los focos del estrellato.

Como un palimpsesto meticulosamente compuesto al borde de una fragmentación convulsiva, así son las piezas de Giobbi. En ellas, una sola cara o vagina nunca es suficiente. Sin embargo, frente a un cuerpo multiplicado y clonado, los ojos parecen preservar su protagonismo como el elemento permanente y estático de la composición —los ojos en su papel histórico por excelencia como las puertas del alma—, junto a una carne pletórica y sepultada a la vez. Si fuera posible captar el flujo de la sangre en las venas, el pálpito del corazón y los destinos de los párpados, todo esto se hallaría en las imágenes de Giobbi. Tal es su fuerza psicológica. Si el cubismo aspiraba a atestiguar una realidad polifacética con miles de posibilidades, si el futurismo de Boccioni pretendía enseñar un mundo en movimiento y evolución perpetuos, los fotocollages de Giobbi hacen referencia a un universo que ya está irreversiblemente desmembrado y mutilado, a un mundo incapaz de adquirir significado como un todo. Las ideologías están muertas y, con ellas, las partes y el todo. Sólo quedan reflejos y residuos visuales, miles de voces incongruentes y una Babel por descubrir: la Babel que llevamos dentro de nosotros.

Aunque son escasos los elementos en común entre los collages analógicos de Giobbi y el legado de John Heartfield —uno de los pioneros del fotocollage—, un estudio comparativo de los dos artistas estimula un nuevo punto de reflexión crítica sobre el trabajo de Giobbi. Heartfield, en diálogo con George Grosz, fue célebre por sus fotocollages de carácter activista a través de los cuales denunciaba la degeneración individual y colectiva en la época de Weimar, anticipando el inicio de la decadencia y del caos en la Europa de entreguerras. En un contexto similar, la obra de Giobbi, lejos de ser explícitamente política, no deja de estar aferrada a los tiempos que corren y, con ello, resulta algo más que un mero planteamiento de angustia individual. No sólo introduce la problemática del cuerpo humano como un campo de batalla para la identidad y la representación, sino que “somatiza” la frustración, la recesión y la crisis de representación en una ciudad y un mundo tras el 11-S. Como si fueran productos de una peculiar mutación biogenética, los cuerpos de Chambliss Giobbi llevan los síntomas de una enfermedad difícil de diagnosticar pero presente en nuestras vidas. Aunque, a su vez, esos mismos cuerpos dilatados en el espacio y el tiempo, fundidos dentro de su propia matriz, dan lugar a un expresionismo psicológico, albergado en la universalidad de la naturaleza humana.

Así pues, es en la dilatación de un tiempo y un espacio en forma de emociones viscerales donde se encuentra el eje de la sinestesia universal de la que Giobbi viene ocupándose desde sus años de compositor. Y es en una de sus series más recientes (Head of Fisher Stevens, 2007) donde el artista parece alcanzar más claramente su meta. Con la ayuda del “magic sculpt”, un material de plástico, los miembros de sus figuras emergen de la superficie plana como piezas plásticas autónomas a la conquista del espacio. Asimismo, la presencia de una puesta en escena más elaborada complementa la búsqueda de un principio estético más orgánico, capaz de transmitir una realidad en la que lo global y lo natural se funden con lo autorreferencial y lo artificial.

Afán por la simultaneidad y la tridimensionalidad, desafío ante categorizaciones estéticas rígidas y reinvención de la técnica; anulación, transgresión y flujo: la experiencia de la vida. Si antes lo fueron el ritmo y la melodía, ahora para Giobbi lo es la fotografía. Igual que la música fluye en una simultaneidad condensada sin necesidad de ser concebida como un todo, nuestra mirada viaja sin obstáculos por las composiciones del artista neoyorquino. En nuestro camino, nos encontramos con una sinfonía de cuerpos y rostros, proyecciones gráficas de una partitura universal inscrita en el tiempo y en el espacio. Así llegamos a descubrir las piezas de Giobbi en su esencia más absoluta, como estudios psicológicos profundos y turbulentos, como mapas de emotividad y expresividad contenida. Son la totalidad y sus partes colapsándose y naciendo a su vez, son reflejos del mundo que nos rodea, un mundo en constante transmutación. Son collages sonoros perpetuos que fluctúan rítmicamente entre el presente y el pasado, el tú y el yo, la vida y el arte…
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The Sonorous Collages of Chambliss Giobbi

When contemplating the photocollages of Chambliss Giobbi, we cannot help being drawn back to the decadent, grotesque and emotionally turbulent world of artists such as George Grosz, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. There is something so devastating in all these mutilated and cut into a thousand pieces and angles bodies; something that carries within it all the everyday madness and mediatic frenzy, as if a random recollection of visual bits were taking place in the manner of Joan Fontcuberta’s “Googlegramas”. Nevertheless, it would be far from accurate to describe Chambliss Giobbi as a painter or a photographer in the classical sense of the term. Both the multiple layers of his compositions and the pictorial quality of his characters deceive our eyes. It is rather the hybridism of his images that takes a step ahead of what is strictly supposed to be figuration, photography and representation in itself.

