{"id":2485,"date":"2020-06-29T21:41:06","date_gmt":"2020-06-29T21:41:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nadinospina.org\/?page_id=2485"},"modified":"2020-06-29T21:41:06","modified_gmt":"2020-06-29T21:41:06","slug":"magin-dominical-de-el-espectador-marzo-de-1994","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/nadinospina.org\/en\/magin-dominical-de-el-espectador-marzo-de-1994\/","title":{"rendered":"Mag\u00edn Dominical de El Espectador. Marzo de 1994."},"content":{"rendered":"
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Nadin Ospina: Refigurations by Alvaro Medina<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

We know what the reflexive verb (figure) means and what the semantic implications of (configure) are. When we imagine, we fulfill the process of imagining something that later, in order for it to materialize, we go on to configure. However, in the work of Nad\u00edn Ospina, we must speak of (refiguring), a word that contains the notion of re-figuring what has already been done or pre-exists. \nTo re-figure something artistically is an attitude adjacent to that of the ready made. The ready made consists of intervening an object and leaving it transformed, after a change of context and meaning, into a work of art. It's come a long way since Marcel Duchamp conceived the first ready made. However, it is one thing to alter a banal object with the purpose of turning it into a work of art, and quite another to take what is already considered a work of art and appropriate it with the purpose of altering its characteristics and even its authorship. This is what happened when Duchamp put mustaches on Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, a fruitful daring that Robert Rauschenberg elevated exponentially when he took a drawing by Wilhelm de Kooning and blurred it, creating a new work with its partial destruction. If Duchamp altered a reproduction, Rauschenberg intervened (or, if you will, deconstructed) an original work.\n\nLet us go a little further and specify now that refiguring is not the same as (reconfiguring). If we reconfigure something, we are most likely motivated by the desire to make its function more operative and efficient or its appearance more attractive. The scope of refiguring (re-figuring or figuring again) is much broader. It implies rethinking the original meaning of the object or work in question in order to introduce the modifications that will change its original meaning or connotation. If all this sounds serious and brainy, it is good to point out that in practice it is usually accompanied by large doses of laughter and fine humor.\nNad\u00edn Ospina is a humorist. This is a characteristic that critics have already pointed out. In the 1992 National Salon \"Ver\" (See), Ospina won a prize with an installation that parodied the museum space. The work consisted of (exhibiting an exhibition) of (pre-Columbian) pieces made by today's indigenous potters, that is, by people who are our contemporaries. The irony of staging a series of pre-Columbian fakes was understood as a simulation, a definition that has the disadvantage of falling short, since it was really about simulating again what in and of itself is simulation. Referring no doubt to the pieces that can be seen in Bogota at the Gold Museum, Ospina had explained: (The museum decontextualizes the work, especially when it shows pre-Columbian pieces, because it adds a different aesthetic quality to the one they originally had). In its strict sense, simulation in the strictest sense is that of realism done on a natural scale because it does not allow the viewer to see beyond what the retina captures. In such a case, the work does not suggest the existence of that beyond.\n\n\nBetween late 1993 and early 1994, Ospina exhibited twice in a row at the Arte 19 gallery, in September and then in December-January. Such a creative effort was undoubtedly the most ambitious and conscientious of his generation. The two exhibitions he did at that time were not motivated by the urge to show everything he had stored in his studio. The idea was to show in two phases what could only be exhibited in two phases. The first phase was entitled Faust, an obvious reference to Goethe's work, and the second Bizarres and Critics. The latter was acquired almost in its entirety for the permanent collection of the Ludwig Forum in Aachen, Germany, and exhibited there in October 1994.\nThe raw material for Fausto (1993) was a ten-meter wide painting by Carlos Salas, already exhibited by its author, which Salas himself fragmented according to the specifications given by Ospina, fragments that he had framed in a certain way. The selected details were (installed) on the walls of the gallery around a table that had eight glass vases with white roses, roses that in Goethe are the flowers of salvation. Two musical compositions were played continuously, an allusion to the heavenly chorus with which the Goethean text ends, interrupted at intervals by a crescendo of applause. Each burst of applause was accompanied by a gradual decrease in the intensity of the light in the hall. Ospina celebrated -and at the same time parodied- the fact that the critic Jos\u00e9 Hern\u00e1n Aguilar had selected the now fragmented painting by Carlos Salas, entitled \"La anfibia ambiguedad del sentimiento (The Amphibious Ambiguity of Feeling) (1989), as one of the ten masterpieces of Colombian art of the 1980s.