Saturday, November 12, 2011
| ENTERTAINMENT | 11
Hanging on for art’s sake BY CARLA HARMS
Herald staff
In a city with a rythm that never seems to slow down, performance art offers a rare opportunity to stop, look, listen and just be in the moment. This is in fact one of the underlying themes in multimedia artist Juan Miceli’s latest undertaking, La suspensión, where the artist hangs upside down from a rope attached to the ceiling of a warehouse. This is an installation of his sculptural works. Aside from all the bungying that goes on – and there were a few tense moments throughout Miceli’s live performance at ThisIsNotAGallery, where the installation opened on November 3 (one in particular occured when he appeared to swing with a little too much force and bumped head against the brick wall) – it is especially interesting to see the artist perform amidst his sculptural works, the medium for which he is most known. It is such a visceral experience to be in the midst of thes sculptures watching the artist perform in real time, and it is a completely different experience from looking at static art. I think it is safe to say that watching Miceli hanging among his sculptures significantly deepened my understanding of his artistic project as a whole. Somehow, watching him suspended in between the different sculptural groupings allowed me to take one step further into “Miceli’s world”, a world where the natural environment is at once proposed as a thing of beauty and disaster. La suspensión marks a departure for Miceli, who is best known for his sculptural works made of found materials such as plastic bottles, discarded plastic toys and parts of them, and crystals from discarded chandeliers. He installs these sculptures in various spaces creating fantasy forests of sparkling foliage and magical creatures. He has never before appeared personally in the midst of these installations. “I have used my body as a work in public interventions or in sound performances...but I think that La suspensión marks the first time I have presented my body in this way,” said Miceli. It was really revealing for me to hang upside down in the installation and observe the almost ritualistic circle of the people surrounding me.” What was apparent to me and the other observers at the opening performance, most notably in that suspenseful moment before Miceli’s head hit the wall, and during which many of the audience members were holding their breath, was that la suspensión was not simply a live performance, but a physical act that required serious training. This is the kind of training that artists do not commonly embark on, but one that Miceli was slightly familiar with be-
fore coming up with the idea for the performance. “La suspensión is a resting pose that I have been practicing for years in yoga classes with my teacher Pablo Monteys,” said Miceli. “One day it occurred to me that this pose was profoundly related to my hanging sculptures and that I could use this position as a way to cross over into ‘being the art’ and that at the same time it allowed me to be more artistic than ever before.” One of the characteristics of Miceli’s installations is his use of hanging sculpture. Experimenting with different lengths and various depths, and using transparent fishing line, the artist creates a sparking 3D fantasy world in which you are never quite sure where it starts and stops. And aside from all the different textures of the discarded plastic materials he uses, he has a penchant for hanging crystals throughout the installations, which reflect light and, with their sparkle, intensify the notion of magic that arises from the works. I first saw an installation of Miceli’s work in the patio window of Itaú Cultural. A sculptural installation titled Invocando el verano eterno (Invoking Eternal Summer), the green forest and sea creatures created from plastic foliage and discarded plastic bottles sparkled and shone suspended in mid air, while water spraying amidst them and hanging crystals reflected light and kept the installation from being comely static. The result was a cross bewtween A Midsummer Night’s Dream and science fiction. What is most evident from Miceli’s work is the underlying environmental theme that comes through not only in his use of found materials, but in the way that he celebrates the glories of nature. What was different in La suspensión was that it showed both sides of the environment – the beauty it holds and the danger it faces. Entering the warehouse space at ThisIsNotAGallery, you are met first with the foreboding sculpture of an animal skull surrounded by curling black tape removed from old VHS tapes, setting a dark tone to the work as a whole. Behind that are other sculptures rendered in black materials, including a work titled Haelterman, a sculpture made with plastic bottles, polyethelene, the skull of a wild boar, broken auto parts, crystals and cables. Haelterman is the most spectacular sculpture of the installation, consisting in part of a giant black whale tail that emerges from the ground, providing strong visual links to the dangers of oils spills. The VHS tape, which Miceli wears as a cos-
