Faraway Brother Style.
The photographic series Faraway Brother Style by Walterio Iraheta parodies the international publications by Taschen concerning architecture entitled New York Style, London Style or Paris Style, focusing on the emigrant architectural style in El Salvador: Faraway Brother Style. The term hermano lejano [faraway brother] refers to a friend or relative who emigrated from El Salvador, generally to the United States, and who sends back money that helps the family finances of the Salvadorans. Iraheta resorts to a photographic series to identify certain recurrent patterns in this new style. He calls attention to substantial changes in the architecture of the rural zones, where among modest houses there now begin to sprout “small-scale castles or palaces” with various floors, built in an eclectic style that freely blends columns, decorative elements, colors, arches and ceramics of classic, baroque and kitsch style or even the North American style of the shingled roof sloped for snow, transplanted into the hot climate of El Salvador. Iraheta’s series identifies the way of life of the Salvadoran emigrant as a particular style in its own right, like that of one of the metropolises, approaching the concept of style more in terms of a way of life than frivolous and arbitrary connotations of elegance or good taste.
Alfons Hug • Paz Guevara
Displaced Architectures, (new scenarios of custom)
by Clara Astiazarán.
Architecture is repressed by custom,
styles are a lie.
Le Corbusier.
Art history, like science, presumes in it´s beginnings of a path through the most ‘solid’ of it´s manifestations: architecture. Stated as infinity truth, we insist that the history of humanity is contained in each of it´s edifications: cultural, religious, political, social and economic symbols translated to the perdurability of stone, concrete, wood, iron or marble. What Octavio Paz masterfully resumed in ¨architecture is the witness less venal in history.¨ is not more than an empowerment of this to narrate. Seen from a different perspective, art history forks from a set path and architecture stayed with flagrant autonomy in regards to itself. In spite of this, they did not stop sharing responsibilities in the human aesthetic compendium.
Faraway brother style is a project by artist Walterio Iraheta (El Salvador, 1968), where he takes as conceptual reference the authority of architectural speech in the construction of an ideal social-esthetic of El Salvador in the past decades; he (re)takes the path set about by architecture as central language for art routed from a ‘secondary’ formality (no lesser sense of value, but for arriving in a second lap) like photography. In this work, the ironic use of a paraphrase of the tittles of architectural publications are suggested with the term ¨style¨ as safeguard of a typology and/or of a recurring mode, while appealing to ‘faraway brother’ (´hermano lejano´ in Spanish)in reference to a crucial social issue from El Salvador´s contemporary history: the immigration process. El estilo del hermano lejano – an almost literal translation- gathers a series of 10 photographs of Salvadorian homes built with family remittances, which is the primary source of the country’s economy1 and that Iraheta recovers in a work of anthropological cut, understood in it´s most holistic sense.
We would have to return to the social-economical and political context, in which the fragmentation of the Salvadorian society takes place, and not only resume it to the era of the civil war, between 1980-19922, but to see it since 1970 and as it persist to date. A continued migration that happens before, during and after the armed conflict and that turned El Salvador into one of the countries with the higher migration index of the region. A process that not only did it provoke an enormous uprooting in the restoration of the most ancestral practices of the indigenous people, or of colonial customs; but it also forced to forget the modern evolution process and the entering of a postindustrial era without development, postmodern era without the fair foundations of the modern world and into a postwar almost as dark as war itself. 3
¨ The rootless man, torn from his frame, his medium, his country, suffers at first, for it is more pleasant to live amongst your own. However, he can take advantage of his experience. He learns how to stop mistaking the real from the ideal, culture with nature. But if the displaced man manages to overcome the resentment born from despise or from the hostility of his hosts, he discovers curiosity and learns tolerance. His presence amongst the ¨autochthonous¨ forms an uprooted effect: by perturbing his customs, by disconcerting through his behavior and judgment, it may help some of them to enter in this same route of detachment to the convenient, a route of interrogation and amazement.¨ 4
So, as a principle of christian root, this thought presumes the crystallization of desire through sacrifice, but contradictorily the exhibitionism of that desire. Due to this, the sacrifice of the faraway brother has to be equipped with the varnish of success stories, those that feed the pseudo Christianity of the ‘self help’ manuals in accordance to the child prodigy. In the words of the constant apostate that once was Niestsche: ¨in architecture, the pride of man, his triumph over gravitation, his will for power, assumes an invisible form¨: what other monument can explain better the Salvadorian exile than it´s own house? 5
This process of selection and classification that Iraheta uses, is characterized by the displacement, from a sculptural attitude and an object point of view that leads to a hydration point in the rhetorical of (post)filmic; it is precise to remember that the artist has defined his field of obsessions from different angles of the Salvadorian contemporary history and in many occasions by using the domestic territory as an allegory to a false self portrait, in a documentary strategy. He manifests an intense concern for the project and the process, as well as a singular predilection for the theatrical world in regards to representation; so his work conflicts in an idea of truth (given in ‘the documents of what is real’ and an idea of the fatuous given in the scenarios). As a result the definition of ‘new scenarios of custom’ refers to farce as a way of life and to ‘non-style architectural’ (suggested by Le Corbusier) as an inherited practice. The photographs of ‘this sculptures’ may be presented as modular disposition or in remembrance to the context itself; majestic houses built in towns whose names are Citalá, Ilobasco or Intipuca can´t be more than a product of that permanent joke that is the tenacious central american tropic.
