Afterthoughts and Postscripts, 54.1: Nicholas Balaisis – Society For Cinema and Media Studies

EL TERCER MUNDO Y LA TERCERA GUERRA MUNDIAL
Por Magdiel Aspillaga

“Hoy en día un cine perfecto- técnica y artísticamente logrado- es casi siempre un cine reaccionario.”
“El arte no va a desaparecer en la nada. Va a desaparecer en el todo.”
Julio García Espinosa. Por un cine imperfecto. (primera y última frases)

“Del desayuno bajo una lámpara art noveau –arte nuevo de verdad diría Feijoo– la masa sube contorneándose como bejuco; reúne cada pedazo roto de vidrio mientras se deja atravesar por la luz.”
Ernesto Oroza. Manifiesto de poliespuma con gasolina. (Napalm)

El tiempo no se define.. se siente, y a veces se mide, lo demás es una invención para pensarnos eternos. El tiempo es tierra  que cae repetidamente sobre el hueco que nos toca, entierra problemas, antiguos conflictos, seres queridos, imágenes, recuerdos, la memoria es tierra, pasa a ser tierra.

Así fue hasta que apareció el cine…

Allí estaba el nuevo y recién nacido invento ocupando el espacio que pertenecía al tiempo, parafraseando a Tarkovski “esculpiendo en el”, luchando contra el.

Por eso con la imagen de un soldado vietnamita en un momento de tregua, sentado mira en silencio un teatro que acaba de ser devastado por un bombardeo,  atravesados de un lento zoom y una particular música, comienza  una confrontación entre el individuo y el tiempo,  entre el individuo y la representación, el cine se encargará del resto. Esta extraña e inexplicable escena  pertenece al documental de Julio García Espinosa “Tercer mundo, tercera guerra mundial”.  ¿De qué trata esta película? ¿Documento de denuncia antibelicista, o deconstrucción formal del cine/ documento/  realidad/ ficción?

En el año 1970 el cineasta cubano  Julio García Espinosa junto a un equipo del instituto estatal de cine cubano se desplazan hacia el Vietnam bajo el fuego de la guerra para realizar el documental “Tercer mundo, tercera guerra mundial”,  considerado como casi todo el trabajo de Julio un original y atípico filme de culto.

Ya Julio García Espinosa había expuesto su visión sobre el cine en el manifiesto “Por un cine imperfecto”,  alabado por muchos, criticado por otros, malentendido por algunos. En una entrevista que realicé al propio Julio me comentaba algo en lo que no había reparado antes:  “los EUA ven las ficciones de Latinoamérica como documentales, nosotros vemos los documentales de los EUA como ficciones.” (1)

Julio se adelantó a muchos con su “Por un cine imperfecto”, en los años 60 se levantaba una conciencia que no solamente tocaba el marco social sino también la relación de la fuerza industrial del cine y su resultado cultural como menciona Hito Steyerl: “Y entonces entramos en todo el período de la década de 1960, con sus luchas internacionales, su tricontinentalismo, etc. La frase de Frantz Fanon, “debemos discutir, debemos inventar”, es el lema del manifiesto Hacia un tercer cine, escrito por Fernando Solanas y Octavio Getino en 1968, en un contexto de dictadura militar en Argentina. La relación entre arte y ciencia se vuelve a mencionar de manera explícita en el manifiesto de Julio García Espinosa, Por un cine imperfecto (1969). (2).

¿Acaso existe un patrón preconcebido de cómo se mira o se consume un producto cultural? ¿Actúa una manera predeterminada, movido por hilos invisibles el consumo cultural dependiendo de la geografía que lo esté consumiendo? ¿Qué opera en nuestra noción de gusto, de la orilla en que nos encontremos,  la orilla del primer mundo o la parte correspondiente a ese llamado tercero?

Habrían de pasar más de veinte años para que apareciera en la escena del arte cubano Ernesto Oroza, aislado e inclasificable; su obra comenzó como un gran proceso de investigación que no se ha detenido, adaptándose a todo entorno encontrado o vivido por el artista. Para mi la obra de Julio García Espinosa es también  un largo proceso investigativo donde el cine agrupa teoría, realización, cine encuesta, proceso político y consumo popular. El icónico cine es absorbido por nuestras cinematografías muchas veces como un proceso mimético, no como un coherente entendimiento de quienes somos y de que nos interesa expresar. Quizás Julio no encontró continuadores de este proceso en la propia industria de cine cubana, paradójicamente alguien como Oroza que no hace cine y no viene del cine, lo continua de esta manera.

En la exposición Navidad en el Kalahari. (Cristo Salvador, Galería, Havana, Cuba,
Sept 21, 2013, de Gean Moreno & Ernesto Oroza) Oroza presentó dos piezas que son el detonante de este texto, las piezas:


“Tercer Mundo, Tercera Guerra Mundial/ Third World, Third World War” – Horn made out with a 16mm film, printed matter. 2013.

Greek light” – Modular lamp made out with Napalm B (polystyrene and gasoline) 2013.

