"Artists in Trance" at Rice University

Art in America, Jan, 1998 by Thomas McEvilley

"Artists In Trance: New Methodologies in work with the `Other'in Latin American Art" was organized by two artists, Abdel Hernandez and Surpik Angelini, with the collaboration of anthropologist George Marcus. Over a period of three months, various performances and lectures were presented along with three exhibitions which were installed in different venues on the campus of Rice University. In the exhibitions, five Latin American artists, along with one American artist of Venezuelan descent, attempted to push the postmodern or multiculturalist association of art and anthropology to a new limit. Hernandez aptly called the project a "workshop for experimental ethnography."

In the gallery of the School of Architecture, Ernesto Leal of Cuba and Juan Jose Olavarria of Venezuela installed a complex work titled Discussion with Betara Desa. In part a parody of ethnological displays in natural-history museums, the installation, whose title refers to a Balinese goddess, sought to reverse conventional ethnographical practice, which traditionally has seen the West as the Self and the rest of the world as the Other. To this end, the artists presented exhibits which treated Houston as a primitive society filled with unaccountable strangeness, from cowboy culture to NASA.

In the Media Center Gallery, Venezuelan-American Surpik Angelini's piece, Psyche's Ethnographic Report, diverted or displaced ethnography through internalizing it. In effect treating her own unconscious as Other, Angelini presented a series of exquisite collage works of cut-up photographs and drawings depicting a journey into the mythic underworld. Nearby was Venezuelan artist Juan Carlos Rodriguez's Installed Ethnography of Barrio la Bandera, in which he collected used materials -- bed sheets and blankets, clothesline, wooden poles from barrio roofs, and so on -- from a Caracas neighborhood in trade for new objects of a similar nature. Transported to Houston, the used objects were installed in a complex labyrinthine structure. On each item was the name of the person from whom Rodriguez obtained it.

Cuban Abdel Hernandez and Venezuelan Fernando Calzadilla installed a massive, painstaking and intricate work called The market from here. The work was based on the artists' anthropological field work in two Caracas markets where they got to know the street vendors. The pair then transported selected parts of the markets -- a stall of herbal and magical potions, a display of ladies' dresses, a mass of old shoes, and so on -- to Houston, where the stalls were meticulously reconstituted. The diorama-style installation occupied a structure of rope and plastic with a floor of ancient scarred boards, and was laid out like a mini-cathedral with nave and transept. Dim light that seemed to have been filtered through parchment and an amplified recording of the sounds of the market added to the atmosphere. The installation also included texts in which vendors addressed themselves to visitors, some recounting experiences of living in the streets and fleeing from the police, some critically or challengingly addressing us, the northern Other. One of the briefer statements was also one of the most vivid: on the wooden chopping block in the herbal merchant's shop was a sign saying, This is the table where I cut your image."

The relationship between ethnography and art has been in flux for a century. Throughout this period, Western ethnography has been looking at art objects from other cultures, but in this ambitious show, artists examined ethnographic practice. This is perhaps the most extreme reversal yet in the ongoing dialogue between these two disciplines.