This ‘architectures’ are at the same time allegories of houses that are ‘non-habitable’, but not so much in the modern treason of pragmatism, but due to the sense of usurping with crude and domestic exercises, the sacrum space of contemplation. Those visions (variable) of the houses, of the architecture, of the simulated culture (explicit in the climatic and installation solutions of cold countries and postindustrial cities) become an emblem of a country that tilts between rationalism and game. From Baudrillard´s interpretation, that hyper real arises from the interaction between the real, the social and the symbolic, so the simulation ends replacing the real; assisting a hyperbole of the fateful, where paths of baroque, kitsch, indigenous and necessity intersect: more than displaced architectures, they are architectures of necessity, one that is founded in legitimating as an exercise of visibility and self acknowledgment.
The taste for artificiality, the fragmentary conception of the space of ‘representation’, the constant aesthetic of bricolage (in the anthropological and post-critical sense of the term) they are the main dish in a series of photographs. In the houses you can see the defective tensed in relation with the idea of perfection, the unfinished as a style form. But they also immediately refer to the drive to assemble and immediately disassemble a reality or a scene. In one of the cases it relates to a harsh combat of mannerism, a stroke of luck with overexposure of power in ornaments (scrollwork), in the mixture of an exuberant, tropical and chaotic architectural weave. It is poverty with a concrete an iron spirit.
Clara Astiazarán, San José, C.R. 2011.
foot notes:
1 Remittances represented 2% of the gross domestic product (GDP) of all the countries in development in 2008, but 6% of GPD of low income countries. In several small nations, remittances exceed one fifth of GDP and constitute the largest source of foreign currency. El Salvador leads the list of countries that live on remittances in Central America. (taken from the Report on immigration and remittances of the World Bank in April 2011, by J.Tuck-Primdahl and Rebecca ONG)
2 Between 1980 and 1992, El Salvador suffered a violent bellicose conflict between the Armed Forces of El Salvador (FAES) and The Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (FMLN) that generated around 75,000 victims from deaths or missing people. The war ended with The Peace Agreements of Chapultepec, January 16, 1992; that demobilized the guerilla and incorporated it to the political life of the country.
3 One of the most commonly known consequences of the war and post war, was the Salvadorian migration of demilitarized youngsters, that later on form part of the gangs in Los Angeles, and would later on export their model to Central America. Currently El Salvador lives a civil war leaded by two gang groups: La Mara Salvatrucha (also known as la 13) and La Mara 18. The gangs do not control the political structure of the country, but they are mafias that controls the daily lives with assaults, kidnappings, bribery and keeps the civil society in constant fear.
In that personal and social tear that signifies any exile, an idea is founded, of a country extended with aesthetic and cultural imports that acquire the quality of ‘custom’. The great theoretical of culture, the bulagrian Tzvetan Todorov in an autobiographical documentary like The displaced Man, executes with masterful wisdom of this tear in the conscience of the haggard:
4 Todorov, Tzvetan. El hombre desplazado (Translation Juana Salabert). Mexico: Santillana, 1998. PG 29
5 Consult Jose Martí: The history of men told by their houses. In The gold Age, Revista Zunzun, Casa Editorial Abril. La Habana, 2003
Iraheta´s work, starting from a cartographical structure, places the new conception of a visual map of a migrant El Salvador, a country-I insist-extended; a wide angle perspective that captures the focalization of disorder. If in Beckett´s work, Happy Day, the characters are buried, literally, in the garbage, in Faraway brother style it restores from the sub soils of the aesthetic. Walterio Iraheta´s project resumes certain poetics that allude –not without strangeness- that life; bourgeois by excellence, with all the elements of comfort, warning that there is someone inside that space, feeling watched and enjoying it; while the artist situates himself from the viewers space, not as a voyeur, but with a civic, historical and scientific curiosity; a stroke of luck as an archeologist of ‘the ordinary’. He is interested in the viewers perspective and asks himself what that habitat consists of, what lies behind that piece of scenery that is within itself a story of the faraway brother´s personal journey; a house does not betray it´s destiny of autobiography. Each construction is somewhat narrative a (micro) history to tell, an object of simulation and as last instance, a system to gaze at exaggerated things, in the limits of delirium, fair sculptural answers to a time of change. It is the answer that leads to any displacement: a change of paradigm and place; a new scenario for customs.
Kryptonite
Kryptonita, by Rosina Casali.
Kryptonite is one of the most paradigmatic works by Salvadoran artist Waterio Iraheta. It implies a single word that transports us irremediably to that rarity which produced in Superman, the man of steel, effects contrary to those qualities that made him an indestructible superhero. However, Iraheta’s work is based on the antithesis of the perfect hero archetype – a corpulent figure with Anglo-Saxon features and an impeccable appearance. First of all, his story begins with the representation of a super-boy with clearly local features, a boy who from up on high, amidst the clouds, is posed in the classic position, his hands on his waist to better show the “S” that covers his chest. This new version of the man of steel provokes a series of readings that put the myth in question and then, by substitution, propose a reconsideration of the limits of heroism. Who are the real heroes? Without a doubt, they are those who lack supernatural powers and yet still resolve the problems of existence in the planetary realm where madness and extreme deficiencies dwell.
