| Miguel Angel Rios
by Raul Zamudio
The impulse to purify media is one of the central
utopian gestures of modernism—
W.J.T. Mitchell
In his essay "The Artist as Ethnographer," the
critic Hal Foster argues that the anthropological framing of modernism by way of cultural
studies as well the waning of art history and its historiography, partially resulted from
the interdisciplinary methodologies that came under the rubric of visual culture. One
argument resides in the latter’s supposed construal of the artwork as part of visual
culture thus exapnding its limitations to the field of art history. Through this
ostensible lack of differentiation art has no greater value than any other form of visual
production, whether this production takes the form of television programs or canonized
works of "high" art. This collapsing of one into the other was also indicative
of certain anthropological paradigms that situated all material production—including
art—of traditional non-European cultures as existing on the same level. In other
words, since in these traditional non-European cultures the artwork was non-existent due
to its social function as a unit in a larger societal whole, then the work could not be
categorized as art per se. For the traditional non-European artwork is first and foremost
an object that has use value rather than symbolic value, and in doing so, negates the
Western notion of the autonomy of the art object. The question of art’s symbolic
value has been one of the armatures that Western aesthetics has historically rested. The
problem roughly sketched above, then, is one of aesthetics. Or more cogently voiced by the
Marxist literary theorist Terry Eagleton, is that the issue writ large in the tension
between these two different modes of locating the art object, either as art or artifact,
evinces what he terms the "Ideology of the Aesthetic."
Interestingly enough, Miguel Angel Rios’ installation
titled "The Children that Spring out at Night," which has been seen to operate
as a critique of the so-called "White Cube," also addresses aesthetics and its
ideological formation. The question of whether Rios’ installation undermines the
"White Cube" is certainly an integral component to it, though it still
necessitates that it be conceptualized in much more complex registers than just a work of
institutional interrogation. The concept of the "White Cube" is ultimately a
philosophical question predicated on both what lies inside and outside of it. In regards
to what resides inside, the isolated artwork is presumably freed ontologically from the
social world that it is a part. As a cultural institution that is part and parcel of a
broader social circuit, the "White Cube" as museum, gallery etc, is always
embedded in the social by virtue of its historical existence. Thus one issue is
ontological, that is to say, what is it that defines the status of the art object, while
the other can be epistemological where the "White Cube" is part of a social
circuit that cultivates knowledge that is particularly ideologically invested. Rios’
work thematically engages these concerns, yet one can equally and deservedly so, posit
Rios’ installation as addressing other narratives of a denser and expansive
philosophical nature. One strategy in accomplishing this is that "The Children that
Spring out at Night" calls into question the viewer, both layman and specialist
alike, to reflexively think on these subjects by virtue of their phenomenological
implication in the work as soon as one enters the installation.
For though the installation initially works by way of what
Duchamp called the retinal in art in that "The Children that Spring out at
Night’ is a visually powerful work, it also demands the body’s participation.
One enters the installation and is induced into a vertiginous state not so much by the
presence of the visual as it is by its absence, for the optical experience of the work is
immediately pulled out from under one’s feet, if you will. This is evident in the
dark cavernous entrance where chanting is heard via a native Mexican language that reaches
cacophonous levels. It is here that one initially encounters the Other. The Other in the
context of this essay has less to do with the anthropological dichotomies of
foreign/native, European/non-European, but more to do with the hegemony of the eye as the
artistic experiential locus par excellence as it meets its Other in the form of its aural
counterpart.
In Rios’ installation, hearing becomes more than a
part of an aesthetic experience but is also a commentary on how cultures use different
forms of knowledge acquisition. "The Children that Spring out at Night" is thus
an adamant attack on Western epistemology by way of its most sacred cow: the eye. At the
same time, by virtue of its theme of hallucinogens it offers other possibilities of being
that underlines its ontological focus on Being. The paradox that Rios so poetically
articulates in this register is that being in "The Children that Spring out at
Night," is not only about the art object, but equally important, it is about its
beholder as well.
Raul Zamudio is an art historian, critic and independent
curator. His essays have appeared in the Encyclopedia of Sculpture and in exhibition
catalogs as well as in Zingmagazine, Art Nexus, Estilo, Part,
Journal of the West, Trans, NYARTS and Art Tribune.
His recent shows have been "The Parallax Hotel" November 2000 and
"Loompanics/Bik Van der Pol" June 2001. |