tume (he wears only the tape), wraps and tangles around his body as he hangs upside down, adding what he calls an “organic and liquid character” to the work as a whole. It is also entwined around several of the sculptures, echoing the the notion of poisonous petroleum. Behind these darker works, and in front of the video projection of Miceli performing, which viewers can watch if they miss the live performance, Miceli has installed groupings of green works, whose forest creatures sparkle with the kind of magic he produced Invoking Eternal Summer. But this is a darker forest than we have seen before, with the black works casting a shadow over the promise of green. “Yes, maybe La suspensión is a side B to Verano eterno or its continuation. When I conjured upVerano eterno in the Tigre Delta, in my imagination I opened a door through which you could enter eternal summer (which is always fertilizing and germinating) but from that also came other potential: what has always crept from the wetlands of the Delta is represented in the totem with the head of a wild boar and the bottom of a sea creature that cross over the space and relate to it in the same instant. This work is called Haelterman... They are really two separate pieces that form one but function idependently,” explained Miceli, adding that the work not only talks about the dangers of petroleum, but also about the origins of the plastic used to make bottles, how it is derived from petrolum, and how that in turn is derived from fossils. “For me La suspensión, in my artistic career, closes a circle (or opens another), where bones once again unite with plastic in a natural way as if they were tow faces of the same thing, just like humans: the union between the heroic and the monstrous,” said Miceli. The border between beauty and monstrosity is evident in much of Miceli’s work, where darkness creeps into his fantasy forests, and where creatures seem to have one foot in this world and one in the next. The last group exhibition Miceli partici-
PHOTO BY WALTER TORRES WITH GRAPHIC DESIGN BY CARLOS BARAGLI.
Juan Miceli suspends his body in an installation at ThisIsNotAGallery
pated in was titled Monsters and took place in the ex-ESMA at ECuNHI (Espacio Cultural Nuestros Hijos). But another border presents itself in La suspensión-the border between Earth and sky, which Miceli explores both physically and through his sculptural installations. While Miceli and some of the scuptures hang from above, others sculptures emerge from the the earth, while others hover in the in-between, as if suspended in mid-air. Both the dichotomies of beauty/monstrosity and earth/sky meet in Miceli’s live performance, but anther theme also emerges, that of sacrifice and ritual. Hanging upside down and splayed out under blood red lights, Miceli’s body appears almost as a carcass on a spit over an asado. The animal sculptures watch his act silently; some, like the skull on the ground, have already made their sacrifice. And if Miceli is the sacrifice, the viewers, in some way, take part in the ritual. During the live performance, the notion of ritual is further evoked by the ambient sound installation presented by Grinbaum-Miceli, the artist’s ongoing sound project with Mono Diego Grinbaum. For Miceli, the performance served as a kind of artistic ritual, one in which he offers up his work as a kind of sacrifice. When asked where the idea for La suspensión came from, Miceli explains that, firstly, it was a natural result of his obsession with making
hanging art. Secondly, he wanted to take this further and explore what it means to be suspended. No longer on earth, but neither in the sky – it is a kind of artificial space where the art takes place. “At the same time I suspend my body it amplifies the meaning of the idea of the suspension in all of its implications,” said Miceli. Some of the implications he mentions are suspending his body as a mode of ritual, suspension in time (which relates to his obsession with immortalizing bones) and suspension in movement. La suspensión can certainly be viewed without the live performance, but it will be very different. The video projected on the wall, created with video artist Queralt Lencinas, does a good job of transmitting what Miceli looks like while hanging, but it obviously doesn’t have the aura of a live performance. And in the end, I suppose, Miceli becomes one more of his own hanging sculptures – a living, suspended work of art.
WHERE & WHEN La Suspensión runs through November 24 at ThisIsNotAGallery (Cabrera 5849, 4774-0401, www.thisisnotagallery.com) in Palermo Hollywood. Admission to the gallery is free and hours are Tuesday through Friday from 5 to 8pm. Miceli will perform one last time on November 17 at 8pm.