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Gego: exploding the field
Art Journal, Winter, 2007 by Monica Amor
Nadja Rottner and Peter Weibel, eds. Gego 1957-1988: Thinking the Line. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2006. 240 pp., 62 color ills., 111 b/w. $55 paper.
Mari Carmen Ramirez, Catherine de Zegher, Robert Storr, and Josefina Manrique. Gego: Between Transparency and the Invisible. Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. 256 pp., 85 color ills., 25 b/w. $50 paper.
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The number of publications devoted to the work of the Venezuelan artist Gego (Getrud Goldschmidt, 1912-1994) in the last five years has suddenly repositioned her as a figure to reckon with in the fields of postwar drawing and sculpture. Her presence in group exhibitions, the recent surveys devoted to the artist, and her increasing appearance in classrooms all pose important questions about canon formation and about the idiosyncratic dynamics of a field exposed to the uneven dialogues between an entrenched conservatism, still pronounced in certain areas such as academia, and practices open to artistic and aesthetic paradigms that deviate from mainstream art-historical narratives. Last year alone, four exhibitions and corresponding catalogues highlighting specific areas of Gego's artistic production appeared: Gego 1957-1988: Thinking the Line, curated by Nadja Rottner and Peter Weibel (which paired Gego's work with that of artist Ruth Vollmer); Gego: Between Transparency and the Invisible, curated by Mari Carmen Ramirez (which emphasized the artist's dedication to drawing); Gego: Defying Structures, curated by myself and Bartomeu Mari (which focused on her second, most important environmental work, the Chorros of the early 1970s); and Gego: Architect, curated by Hannia Gomez (devoted to Gego's public works and architectural background). Here, I will address the first two publications, which follow the classical format of exhibition catalogues, with essays by guest writers, a section of plates, a chronology, and a bibliography on the artist. Thinking the Line also includes interviews and criticism by contemporaries of Gego, sufficient to give the reader a taste of the local reception of her work, but not enough to make this section representative of the enthusiastic responses Gego generated in the Venezuelan intelligentsia. This gesture of inclusion, though, is crucial, as it gives voice to important interpreters of Gego's work whose words, in the recent literature, tend to be obscured by Alfred H. Barr, Jr.'s one-time (unrecorded) comment on Gego's "parallactical charm." (1)
Bruno Bosteels opens Thinking the Line with a text that attends to issues of inclusion and exclusion. His introduction summarizes debates of the 1990s that emphasize the pitfalls of geographic categorization in the arts and problematizes the linguistic/conceptual hierarchies in which Latin American art is inscribed--the latter always rendered the marked term of the unmarked/marked binary and therefore implicitly considered incomplete or lesser. Bosteels's excursus on modernity, colonialism, and the politics of neoliberalism concludes with doubts regarding Gego's public-art works, situated as they are (or were) in banks, shopping malls, "and other monuments to the world of global marketing and finance" (24). Abruptly, Bosteels decides not to address these works--which among Gego's critics have received little or no attention, presumably because many of these critics have never been to Caracas to see them in situ, or because they indeed are sometimes radically different from her more vulnerable and radical environments and drawings. Instead he turns to Gego's best-known works (the series Reticulareas, Trunks, Streams, Drawings without Paper, and others) which he evokes in tandem with various theoretical tropes: "purport" (Louis Hjelmslev), "diagram," "rhizome," and "immanence" (Deleuze), "discipline" and "control" (Foucault, Deleuze), and "suture," (Jacques-Alain Miller). These are provocative suggestions, no doubt, but instead of leading to a close and elaborated reading of specific works, Bosteels dwells on three major themes treated repeatedly in the literature on Gego: the rhizomatic, the organic and constructivist models, and the status of the subject/viewer. (2) These references echo arguments rehearsed by a host of international critics who have paid little attention to the local or contemporary reception of the work, raising, in passing, questions about amnesia and obliteration in the canonization of noncanonical figures and their concomitant cultural and geographical contexts.
In the same catalogue, Juan Ledezma takes up the issue of the medium in Gego's work to assert the artist's materialist drive and ponder the collective dimension produced by her work. He does this through the lens of prewar constructivism by tracking themes relevant to Gego's work such as the organic and constructivist models (again), the engagement with architectural space, and the viewer's interaction with the work (one in which the spectator's moment of recognition or conceptual clarity, produced in the viewing of classic constructivist works such as Aleksandr Rodchenko's Spatial Constructions, is frustrated). Yet the prewar constructivist practices that are Ledezma's frame of reference--aesthetic and productive models that in dialogue with a revolutionary culture redefined the art object in terms of functionality--are at odds with the ingrained "failure" (from a utopian standpoint) inscribed in Gego's Reticulareas and Drawings without Paper. To be fair, Ledezma attends to the public dimension of Gego's work, an element which can indeed be compared to constructivism's emphasis on collective reception, as long as historical differences are kept under check. Furthermore, through an allusion to the formative role of transrational language in constructivism, Ledezma makes alterity, defamiliarization, and the suspension of conventions the foundation of a new public space common to constructivism and Gego's work. This emphasis on a public, social reading of Gego's work, associated with the status of the subject in it, is one of the characteristic traits of the recent literature on Gego. It implies a displacement from tectonics to an "expanded field" that alters our traditional understanding of the effect and affect of works of art.