Piezas que venían acompañadas del tabloide: Modelo de expansión (Marabú – Tabloid) Collage. Gean Moreno & Ernesto Oroza. 2013.  (3)

La lámpara coincide con el cuerno, el NAPALM coincide con el celuloide, la lámpara de NAPALM coincide  con el cuerno confeccionado con celoluide, material altamente inflamable durante muchos años también. En la película de Julio hay una secuencia completa creada a partir de gráficos y datos que describe todo el proceso de creación y efecto del NAPALM y su constitución química, cantidades de elementos y sustancias. La provisionalidad, que para mi se traduce en libertad a través de la obra de Oroza adquiere otro efecto cuando introduce el NAPALM con todo lo que ya lleva implícito de la parte de Julio;  es Vietnam, es la guerra, es la muerte, es la provisionalidad de un objeto que sirve para alumbrar (glamorosa lámpara cubana) y para matar (creada con la misma base de la conocida y mortífera bomba)  al final de todo es el subdesarrollo. Regresamos al inicio, a lo que somos, es el tercer mundo y esta parte que le toca, la libertad quizás de pertenecer al tercer mundo sin sonar a consigna sino mucho más a concepto estético, Julio y Oroza son ante todo estetas, han descubierto la belleza de una denuncia, la belleza de un objeto que en si mismo y debido a su carácter provisional se convierte también en denuncia. Otras piezas recientes de Oroza llevan la misma carga, como los aretes provisionales de plástico con el CLIK del clásico cartel de Félix Beltrán.

CLIK (después de Felix Beltran), 2013. By Ernesto Oroza. Aretes fabricados con poliespuma y gasolina (Napalm B). CLIK (after Felix Beltran), 2013. Earrings made out with the mix of expanded polystyrene and gasoline (Napalm B).

Encasillarlos a ambos es tarea difícil, en el caso de Julio lo definieron con un calificativo que no le era ajeno “TEÓRICO”. Julio es un teórico, nadie veía en la obra de Julio “ficciones”, la obra de Julio no exportaba ficciones, porque sencillamente las ficciones de Julio no son como las ficciones que el tercer mundo piensa deben ser. Indiscutiblemente Julio es más que teórico, la teoría es solo una parte de sus proceso, Julio es un artista en el sentido amplio y profundo de la palabra. Así mismo Oroza usa su teorización como parte de su proceso creativo, sus textos continúan su obra que a la vez es documentación de otros procesos vernáculos, ambos paradójicamente tienen un antecedente, la mayor influencia posible, el mayor “documentador”.  SAMUEL FEIJOO.

Podría titularse vernáculo cuando en realidad no es otra cosa que “realidad popular”,  aproximación a la máxima pasoliniana del subproletariado (quizás la verdadera obsesión de Feijoo, García Espinosa y Oroza) el sujeto desprovisto de historia con una inocencia que la sociedad burguesa clasifica como marginal, el ser marginal (como diría otro pariente teórico de esta triada, José Luis Cortés “El Tosco”: “marginal depende de donde este ubicado el margen”). El sujeto inocente solo necesita iluminarse, el material a mano es el NAPALM, pero pudiera haber sido otro, no hay una consciencia sobre la elección del material en el caso del sujeto subproletario. En cambio los tres artistas (pequeño burgueses quizás) no pueden alejarse de un entendimiento de este proceso de análisis del que no es burgués, pequeño burgués, o pretensión de burgués, ahí entra a jugar un papel interesante el cuerno con celuloides de sus piezas.

Los cuernos de celuloide de Oroza son piezas aisladas que como muchas otras de su obra,  se descontextualizan y cobran el acento “inocente” que las hace únicas, si el cuerno de celuloide tenía una función decorativa en los tempranos 70 era por la pretensión de confort, estatus, comodidad que en muchos filmes y la propia iconografía de la época representaba el cuerno, cercano al safari, me recuerda la escenografía de algunas series de los 70 como las eróticas de “Black Emmanuelle” o por qué no,  aquellos seriados cubanos como “Cabinda” donde los militares de la UNITA sudafricana trazaban estrategias contra el ejercito cubano desde exóticos bungalows decorados con oscuros y esbeltos cuernos, trofeos de animales cazados,  quizás una inteligente selección de props para demostrar la naturaleza fría de los personajes malvados que muchas veces eran interpretados por cubanos rubios que sabían hablar ingles. (4)

La idea de usar el propio cine como materia prima, la inmortalización del tiempo en fotogramas sin segundos, congelados, petrificados en una masa corpórea que fundaría el cuerno, el cuerno de antílope o cualquier otra animal africano, es para el cubano insular la idea del escape al sitio lejano, al continente donde muchos iban a combatir por el llamado “internacionalismo proletario” y donde muchos también encontraron la muerte. Es Hemingway, es el colonizador ilustrado de manera naif en los libros de texto o en los cuentos  de Kipling, es demostración burguesa de poder económico, es poder económico, el cuerno es símbolo, falocentrismo y a la vez la delicadeza femenina de lo estético,  es el adorno de la casa, es el adorno domestico, es una casa donde puede coexistir la fuerza de un hombre que “resuelve” y una mujer que pone su delicadeza y sensualidad, es la Black Emmanuelle pero es Angola, es sencillamente la sala decorada de manera bonita y demostrar que no somos tan pobres ni tan sencillos.