Kryptonite also explores the object representation of the mythical character from the world of comic books, evoking that silent conversation that every child has with his or her toys. In this personification of the alter ego, Superman shares his existence with those religious objects from childhood that accumulated in domestic alters, in treasure boxes or on nightstands, becoming the last thing one sees at night and thereby the main constructor of the dreamed world. Given their hypothetical parallel existence, the characters speak to each other, exchanging wisdom, beliefs, existential worries or flying lessons.
If we had become used to Walterio bringing us miniscule drawings and photographic collages filled with nostalgia, Kryptonite shows us the artist’s need to rebel for a moment against his own technical and narrative precision. Iraheta is of the generation that grew up with television and cartoons like daily bread. And it is from that experience that Walterio brings us this collection of situations that transport us to an imagined world that has been decoded by the artist, based on the immediacy of the symbolic value of objects and the collective urgency to locate its messages in a habitat that is familiar, possible, reachable, and real.
Rosina Casali, Guatemala, October 2004.
Kryptonite, by Clara Astiasarán.
- My friend Edu … asks me, “Does Superman need to eat?”
- Well, no, not really. His body feeds off solar energy and that is enough for him.... In the comic book Peace on Earth this is mentioned, since Clark, studying the problem of hunger on Earth, feels sorry for them and says that since he doesn’t need to eat hi will never know the pain of hunger.
(Taken from http://supermanjaviolivares.iespana.es/supermanjaviolivares/CURIOSIDADES.htm)
At the end of Kill Bill 2 – Quentin Tarantino’s masterpiece – David Carradine (Bill) performs a long monologue[i] about the duality of Superman/Clark Kent, inverting the alter ego relationship between the hero and the man. It is a commentary that affirms the impossibility of avoiding or changing the destiny that awaits each person: Beatrix Kiddo[ii] was born an assassin, just as Superman was born being himself. This monologue, which the most well-read critics have associated with an old essay by Jules Feiffer[iii].
Leads one to a rereading of Salvadoran artist Waterio Iraheta’s Kryptonite, in an exercise of cultural transvestitism where all imposition – beneficial or not – constantly acquires a level of fatality.
The non-western world is bombarded daily – in their interactions with the media – with visual images that obliterate their esthetic vision. However, art takes this effect and turns it into counter-discourse when it subverts and appropriates images from the mass media. It is in this vane that the Superman character becomes the leitmotiv of Iraheta’s visual essay – the same hero that was used as an instrument of patriotic propaganda during World War II.
These days, after the end of art – as announced with the arrival of Warhol and his Brillo Box[iv] – artistic production has begun to displace itself from its accepted spaces of expression, keeping the taxonomy of the period as its shield, and with the haste and the dizziness of the times led to the annihilation of the daily[v]. The bizarre terrain of art allows us, on many occasions, to have intimate dialogues with objects that refer to our everyday experiences, leading to the reformulation of realism. It is in this way that we are constantly falling back on the archaeology of modern objects, or a barter and trade economy, carried out in trades, in juxtaposition, or in costume. These transactions, and their conceptually elaborated premises, blame the questions “what” and “how” for encroaching upon the “why” and removing it from artistic discourse, and it is there that the objet trouvé continues to be the muse for the hazardous. It is in this way that Iraheta’s hand works to make these things – Superman’s clothes or his classic figures (including the flying lessons, done in Porter’s[vi] style) – subjects of transfiguration[vii], that which introduces us to the sacrosanct cult of the ordinary.
If the work of Iraheta had accustomed us to more domestic[viii] and self-referencing exercises, Kryptonite threatens with all the artist’s range of possibilities – meticulous work in drawing, photography and installation – staged as a malefic game. This duality of antonyms is the deceptive doubling back upon which a new aesthetic has been created: arriving at what belongs to oneself with a sense of déjà vu, an irremediable association of our false discourse of infinitely asking for forgiveness. Iraheta does not need to define himself as apocalyptic[ix] in order to play with this historic illness that has pushed us to the cynicism of adopting the aesthetic of populist spontaneity and attributing to it the end of the ridiculous.
One question cannot be avoided with this exhibit: What is Kryptonite? In the Superman saga, you have the response in a strange and diversified mineral, which comes from Krypton, the superhero’s planet, and which makes his powers disappear. Tempted by metaphoric language, this explication derives from a psychoanalytical reading, one which equates the place from which we come with the mother figure and the loss of powers with the catastrophic. Thereby the super-people who share the exhibit with the hero share not only a quota of solar energy, which is essential for survival, but also two fatal qualities – their own planet which rejects them, and a suit as false as the emancipating stories and the modern utopia. Here, all are left naked and without the crown.
It shouldn’t surprise us that the artist has chosen local stereotypes to fit with his historical joke. We must revisit the taste for the local, for clichés and regional exoticism, in order to borrow from a discourse that remains on the boundaries between the politically correct and the rampantly amoral. Each one of those portrayed – like Beatriz Kiddo, like Superman – shows their fatality, shows that as much as they may “cross dress,” trying to fully disguise themselves, they cannot escape their own Kryptonite, the obligation to a life that detests possibilities.
Clara Astiasarán, Costa Rica, April 2005.
[i] Bill: “Superman is just Superman – he didn’t become Superman, Superman was born Superman. When Superman gets up in the morning, he is Superman. His alter ego is Clark Kent. His costume with the big red “S” is the sheet he was wearing when the Kents found him. Those are his clothes. Kent’s outfit? His glasses, his suit – that is the costume Superman wears to blend in with us. Clark Kent is how Superman sees us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent? He is weak, confused about himself… he is a coward. Clark Kent is Superman’s critique of the human race.”
