Notes for Echoing Chingazos in the Echo Chamber;
a show scheduled for early February 2006
at Tropico de Nopal Gallery- Art Space
(this color indicates newly added items)
*I’d like to see a folk harp player at the opening, playing classic and contemporary Mexican and Chicano standards. Busting out endless cacophonous rolas, I mean the baddest ass jams you could ever hear, and they would arrive in your ear like a million furies- each note cascading down into a deluge- string overlapping upon string in a wicked playlist-
The harp is like the geodic lens- hard falling and multivalent. Wrenching off what covers, what covers, what covers
*The artist talk should be organized so that I’m lower, at least 2 feet lower than everybody else- whether we can do this by elevating the audience chairs or by putting me in a miniature seat.
* In the process of putting together this show, I’d like to employ particular techniques that might or might not have to do with art making. These things might sound stupid, non-sensical or inappropriate, but I would like to mesh them into the practice of putting this thing together and into the aesthetic of the show, which I would like to be unusual in every aspect.
The themes and elements of the work should somehow overlap or even interfere with each-other, creating new hybrid ideas or patterns out their interrelations- much like a moiré pattern.
The show should be entirely built up then flattened, articulated then dispersed, meaning should be delineated then cast away leaving its traces as the subject. It’s a matter of luck and timing that will dictate at just which state each particular art piece will be stopped at.
I especially take to the suggestion that mystery is an object/idea which has been poked opened with many holes. There should be many holes/corridors in the conceptual structure of the exhibiition.
Every element should adhere to the magical practice of metaphor, illuminosity and ephemerality, where the “real” nature of the object will be undermined by the illegitimacy or incomprehensibility of it.
Furthermore, every element should adhere to the overarching principals of cyclical and ascending dualities, the micro, meso and macro cosmos that are the foundations of alchemical systems.
* A mural could be painted in the gallery, accompanied by an altered, aged photo of Eufencio looking on as the "artist" paints the mural
* A pamphlet could be placed among the various artworks detailing how all of the mythology surrounding Eufencio Rojas and his collection are false- "The Real Truth About 'The Doctor'" expounding on how Eufencio's real name is Alberto Ruiz and that he's a washed up MTA administrator, that El Huracan is a two bit plagiarist from Whittier who was hired by Ruiz to make "art" which he then had fradulently appraised at a high value in order to get tax write-offs etc. etc.
* Charles Mingus described the idea of statements in music in terms of conversation: One doesn't begin a conversation by saying every word at the same time. There are introductions, formalities which proceed to small talk other niceties and then eventually to the meat of a conversation and the phasing out of that conversation. This arch could be applied to all forms of music, from the micro of a solo to the whole of composing. How does this apply to an exhibition? How is an exhibition a composition? How is time honored in an exhibition?
* I would like to see some of that formality in evidence for this show- little formalities acting as entry ways to less civilized or contain(able)ed ideas and outbursts. Corridors, tunnels and entry ways made of humor and metaphor, habitual phrases and cliches, which somehow lead to the ecstatic.
* The show could also be constructed as a variation on a Cabinet of Wonders. Instead of a collection of wondrous and "possesible" objects that reflect the harnessability of magical nature, this Cabinet or Room of Wondrous Misery will be filled with objects in transition, self-contradicting objects, things that refuse to cohere into a possession that rationality can quantify. Whereas the Cabinet of Wonders is about satiating some need for owning and understanding magical nature, thi cabinet or room could be filled with the static of the opposite, the blast of unresolved, unownable, un-understandable and frusterating objects.
* These objects, unresolved and dispersed have a monstrosity to them- instead of existing they shift- built into them is a living contradiction which, depending on which "side" of the contradiction is winning, alters the meaning, or perception of the object.
* Interference and lack of cohesion are themes- I would like to see the chaos left unresolved and left to attract itself into shapes formed by randomness and organic processes. I hope that this will be the total opposite of how an artist is supposed to create.
* Along those same lines, drawing and papier-mache lack the cutting sharpness of photography and furniture- the dirt of incidence and the viscerality of street sludge and chaos, The show has to be sharp and stoic, with blank cabinetry and whispers of vegetation creeping into domestic settings- the terror of healing via the terror of remnants, of looking glass or bubbly horror- photos layed out on a table, photocopies, cabinets and shelving, old furniture, stuff butting up against other stuff in bad feng shui- negative spaces should suck the air right out of the room and your lungs- sparseness and sharpness (gallery design) courting a certain disaster as if the mineral/vegetal/elemental/organic chaos of natural order is about to crush, or better yet, has taken a quick break and is about to resume its casual devastation of the silly and trivial white cube... that should really be lingering in the air.
* The goal is to maintain a certain hardness, a cerain crystalline vision and maintain it throughout the show in every medium.
This means:
- Fotos are seamless and dirty
- papier mache is precise or generalized but always architectural- in fact, architectural structure should take precedence over figuration
- Wall drawings should be at once schematic (didactic) and somewhat antique or dirty- and organized on the wall so that each drawing is isolated from the other, as if each specimen was in a different cubicle on a shelf.
- fotocopies should be thought of as "preserved" or "salvaged"
- sculpture should be in various stages of completion
- Furthermore, there should be a general balance struck between unfinished (foolish)pieces and beautifully (realized) ones.
* The goal is to set up a structure in the gallery to extrapolate off of as time allows
* It's important to view the exhibition as an isolated culture of the work. The process of creation and change is always occuring outside the artworld/gallery etc. This exhibition should be seen as an isolated sampling of the ongoing work- like a scientific culture, it remains alive and changing, but somehow separated from the main stream of the work