Ernesto-Oroza-Tercer-Mundo-Tercera-Guerra-Mundial. 16mm films

En muchas de las piezas con cuernos de Oroza se observa una extraña película, que muestra una especie de documental, el primer plano de un hombre mirando a cámara repetido infinitamente hasta la muerte, esa otra parte que corresponde a ambos materiales.

¿Es la muerte quien rige sus piezas? No solo por la implicación directa del Napalm y la guerra, de los cuernos y el trofeo de caza, del celuloide como invención para luchar contra lo que va a perecer por el tiempo;  sino por la propia esencia del material seleccionado. La presencia de esta es la sustancia que la define, única y verdadera sentencia en esta serie: “del polvo eres y al polvo volverás”.

Miami. 20 de julio 2014.

_____________________________________________________________
1.     Como parte del proceso de investigación y filmación de un documental que realice sobre Julio titulado “Como hacer un filme en un país subdesarrollado”   título tomado de un proyecto sin terminar del propio Julio, tuve la posibilidad de realizar varias entrevistas además de recopilar información de archivo sobre la obra de Julio. Del proyecto original pensado para largometraje documental solo salió una pieza de apenas 20 minutos. La fotografía de este proyecto la realizó Iván Nápoles, un importante camarógrafo del documental cubano, el cual había visitado Vietnam en múltiples ocasiones en plena Guerra junto a Santiago Álvarez ,con el cual rodó documentales como “Hanoi, martes 13” y “79 primaveras”. Paradójicamente Iván Nápoles fue también el fotógrafo de “Tercer mundo tercera Guerra mundial”.
2.     Hito Steyerl. ¿Una estética de la resistencia? La investigación artística como disciplina y conflicto.
3.     Estas dos piezas volverían a exhibirse más tarde en la exposición Miami    3D. Curada por Ombretta Agro Andruff.  3900 N MIAMI AVE. DEC 2-15, 2013.4.
4.     “Black Emanuelle”, serie de películas de Joe D’Amato y “Cabinda”, Jorge Fuentes.

MIAMI DRIFT – Léopold Lambert

A map the author made of his trips in Miami.

http://miamirail.org/visual-arts/miami-drift/

“…generic and ubiquitous elements of urban life that reveal the composition of the contemporary city as a distributed network of patterned practices.”

The Miami Rail’s Brian Droitcour features Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza: “Street View”.

STREET VIEW
Brian Droitcour

I walked twenty blocks from Wynwood to Downtown Miami before I took a car back along the same route an hour later. At a foot pace, the garages and open lots showed me their garbage, their tired weeds, their trucks parked at extravagant angles. The limp X where the train tracks meet North Miami Avenue was a real no-man’s land: left without a curb or a zebra, I scurried across to the safety of the shady sidewalk beside the cemetery. On the return drive, the street-level entropies receded from my sped-up gaze, which took in the horizons of high-rises, the persuasive lines of the city in its totality. Gean Moreno was driving. “Miami is an experimental ground for the investment of foreign capital in an American city,” he said. I mentioned the disbelief I had felt on my last visit to Miami, nearly five years earlier, that all the new construction would turn profit. But Moreno told me that an influx of Latin American money kept developers in business. It goes on. He told me about the Singaporean company pouring three billion dollars into a casino. And yet, some of the big buildings we drove past were empty, their ground floors cinder-blocked and fenced in to keep out squatters. Even at forty miles an hour the city has visible chinks that describe the forking paths of plans and life.

Moreno and his collaborator Ernesto Oroza pay close attention to Miami’s frayed urban fabrics and the spontaneous actions applied to mend them. They document them in the Tabloid, a series of newsprint publications produced in conjunction with installation projects. The latest issue is a study of “moiré houses”: homes used as part-time barbershops or bakeries, whose functional zoning flickers between residential and business, like the optically unstable overlaid grids of a moiré pattern. Other installments have examined the repetition of faux-stone ornament, Royal Palms in lobbies, sidewalk speaker systems—generic and ubiquitous elements of urban life that reveal the composition of the contemporary city as a distributed network of patterned practices. In Moreno and Oroza’s installation, the accumulation of found sculptures and the repeating designs of the newspapers covering the wall make this vividly palpable, while elevating the visibility of local practices scaled to human bodies over the busy geometries seen on Google Maps. “Whereas the global approaches of modern architecture relied on criteria extrapolated from an imaginary and ideal future, these new practices aim to start with an understanding of what exactly is needed and possible at a local level,” they wrote in “Learning from Little Haiti,” a 2009 essay for e-flux journal. “Teleology is replaced with radical pragmatics.”