[ii] Beatriz Kiddo, the girlfriend, is the character played by Emma Thurman in Tarantino’s Kill Bill 1 and 2.
[iii] Jules Feiffer is one of the most important screenplay writers of the Superman saga, and he has also written some theoretical reflections about the same subject.
[iv] Arthur C. Danto makes the commentary that art history was closed in 1964, with Warhol’s Brillo detergent boxes, evidently as a metaphor for the end of emancipatory discourse as it relates to art. Arthur C. Danto: After the End of Art. Contemporary Art and the Bounds of History. Barcelona: Editorial Paidós, 1999, p.46.
[v] Fernando Castro Flórez: Skirmishes. Art in Times of Demolition. Murcia: CendeaC, Collection Ad Hoc, 2003, p.41
[vi] One of Kriptonita’s most important references as an exhibit is to the dynamic of objects and the work with toys by the Argentinean conceptual artist Liliana Porter. The “Flying Lesson #2” illustrates this reference.
[vii] Arthur C. Danto: The Transfiguration of the Common Place, an Art Philosophy. Barcelona: Editorial Paidós, Estética 31, 2002.
[viii] The term “domestic” is used in reference to the intimacy – the miniscule and extremely precise nature – of the previous work by Walterio Iraheta.
[ix] Humberto Eco: Apocalyptics the Integrated. Editorial Debolsillo, 2004
Kryptonite is one of the most paradigmatic works by Salvadoran artist Waterio Iraheta. It implies a single word that transports us irremediably to that rarity which produced in Superman, the man of steel, effects contrary to those qualities that made him an indestructible superhero. However, Iraheta’s work is based on the antithesis of the perfect hero archetype – a corpulent figure with Anglo-Saxon features and an impeccable appearance. First of all, his story begins with the representation of a super-boy with clearly local features, a boy who from up on high, amidst the clouds, is posed in the classic position, his hands on his waist to better show the “S” that covers his chest. This new version of the man of steel provokes a series of readings that put the myth in question and then, by substitution, propose a reconsideration of the limits of heroism. Who are the real heroes? Without a doubt, they are those who lack supernatural powers and yet still resolve the problems of existence in the planetary realm where madness and extreme deficiencies dwell.
Kryptonite also explores the object representation of the mythical character from the world of comic books, evoking that silent conversation that every child has with his or her toys. In this personification of the alter ego, Superman shares his existence with those religious objects from childhood that accumulated in domestic alters, in treasure boxes or on nightstands, becoming the last thing one sees at night and thereby the main constructor of the dreamed world. Given their hypothetical parallel existence, the characters speak to each other, exchanging wisdom, beliefs, existential worries or flying lessons.
If we had become used to Walterio bringing us miniscule drawings and photographic collages filled with nostalgia, Kryptonite shows us the artist’s need to rebel for a moment against his own technical and narrative precision. Iraheta is of the generation that grew up with television and cartoons like daily bread. And it is from that experience that Walterio brings us this collection of situations that transport us to an imagined world that has been decoded by the artist, based on the immediacy of the symbolic value of objects and the collective urgency to locate its messages in a habitat that is familiar, possible, reachable, and real.
Rosina Casali, Guatemala, October 2004.
Kryptonite, by Clara Astiasarán.
- My friend Edu … asks me, “Does Superman need to eat?”
- Well, no, not really. His body feeds off solar energy and that is enough for him.... In the comic book Peace on Earth this is mentioned, since Clark, studying the problem of hunger on Earth, feels sorry for them and says that since he doesn’t need to eat hi will never know the pain of hunger.
(Taken from http://supermanjaviolivares.iespana.es/supermanjaviolivares/CURIOSIDADES.htm)
At the end of Kill Bill 2 – Quentin Tarantino’s masterpiece – David Carradine (Bill) performs a long monologue[i] about the duality of Superman/Clark Kent, inverting the alter ego relationship between the hero and the man. It is a commentary that affirms the impossibility of avoiding or changing the destiny that awaits each person: Beatrix Kiddo[ii] was born an assassin, just as Superman was born being himself. This monologue, which the most well-read critics have associated with an old essay by Jules Feiffer[iii].
Leads one to a rereading of Salvadoran artist Waterio Iraheta’s Kryptonite, in an exercise of cultural transvestitism where all imposition – beneficial or not – constantly acquires a level of fatality.
The non-western world is bombarded daily – in their interactions with the media – with visual images that obliterate their esthetic vision. However, art takes this effect and turns it into counter-discourse when it subverts and appropriates images from the mass media. It is in this vane that the Superman character becomes the leitmotiv of Iraheta’s visual essay – the same hero that was used as an instrument of patriotic propaganda during World War II.
These days, after the end of art – as announced with the arrival of Warhol and his Brillo Box[iv] – artistic production has begun to displace itself from its accepted spaces of expression, keeping the taxonomy of the period as its shield, and with the haste and the dizziness of the times led to the annihilation of the daily[v]. The bizarre terrain of art allows us, on many occasions, to have intimate dialogues with objects that refer to our everyday experiences, leading to the reformulation of realism. It is in this way that we are constantly falling back on the archaeology of modern objects, or a barter and trade economy, carried out in trades, in juxtaposition, or in costume. These transactions, and their conceptually elaborated premises, blame the questions “what” and “how” for encroaching upon the “why” and removing it from artistic discourse, and it is there that the objet trouvé continues to be the muse for the hazardous. It is in this way that Iraheta’s hand works to make these things – Superman’s clothes or his classic figures (including the flying lessons, done in Porter’s[vi] style) – subjects of transfiguration[vii], that which introduces us to the sacrosanct cult of the ordinary.