\nAlmost at the same time, at the Museo de Arte de la Universidad Nacional, directed precisely by Jos\u00e9 Hern\u00e1n Aguilar, the painter Carlos Salas exhibited at the end of 1993 a work that as a whole was ambitious, solid and coherent. I share Agilar's enthusiasm for Salas' work. \nIn a country of many and very decorative abstractionists, a trend that in a little more than half a century has produced few names of value, Salas is one of those who count, perhaps because he is not limited to being a painter. Many of his works involve the actions of assembling, partially disassembling and reassembling canvases. Aguilar has referred to the actions of assembling and disassembling. I now add that of reassembling, because this is what Salas does to produce new structures with a playful sense.\nBy expressing the ideas of assembling and disassembling, Aguilar suggested to Salas a path to follow. Only Nad\u00edn Ospina also caught the signal. As he is a very serious humorist, he appropriated for himself the idea of assembling, disassembling, reassembling. There is nothing strange in the fact that he proceeded in this way. From the time he was an art student, Ospina worked on the basis of serializing motifs. By refiguring someone else's work for his Fausto, Ospina serialized the fragments and succeeded in making Aguilar's planting of the masterpiece acquire a dimension that no one suspected.\nBy the way, Carlos Salas is responsible for the introductory text that can be read in the catalog of Ospina's Fausto. In an aside, the painter tells that Nad\u00edn Ospina (acquired fragments of a large-format work, indicating the measurements of the pieces he needed). By selling under such conditions the most exhibited of his works, Salas-Fausto gave the soul of his very long canvas to Ospina-Mefistopheles. It should be noted that if the irony was conceived by Ospina, Salas was the accomplice who made it viable. Not for the gold but for the desire to see it become the exemplary monument that the critic announced. Salas was explicit when he wrote in the catalog: (Aguilar initiates the game of the masterpiece, Ospina ironizes this relationship, in itself ironic of Aguilar, transforming it into a possible OM(Obra Maestra) (masterpiece)). In short, Ospina's Fausto was the irony of an irony.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

II

It is worth repeating that Nad\u00edn Ospina had managed to resimulate a simulation with the (museum space) that he presented at the 1992 National Salon, entitled In partibus infidelium <\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/a>(In lands of infidels), a work built with pre-existing elements, with the artist refraining from intervening in it manually. In Fausto<\/em><\/a>, the same thing happened, since it is Salas who paints and Ospina who exhibits what was previously exhibited. The minimalists had already de-fetishized the traditional principle that the work of art should come from the artist's hand and even tried the healthy radicalism of resorting to industrial-type workshops to commission the manufacture of the pieces. In this context, it is worth mentioning the personality of Sol LeWitt, who delegated to artists hired for this purpose the elaboration of his drawings, executed according to the instructions he formulated with absolute precision. Almost immediately, the conceptualists imposed the idea that it was not necessary to fabricate anything because the mere statement of the work was enough for art to exist.\n
That was what was happening in other places about four decades ago. In Colombia in 1993, it was the simple parody of those practices and not the fact of commissioning someone else to execute the work that constituted the foundation of Ospina's artistic work. If In p\u00e1rtibus Infidelium <\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>was a parody of the museum, Fausto<\/em> is a parody of art history and the role of the critic. I recall in passing that Fernando Botero has parodied art history from Piero della Francesca, Mantegna and Raphael to Rubens, Zurbar\u00e1n and C\u00e9zanne, but it is one thing to smile at the past and another thing to laugh at the present.\n
