In 1991-2, Maria Martinez-Cañas worked on a series of photographic prints, Quince Sellos Cubanos (Fifteen Cuban Stamps). The postal stamp as the main referent in this group of works served as a counterpoint to the significant presence of the map in her photographs at the time. If the latter marks a place, sets it down in print, anchors it to the representation of a topography, the former speaks to the potential routes through which one can be rid of such a place, to the vectors that may link it to irreducibly dissimilar territories. Where the map aims at concreteness, the stamp revels in the virtual, fires up the imagination. The epistolary in this scheme is a genre of liberation, but it is often the literature of a freedom that we find only when forcefully moored to a location. As Martinez-Cañas proposed at the time she was working on these prints: “If the map is used to find and locate, the stamp is used to deliver (send; separate)...” It is precisely at the intersection of “locate” and “separate,” in the lacuna or blind-spot where a mechanism is at work that allows one of these to stand for another and negate it at the same time, that we’ll settle into throughout these pages.
One of the Fifteen Cuban Stamps is titled El Mantel Blanco: Amelia Pelaez (The White Tablecloth: Amelia Pelaez). It “reproduces” a post-cubist still-life from 1935 by Cuban modernist painter Amelia Pelaez that was reproduced on a postage stamp. In this echo chamber of repeated imagery, we have to pause for the obvious differences. We go from painting to printed image to the composite of many images that make up the negative (or the negative matrix, as Andy Grunberg calls it, that opens a microcosmos within the image) from which Martinez-Cañas print is made. In a sense, El Mantel Blanco: Amelia Pelaez is less an appropriation of a Pelaez painting as such than a mnemonic suggestion and a container for the avalanche of juxtaposed images that Martinez-Cañas quilts together, which have to find an order of some sort if they are going to be more than a stream of loose and meaningless material. But, of course, the accumulation of images conspires against its own congealing. Juxtaposition and montage, unhinged agglomeration and free associative logic, in the tangle of seemingly endless repetition, invite a dispersal of meaning, a fragmenting of experience--the represented experience, surely, but that of the viewer as well. Like map in relation to stamp, then, Pelaez’s painting plays antinomy to the photograph that approximates it. One contains, draws in, employs centrifugal force; the other pressures the edge, looking to break out, to spin increasingly further away from some imaginary core that can unify it all.
But that’s how it has always been. Painting is the solid unit that increasingly plays at being fragmented, while the photograph fragments experience in its quest to give us an unequivocal representation of things. Both fail at their purported goal. We may be exaggerating or generalizing to underscore the point, hoisting on both painter and photographer a naivete neither deserves, but in our case this is how things stand: the Amelia Pelaez marks a unified space--that of modernism, of Cuba, of conventional genre, of verifiable reality, of settled living patterns, of an unbroken cultural line; the Martinez-Cañas double is its very inverse, as doubles always are: it marks the fragmentation of exile, of broken familial and cultural lines, of uprooted identities and lifestyles, of fantasy and projection of a lost source, of the unstable and slippery hybrid genres that autobiography always ushers in. The analogy between painting and print exists, then, always on the cusp of breaking down. But it is here, precisely, where it is successful in that it reminds us that the photograph always maintains an undigestible and wild edge. This is the curse and the blessing, the stigmata, that has marked it since its inception.
Appearing at the moment when the human environment had been irrevocably altered by the rampant proliferation of image-making and communication technologies, the photograph was one of the shocks of modernity. One moment people were blowing out their candles and tilling the soil with their oxen and the next they were having disembodied voices--like God’s or a ghost’s--coming through their telephones and gramophones; hallucinatory and faraway places were plastered on the all-too-mundane front pages of their newspapers, rubbing off on their fingertips; monumental trains sped toward them on the ambiguous membrane of the cinematic screen; and moments of experience were extracted by the camera from what had always seemed a natural and continuos flow. Different modes of receptiveness where demanded for these new kinds of stimuli, but the speed of adaptation hardly met the speed at which these new things came thundering into human psychic mechanisms, short-circuiting things in there, and rendering our ecologies increasingly inhospitable. We ended up with an “atrophy of experience,” as Walter Benjamin proposes, rather than with the real thing. Shock deflection became the main task of post-Goethean consciousness.