If the work of Iraheta had accustomed us to more domestic[viii] and self-referencing exercises, Kryptonite threatens with all the artist’s range of possibilities – meticulous work in drawing, photography and installation – staged as a malefic game. This duality of antonyms is the deceptive doubling back upon which a new aesthetic has been created: arriving at what belongs to oneself with a sense of déjà vu, an irremediable association of our false discourse of infinitely asking for forgiveness. Iraheta does not need to define himself as apocalyptic[ix] in order to play with this historic illness that has pushed us to the cynicism of adopting the aesthetic of populist spontaneity and attributing to it the end of the ridiculous.
One question cannot be avoided with this exhibit: What is Kryptonite? In the Superman saga, you have the response in a strange and diversified mineral, which comes from Krypton, the superhero’s planet, and which makes his powers disappear. Tempted by metaphoric language, this explication derives from a psychoanalytical reading, one which equates the place from which we come with the mother figure and the loss of powers with the catastrophic. Thereby the super-people who share the exhibit with the hero share not only a quota of solar energy, which is essential for survival, but also two fatal qualities – their own planet which rejects them, and a suit as false as the emancipating stories and the modern utopia. Here, all are left naked and without the crown.
It shouldn’t surprise us that the artist has chosen local stereotypes to fit with his historical joke. We must revisit the taste for the local, for clichés and regional exoticism, in order to borrow from a discourse that remains on the boundaries between the politically correct and the rampantly amoral. Each one of those portrayed – like Beatriz Kiddo, like Superman – shows their fatality, shows that as much as they may “cross dress,” trying to fully disguise themselves, they cannot escape their own Kryptonite, the obligation to a life that detests possibilities.
Clara Astiasarán, Costa Rica, April 2005.
[i] Bill: “Superman is just Superman – he didn’t become Superman, Superman was born Superman. When Superman gets up in the morning, he is Superman. His alter ego is Clark Kent. His costume with the big red “S” is the sheet he was wearing when the Kents found him. Those are his clothes. Kent’s outfit? His glasses, his suit – that is the costume Superman wears to blend in with us. Clark Kent is how Superman sees us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent? He is weak, confused about himself… he is a coward. Clark Kent is Superman’s critique of the human race.”
[ii] Beatriz Kiddo, the girlfriend, is the character played by Emma Thurman in Tarantino’s Kill Bill 1 and 2.
[iii] Jules Feiffer is one of the most important screenplay writers of the Superman saga, and he has also written some theoretical reflections about the same subject.
[iv] Arthur C. Danto makes the commentary that art history was closed in 1964, with Warhol’s Brillo detergent boxes, evidently as a metaphor for the end of emancipatory discourse as it relates to art. Arthur C. Danto: After the End of Art. Contemporary Art and the Bounds of History. Barcelona: Editorial Paidós, 1999, p.46.
[v] Fernando Castro Flórez: Skirmishes. Art in Times of Demolition. Murcia: CendeaC, Collection Ad Hoc, 2003, p.41
[vi] One of Kriptonita’s most important references as an exhibit is to the dynamic of objects and the work with toys by the Argentinean conceptual artist Liliana Porter. The “Flying Lesson #2” illustrates this reference.
[vii] Arthur C. Danto: The Transfiguration of the Common Place, an Art Philosophy. Barcelona: Editorial Paidós, Estética 31, 2002.
[viii] The term “domestic” is used in reference to the intimacy – the miniscule and extremely precise nature – of the previous work by Walterio Iraheta.
[ix] Humberto Eco: Apocalyptics the Integrated. Editorial Debolsillo, 2004
My feets are my wings
From the land of the symbolic, by Anabella Acevedo.
One comes into contact with the works of My Feet are My Wings (Mis pies son mis alas) and asks: What is there behind the obvious, or, what is the artistic work really claiming? Recognizing the previous work of Walter Iraheta, one knows that besides the aesthetic pleasure
that is experienced in front of a rigorous artistic creation, whether be it painting, photograph, installation or another medium, there is something more that searches to communicate, sometimes through irony or a sense of humor, other times through nostalgia, and still more
through pure suggestion. Moreover, each work in the series is part of a larger discussion that the artist has elaborated upon and can tell us with detail, if he were asked. In fact, in the blog openned by the artist in relation to this show we read:
"My Feet are my Wings is a collective of photographs in which exists an analogy between the object and the human being, the object as live matter, capable of evoking feelings and sensations, capable of passing on to us a large amount of information left in it, contained by the
energy of the people who participated in its making and those who will then make use of it. The object is a symbol of power, a symbol of belonging, of tenacity, of status, of style, of necessity, history, the beginning and the end. The object gives testimony to space and time." That is, the work is an allegory, as Heidegger explains it well: "The work is symbolic. Allegory and symbolism are the frameworks of representation under which the characterization of a work of art has moved for a long time." That is, the work goes beyond itself as an object of art and guides our look toward other realities. A shoe stops from being just an object of use and relates to us as a human experience, real or fiction.