“feeling bad for all my NYC friends who can’t experience the joy of @Walmart”: This is a tweet from Manuel Palou, or @artnotfound, that I read last May, when he made a Miami Walmart his studio and gallery. He discovered that the length of the pool noodles matched the width of the store’s aisles, and used them in installations that blocked passage through the toy section. He took a dozen pairs of black galoshes off the shelf and arrayed them in a militant row on the floor. He took photographs of his handiwork and sent them to Twitter immediately. “Literally been in @Walmart’s toy section for like an hour now and loving it,” he announced. “@artnotfound Our toy section does have a great selection,” came a reply from Walmart’s account. “Hope you found everything you were looking for!” Twitter offers the potential for fleeting personal contact with a big-box brand—though as Palou’s interaction shows, the brand’s polite distance can make this contact absurd. The cheery emptiness of Walmart’s reply echoes the way the corporation’s development plans respond to aggregates of urban populations. Search for “Walmart Miami” on Google Maps, and the city turns into a crater, dotted with Walmart’s pips along the ring. Its brand is about antiseptic convenience, but if you go to a store (or make a vicarious visit via www.peopleofwalmart.com) you find the fragrance of disinfectant mixed with body odor and snack foods. The cheapness percolates up through the floor plan’s orderly grid. Palou’s ephemeral sculptures exaggerated and relished the weirdness of these juxtapositions.

Palou collaborates with Moises Sanabria on the art duo Art404. Their exploits have included loading a one-terabyte external hard drive with $5 million worth of pirated media, provoking a member of the hacker group Anonymous to take down Gagosian.com, and riffing on Damien Hirst’s spot paintings by making prints that follow the rules Hirst devised for his fabricators but replace the spots with round brand logos. Some of their projects may come off as puerile. (When I was in Miami, Palou showed me pictures on his phone of a sculpture he’d made from marijuana; he had manipulated the installation shots in Photoshop to make it look enormous.) But even so, they pointedly articulate a symbiosis between technologies of order—whether in information networks or urban architectures or the zones where the two meet—and the creative activity generated at their nodes and gaps. In that regard, they share a sphere of interests with Moreno and Oroza, even if their approaches differ dramatically. They prefer action over research as a mode of art-making, Twitter over e-flux journal as a platform of public address.

2013/03/17
Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza
http://artforum.com/picks/section=us#picks39518

ALEJANDRA VON HARTZ GALLERY
2630 NW 2nd. Avenue
February 7–March 28

View of “Drywood,” 2013. “Drywood,” the title of this exhibition, refers to Cryptotermes brevis, a termite that can survive with barely any water, relying on six rectal glands to retain all moisture from digested matter. Endemic in Florida, it is an apt symbol in the hands of Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza, who here use the insect to signify another tropical infestation—the tourist souvenir. Just like a termite gnaws through walls, a souvenir eliminates the distance between cities and undermines their autonomous identity by propagating a simplistic, generic reading of a place. For their first exhibition at this gallery, Moreno and Oroza have placed twelve cement balls—each fifteen inches in diameter—in two neat rows across the front space. Before the concrete was poured, the artists stuffed the molds for the balls with Florida-branded beach towels featuring dolphins and sunsets, and now the spheres hemorrhage patches of brightly colored terrycloth. In its raw materiality and its role as a protective shell, the concrete hints at both the manufacture and the transportation of these souvenir items. Moreover, the anonymous surfaces, crisp and unadorned save for the prints of sea turtles peeking through, underscore the inherent sameness of all tourist items—the tchotchke Platonic ideal.

But the cracking face of the spheres realizes a breakdown of the logical dissemination of the souvenir and similar consumer items, a crisis that is examined in the rest of the show. Stapled to the walls in ordered repetition are twenty-four issues of Tabloid, Moreno and Oroza’s single-page newsprint journal, at once a record of their practice and an ongoing critique of mass production. A bootleg copy of Glauber Rocha’s 1972 Brazilian film Cancer plays in the back room. The visceral memory of the Brazilian avant-garde is evoked by Rocha’s self-proclaimed experiment in minimal editing, and within this streamlined world of the spheres and the newspapers, it is a rambling, amorphous intrusion. Like the termite, the film burrows through the traditional borders of shot and scene by actively ignoring editing. Here is the crux of Moreno and Orozas’s argument—an attempt to unite the production and distribution of souvenirs through the strange biology of termites. Throughout the show, the uneasy placement of the objects foreshadows future rupture. The artists have set the spheres on the cracks between the floorboards and one, set off by the crack, seems to be threatening to tunnel—not unlike Cryptotermes brevis—right through the drywall. — Hunter Braithwaite

Performance Beyond Miami’s Parties
by Paul David Young 12/06/11 Art in America.

The tenth edition of Art Basel Miami Beach was supposed to “reflect a shift toward expanded conceptual, performative and temporal gestures,” according to a curatorial statement. But there was little performance at the main fair, nor at the satellite fairs and events, unless you count the parties.

