How to undo an imaginary? About Claudia Coca's Barbarian Tales
Mikhail Mitrovic Pease
May 2105
In 1902 Paul Gauguin painted Barbarian Tales [Contes barbares], an oil on canvas where the encounter between the exotic bodies of indigenous Polynesian women and a mysterious red-haired foreigner is represented as if the latter were listening to some native secret in the middle of a tropical landscape. and misty. The primitivist bet, which this painting perfectly illustrates, sought to criticize the European and capitalist decadence through a return to a certain idea of paradise that, they thought, was still alive in other latitudes. It is a rather romantic aesthetic ideology that has been constantly renewed throughout the 20th century, using non-Western societies generically as the source for artistic work, but only in an imaginary register. Imaginary not only because all these local stories, native forms and images of indigenous bodies have served as new engines for the stuck Western imagination, but also because all of this has been reduced to their artistic use as images: in a stabilized, not dialectical way. and oblivious to any critical discourse on its historicity. It is worth noting here that Gauguin himself considered that painting "is the most beautiful of all the arts" since "by seeing it, each spectator can create a novel with his imagination". [1] Rare images to feed a tired imagination, or just plain boring. The painter, finally, would die on those islands a year later.
A century later, and having extended the primitivist logic to spaces unsuspected by its artistic origin -to the visual policies of many States, such as Peru-, we know of the many contradictions that condition the appropriation or capture of every society through the images. Furthermore, if an artist seeks a critical look at colonial processes today, she should be deeply suspicious - as a minimum condition - of any visual proposal where images are not questioned. Or, in other words, where the artistic use of images does not pose a critical distance from their daily or spectacularized uses, although sometimes it is not possible or desired to distinguish between the two strategies.
Claudia Coca's commitment in Cuentos Bárbaros (2015) is precisely the denial of that primitivist heritage and the denunciation of it as an obsolete strategy in the face of the colonial issue, which has been the main axis of her reflection and work. This becomes evident when abandoning a figurative strategy and re-raising the question why it is what is represented under the set of images that make up the exhibition. They are, at first glance, a lot of words about landscapes without a trace of the human or, rather, where the only human trace is the word itself, thus imposing a signifier on a background that refers in the first place to nature.
There is nothing natural in the images of Cuentos Bárbaros, but the gesture of the imposed letter affirms that, after the absence of a recognizable figure that allows the observer to identify herself, the words function as a trace that invites to imagine the absent. An opaque yet legible trace, and it is not possible to read a word alone, since from Saussure we know that a signifier summons a set of paradigmatic relations that allow us to differentiate and specify it. [2] The desired effect is to force the viewer to fill in the image, opening up a field of interpretation possibilities that could well account for her own ideological position. Although I could continue to speculate on the effects of the work and the role of the observer, I am going to focus on the linguistic component of the set of pieces presented by Coca.
There is not much mystery in the backgrounds on which the words are inscribed: images of seas and skies, both purified from a landscape setting, thus reducing any geographical reference that could be sought when observing them. Both funds simply aim to operate as nature on which a set of words are written that we can divide into two groups: those that refer to the colonial production of the individual body, as opposed to more general ones that can characterize society as a whole. Within the second block, I want to focus on the colonized-emancipated pair.
It is not in vain that the sea, a common background to both, is represented through two opposite movements: a wave that advances, in front of its subsequent retreat that reveals the shore. In the first one, colonized is written, while once the colonial wave has withdrawn, the word emancipated is revealed. The joint reading is not equivocal: the colonial process –the advancing wave- produces a form of emancipation –the independence and the production of the Republic, we could say- that is inscribed in a unique terrain –the shore, which in turn refers to the territory and to the social body. That is to say, between colonization and emancipation there is a non-dialectical relationship - this seems to be Cocaine's meaning - that remains untouched throughout history.
This idea does not need a figurative strategy since any image that directly refers to a passage in national history (characters, symbols, etc.) would refer directly to a particular reflection on history. Faced with this, it seems to me that these images show a synchronic cut where the main thing is to suspend the logic of national historical development and think that it is the thought - it is the words - that continue to be subject to those waves. It is the subject, finally, who is stranded in that coming and going of the sea that continues to define our present.
From there, why is the only external reference to the nature-language pair National Geographic? Perhaps its meaning does not go so much through its rescue of the archive as through an iconic use of the most important magazine of global multiculturalism: the cover, used as a frame, makes any image inside seen as historical evidence of the survival of the primitive, as societies that still blend with the natural landscape. By refining the current photographic image used by the magazine, Coca introduces the sea and the phrase barbarian bodies, showing that local imprint of the global (and contemporary) colonial discourse.
Coca no longer seems to be interested in showing the forms of colonization on the body or the gaze, as she distances herself from direct comment to pose a question that is perhaps more difficult to answer: will the visual arts continue indefinitely reviewing the archives of national histories? to get raw material? His response is, in my opinion, skeptical of an artistic practice that at the time produced new critical impulses in local art, but that increasingly reveals itself as a commonplace that, moreover, seems to go very well with the interests of the artist. capitalist market dominating the scene. We could say that, taking into account Coca's work developed in recent decades, we are facing an attempt to reinvent her critical production strategies.
If with his painting Cuentos Bárbaros Gauguin wanted to free the western imagination through an exotic look at the supposed primitive world, the Cuentos Bárbaros de Coca seek to drain that colonial imaginary that, long before the primitivist fantasies of the second colonialism, continues to determine thought. and the sensitivity of the contemporary individual. A symbolic draw through the word.