of new spaces, territories and habitats, the exploration of new emotions, the incidence of mass media and the bombardment of images to which the artist is subjected to. As for the link with memory, very popular in previous decades, this witnessing what happened goes from narrating it without apparent evidence of judgment to a forced conceptualization and intellectualization of the phenomena and the historical conditions of contemporaneity through an analytical parallelism of the repeating circumstances. In this sense, something quite interesting happens when the artists distance themselves to do the dissection of the topic; unlike previous generations, they do not seek to atone for any historical guilt, nor resolve conflicts carried by others. This moment can be considered transitional in the displacement or migration of meaning. Themes have mutated. Symbols have migrated to a different context. Roles have been exchanged and that which formerly meant something, has now disappeared as a central theme or approach, or has acquired a different connotation. Some of the first strong examples in contemporary Dominican art are produced at this time; artists went from storytelling to intellectualizing and conceptualizing. The significance of this type of work lies primarily in that it reflected the problems without resorting to a literal declaring narrative, and irrevocably translated the irresolvable and conflicting nature of violence, marginalization, migration, the abuse of women and children and many other issues that were reflected in the work of these artists. Determining pieces as the shown by Jorge Pineda in 2002 at the Museum of Modern Art entitled Jardín Secreto serve as archetype for talking about this transition. It exemplified the importance and implications of the transfer of sense in contemporary Dominican art. The significance of this work was primarily in that it embodied the problem without resorting to a literal declaring narrative and irrevocably shapes the conflict and irresolvable nature of violence, the abuse of women and children and the symbolic elements of our Dominican culture. The use of an iconic image of hope –the baptismal font of the Dominican founding father par excellence–, full of contact cement –used by homeless children for doping– and on this fresh and deeply scented material, a projected flower that dissolved in an effect that mimics the drainage of a toilet was highly powerful and sublime. Jardín Secreto also questioned representation, art or production of sense and what its scope is and how
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it can transmit or represent a particular idea. This piece is not so much about the religious image implied by the baptismal font, or the nationalist one, by implication of Juan Pablo Duarte, as it is about frustration and the tethering Dominican dream. The presence of performance, installations and video art in the biennales and national competitions became stronger. Thanks to the openings of these spaces we could see Un día en la vida de Julie Ozama by Alette Simmons Jiménez, El Chupa-chup by Johnny Bonnelly and the numerous performances of Yih-Yoh Robles. Later, and with full awareness of the media –understood as language and context at the same time–, and in a way as resistance to the normalization artistic production was subjected to, and in response to a changing landscape where every day the borders of the artistic and the social were fading, and stimulated by topics of identity, notions of belonging, rooting and uprooting, cultural heritage and other elements in the arena at the time, artists such as Mónica Ferreras, Quisqueya Henríquez, Miguel Ramírez and others, developed bodies of work essential for the analysis of the “history” of contemporary art in our country. It is impossible to evaluate the impact of these “new” ways of making sense –installation, performance and video art– today without also analyzing the ideological –or conceptual– directions of the society that framed them and they answer to. This is a complex issue and involves such specific temporo-material qualities of each media, that’s the reason they have been poorly explored. Valeria Graziano made that clear when she argues that art always comes “informed by reality and facts, but the way in which it becomes an “informant” of society often is prudently set aside.”11 In recent years we have been witnessing the emergence of new ways of “making” art aside from the traditional and instituted visions. We have seen how a network of critical and creative resistance based on cultural diversity, institutional critique and gender policies has been created, which has given a distinct plural and multidisciplinary appearance to what were considered as the proposals of contemporary art 11 Graziano, Valeria, Intersecciones del arte, la cultura y el poder: arte y teoría en el semiocapitalismo. En: Brea, José Luis Ed. Estudios Visuales: La epistemología de la visualidad en la era de la globalización. Ediciones Akal. 2005. Pag. 173.
until now. These proposals have incorporated, little by little, a whole set of spaces and existential times, marginal or very intimate experiences that constitute the keys of current Dominican existence. We can say that there is a huge difference in the handling and use of instruments that art offered in earlier contexts and those given by contemporaneity. We suggested once, referring to the field of the production of meaning in our country in recent years, that we were in a transitional moment in the movement or migration of meaning. I said the subjects had mutated. That symbols had migrated to a different context. That the roles were exchanged and that which formerly meant something, has now disappeared as a central theme or approach, or has acquired a different connotation. I think we could say the same of the means and instruments of creative work. That leads us to three key elements in the production of sense referred to installation, performance and video art currently in the Dominican Republic. First, vocation, understood as the willingness or ability to deal with these artistic languages; second, the components or elements of artistic discourses and, finally, the attitudes understood as tactics of approach to the topics that enrich these artistic practices. My emphasis, therefore, in the presentation of recent artistic production will not be historic or archaeological, but mainly diagnostic.
Putting things in place Installation, as a piece developed in situ, discursively determined, and an ambiguously defined presence in the field of contemporary Dominican art presents a different reality. This ambiguity refers to flows of intensity in its production and visibility. From works of activist character and of rupture with the status quo of the national artistic production, up to the most intimate –and paradoxically collective– approaches occur and explore from various exhibition spaces and art competitions. When I refer to visibility and installation production flows, I do so to establish the inconsistency of it in the territories of contemporary Dominican art. Along with this should also be the incidence of this way of producing meaning in the present state of things in regards to contemporary art. The recent history of this event has revealed that it has activated new gears in the production and staging of the “work of art”, that they intend to further relations between space, power –institutional, public, personal–, representation and
materiality. Assuming space as an essential and significant part of the work and allowing its visibility as a definite place, installation called into question the traditional division between work and exhibition space, giving another meaning to what Foucault called “closed architecture”12 (prisons, houses, socialization spaces, zoos, etc.) Hand in hand with installation, artists began to assume these spatial modules as means of production and control of subjectivity. A good example of this would be the saturated pieces of Raúl T. Morilla with multiple elements and concepts mingling at the same time in a corner of the museum space. Precisely the theme of “closed architecture” guides me to the life-work of Eric Santos. This artist, in a deeply corrosive commentary on the links between artistic production and the art system, “takes” his home as a space for creation and develops an obsessive and meticulous intervention. This kind of chaotic containment is also present in Patricia Castillo’s (Patutus) Encuentro de poderes –presented at the Landings tres exhibition at the Centro León– and Surface –exhibited in the 25th National Biennial of Visual Arts–. In the first installation, the artist tries to contain water, but this contention is directed toward the process of commoditization of water, to the notion of insularity and the ‘powers’ of the precious liquid. In the second she built a pile of second skins –costumes– that at the same time served as a germinating surface. Another important avenue of approach that emerges in the current installations is that of humor, sarcasm and the evocation of realities and identities in a scathing manner. In Canibalismo, made by Natalia Ortega and Patricia Castillo (Patutus), we saw an organized mandala of ceramic containers, each with pieces of hair that could very well refer to the consideration of hair as a vital element for people and the autophagy present in these processes. On the other hand, the Shampoo collective (known today as Picnic) makes a visual “apologetic” to the Dominican “plastic” arts, referring in turn to the strange habit of calling visual arts “plastic arts” and on the national scenario of art as that of serialized production. 12 Referring to the issue raised by Foucault: “in this industrial society where closure ensures that the body, time, and the lives of men become productive force to ensure gain there must exist a sub-power; is the plot of capillary political power which is the life of men, linking them to work and making them productive agents.” FOUCAULT, Michel. ¨Vigilar y Castigar¨ (birth of the prison) Ed. S. XXI, Mexico, 2001, p.235.
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