Before \u00a0Fausto,<\/em>, it remained to be seen whether Salas's gigantic and applauded painting would really become a masterpiece. Today, thanks to Ospina, it is without a doubt. This is the very nature of the artistic expressions derived from the rise of conceptualism. What the artist proposes, that is what the work of art is. If Nad\u00edn Ospina gave mustaches to the museums in the 92 Salon, with Fausto<\/em> he gave mustaches to history, that history that the competent and authorized art critic tries to model on the march of events. Of course, Ospina is not an orthodox conceptual artist but a post-conceptualist who has dared to give back to the artistic work its visuality, its plasticity and its materiality, qualities lost in the heat of the theoretical battle that was unleashed in the sixties and seventies. Moreover, the excellent technical workmanship of his pieces is showing us, with each exhibition he makes, that the artist does not believe in the tawdry and ephemeral work.\n
At least since 1987, Ospina's proposals have been articulated with coherence and reached one of their peaks in the second of two consecutive exhibitions. I am referring to the one he concluded in 1993, with which he painted moustaches for us critics. Irony of good law his, which I recommend to take seriously without getting angry, refiguring and not disfiguring the artist's intentions. For the occasion, Nadin Ospina posed one of the most disturbing and bitter problems of Third World art, which can be summarized in the words center<\/em>and periphery.<\/em> In general, the idea that the center is in the industrialized countries and the periphery in our countries is widely accepted, a classification typical of economists and politicians who thrive in a divided and segregated world that, fortunately, has no application among sociologists and people of culture. For it is as absurd to suppose that at the global level there are central societies and peripheral societies, as it is to believe that there are queen cultures and vassal cultures, master cultures and slave cultures, patron cultures and lackey cultures, denominations that could undoubtedly fit into the field of political economy. As far as the arts are concerned, the issue has often been reiterated, but with an eye on production and not on criticism, arguing with theories and not with works, a diagonal crossing that is evidently contradictory. Is it possible to rethink the issue with images and not with the verb, judging the theorists who distort the facts and not the artists who simply work? Ospina has proven that yes, it is possible.\n\n
When he presented the second installation at Arte 19, the basic approach was similar to the one that had given Fausto<\/em> its raison for being. In the center, instead of the Goethean roses of salvation, he placed three series of sculptures of (pre-Columbianized) animals, as Javier Gil called them in the text of the respective catalog. These sculptures represent hippopotamuses, Nile crocodiles and African turtles. Around those sculptures, on the walls or against the walls, as if they were observing the motionless fauna, were thirty-one characters of different sizes, materials and textures derived from the Simpson family, also pre-Columbianized. The sprouting eyes of Ospina's Simpsons alluded clearly and directly to the gazes of the critics.\nThe center pieces, distributed in three groups, were titled Bizarros (1993). The word bizarro is an adjective that qualifies the courageous and hard-working, as well as the generous, lucid and splendid, but also the quixotic. On the other hand, we know, at least those of us who have read with pleasure the comic book Superman<\/em>, that bizarro is the double and false character who tries to impersonate the hero of the planet Krypton for perverse purposes. With this in mind, intertwined with quixotic bizarreness and falsehood, the fat and voracious hippopotamus was renamed Bizarro gourmet.<\/em><\/a>.<\/a> The \u00a0<\/em>open-mouthed crocodile ((as if he were an opera singer), the author has told me) was given the title Bizarro divo.<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0<\/em> And finally the gentle tortoise, which raises its head and looks with a casual alert gesture, was called Bizarro challenger. <\/em><\/a>The satisfaction of the gourmet, the exhibitionism of the divo and the challenging realism were interwoven in open sets that had their counterpart on the outside, in the rows of characters placed against the wall.\nThat counterpart was Bart, Lisa and Marge Simpson under the title of Archaic Critics<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em> (1993), made of opaque and rustic concrete. Then followed the pair formed by Ecstatic Critic and Archaic Critic IV <\/em><\/a>(both 1993), carved in stone. In his ecstasy, the former was a seated Bart Simpson; the latter, on his feet, was a Homer Simpson, absolutely immobile. The Hig-Tech<\/em><\/a> (1993) critics make up a group of twenty-five pieces of gleaming pottery, all mounted on shelves of impeccable whiteness. The polish set them apart from all the others and made them look eternally new, contrasting with the dusty old age of the archaic Critics<\/em>. . Lastly, we have The Critics <\/em><\/a>(without further qualifiers), from 1992, two small ceramic pieces in which a Bart Simpson made a strange couple with a Buddha.\n