However, two lecture-performances provided a valuable opportunity to experience two sharply contrasting uses of this very current art form: Hennessy Youngman’s NADA-sponsored The History of Art Part 1 in the lobby of the Deauville Hotel on Dec. 1, and Ernesto Oroza’s Architecture of Necessity at the Fluxus-inspired exhibition “Four Minutes, Thirty-Three Seconds” at LegalArt, curated by Omar Lopez-Chahoud, on Dec. 2. The lecture-performance is often an ironic institutional critique of suspect curatorial practices, museum politics or art history. Terence Koh’s recurring Art History, for example, involves a rapid-fire series of images that he explains using incomprehensible babble.

Youngman is known for irreverent online videos that combine street talk and glib attacks on specialized art vocabulary, but History of Art Part 1 amounted to a sad commentary on the catchall of “art performance.” After several sound checks, the bearded Youngman, wearing a red Spiderman baseball hat, khaki shorts, gold chains, a BET leather bomber jacket and ankle boots, took his seat between some potted palms and began to read as a video projected behind him. Soon he announced that part of the script was missing, disappeared for a while and returned, without any additional material.

Youngman’s “history” began with the paper tiger of the artist as a mythic loner, a shaman “bringing magic into the world.” He railed briefly against the “MFA industry” of art education for producing “a creative class more like a search engine,” though, to the extent that he completed his performance, it was clearly itself a product of Google. He didn’t get very far before leaning into some racial comments about the crowd, a theme reprised throughout the performance. “Talking to a bunch of white people in the lobby is kind of weird. I need a lot of alcohol to cope with that.” Later, he said he saw “four brown people here” and described the audience as a “sea of milk with some chocolate chips in it.”

His refutation of the artist as lone protagonist was a belabored drug joke. He claimed that many historical figures, perplexingly mostly not from the history of art (the Incas, Pizarro, Thomas Edison, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Freud, Richard Pryor), had achieved something not because of “divine Providence” but because they had a “secret ally.” Then he trotted out pictures of work by Donald Judd and Carl Andre, facetiously asserting that they made their breakthroughs with the help of cocaine.

At this point, Youngman, bored, abandoned the lecture, turned off the video projection, and spent the rest of his time walking among the crowd, asking audience members general questions. “Are you an artist? A collector?” “Why are you here?” He warned the crowd, “Don’t come to NADA if you’re an artist because you’ll leave very depressed.” Youngman didn’t explain why that might be true. (In fact, the NADA fair was more vibrant than the main fair.)

Approaching one young woman, he inquired about the quality of his performance. “It’s pretty boring, right?” The woman sheepishly admitted, “A little . . . ” to which Youngman replied, “Should I just play music?”

He announced, “I’m going to keep doing this until you guys leave. This is called performance art.” Indeed, the eager crowd that had gathered was almost entirely gone by the time Youngman stopped the in-crowd interviews. The ending was hardly noticed by the people in the lobby who had wandered off to talk or drink the free Grolsch beer. To paraphrase Youngman, if this is performance art, it does require a lot of alcohol to make it tolerable.

By contrast, the unironic Ernesto Oroza, a Miami-based artist who resided in Cuba until four years ago, took his lecture entirely seriously, at least until he set fire to a pencil using live electric wires attached to a plastic sandal and then tried to operate a fan connected to a rotary telephone.

The pencil ignition was the illuminating conclusion to Oroza’s exploration of Cuban domestic innovation in response to the shortages and regulations of the Castro regime. Oroza was pleasantly low key, showing and describing rather than opining or advocating. An artist working with the ephemerality and low-tech predisposition of Fluxus, the raven-haired Oroza fingered his black plastic glasses, while operating his laptop and reading from a folded typed script that he had removed from his pocket.

Oroza explained how Cuban Marxism turns home ownership into a game of cat and mouse. With strict regulation on property ownership and construction, Cubans assert ownership piecemeal, establishing a stairway or extending the floor plan like a tendril to enclose a nearby freestanding wall. You can’t build a stairway, so you build ascending platforms that that functions as such, but is nonstandard enough to escape prohibition.

With a slideshow illustrating vernacular Cuban architecture, Oroza showed the absurd but delightful effects of this system. He illustrated its transformative potential through photographs of strange building fragments that he described as “the potential house.” A wrought iron handrail of an exterior staircase, breathtakingly irregular, had been created to avoid appearing to be a handrail. It curved in beautiful, organic curls, folding in, one on the other, not a stairway railing after all, but a primal kind of sculpture, site-specific and expressive of an individual will to overcome the impossible.

Oroza considered this “architecture of necessity” to be an instance of the total Cuban social adaptation to the island’s economic isolation, the most famous example of which is the country’s bizarrely well-preserved fleet of 1950s cars. For Oroza, this Cuban resourcefulness engenders a “pre-cultural sense of eating and sleeping,” a state that seemed momentarily desirable.

Oroza’s finale coaxed out the showman in him. Installed on the wall in the exhibition space of the superbly installed “Four Minutes, Thirty-Three Seconds” was Oroza’s black plastic sandal with two live wires protruding from it. Oroza placed a graphite pencil across the live wires and it burst into flames. He repeated the trick, explaining that this was a common practice in Cuba where there are no matches. Smokers set pencils on fire with electricity to light their cigarettes. (Don’t try this at home.) It was a vivid, comic illustration of human perseverance and a nice bit of stage pyrotechnics. After the final explosion, Oroza installed the burnt pencils in a row atop the electrical conduit feeding the socket, where they remain until the exhibition closes, Jan. 31.

