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Plural

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Workman 1

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Mackenzie

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Review

**Xenia Benivolski** is a writer and curator currently based in Toronto.

The sun’s light undergoes a profound change when it reflects off the moon’s cool surface to reach our planet. Mixed with ambient starlight and the light reflected by the Earth itself, its speed is measured in years. Over the course of each day, the moon surveys our entire Earth, both past and future bouncing off its surface. In countless books and movies, characters wax poetic about looking at the same moon at the same time, as if the celestial body is a mirror where time is of no particular consequence, a fictional portal to another. The sentimental phrase, “When I am looking at the moon, I imagine you looking at the same moon and somehow we are together,” is simultaneously proclaimed by a chorus of many through a long history of fictions, displaced from the real flow of time. It was thus a happy coincidence to find Rodrigo Hernández’ 2014 publication, \_What is the moon?\_[^1] resting on the counter at the entrance to his solo project exhibition curated by Chris Sharp, an American curator who relocated in 2012 from Paris to Mexico City, where he co-directs the small but influential gallery Lulu.

Hernández’s commitment to ambiguity is guided by a sense of responsibility to show his subject from all sides. In his work, he provides a lyrical reading of history as a series of non-linear aesthetic and ideological junctures of time and space, seeking to elaborate on a set of dichotomous assumptions that are inherent to his historical subject. Painted paper sculptures appear to be intricately etched metal plates, flattened by a hammer and covered in silver paint; however, the etched marks turn out to be fingerprints. Resting against the brightly coloured walls, the glimmering pieces depict vague scenes from pre-colonial Mexico. The images directly reference the anthropological illustrations of indigenous, pre-Columbian life that have become the celebrated domain of Mexico City-born artist Miguel Covarrubias (1904-1957).[^2] In the framework of these small, silvery sculptures, figurative elements from Covarrubias’ book, _Indian Art of Mexico and Centroamerica_ (1957), have been conflated with formal aesthetic elements of Italian Futurism, in particular the polemical 1915 text by Italian Futurist poet Marinetti _War, the World’s Only Hygiene_ \[3\] from which the artist borrowed the title of this exhibition: _Every forest madly in love with the moon has a highway crossing it from one side to the other_.

Rejecting the virtues of the Italian Renaissance, Marinetti announces the arrival of aesthetic liberty, a construct utilized in Hernández’s retrofuturistic reconstruction of the historical visual element “Let the tiresome memory of Roman greatness be cancelled by an Italian greatness a hundred times greater… \[sic\] there is nothing for us to admire today but the dreadful symphonies of the shrapnels and the mad sculptures that our inspired artillery molds among the masses of the enemy.” According to Hernández, Covarrubias similarly quotes a progressive visual ideology that promotes “simplicity and sensual realism in the shapes: vigorous and original concepts” in opposition to the “formalized and rigorous art from the highlands, and the baroque, unbounded art of the lowlands of the classic period, both impregnated with symbolism and ceremonial functionalism.”[^4] This sets up an oppositional premise between ontologies of the tenses, across continents. But the opposite of the moon is neither the sun, nor the Earth. A true dichotomy does not necessarily dictate a common ground. This exhibition conflates radical scenarios perched on the edge of a collective consciousness, only to collapse back into fiction. If both past and future have a historical potential, then the contemporary must lie at their intersection, one that clearly no longer needs to take place in the present tense. A tropic of contemporaneity turns out to be where such radicality is asserted through fictions. Both risking and resisting a nostalgia for an ideological now, the work addresses the contemporary historical subject in a nuanced way, propelling the _geodesic spacetime dynamic_ into an aesthetic that hosts a life of its own.

This combination is arresting in its flattening of not only the physical sculptural form but also of perspective and history itself. Citing a bird’s-eye view of pre-hispanic Mexican depictions of Indigenous living, seen through the lens of divisionist cubist perspectives that were prominent in post-World War I Europe, the aesthetic is obtained through the mechanization of production and the influence of photography. The meeting of these visual forms sets up a strange epistemological ground, breeding a serendipitous dynamic of human history through time: a history repeating variations on the manifestation of radical language and symbolism. Within this landscape, Hernández is a witness to a vastly different array of characters all singing the same song.

[^1]: “What is the moon?” is an adolescent and romantic question according to writer and curator Arnisa Zeqo, and the impetus for this publication: an appendix to an exhibition by the same name, held at the Bonnefantenmuseum  
in Maastricht. The four-page foldout was produced by Jon Frenken and edited by Hernández at the Charles Nypels Lab of the Jan Van Eyck Academie of Maastricht, Netherlands, 2014–2015, supported by the JVE Academie and the Laurenz-Haus Stiftung Basel.
[^2]: José Miguel Covarrubias, _Indian Art of Mexico & Central America_, New York: (Knopf, 1957) Mexico.
[^3]: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Guerra sola igiene del mondo (War, the World’s Only Hygiene) (1915), in Opere di F.T. Marinetti, vol. 2: Teoria e invenzione futurista, ed. Luciano De Maria (Mondadori, Milan, 1968).
[^4]: Oliver Martínez- Kandt, “Go, Gentle Scorpio,” February 2015, Terremoto, Mexico City.

Writer

Performance

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This article reviews Rodrigo Hernández’s exhibition every forest madly in love with the moon has a highway crossing it from one side to the other presented at Kurimanzutto in Mexico City from Feb. 6 – March 17, 2016.

Rodrigo Hernández: every forest madly in love with the moon has a highway crossing it from one side to the other

**Steffanie Ling** is a producer of criticism, pamphlets, stories, essays, exhibitions, reviews, bluntness, anecdotes, shout outs, wrestling storylines, proposals, applications, jokes, readings, minimal poems, poems, dinner, compliments and diatribes. Her books are _Nascar_ (Blank Cheque, 2016) and _Cuts of Thin Meat_ (Spare Room, 2015).