But the photograph did more than segment the flow of experience. It also framed the segments. One shouldn’t underestimate the violence of the gesture; or overlook the impunity with which the photograph edits and structures narratives, and the ease with which it has historically offered itself to the highest bidder. It’s this violence that renders imprecise the difference between locating and separating, between capturing a moment and inventing it at the same time and always in the service of specific interests. Although we’ve recently begun to cut through the fantasy of objectivity that once held the photograph aloft, the “excessive force that acts of framing always risk” remains a pertinent problem in an age in which images proliferate and travel at speeds that should be as shocking and traumatic as the colossal trains that once threatened the unsuspecting audiences of early cinematic screenings.
Although in the last decade, Martinez-Cañas has moved into ways of working that diverge from the early collaging and montaging of Quince Sellos Cubanos, increasingly using the computer as an important instrument in the production of her images, her early concerns aren’t completely lost on newer works. Tetralogy, the titled under which the production of the last four years is being collected, is made up of four series of photographs: Lies (2005), Adaptation (2006), Tracing (2007), and Duplicity as Identity (2008-9). Like an autobiographical sketch in four parts, these different series of photographs share both overt and underlying connections and themes. In fact, they are all organized, at their fundamental core, around photography’s potential to thematize the framing distortion it always secretly unleashes, and they all stem from a personal incident that revolves around another kind of mediatic framing.
In 2003, Martinez-Cañas‘ father, a well-known trader in Latin American art, was accused of participating in the forgery of a certificate of authenticity. With the jury still out on the charges, as the saying goes, local media and fellow art dealers jumped the gun and engaged in a smearing campaign. Martinez-Cañas understood the impulses behind this as nefarious and vindictive, any question of fairness or the possibility of deferring judgement until all the facts were in were shoved aside the moment the story hit the press. The incident brought up not only complicated memories of a family ordeal endured decades before, but it reminded Martinez-Cañas of how easily communicative media can frame and distort a story while hiding the mechanisms through which they do this; while, that is, fervently saluting the flags of disinterestedness and neutrality.
The photographs in Lies emerge out of this moment of disgust and recognition. They flesh out a sense of antagonism toward the medium that has always been Martinez-Cañas’ natural habitat as a cultural producer. It’s an effort to put her own house in order. All the photographs begin by pilfering from existing books an image associated with brutal forms of dying. The images range from gruesome crime scenes to electric chair executions to serial killer evidence stashes. Martinez-Cañas runs these “straightforward” images through Photoshop filters to straightforwardly distort them. She blurs and balloons the masses and softens and smears the lines. A stack of suitcases taken from murdered Jews in Vichy France become a geometric composition in satin grey, black and white. The condemned prisoner strapped to a Texas electric chair is marshmellowed into a humorous animation figure. Titled Michelin Man, this photograph elicited more than a few chuckles when first exhibited. Inadvertently, we, its careless consumers, grow inhuman in the mirror that the image holds up to us. Should the image and our situation before it suddenly grow clear, we would surely loose our composure again but not to joy or laughter.
The nefarious subject matter in Michelin Man, and the political implications that the original photograph may hold, are lost to the effects of a handful of not-very-difficult commands in Photoshop. Framing things is this simple. A word or an angle is enough to recast the facts as the very opposite of what they are. In the end, this set of images is as much about Martinez-Cañas particularly difficult moment witnessing her father’s predicament as it is about the reckless abandoned with which we have taken the photograph (and other mediatic artifacts) as evidence. Psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche once reminded us that it always takes two traumas to make a trauma. In Martinez-Cañas‘ work, we can see this confirmed: the trauma of seeing her father framed by the mass media articulates what has always been at the threshold of clarity in her work, sometimes implied and sometimes declared: that photography is inherently bound to betrayal; that it is indistinguishable from the violence of the act of framing. Every one of its fibers is suffused with the potential for deception. This is not an atrophied condition for the medium, but it’s given ontological state.