Now, if you look closely at the general arrangement of the set it is easy to discern that the center of the gallery referred us to the natural world and its periphery to the cultural sphere. In other words, the center evoked that which the commonplace identifies with underdevelopment, while the periphery was the realm of characters that we all know and that Ospina dressed up as art critics. Ospina's criticism was irreverent and devastating. The Simpsons predominated, associated with development because they belong to a family of characters created by U.S. television, which can practically be seen on the screens of any country in the world. The counterpoint rested on the figure of the solitary Buddha, an iconic image no less popular, coming from ancestral Asia. The art critic Buddha rests quietly, in contrast to the exacerbation of the High-Tech Critics<\/em>, who dominated numerically and visually this huge and round installation.\n
As for the hippopotamuses, crocodiles and turtles, these are vessels that can be related by the finish with those of the Tairona pottery, in the Caribbean coast of Colombia, but also with those of La Chorrera, Ecuador, which was the site where the body of the primitive ceramic pot evolved towards figurative sculpture, preserving in the process the tip or spout and the curved handle, which makes it a sculpture that at the same time serves as a vessel for ritual purposes. To better understand the appropriation or borrowing that Nad\u00edn Ospina allowed himself to take from the pre-Columbian world, it is appropriate to summarize the history of the American sculptural vessel.\n
The primitive and versatile sculptors of La Chorrera modeled vessels in the shape of gourds, owls, birds, monkeys, houses, etc., but also human beings. The substantial Ecuadorian contribution was adopted by other peoples, influencing to the south cultures of the Peruvian area such as Chavin, Vicus, Moche, Chimu, Lambayeque, Nasca and Huari-Tiahuanaco, and even influencing the Incas, although in a rather attenuated way. To the north, in the Colombian area, the impact on the Calima and Tairona peoples is notable. Even further north, the impact of the alcarraza figurative or sculptural vessel of La Chorrera had repercussions on the culture of Guanacaste, in Costa Rica, and left a varied imprint, within the limits of present-day Mexico, on the Colima, Toltec, Mixtec, Veracruz, Huasteca and Aztec sculptures. \n
In its slow evolution, towards the south and the north, the figurative alcarraza was transformed into a vase when the spout widened and then into a pot when it lost its handle. As for the manufacturing materials, clay, stone and gold were used. The effigy vessels of the Mochicas, also called portrait bottles, are highly prized for the realism with which they present Tlaloc (god of rain). Undoubtedly, the figurative sculptural vessel is one of the most peculiar and interesting artistic manifestations of ancient America.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nadin Ospina: Refiguraciones por Alvaro Medina Sabemos lo que signif\u00edca el verbo reflexivo <<figurarse>> y cu\u00e1les son las implicaciones sem\u00e1nticas de <<configurar>>. Cuando imaginamos, cumplimos el proceso de figurarnos algo que luego, para que se materialice, pasamos\u00a0 a configurar. Sin embargo, ante la obra de Nad\u00edn Ospina hay que hablar de <<refigurar>>, vocablo que encierra […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":154715982,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_wpcom_ai_launchpad_about_page":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_gallery_page":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_contact_page":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_events_page":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_video_page":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_portfolio_piece":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2485","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/PaPj6W-E5","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nadinospina.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nadinospina.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nadinospina.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nadinospina.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/154715982"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nadinospina.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2485"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/nadinospina.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2485\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2496,"href":"https:\/\/nadinospina.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2485\/revisions\/2496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nadinospina.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}