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Gego: exploding the field
Art Journal, Winter, 2007 by Monica Amor
Two contrasting articles, one by Hannah Feldman arguing for a multinational reading of Gego's work, and another by Julieta Gonzalez favoring its association with its social local context, complement the texts discussed above. The first rehearses ideas set forth by Marta Traba concerning Venezuelan geometric abstraction's apparent disregard for the country's social ills and concomitant quest for cultural and infrastructural modernity. While Feldman describes these works' unwillingness to deal with their "mess[y] historical circumstances" (61), Gego used the word messy (in English) in her sketches to define some of the pieces that made up the Reticuldrea. Of course this line of thought does not indicate a desire to deal directly with social context, but it suggests Gego's distance from the technoscientific orientations of kineticism--a distance that critics contemporaneous to the work and more recent local reviewers have been at pains to describe. (6) Feldman rightly notes that Gego's work calls for a layered and complex reading that takes into account her experiences of displacement, exile, and, I would add, otherness (let's not forget that in addition to her status as immigrant, she was a woman, and not a young one when she produced her most successful work). Aren't these conditions what trigger such strong affinities between Gego's work and the projects of emigre artists such as Mira Schendell, Eva Hesse, Yayoi Kusama, and (as the exhibition from which this catalogue ensues suggests) RuthVollmer? Signaled by the experience of displacement, these works seem to be engaged in a poetics of unhomeliness, a flight from the certainty of medium-specificity and spatial monumentality, toward an aesthetic practice of material vulnerability, and, as Bosteels and Cabanas suggest, of immanence. But I cannot agree with Feldman's assertion that "the efforts made to assert Gego's national identity as seamlessly Venezuelan reflect not only the concerns of market economies, but also, and precisely, the discomfort that indeterminate categories of being arouse in societies conditioned to subsume difference" (63). Traba, for one, was happy to define Gego's work as European, while in my own writings I have forcefully argued for what has been called a "local" reading of the work--I prefer to designate it an architectonic reading that neither excludes a nomadic one nor allies itself with the national. (7) As notes from her teaching indicate, Gego was an attentive observer of her urban surroundings, so it was the disruptive and precarious logic of the work, along with Gego's emphasis on basic sheltering, that led me to read her work as a figuration of the urban disarray of the city and the shantytowns that border it. (8)
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Finally, a series of poetic comments on Gego's knotting and linking procedures, written by Luis Enrique Perez Oramas, wraps up this well-rounded publication, fully illustrated with Gego's by now well-known works. The book is, no doubt, a serious contribution to the literature on Gego by a group of young scholars genuinely interested in understanding the specificity of this artist's work and its situation within the history of postwar art.
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