Perhaps it all started in that decisive moment back in 1998 when he, who had for years been a distinguished composer of classical music, suddenly surrendered to the visual arts. It all happened fast: The encounter with that forgotten and dusty thick book at a corner of a Manhattan bookstore; the return to the studio; the obsessive need to cut, copy and make new characters out of hundreds of black and white faces; and, finally, the definitive fleeing to photography, to exhaustive photo-sessions recompiling more faces and angles for hours on end. Tearing and gluing prints, giving birth to errant anthropomorphic mutations, applying onto their fissures bees’ wax and watching how this dissolves into new masses and rivers of colour... Half analogue, half digital, the collages of Chambliss Giobbi take us with their physicality back to the origins, to collage in its more primitive essence.

If there have been many impulses for this orgiastic parade, one thing is certain: In the work of Chambliss Giobbi nothing is left to coincidence. What’s more, each one of these portraits is based on a process of interaction and dialogue established between the artist and his models. Some of them are family and friends or even Giobbi himself. Others (Fisher Stevens, Gina De Palma, Indian Larry, Enigma) are actors, performers, urban legends of the NY underground scene, incarnations of myths fabricated by popular culture. Be that as it may, once in front of his camera, all of Giobbi’s subjects are rendered personifications of staged identities, pure spectacles in movement. The crossing of emotion and mediatic paranoia turns the process of photographing these people —a process which may be invisible to the spectator, but so fundamental for the conception of the final composition— into a state of Dionysian ecstasy. The extreme variety of poses and angles obtained by hundreds of shots satisfies the insatiable obsession of the photographer-voyeur for the body of other, but it also incites exhibitionism on behalf of the subject. Following this, it would not be wrong to affirm that the final art piece provides the aesthetic frame for the performative interpretation of such a frustration and tension. It is the artist who becomes subjected to these characters’ avid need for self-exposure under the lights of stardom.

A meticulously composed palimpsest on the verge of a convulsive fragmentation, this is what Giobbi’s pieces are. Within them, a single head or vagina is never enough. Still, opposite a cloned body, the eyes seem to preserve their protagonism as the permanent and static element of the composition; the eyes in their per excellence role as the gates to the soul, alongside a plethoric flesh. If it were possible to capture the blood flow in the veins, the heartbeat and the destiny of each blink, all would be found in Giobbi’s images. Such is their psychological power. If Cubism aspired to bearing testimony to the multifaceted reality of thousands of possibilities, if Boccioni’s Futurism pretended showing the world in movement and perpetual evolution, Giobbi’s photocollages make reference to a universe irreversibly dismembered and mutilated, to a world incapable of assuming significance as a total. Ideologies are dead, and with them the part and the whole. What remains is a handful of visual reflections and residues, thousands of incongruous voices and a Babel to discover; the Babel each of us carries inside.

Although there is little in common between Giobbi’s analogue collages and the legacy of John Heartfield —one of the pioneers of photocollage— a comparative study of both artists propels an interesting, newly formed critical viewpoint for Giobbi’s work. Heartfield, being in a constant intellectual dialogue with George Grosz, is well known for his activist photocollages through which he denounced the individual and collective degeneration of the Weimar period, thus anticipating the beginning of decadence and chaos in the interwar Europe. In a similar way, Giobbi’s work, though far from being explicitly political, is a product of the current times and as such, it results to something more than a plain expression of individual anguish. It does not merely introduce the problematic of the human body as a battlefield for identity and representation. It actually “somatises” all the frustration, recession and crisis of representation as experienced in a city (New York) and a world after 9/11. Subjected into a peculiar biogenetically-like mutation, the bodies of Chambliss Giobbi seem to carry the symptoms of a disease hard to diagnose but present in our lives. At the same time, these very bodies, dilated into space and time, fused in their own raw material, give birth to a profound psychological expressionism, sheltered on the universality of human nature.

It is in the dilatation of a time and a space in the shape of visceral emotions where the core of the universal synaesthesia Giobbi has been dealing with since his time as a composer lies. And it is in his most recent collages, which escape from the flat aluminium panels, emerging as autonomous sculptural elements, where the artist seems to be clearly approaching his goal. Likewise, the presence of a more elaborate mise-en-scene in other recent works, such as Portrait of Fisher Stevens II, 1997, complement his search for a more organic space; a space capable of transmitting a reality in which the global and the natural is fused with the self-referential and the artificial.

Longing for simultaneity and three-dimensionality, challenging rigid aesthetic categorizations, reinventing technique. Transgression and flow: the experience of life. If melody and rhythm meant everything to Giobbi before, now it is photography. In the same way that the music flows without any need to be conceived as a total in a condensed simultaneity, our gaze travels through Giobbi’s compositions without any obstacles. In our way, we encounter ourselves with a symphony of bodies and faces, graphic projections of a universal score inscribed on time and space. We thus reach to discover Giobbi’s artworks on their most absolute essence: as profound turbulent psychological studies, as maps of condensed emotiveness and expressiveness. They are the whole and its parts, collapsing and rising to birth at the same time. They are the mirrors of the world that surrounds us, a world in a constant transmutation. They are perpetual sonorous collages fluctuating between the past and the present, individual and collective self, life and art…