Exhibition invitation.

Catalog text

The simulation of Nadin and Simpson

Javier Gil

Catalog of the exhibition BIZARROS Y CRITICOS, Gallery Arte 19, Bogota, August 1993.

Nadín Ospina gives us in his surprising exhibition recently aged pieces, recently "pre- Columbianized". It gathers hippopotamuses, crocodiles and turtles extracted from toys of massive circulation; heads and figures of the famous Simpson's character in poses that resemble the strength, frontality and timelessness of the pre-Columbian statuary. This series of elements are arranged with the utmost aesthetic rigor, simulating the presence of an artistic or anthropological space. The artificial figures, elaborated with the greatest technical precision, reveal the fissures, cracks and discolorations that time imprints on ancient objects. By virtue of this, the exhibition produces in us the strangeness of what is and is not at the same time, of the serious and the ironic, of the real and the simulated.

Several reflections, then, can be derived from the artistic operations performed by Nadín Ospina:

- Around the artist. The artist disappears in his classical condition linked to good work, style, authorship, to a unique and individual personality.

None of that is perceived on this occasion, a new concept of artist is insinuated, the one who operates on things already made, an operator of conceptual order from minimal interventions. Almost the artistic merit -in its classic sense- corresponds to the artisan with admirable technique. 

- It exposes the generalized simulation that characterizes our time. Baudrillard has indicated that we are witnessing the end of the real - original and the consequent staging of the simple sign of things. From truth to appearance, from art to artifice. Simulacra, folds and unfolding of a simulation that no longer hides anything, but simply announces the legitimacy of the logic of the simulacrum. It makes us see the production of "authenticity", the new industry of "authenticity", the genuine production of "past", being more and more evident our happy coupling to that logic. We no longer seek original truths, we settle for simulations. Artificiality of the natural, naturalness of artifice. The cultured and the popular are paired in this attitude, the difference lies in the fact that some opt for art reproductions or artificial flowers, while the "cultured" groups opt for pieces that strive to look original, unique, old, perfect, plausible.

Even within this logic, the common desire for differentiation and distinction persists.

- From the same strategy of simulation, he produces a critical commentary on how culture is produced by the museum. It simulates an anthropological space to make evident from within -and with its own logic- the artifices and fictions hidden behind the presumed innocence of the museum. On the one hand, the anthropological museum commemorates the past as legitimate and sacred in the face of a profane and relatively vulgar present. This leads to the fetishization and fixation of culture in certain decontextualized "objects", stripped of their vital links and their daily "work". The anthropological exhibition, by means of this abstraction, endows the objects with a logic, a grammar and an aesthetic that is alien to them. In passing, it produces a concept of culture that is indifferent to everyday practices and experiences and is limited to objects to be kept, contemplated and disseminated as "works of art". This derives directly from the places and forms of exhibition.

-In this chain of simulacra the artist makes a simulacrum of himself. In previous opportunities he has shown his work with a "serious" artistic disposition. Today he parodies himself, creates a space similar to the previous ones, with the same aesthetic neatness, but with a different attitude.

-The closeness of the cultured and the popular is shown, once again, through the idea of collecting. While the "cultured" man collects, thinks he collects or pretends to collect originals, the common man collects -perhaps with less differentiating eagerness- prints or images from the mass media. The magnificent image of a pre- Columbian Simpson allows us to think of a similar attitude between the collector of "originals" and the collector of mass images.

It also gives us food for thought in other directions: New deities coming from the world, from the mass-media?, networks of contamination of images and times?, absolute proximity of all things in the postmodern era?, mockery of certain values?, criticism of a presumed, original, and uncontaminated identity, putting in its place the syncretism that the same identity suffers with diverse images and times?.

Perhaps today there is more identification with the images of the mass media than with a remote and unmodifiable identity.

In any case, the serialized reproduction of Simpson men, beyond the smile that its allusion awakens in critics, is an object that reveals the deterritorialization of contemporary culture. This figure synthesizes the unique product with industrial production, the original with the massive, the sacred with the everyday, the past with the present, the popular with the elitist, the fleeting with the permanent. It merges the most radically different, making explicit their unexpected proximities, we could almost say that the pre-Columbian Simpson becomes a happily mocking and playful symbol of many of today's cultural displacements.

Magazin Dominical of El Espectador. Text by Alvaro Medina

Poliester Magazine. December 1995. Text by Carolina Ponce de León

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