When one thinks about photography, it is assumed that this allows the possibility of faithfully copying a fragment of reality. That is to say, we assign credibility to it as a primary characteristic. We do not doubt the existence of the shown as our eyes see it. Submerged in the enchantment of good photography, we don't think in that moment of light and shadow, compositions or games. Instead, we comfortably accept the condition as visual truth. This is not to say that it is not really this way. In My Feet are My Wings, for example, we see shoes of every type, in photographs and in installations, and the shoe portraits effectively remain to the world as real and possible. However, the disposition of the shoes, the composition of the series,
and the combinations and sets change the dimension of the real character that is presented to us, propelling us to look beyond to a new alegorical reality, in such a way that the shoes stop being just more objects whose senses give others their use, and begin to convert
into elements of reflection about reality and human nature.
On the other hand, photography as a fragment of reality that remains outside forms part of that chain of meanings already established by that initial fragment. In "Preludio," for example, there is a boot placed over a white sheet. We assume that it is a woman's boot and that the woman has taken it off. We also imagine that the taking off of the boot has been a prelude to an action that is only suggested to us through the composition and the title of the work. So, what Walter does to unite the boot, the white sheet, and the title is provide the objects with new contexts, and by that, new meanings. It does not matter if the artist has created a simulation by putting the boot on the bed to photograph it in the end. The thing of importance here is that not only have we've bitten the fishhook that's been thrown to us, but with indulgance.
Even in photodocumentary, photography has those both sides, that of the actual copied reality and the other filled with a multitude of significances. This unites the fact that the selection of the fragment of reality photographed has put the look of the artist, of the documentary
photographer, or of the innocent picture taker that only wants to record what's been lived or seen, in an impossible act of retaining an ephemeral moment. Therefore, the artist elects the object of his or her gaze (and in doing so has already designed a new being) and already knows how it appears in his eyes or recomposed according to a prior idea. In other words, the artist adjusts the reality to his lens. Walter Iraheta does both things by photographing shoes and feet
and applying new significance to them.
On the other side, photography places us in a precise moment that, nevertheless, opens us to the world and history, creating a narrative that starts from associations. But in the instant this has been fixed and the artist has captured it, such existing is gone, and its existence begins to take forms of discourse that the artist has iniciated--even before taking the photo--and what we see of the work we can continue or not, adding elements that come from our own history, from our particular experience in this world. Photography in its originality belongs to the artist, but it is also ours, like the shoes photographed by Walter that belong to someone else and that he makes his own through the camera, through their free disposition, and the act of transforming them into works of art.
On one hand, we have photographs whose origins come from exhumations done by the artist in Rabinal, Guatemala. Beautiful, elegant and sober, despite the profound sadness they hold and the terrible reality that alludes it. Next, we have installations like Mandala or Jardin, en which Walter has decided the character of the shoes, the grand part of them old and used, rescuing them from abandonment and giving them a new sense of dignity. There are also that photographic installations that establish a dialogue with artists like Magrite and Duchamp, and
with the ironic weight that they possess, seem to give the work the necessary balance that takes us away from the nostalgic horror and contemplation of beauty to the reflection over objects that define us--in this case, shoes.
One of the symbolic values of the wings is that of the "regeneration", which is precisely what Walter Iraheta finishes with in this work. By photographing portraits of the shoes, we are told about the feet, and doing so uncovers or grows the stories of life.
Anabella Acevedo, quetzaltenango, Guatemala, 2007.
My Feet are my Wings, by Monica Kupfer.
In Salvadorian artist Walterio Iraheta¿s photographs, shoes cease to be everyday items and become iconographic signs or symbols with personalities of their own. The pictures in his portfolio entitled ¿My Feet are my Wings,¿ which concentrate on images of footwear, mostly white shoes, is remarkable for its sense of harmony, its visual drama, and its narrative content.
In the stories that these photos embody, shoes¿worn, fixed, arranged in order, or dumped¿are the main characters. The image of a lady¿s single white boot lying among rumpled sheets in Preludio (Prelude) awakens thoughts of romantic experiences. The large mass of shoe soles pointing in the same direction in Cementerio de zapatos (Shoe Cemetery) brings to mind ideas about people marching together for a cause. Iraheta offers a plethora of possibilities for the imagination by representing humanity through their old shoes: one envisions men, women, and children, whole families, lovers, the living and the dead, people known and anonymous, commemorated or forgotten.
Moreover, Iraheta pays homage to art history and to great artists like Marcel Duchamp (two boots on a green field) or René Magritte (this is not a boot against a blue sky). The torn soles, the worn leather and the tongue sticking out of Zapatos rojos (Red Shoes) inevitably remind us of Vincent Van Gogh¿s paintings of tattered boots in which the artist echoed the hard life of the poorer classes. Closer to our own region and time, Iraheta shows sensitivity for the history of Central America in compositions such as Zapatos encontrados (Found Shoes), which resembles an archeological showcase of objects unearthed from a mass grave. His invitation to reconstruct history is both powerful and persuasive.
Just as some stories make us uneasy, other photographs offer a sense of balance. In Mandala, the monochrome and essential geometric structure of a circle of white shoes bears resemblance to a garden for meditation. On the other hand, his photograph Jardin (Garden), in which shoes are scattered arbitrarily over a gray surface, suggests the idea of order within chaos, and conveys a feeling of freedom, or even fun. The solitary object in Bota (Boot), dramatically lit from above, is more closely linked to the traditional Freudian symbolism of shoes as vessels for feet; as the objects of sexual fetishism.