Ernesto Oroza: el espacio relacional de todas las cosas del mundo
ADRIANA HERRERA

Ernesto Oroza (La Habana, 1968) exhibe actualmente la muestra de videos y fotografías Enemigo Provisional en Art@Work. En 2007 obtuvo la beca Guggenheim por su proyecto Arquitectura de la necesidad que indagaba en la reconfiguración ocurrida en el interior y exterior de los hábitats de La Habana. Tras graduarse de diseñador industrial durante el Período Especial había enfrentado la imposibilidad material de producir obras sofisticadas y descubrió en cambio que existía un impresionante “período de diseño popular masivo”, según escribió el crítico y artista Gean Moreno, con quien ha creado obras colectivas explorando un similar tipo de práctica en el Little Haiti de Miami.
Viendo su oficio sobrepasado por un entorno en el que la gente trasformaba sus viviendas con inesperadas envolturas o modificaciones inusuales para resolver la escasez habitacional; y en el que también se fabricaban objetos con lo que había a mano, improvisando soluciones frente a la carencia; renunció a sus ideas académicas para absorber las prácticas de la estética y vida popular.
Se convirtió en un “ex diseñador”  –como lo llamó Moreno, apropiándose del término acuñado por Martí Guixé-, que más que crear, acopia objetos de arte encontrados que fotografía, usa como patrones, o como ingeniosas instalaciones de solución espacial fabricadas con recursos “pobres” como baldes, cajas de cartón, piedra o plástico. Pero sobre todo, funcionan como artefactos de pensamiento para revelar zonas de interrelación en sombra.
Su práctica artística refleja cómo la  necesidad puede propiciar en Cuba el despliegue de una recursividad orgánica, marcada por los ritmos y las urgencias de la gente. Pero lejos de caer en el romanticismo que hace exóticos esos objetos caseros ingeniosos – una lámpara de querosene hecha con una botella de leche-, reafirma que no se renuncia al deseo del objeto “verdadero”. Como un Aladino contemporáneo, Oroza cambiaba de hecho, un ventilador nuevo por el que alguien había creado con un disco de acetato para “resolver” su carencia, y lo usaba como un readymade de la arquitectura de la necesidad.
Oroza demuestra hasta qué punto diseño y arquitectura, asumidos desde la supervivencia cotidiana, pueden desafiar la ética de un sistema que reprime la iniciativa individual, pero también la de otro que conduce a un consumo de cosas hechas y no necesarias a fin de someterlo a un omnipotente poder financiero.
Su obra no está en las piezas, sino en la intermediación social. Es una mirada apostada en los espacios emocionales –del deseo, del miedo a la escasez, de la posesión simbólica, de la necesidad de expansión- que se activan en las relaciones de las personas con los objetos y arquitecturas con los que viven. Su estética relacional se apropia de las prácticas populares para erosionar los lugares comunes que saturan las ideologías del poder.
De modo coherente con una programación ligada a la observación cultural de la migración y de los desplazamientos territoriales y de visión en Miami, Art@Work exhibe el video y las fotos de Enemigo Provisional. Las piezas registran el estado en que queda un set de objetos caseros tras ser usados en los campos de tiro improvisados que Fidel Castro autorizó montar con escopetas de cacería amarradas a una barra. El gobierno las suministró conminando a la gente a entrenarse a disparar para enfrentar la amenaza de una invasión imperialista. Los campos provisionales, creados para una espera hipotética, funcionan como negocios improvisados en estructuras donde se cuelga cualquier objeto inútil que pueda ser baleado. Balones desinflados, muñecas viejas, piezas sueltas, reciben una descarga de agresividad popular obviamente más conectada con la liberación de una energía de frustración social, que con su supuesto propósito de entrenamiento. Cada objeto agujereado y fotografiado cumple una función que desplaza la inmovilidad de una sociedad donde todos están a la espera de lo que no ha de venir, por una catarsis tan absurda o grotesca como el estado en que quedan estos blancos que hablan no sólo de la extensión del simulacro sino de las estrategias de desplazamiento. El “enemigo” externo provisional ayuda a acatar la inacabable espera.
Oroza propuso la “desobediencia tecnológica” como una vía para remover la inmovilidad que imponía en Cuba determinó una forma de vivir en la transición; pero también el perenne tránsito hacia el progreso que en el capitalismo acaba por obviar, en aras de una sofisticación tecnológica, “los paradigmas de vida humana”.
Otro video exhibido pertenece al archivo llamadoDesobediencia tecnológica y muestra la aparición de Fidel Castro intentando promocionar la ventaja de productos chinos para el consumo, en un momento en que masivamente la gente diseñaba con cualquier cosa objetos de necesidad. La reproducción de esa imagen del líder político que parece encarnar un vendedor callejero armando cuentos sobre el producto que intenta vender, evidencia el límite de las ficciones sociales y erosiona el poder discursivo de un sistema a partir de la visión de los objetos.
En síntesis, estas obras encontradas que interpelan los límites de las ficciones sociales, burlan los estereotipos de exaltación o detracción del consumo del comunismo y del capitalismo, y proponen la formulación de otra ética en la relación del hombre y las cosas.

