No Absolutes
Contemporary Art from the Region
October 8, 2000 - January 7, 2001
Catalogue Essay - Luis Gutierrez
Luis Gutierrez
Luis Gutiérrez contrasts comfort with violence. Gutiérrez made the photographs
in the series, The Six O’Clock News, from television coverage of
the Pope’s visit to Santiago de Chile in 1987. The event triggered violence
in the streets as protesters, armed with signs that read, “Here in Chile,
there is torture,” attempted to get the attention of the Pope. Their goal
was to alert him to the repression under August Pinochet’s dictatorship.
Gutiérrez remarks that he was struck by the proximity that he felt to
the events, yet he was protected from the brutality as he worked in his
studio, watching the news. The use of long exposure transforms the images
toward abstraction, so that the arm of a protester being carted away by
the police becomes an abstract stroke of color across the image. Like
Arismendi, Gutiérrez offers beauty as an antidote, yet he also uses that
beauty to seduce us into remembering that this brutality exists and merits
our attention and refusal.
Gutiérrez reminds us of the fragility of life and portrays the way in which we can embrace contradictory systems of thinking in his installation that is also a memorial to a Cuban sugar-cane cutter. Gutiérrez never met the man who was killed by the machine that cuts the cane. He was at a farm soon after the event occurred, when everyone working on the field was vividly aware that their intense work was done at the risk of their lives. The sense of shared risk and responsibility that characterizes the spirit of the sugar cooperative is reflected in the photographs of those affected by the loss of a compañero and friend.
In the installation, Gutiérrez memorializes the man and places two ofrendas at his head and feet, representing two sustaining belief systems existing in Cuba. At his feet is an altar to Marxism and socialism. A radio that viewers activate plays “The Internationale,” the anthem of socialist countries everywhere. The slogan of the Cuban Revolution comes to mind: “Patria or Muerte,” fatherland or death. At his head is an Afro-Cuban altar. The deity Ogun is central to the arrangement, the orisha who protects those who are close to sharp instruments and use tools. The piece embraces the contradictions between socialism and the afro-Cuban system, as so many other contradictions are accepted in the contemporary world. On the one hand is the “rationalized” vision of social organization that socialism purports to offer, on the other, the afro-Cuban system that organizes nature into spiritual forces. And suspended between these two systems is the reality of life and death.
Marilyn A. Zeitlin
Director/Chief Curator
Arizona State University Art Museum
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For more information contact John Spiak at spiak@asu.edu.
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