It¿s easy to get carried away by the wide variety of associations Iraheta¿s photos suggest. However, this is only possible for the observer because his technique and presentation are so impeccable that they become imperceptible. There are no messy details to distract us from the images, whose balanced and traditional compositions offer a base for the flight of the imagination. It is no coincidence that Iraheta was initially known for his careful, almost precious, drawings and then by his paintings and mixed media works of nostalgic images that straddled the line between realism and surrealism.
Iraheta, who first studied at the National Arts Center in San Salvador, has gone through a process which began with traditional techniques, but continuously expanded to include any technique or material in the creation of artworks. His past exhibitions provide multiple examples, such as his ¿constellations¿ of discarded bottle caps; the objects and installations in his ¿Kryptonite¿ series that included meetings between Superman and the Virgin Mary; and his photographic and video series entitled Landschaft in which he used networks of electric cables to represent the contemporary landscape and our urban reality. As a creator, he is constantly moving towards new languages and topics, passing from one to another without losing his way in the search for aesthetic results. At times, however, his choices come dangerously (and consciously) close to being too kitschy, or he seems unnecessarily reticent to breaking with convention, in an effort to preserve a traditional sense of visual structure, and the sort of perfectionism and appreciation for detail that has characterized him as a draftsman.
What remains unchanged is the direct and enriching conversation Iraheta achieves between his work and its viewers. There are moments of mockery and humor, or of social consciousness, as well as more intimate passages related to love and memory. In some pieces, the focus is on himself as the subject, a natural consequence of the self-referentiality apparent in all of his oeuvre. In this exhibition entitled My Feet are my Wings, there are no images of anatomical parts or winged figures, but the references are clear. Although they are not depicted, we are reminded that our feet provide us with support as well as transportation, that shoes can pressure us but also give us freedom, and that, in many cases, they are left behind as proof of our passage through life.
Monica E. Kupfer, Panamá city.
One comes into contact with the works of My Feet are My Wings (Mis pies son mis alas) and asks: What is there behind the obvious, or, what is the artistic work really claiming? Recognizing the previous work of Walter Iraheta, one knows that besides the aesthetic pleasure
that is experienced in front of a rigorous artistic creation, whether be it painting, photograph, installation or another medium, there is something more that searches to communicate, sometimes through irony or a sense of humor, other times through nostalgia, and still more
through pure suggestion. Moreover, each work in the series is part of a larger discussion that the artist has elaborated upon and can tell us with detail, if he were asked. In fact, in the blog openned by the artist in relation to this show we read:
"My Feet are my Wings is a collective of photographs in which exists an analogy between the object and the human being, the object as live matter, capable of evoking feelings and sensations, capable of passing on to us a large amount of information left in it, contained by the
energy of the people who participated in its making and those who will then make use of it. The object is a symbol of power, a symbol of belonging, of tenacity, of status, of style, of necessity, history, the beginning and the end. The object gives testimony to space and time." That is, the work is an allegory, as Heidegger explains it well: "The work is symbolic. Allegory and symbolism are the frameworks of representation under which the characterization of a work of art has moved for a long time." That is, the work goes beyond itself as an object of art and guides our look toward other realities. A shoe stops from being just an object of use and relates to us as a human experience, real or fiction.
When one thinks about photography, it is assumed that this allows the possibility of faithfully copying a fragment of reality. That is to say, we assign credibility to it as a primary characteristic. We do not doubt the existence of the shown as our eyes see it. Submerged in the enchantment of good photography, we don't think in that moment of light and shadow, compositions or games. Instead, we comfortably accept the condition as visual truth. This is not to say that it is not really this way. In My Feet are My Wings, for example, we see shoes of every type, in photographs and in installations, and the shoe portraits effectively remain to the world as real and possible. However, the disposition of the shoes, the composition of the series,
and the combinations and sets change the dimension of the real character that is presented to us, propelling us to look beyond to a new alegorical reality, in such a way that the shoes stop being just more objects whose senses give others their use, and begin to convert
into elements of reflection about reality and human nature.
On the other hand, photography as a fragment of reality that remains outside forms part of that chain of meanings already established by that initial fragment. In "Preludio," for example, there is a boot placed over a white sheet. We assume that it is a woman's boot and that the woman has taken it off. We also imagine that the taking off of the boot has been a prelude to an action that is only suggested to us through the composition and the title of the work. So, what Walter does to unite the boot, the white sheet, and the title is provide the objects with new contexts, and by that, new meanings. It does not matter if the artist has created a simulation by putting the boot on the bed to photograph it in the end. The thing of importance here is that not only have we've bitten the fishhook that's been thrown to us, but with indulgance.
Even in photodocumentary, photography has those both sides, that of the actual copied reality and the other filled with a multitude of significances. This unites the fact that the selection of the fragment of reality photographed has put the look of the artist, of the documentary
photographer, or of the innocent picture taker that only wants to record what's been lived or seen, in an impossible act of retaining an ephemeral moment. Therefore, the artist elects the object of his or her gaze (and in doing so has already designed a new being) and already knows how it appears in his eyes or recomposed according to a prior idea. In other words, the artist adjusts the reality to his lens. Walter Iraheta does both things by photographing shoes and feet
and applying new significance to them.