Ron Tran has been compared to a priest and a shop- keeper. For _Somewhat Mine: A Nanaimo Retrospective_, Tran plays the role of an artist who is having a retrospective. Retrospectives usually present a body of work in order to indicate a major period of development, a.k.a. the mid-career retrospective, or provide a complete survey of work produced over many decades. Since Tran just received the City of Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award for Visual Arts for emerging artists in 2015, we are either being introduced to a new modifier: _career-spanning-thus-far_, or _early career retrospective_, or better yet, this employment of the retrospective model suggests a creative misuse of the format.

In any case, the length of the gallery is bisected by a zig-zagging of silver, gridded construction fences where artworks are displayed amongst props from Keltie’s Photo, a local photo studio and prop house. While construction fences are typically eyesores that prohibit and alienate pedestrians, these aspects don’t apply here. By day, these fences are as ubiquitous as the sidewalk itself and we repress them as part of the milieu of a city’s visual noise. Here, this tedious-looking fence is employed sculpturally – or theatrically; as a prop among props. The fence continues to incite the kind of curiosity and rebellion that is inspired by the presentation of a barrier or authoritative object, however its effect as exhibition design is already the rebellion that we wish to launch against humdrum art installations. For instance, the exposure of the rear end of a picture frame or other unhidden sundries used for hanging Tran’s artworks was becoming, rather than unruly – in the same way an unsanctioned side- walk sale draws you in to excavate the wares.

Tran is already in the habit of recalibrating the designed purpose of objects, and social apparati are not excluded from his stripping of quotidian statuses and conventional use-values. This operation can be applied to works new and old in _Somewhat Mine_. Documented in this exhibition are some early ephemeral works, such as _Shelters_, where Tran retrieved umbrellas from the bus company’s lost-and-found and installed them at bus stops without shelters. Adjacent to this work was another early work altering the public sphere, _Lost Pets_. The gesture involved framing lost pet signage around the city. These subtle sculptural interventions hinge on a relational quality to meet their full poetic potential. On one hand, Tran could be seen as a sort of vigilante of good manners, providing shelter from the rain and reinforcing provisional signage belonging to worried pet owners but his actions underline how vulnerable innocuous public spaces are to being messed with, for artists to leave evidence of anonymous kindness, but also equal in their potential to be rendered austere by a contemptuous passer-by. Public space as an arena for complex intersections of intention is further exemplified by Tran’s _No Gay (Bolzano)_, a new work created in the context of Nanaimo, which consists of one of the city’s vernacular bus benches inserted with a kind of crude vacation destination banner for Bolzano, Italy. The advertising graphic features text reading bolzano in a warped shape reminiscent of PowerPoint headers paired with a portrait of the artist posing lackadaisically with a vacant expression on a public bench emblazoned in black spray paint with no gay! His presence on the bench is instantly complicated by his proximity to the homophobic statement.

This bus bench is positioned to view _Head Red Toes and Green (unintentional moments)_, a looping slideshow with Tran in various costumes. These portraits taken by friends using their cellphones and assembled here as a performative lookbook of the artist in his social habitat portray moments where curtains and house- hold kitsch become provisional couture. With our backs to the unsavory sentiments expressed in _No Gay (Bolzano)_, we try to take in Tran’s outfits, admire the craft and drapery borne of spontaneity, but the images change too quickly to scrutinize. As shyness, it’s unconvincing, but this work gives quick glimpses into Tran’s aesthetic sensibility, for fun, rather than art per se. In their underprivileged presentation, this sensibility for pattern, texture, and arrangement resonates as studies that might inform moments from projects reprised in the exhibition; projects such as _And You Can Do Anything With Them Under Such Circumstances_ (2008), a series of whimsical still-lives with furniture and other consumer objects made at portrait photography outlets like Photo Express and Sears, and _Kitchen Garden at Home/Store_ (2014), an experimental art and retail project in Chinatown Vancouver that combined sculpture as merchandise.

Retrospectives take place as tools to measure and canonize a period of artistic production for the history books, but the scope of time that gets privileged rarely includes the artist’s undergraduate school work. The presence of Tran’s grad project, _The Peckers_ (2007), a lighthearted twist on Paul Kos’ _Sound of Ice Melting_ (1970) whereby Tran filmed and recorded a flock of pigeons feeding upon a set of amplified instruments doused with bird food, begs the question of whether the notion of being in retrospect is taken to heart as a verb (to look back in hindsight and reflect) rather than a noun (an institutional device).

During the artist’s time in Nanaimo, some completed projects were re-investigated and managed to grow in their scope of collaboration – for example, 2011’s _It Knows Not What It Is_ now includes a neighbouring youth art program’s oil pastel and crayon rendition of the iconic wooden stick. Tran’s inherently polyvocal approach warrants extensive attribution to his collaborators and an exhibition map that borders on movie credits. The names are not necessarily those of a collector, but Tran’s incorporation of props and a “cast” of sorts hearkens to the artist as perhaps more of a director, a facilitator of novel experiences, than one who simply plays roles. Whether this is a retrospective _performed_, or a curatorial nudge at the pomposity of the format, Somewhat Mine sets a precedent for the continued subversion of it when “another” retrospective of Tran’s work comes around again

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This article reviews Ron Trans exhibition Somewhat Mine: A Nanaimo Retrospective at the Nanaimo Gallery in Nanaimo BC, presented from March 11- May 14, 2016.

Ron Tran: Somewhat Mine: A Nanaimo Retrospective

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