ESPECIAL/EL NUEVO HERALD
Adriana Herrera es escritora, curadora, y crítica de arte. Colabora con galerías y museos, y asesora publicaciones especializadas.
‘Enemigo Provisional’ de Ernesto Oroza en Art@Work, 1245 SW 87 Ave. Hasta el 21 de septiembre. Charla del artista y visita guiada el jueves 15 a las 7 p.m.
adrianaherrerat@gmail.com

Forces of Radical Pragmatism and Pirate Ethics:
Brian Kuan Wood on the Work of Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza
Paletten Nr 1 2011

Download article

Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza. Untitled (decoy), 2010.
Wood and found tiles. Functional object 48” x 48” x 12”

see exhibition images here

(english version):
Farside Gallery. Miami
by José Antonio Navarrete / Arte Al Dia International, July 2010

Decoy, the exhibition of works by Gean Moreno and Ernesto Oroza, gathers together objectual constructions whose conformation and referential potential are the result, in each case, of interactions of varying degree and nature between different disciplines, models and systems of cultural production. I include as examples, in an incomplete list, urban planning, architecture, sculpture, design, interior decoration, museography, essayist literature and publishing activities.

The basic regulator of these interactions is the research work and reflection that both artists have engaged in during the past few years. Established as a methodology, the expansion and enrichment of that work has been put to the test, consecutively, in the different projects implemented within its framework. We would even go further in the case of the example we are addressing: besides shedding light on some aspects of the exhibition, “Notes on the Moiré House (Or, ‘Urbanism’ for Emptying Cities)”, the text authored by both artists and included in the tabloid that accompanies Decoy, represents a moment in the development of a line of thought whose elaborations, previously disseminated, also serve as methodological support for the strategies applied in the show. Likewise, the elements and structures physically displayed in the exhibition space already form part of or are on the way to become configured as a series of conceptual and material sys- tems and tools in an ongoing process of growth that Moreno and Oroza have forged, progressively, under the principle of diagram design. Theirs are, therefore, modelizations with a high level of pragmatic capacity, adaptable to very different installation and operation situations, and with functional possibilities of use outside the field of art, ultimately their place of origin.

In terms of artistic deed, Decoy features a close relationship with the problems of the contemporary city and the ways of inhabiting it, as well as with the production processes, the con- sumption flows and the new social behaviors that characterize the latter, but I would dare say that it communicates interstitially with one of the richest trends of the European avantgarde: the one that put into circulation the notion of the link between art work production life. It is true that, setting itself apart from the celebration of technique and of social redemption that nourished the approaches to the subject elaborated by the Bauhaus and by Russian productivism, what Decoy proposes as strategy is the use of any material and opportunity available for the popular invention of alternatives to the impositions of consumerism; however, of the demythologizing impulse of artistic practice associated to this modern trend, Decoy con- serves what was perhaps its most important trait: the interest in fusing (confusing) art into (with) architecture, design and, in general, the processes of material production.

Perhaps the notion of diagram central to Moreno and Oroza’s current discursive speculations, as we pointed out before might be fitting as metaphor to represent the research exhibition project that both artists are articulating jointly. In that case, Decoy would be something like one of the components or operations of that project: a place to situate oneself inside their diagram.

(spanish version):
Farside Gallery. Miami
por José Antonio Navarrete / Arte Al Dia International, Julio 2010

Decoy, muestra de Gean Moreno y Ernesto Oroza, reúne construcciones objetuales cuya conformación y potencialidad referencial resulta en cada caso de interacciones de carácter y grado variables entre distintas disciplinas, modelos y sistemas de la producción cultural. Incluyo como ejemplos, en una lista incompleta: el urbanismo, la arquitectura, la escultura, el diseño, la decoración interior, la museografía, la literatura ensayística y la labor editorial.

El regulador básico de esas interacciones es el trabajo de investigación y reflexión que los dos artistas han desplegado durante los últimos años. Constituido como metodología, la expansión y enriquecimiento de este trabajo han sido puestos a prueba, consecutivamente, en los diferentes proyectos realizados dentro de su cauce. Diríamos más, atendiendo al ejemplo que nos atañe: “Notes on the Moiré House (Or, ‘Urbanism’ for Emptying Cities)”, el texto con autoría de ambos incluido en el tabloi- de que acompaña a Decoy, además de iluminar algunos aspectos de la exposición se inserta como un momento del desarrollo de un pensamiento cuyas elaboraciones previamente difundidas también sirven de soporte metodológico a las estrategias que se aplican en ésta. Por igual, los elementos y estructuras dispuestos físicamente en el espacio de exhibición ya forman parte de o se encaminan a configurarse como una serie en crecimiento hasta el presente de sistemas y herramientas conceptuales y materiales que Moreno y Oroza han fraguado, de manera progresiva, bajo el principio del diagrama. Se trata, en consecuencia, de modelizaciones con una elevada capacidad pragmática, adaptables a situaciones de instalación y desenvolvimiento muy diferentes y con posibilidades funcionales de uso fuera del campo del arte, su lugar de origen en última instancia.

