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Iceberg in sight in the Caribbean Sea Jorge Pineda visual artist
Un elefante se balanceaba sobre la tela de una araña y como veía que resistía fue a buscar a su camarada.1 The language of art is ambiguous. The words that make it up are what they are, are their opposites, and the long path from one to the other. Often these words do not necessarily have to do with the concept issued, but with the resonance they bring to the phrase; with the elegance, superfluous or not, that gives the speech, and so on to the infinity, or until finding the other shore. The truth is that, in their autonomy, these words constantly challenge the imagination of the source and the recipient, and we become polyglots of parallel and new, often unintelligible languages, yet that have the same structure as our native tongues. Many of these words are neologisms, no time to think about them, and then instantly we incorporate it settled our speeches with the conviction of being the repositories with it, of a knowledge that ensures us a niche in the castles of the Cutting Edge Lobbies whose movable walls, –with moat, dragon and to be rescued Princess included– are installed on art fairs and biennials, and define the new maps of power. 1 This is an excerpt of a particular children’s song traditionally taught to children by adults, part of our traditional culture. The rhyme tells the story of an elephant that balances in a spider web and finding it strong calls another elephant, and the song goes through the number of elephants the person wants. A possible translation goes as follows: An elephant was balancing On a spider web, Since he saw he didn’t fall, He found another elephant to call!
Thus, contemporary can mean actual, but also refers to a period of art that lives between margins full of inaccuracies. Imprecisions of data, dates and events wrapped in an intellectual fog that gives us a great pleasure to thicken, though occasionally a ray of light reaches through it. In fact, we do not know whether the contemporary epoch is over, but we have heard of a prize that will be awarded to the one who will “discover” the word that designates the new thing that is coming, the new thing that follows this. Already have been offered, on a golden platter, the head of our beloved grandfather Duchamp, as a premise, to conjugate with all possible variations –post this, post that, post the other– unleashing, officially, the race to discover the new word, to the new El Dorado. Dos elefantes se balanceaban sobre la tela de una araña y como veían que resistía fueron a buscar a su camarada.2 When we combine the contemporary term with other words of similar ambiguities, such as Dominican contemporary art, we find a label that can help us to quickly identify with noticeable efficacy an element that many perceive as an equally amorphous in an amorphous space. This label is preceded by at least two labels more, Caribbean contemporary art and contemporary Latin American art. The amorphous of the amorphous of the amorphous. All these labels are defined to construct a type of Babel Tower which is to invent a common language to homogenize all these cultures in time and space. As we see, this label changes really easily with the last adjective that complements it 2 This is the second part of the children’s song: Two elephants were balancing On a spider web, Since they saw they didn’t fall, They found another elephant to call!
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