On the other side, photography places us in a precise moment that, nevertheless, opens us to the world and history, creating a narrative that starts from associations. But in the instant this has been fixed and the artist has captured it, such existing is gone, and its existence begins to take forms of discourse that the artist has iniciated--even before taking the photo--and what we see of the work we can continue or not, adding elements that come from our own history, from our particular experience in this world. Photography in its originality belongs to the artist, but it is also ours, like the shoes photographed by Walter that belong to someone else and that he makes his own through the camera, through their free disposition, and the act of transforming them into works of art.
On one hand, we have photographs whose origins come from exhumations done by the artist in Rabinal, Guatemala. Beautiful, elegant and sober, despite the profound sadness they hold and the terrible reality that alludes it. Next, we have installations like Mandala or Jardin, en which Walter has decided the character of the shoes, the grand part of them old and used, rescuing them from abandonment and giving them a new sense of dignity. There are also that photographic installations that establish a dialogue with artists like Magrite and Duchamp, and
with the ironic weight that they possess, seem to give the work the necessary balance that takes us away from the nostalgic horror and contemplation of beauty to the reflection over objects that define us--in this case, shoes.
One of the symbolic values of the wings is that of the "regeneration", which is precisely what Walter Iraheta finishes with in this work. By photographing portraits of the shoes, we are told about the feet, and doing so uncovers or grows the stories of life.
Anabella Acevedo, quetzaltenango, Guatemala, 2007.
My Feet are my Wings, by Monica Kupfer.
In Salvadorian artist Walterio Iraheta¿s photographs, shoes cease to be everyday items and become iconographic signs or symbols with personalities of their own. The pictures in his portfolio entitled ¿My Feet are my Wings,¿ which concentrate on images of footwear, mostly white shoes, is remarkable for its sense of harmony, its visual drama, and its narrative content.
In the stories that these photos embody, shoes¿worn, fixed, arranged in order, or dumped¿are the main characters. The image of a lady¿s single white boot lying among rumpled sheets in Preludio (Prelude) awakens thoughts of romantic experiences. The large mass of shoe soles pointing in the same direction in Cementerio de zapatos (Shoe Cemetery) brings to mind ideas about people marching together for a cause. Iraheta offers a plethora of possibilities for the imagination by representing humanity through their old shoes: one envisions men, women, and children, whole families, lovers, the living and the dead, people known and anonymous, commemorated or forgotten.
Moreover, Iraheta pays homage to art history and to great artists like Marcel Duchamp (two boots on a green field) or René Magritte (this is not a boot against a blue sky). The torn soles, the worn leather and the tongue sticking out of Zapatos rojos (Red Shoes) inevitably remind us of Vincent Van Gogh¿s paintings of tattered boots in which the artist echoed the hard life of the poorer classes. Closer to our own region and time, Iraheta shows sensitivity for the history of Central America in compositions such as Zapatos encontrados (Found Shoes), which resembles an archeological showcase of objects unearthed from a mass grave. His invitation to reconstruct history is both powerful and persuasive.
Just as some stories make us uneasy, other photographs offer a sense of balance. In Mandala, the monochrome and essential geometric structure of a circle of white shoes bears resemblance to a garden for meditation. On the other hand, his photograph Jardin (Garden), in which shoes are scattered arbitrarily over a gray surface, suggests the idea of order within chaos, and conveys a feeling of freedom, or even fun. The solitary object in Bota (Boot), dramatically lit from above, is more closely linked to the traditional Freudian symbolism of shoes as vessels for feet; as the objects of sexual fetishism.
It¿s easy to get carried away by the wide variety of associations Iraheta¿s photos suggest. However, this is only possible for the observer because his technique and presentation are so impeccable that they become imperceptible. There are no messy details to distract us from the images, whose balanced and traditional compositions offer a base for the flight of the imagination. It is no coincidence that Iraheta was initially known for his careful, almost precious, drawings and then by his paintings and mixed media works of nostalgic images that straddled the line between realism and surrealism.
Iraheta, who first studied at the National Arts Center in San Salvador, has gone through a process which began with traditional techniques, but continuously expanded to include any technique or material in the creation of artworks. His past exhibitions provide multiple examples, such as his ¿constellations¿ of discarded bottle caps; the objects and installations in his ¿Kryptonite¿ series that included meetings between Superman and the Virgin Mary; and his photographic and video series entitled Landschaft in which he used networks of electric cables to represent the contemporary landscape and our urban reality. As a creator, he is constantly moving towards new languages and topics, passing from one to another without losing his way in the search for aesthetic results. At times, however, his choices come dangerously (and consciously) close to being too kitschy, or he seems unnecessarily reticent to breaking with convention, in an effort to preserve a traditional sense of visual structure, and the sort of perfectionism and appreciation for detail that has characterized him as a draftsman.
What remains unchanged is the direct and enriching conversation Iraheta achieves between his work and its viewers. There are moments of mockery and humor, or of social consciousness, as well as more intimate passages related to love and memory. In some pieces, the focus is on himself as the subject, a natural consequence of the self-referentiality apparent in all of his oeuvre. In this exhibition entitled My Feet are my Wings, there are no images of anatomical parts or winged figures, but the references are clear. Although they are not depicted, we are reminded that our feet provide us with support as well as transportation, that shoes can pressure us but also give us freedom, and that, in many cases, they are left behind as proof of our passage through life.
Monica E. Kupfer, Panamá city.
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