Transparent Scenarios - Inigo Manglano-Ovalle

Art in America, Oct, 2000 by Michael Rush

Architecture is one of the many preoccupations of Chicago-based artist Inigo Manglano-Ovalle. In a pair of recent video installations he combined minimalist metal structures with oblique narratives shot in buildings designed by Mies van der Rohe.

Cathedrals of high modernism such as Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building in New York have had powerful reverberations in contemporary art, even though Minimalist Donald Judd thought at one point that art and architecture should never be mentioned in the same breath. That's a sentiment with which Inigo Manglano-Ovalle does not agree. Architecture as a means of exploring human identity preoccupied the 39-year-old Chicago artist in two highly visible venues in New York last spring: the Whitney Biennial and a solo exhibition at Max Protetch Gallery. Born in Madrid and raised in Bogota and Chicago, Manglano-Ovalle has gained recognition over the last several years for installation work that has involved such diverse material as human genetic research data, sensory deprivation tanks and car sound systems. For the recent New York exhibitions, he presented video installations that were characterized by a sleek minimalism. In each work, thin polished aluminum bars and tautly strung wires provided open structures within which projection screens were suspended like sheets on a very upscale clothesline.

The architectural links were most apparent in the Bennial's Le Baiser/The Kiss, shot at Mies's Farnsworth House in Plano, Ill. Upon entering the darkened gallery occupied by the piece, viewers were immediately met by the lush color of a videotaped autumn scene: huge trees full of intensely yellow leaves, seen through the open expanse of the glass-walled Farnsworth House, sway gently in a breeze. The video, viewable from both sides of the screen, is so alive with color and movement that it feels like another being in the room. It's only slowly, as the eyes adjust to the surrounding darkness, that the outlines of the aluminum structure make themselves known as schematic version of the facade of the building in the video.

The all-glass exterior of Mies's house, which was built for Chicago physician Dr. Edith Farnsworth in 1951, becomes like a blank canvas upon which Manglano-Ovalle, paints his scenario. Dressed in gray overalls and an orange hat, the artist appears in his video as a window washer, working his squeegee across house's vast expanse of glass, Inside the house, an androgynous figure in a red jumpsuit and wearing headphones stands at a portable, DJ station. Despite the transparency of the glass separating them, neither character acknowledges the other--the social worlds they inhabit are apparently too far apart.

An eerie silence permeates the segments shot from inside the house, Anticipating doom, as cinema has trained us to do when such bucolic scenes appear on a screen, we fear for the house's solitary, vulnerable occupant at the hands of the relentless workman. Nothing untoward happens, of course. In fact, nothing much happens at all. If the window-washer is trying to seduce the person in red with suggestive wiping movements, he gets no response. When the camera shoots from outside, ambient noises of crackling leaves or of the squeegee on glass combined with the droning sound of a guitar solo make for a more easygoing mood.

Throughout Le Baiser/The Kiss, the glass walls of the Farnsworth House act as an impassable divide between the worker and the inhabitant of this stylish dwelling, who never acknowledges the hired hand who helps keep the surroundings so clean and desirable. For Manglano-Ovalle, apparently, this separation encapsulates class distinctions in contemporary society. This polemic, and the implications it holds for how we view modernist architecture, might be lost on some viewers given the sheer beauty of the piece. The strong visual impact of the work is enhanced by the artist's practice of shooting with a wide-format digital video camera and then transferring the tapes to DVD for projection. Among other things, Manglano-Ovalle's virtuosic use of the medium reminds us how far video art has come in terms of lushness of image.

Climate, at Max Protetch, was an even cooler presentation of a mysterious narrative or, in this case, three narratives involving a set of unrelated characters: a surrogate mother, two futures analysts who predict markets based on weather forecasts, and a gun fetishist. The scenes, which were filmed inside another Mies building--an apartment house on North Lake Shore Drive in Chicago--are fragments from a larger, as yet unrealized narrative conceived by the artist. As in the Whitney Biennial piece, the videos were projected onto horizontal-format screens suspended from open aluminum frameworks whose proportions and placement echoed the windows in Mies's design.

There was an overriding sense of tension in the projected images. Circulating among the three screens were shots of a man's hands obsessively cleaning and fondling a semiautomatic weapon, scenes of two men in suits visibly preoccupied with some encroaching danger, and a view of a young woman uncertain about the impending birth of her child.