miércoles

Gallery openings in New York tend to be hushed, respectful affairs. An opening in BA is positively raucous by comparison. Two exhibits debuted at the Ruth Benzacar Gallery on Wednesday night. The gallery occupies two below-ground floors at the head of Calle Florida, a commercial area that is both literally and figuratively pedestrian.

On my way to the show I was twice detoured: once by a crowd of excited photographers and onlookers outside a theater on Avenida Corrientes (the celebrity, whoever it was, remained invisible from across the street) and once because a Peronist-Environmentalist protest had blockaded Calle Florida, transforming it into something decidedly less pedestrian, in both senses of the word.

In the gallery, the two exhibits could not have been more different. On the bottom floor, an installation of trash by Leopoldo Estol y amigos. There is nothing remarkable about this trash, other than that it includes many dead leaves and some of it is hanging from the ceiling. Also you can walk around in it, which people do not usually do with trash. The exhibit is called "La Mañana de ese Mundo," but its only principle is clutter, and not of a particularly interesting kind.

A crowd has turned out for the opening, making it difficult to move up and down the staircase, and I am of course as interested in people-watching as I am in trash-compacting. It's an all-ages event, from babies in strollers to elderly men in baggy suits with grey hair slicked back to cover the napes of their necks. The women are chic, but in a completely unfussy way, wearing t-shirts and jeans with a good pair of shoes, or knit dresses and necklaces. Everyone has bare arms, and many are carrying backpacks. The French word for gallery opening or private view is vernissage, which literally means polished. At this vernissage, it's wine that brings the glow to the surface, as everyone polishes off the glasses the servers bring around.

Upstairs, in Flavia Da Rin's mannerist images, guests at a young boy's funeral disport themselves conventionally, and to Da Rin what is the same thing, inappropriately. Oskar, named after Herman Hesse's Oskar Matzerath, is seen in monotone, weakly blowing out the candle on a birthday cake or lying silent and feverish in his sickbed. Or else he semi-transparently haunts other frames as a colorful but silent and gaze-returning specter. The mourners wear black and carry garishly-colored accessories as they smirk and flirt and primp and even shriek, always, always looking to see who's watching. Melodrama is the order of the day, and just as grief is the magnifying glass for so many other emotions, so the mourners' bodies are distorted, their heads enlarged with enormous, glistening eyes (tearful or scheming or both), and their arms elongated, culminating in grotesquely large knuckles.

Are these photographs, or paintings, or what? Their style is derivative of John Currin, but their texture conveys a distinct sense of the fantastic. The creamy or ghastly skin tones and the crisp details in the clothing could only have been captured with a camera, but the hair is painted on, marbled, almost, in its highlights, and the scale of perspective is hardly realistic. The figures and the strange, misty, marshy, meadowy, mountainous nature against which they're set are fully synthetic. Even the nymphs, who explode in an orgy of color along one wall of the gallery, and the ghost band, whose music is like perfectly pitched gossip to the living girls who convulse in agonized delight, are wrapped up in their performance of frantic or mournful elation.

This is not a very charitable view of performance, limited as it is to hypocrisy and opportunism. Oskar is skeptical and suspicious of the nymphs who fawn over him in the shimmering otherworld, where his corpsely pallor turns up the saccharine in the rainbow hues. Da Rin takes her cues from Cindy Sherman and photographs herself exclusively--pre-Photoshop, she is parent, grandparent, nymph, Oskar, and all--but where Sherman's target is conventions of representation, Da Rin is content to skewer merely her own viewers. She describes the event she depicts as "entierro-vernissage," or burial-opening. While she may want her viewers to see themselves in the absurd delirium of her photos, it is a bit ungenerous to suggest that they are more interested in each other than in the object they have convened around. Even if that's true (and as far as my interested eye can see, it's not: people are studying and photographing and talking about what's on display), comparing one's own project to a pint-size haunt manages the neat trick of declaring it simultaneously dead and alive, disavowing and proclaiming its importance in the same breath. We have not gathered here tonight to mourn the dead, and our liveliness is not a source of shame. Art is not merely an occasion, but that it is an occasion that brings people together does not discredit it.





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Buenos Aires: Where Zizek is a disco, and Disco is a supermarket.