Adaptation and Tracing, the series that followed Lies, start out by mining the personal photographic archive of prominent mid-century Cuban curator Jose Gomez-Sicre. Having helped organize exhibitions at MoMA and serving for a long time as director of the Visual Arts Sections of the Pan-American Union/Organization of American States, Gomez-Sicre proposed and fleshed out an alternative reading--internationalist and in tune with the modernism that was blooming in New York--of Latin American art. He traveled the continent and championed a generation of brazen young painters. He wrote about them in international magazines and gave them their first American shows. As the Peruvian painter Fernando de Szyszlo once proposed: before Gomez-Sicre, there was Argentine painting and Colombian painting and Venezuelan painting; after him, there was Latin American painting--a coherent set of artifacts involved with the same preoccupations as the most advanced work being produced anywhere.
Adaptation begins with Gomez-Sicre’s images of exhibitions. Throughout his travels, the Cuban curator photographed the things he encountered in museums and galleries. Martinez-Cañas took these images and deleted the artworks. Only the museum and gallery architectures are left, along with podiums and other display structures. Whatever it is that he valued and thought enough to record is evacuated from the scene. Where the paintings and sculptures should be, there are only blank squares, missing subjects. As in the Lies photographs, Martinez-Cañas begins by distorting something in the image, but the ramifications here may have more intense resonance. In the first place, what has been taken out are artworks, those things that sit precisely where Martinez-Cañas photographs usually sit. In some sense, she refuses to forgive the high-end cultural artifact from the indictment she casts on every other photographic genre. All are equally prone to frame things, and with equal violence.
Secondly, these photographs return in a roundabout to the subject that was so central to Martinez-Cañas’ early photographs: exile. If once the fragmentation that the photograph allegorized was treated as analogous with the fragmentation that exile represented, now it is the possible erasures that the photograph is prone to that becomes an analogy of the cultural and historical erasures that accompany exile. After all, what is being erased in Martinez-Cañas‘ Adaptation photographs is as much the artworks as Gomez-Sicre’s position behind the lens; that is, an entire secular intellectual tradition that was lost to Revolutionary faith and fervor; a tradition that has undoubtedly found itself increasingly threatened with the possibility of being written out of historical accounts. It’s less a question, here, of whether Gomez-Sicre went to bat for the wrong team (Alfred Barr’s modernism, capitalism, etc.) than whether we should constantly struggle to open spaces where we can think of and challenge the detrimental ways in which banishment is part of a matrix of gestures that flatten out the richness of the world by eradicating alternative versions to the “correct” story-lines.
Tracing focuses on Gomez-Sicre’s personal photographs--landscapes, street scenes, and the like. In this series, we get a paradoxical erasure through addition. On certain sections of each of the photographs, Martinez-Cañas overlays a sheet of trace paper. She then copies the lines that pop out from the photograph below, rendering the image less clear than it was when shadows, a much larger range of details, depth of fields and other kinds of visual information were available. The “window” that the paper creates becomes a space of re-abstraction. In Untitled (Wall), an element in the front of a photograph of ruins or an archeological site is pencilled into a cartoony mushroom blob. Indeterminacy takes over as figurative clarity dissipates. But this re-abstracting of the image is physical and allegorical. What we find encoded into these literalized efforts to undo the figurative clarity of these images are all the abstract qualities that organize the image--from the framing to the ideological input that finds manifestation in the final artifact. External elements and the defining effects they have on the artwork are folded back in so that these images double as self-reflexive moments on the medium itself. That these images come from the archives of Gomez-Sicre, a front-liner in the ideological exchange between Cold War modernism and the emergent New Left challenges to it, only underscores the point further.
The 34 portraits of Duplicity as Identity close the Tetralogy cycle--at least temporarily. In these photographs, Martinez-Cañas’ face is blended with that of her father. Using a scale of 10% blending--i.e, 100% her face/0% his; 90% hers/10% his; 80% hers/20% his; etc--the series turns uncanny at its exact midpoint--50% hers/50% his--when the faces of parent and child match precisely. It becomes a game of equivocation, of mistaken identities. The question that seems inevitable at this point: Is there in fact only a single subject in these portraits? Can physiognomic fusion be this complete? Can different things be this easily conflated? Duplicity and identity, like “locate” and “separate,” are words that shift before our eyes, marking the slippery surfaces on which what we take to be real glides on.
Gean Moreno is a Miami artist and writer. © 2009 |
