IMITATION OF LIFE
by Dan Cameron
The slippage between states of dreaming and waking
is symbolized in the sculpture of Walter Martin & Paloma
Muñoz by an ongoing tension between the purely visual qualities
of the work and a type of functionality that is enacted without ever
being applied. Cradles rock, pendulums swing, books are held by
bookends, shoes slide onto feet, dogs chew bones and a faucet does not
stop dripping. However, the crib portion of the cradle teeters
precariously above the viewer's head, watches dangle hypnotically from
disembodied hands near the ceiling, bookends become beasts of burden,
feet and shoes are fused into the same object, the dog is revealed as a
skeleton made from cartoon bones that resemble its dinner, and the
drips are revealed as pieces of fruit squeezed from an unrepairable
faucet attached to the trunk of a tree. This surrealist tendency is
achieved within the scope of a visual "first glance" that is based on
the expectation of finding a certain logical order within the world.
Once the more whimsical aspects of the work are revealed, however, its
ties to the world's logic become accentuated rather than erased.
Considered separately, these works can be appreciated less as
extensions of the same riddling order, and more as unique
investigations into the kinds of paradoxes that each form seems
to represent. For example, I Wake to
Sleep and Take my Waking Slowly (1994),
the cradle work
in the first example, points to what the artists describe as "the state
of grace of infancy", as well as the distance one has to lower
oneself to reach the "common ground of maturity". But the close
proximity of danger implied by the imaginary infant's precarious
and inaccesible state can also be interpreted as the authors warning
that the world's promise of protection needs to be taken skeptically,
as well as an assertion that the infant's state of extreme fragility is
what in fact enables it to remain "above it all". If such an
interpretation of birth seems a shade too pessimistic , it needs to be
taken in stride with some of the artists' reflections of death - for
example, Eliminating the Unconscious
(1994). In this piece, the stage is literally set for the "reader" of a
sculptural stack of spurious self-help books to commit suicide, by
stringing a noose (provided) over the hook of a large chandelier. The
titles of the "books" - Maybe You're
just Inferior and The Insanity
Racket are two worthy examples - mock the intensity with which
recent generations have come to place the advice of self-styled experts
over and above their own lives experience.
In other recent works, the passage between life and death (and
sometimes following the later), is noted as a kind of suspended
equilibrium between two finite points, the first of which is
unknowable, the other inconceivable. Perhaps this explains to some
extent the occasional appearance of hypnosis as a theme within their
work, as in the piece A Cure for All
Remedies (1994), wherein the sculpture's movements represent an
actual attempt to create, through kinetic means, a bona fide hypnotic
effect on the viewer. Rather than delving directly into the area of
psychotherapy, however, the title suggests that the search for a cure
has in turn become one of the great problems of our civilization. In
other words, we no longer require a cure from the ailments that plague
us, but rather from all the misguided attempts to make ourselves feel
better. Into this breach steps art, which also asks us to "keep our
eye" on something, without ever specifying what that thing might be. We
might actually succeed in placing ourselves in a trance, but without an
intermediary to direct our mental energies, the danger becomes one of
leaving ourselves open to virtually any available influence.
In one of their least elaborated but no less pointed works, Life
begins at 40 (1994),
Martin
& Muñoz seem to question what it is we actually do with the
time span that comprises our life. A lone elephant supports a gradually
expanding mountain of apparently leather-bound books. The top most (and
heaviest) volume bears the work's title, while the next lower (and
slightly smaller) is entitled Life
begins at 50, and so on, until one gets to the lowest and most
modest volume, Life Begins at 84.
The artists' implication seems to be that if you wait until forty to
begin your life (specially by searching in a self-help book for
answers), you are already too late, since the dream that was
deferred extends all the way back to infancy.In the context of this
argument, the symbolism of the elephant is specially telling, since, as
the animal that never forgets,s/he is perpetually in the process of
placing the past in context with the present - something we mere
mortals generally forget to do.
Nature is frequently, though not always, used as a point of contrast
with man's follies in Martin & Muñoz sculpture. In their
notes for Under a Moon Nailed Fixed
(1993), the sculpture of a dog-skeleton gnawing a bone, the artists
refer to "the innocence of the eater who will be eaten", as if to claim
the food chain as another system of poetic justice. With its posture of
complete involvement in what is doing (one can almost see the wagging
of the tail), the dog is an image of unself-consciousness in regard to
its ultimate fate. The position of man in relation to this system seems
to be spelled out in the two tree-based works that the artists have
produced: Fruits of the Wound (1994)
and A Merciless Symmetry
(1995). The former presents a barren tree producing fruit through the
attachment of a faucet to its trunk, while the latter shows a similarly
lifeless tree, its trunk split down the middle with a butchers knife,
surrounded by fresh red apples. In both examples it is clear that man's
intervention plays a critical role in reanimating the apparently
lifeless plant, and yet the act of adaptation seems quite violent, as
if it were a kind of visual argument in favor of a manifest destiny.
While it may be pointless to reduce Martin's and Muñoz'
sculpture to a fixed world view - indeed, the humor in the work argues
against such rigid interpretation-, it seems clear that the metaphors
produced by this collaborative team represent an attempt to explore
some of the deeper aspects of their philosophies about life. Not only
the works embody a strong distrust towards the place given
to rational thought in most accepted notions of western civilization,
but the artists unusual ability to distill these meanings into a single
visual statement privileges the perceptual over the conceptual to an
extent which is quite rare in current art. At the same time that they
produce riddle-like parables about modern existence, they do not shirk
the artist's obligation to invent a new formulation of tactile and even
sensual pleasure. Like the philosophy conveyed by their predilection
towards visual paradox. Martin's & Muñoz' critical awareness
is balanced by the knowledge that no matter how far the human species
evolves (or devolves), we will never invent a credible substitute for
experience.
Dan Cameron
New York-Moscow / Aug-Sept 1995
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