En tanto hecho artístico, Decoy se postula en relación estrecha con las problemáticas de la ciudad contemporánea y los modos de habitarla, así como con los procesos de producción, los flujos de consumo y los nuevos comportamientos sociales que caracterizan a la última, pero me atrevería a decir que se comunica intersticialmente con una de las tendencias más ricas de la vanguardia europea: aquélla que puso en circulación la idea del vínculo existente entre arte trabajo producción vida. Es cierto que, a distancia de la celebración de la técnica y la redención social que alimentó los enfoques sobre el tema elaborados por la Bauhaus y el productivismo ruso, lo que Decoy propone como estrategia es el aprovechamiento de cualquier material y oportunidad disponibles para la invención popular de alternativas a las imposiciones de consumo; sin embargo, del impulso desmitificador de la práctica artística asociado a esa tendencia moder- na, Decoy conserva lo que quizás fuera en ella más importante: el interés por fundir (confundir) el arte en (con) la arquitectura, el diseño y, en general, los procesos de la producción material. Tal vez la noción de diagrama central para las especulaciones discursivas actuales de Moreno y Oroza, como señalamos antes podría ser apropiada como metáfora de representación del proyecto de investigación exposición que ambos están articulando conjuntamente. En ese caso, Decoy sería algo así como uno de los componentes u operaciones de ese proyecto: un lugar para situarse en el interior de su diagrama.

Contemporary artist Ernesto Oroza re-presents “Archetype Vizcaya”
By Janna Lafferty, Vizcaya Museum & Gardens Examiner April 21st, 2011.
http://www.examiner.com

There is irony in Ernesto Oroza’s title, “Archetype Vizcaya.” He is less asking his audience to uncover something original and immutable then to point to the many folds of appropriation, redefinition, hybridity, and adaptation—processes of change—that first produced and continue to reproduce Vizcaya. For Oroza, Vizcaya provokes uneasy questions about the boundaries between production and reproduction, foreignness and indigineity, and the absoluteness of originality, authenticity, and meaning. Can reinvention, simulation, and syncretism be their own archetypes? Engaging these themes, Oroza puts the eclecticism of owner James Deering’s and designer Paul Chalfin’s architectural historicism into conversation with how he sees people variously using, thus re-defining, Vizcaya today. Among them, the museum’s methods of material conservation and Vizcaya’s popularity as a venue for quinceañeras.
Ernesto Oroza is a contemporary artist and conceptual designer from Cuba, whose work has enjoyed exhibition in galleries and museums across the globe, including France, Canada, New York, Spain, and the Netherlands. His work explores vernacular appropriations of material culture. As the artist currently commissioned for Vizcaya’s Contemporary Art Project, Oroza invites visitors to revizualize Vizcaya—to see elements that largely go unseen, emphasizing its layers of appropriation and hybridity. He accomplishes that in three ways.
First, Oroza has created a “map” in the form of a fold-out brochure, which visitors pick up in the piazza of the main house. Inside, Oroza has created a cartography of otherwise obscure visual elements, creating a beautiful legend of patterns that come from the floors, terrazzos and other decorative objects throughout the house. Each snippet of visual design on the map is numbered, correlating to one of 41 rooms, so that visitors become explorers of unique visual patterns. All of them instantiate the ways James Deering and Paul Chalfin appropriated the design and art elements of particular times and places. The map itself becomes its own decorative take-home piece.
Secondly, Oroza calls attention to the plexiglass coverings that have been placed over certain elements in the home as a preservation measure. Oroza sees these as curious and invasive elements that assert new meaning and definition into this place. They are the kind of implements that transform a private residence into an institutionalized public space. On their surface, Oroza imposes his own invasion—his own subjective layers, placing silhouettes of invasive plant species known to threaten Miami’s native flora. It seems an obvious provocation of questions. To what extent do we understand “Villa Vizcaya” and its architects as invaders, bringing outside elements and planting them in the Miami wilderness?
Finally, a second-story room plays a looped video collage, cataloguing amateur videos of people who’ve set their quinceañeras and weddings in Vizcaya’s elaborate gardens–gardens that themselves simulate the renaissance garden layouts of Italy and France. By the time we are watching these families borrow Vizcaya and make it their own, we have a sense of how the inventors of Vizcaya did the same. The meanings attached to Vizcaya become layered and fluid, a place of pronounced bricolage in city of tremendous flux.
Ernesto Oroza’s installation continues through May 29th, as part of Vizcaya’s ongoing Contemporary Arts Project (CAP). CAP was established as a way for the museum to connect with the national and local art community, extending invitations for notable artists to interpret Vizcaya’s space and resources. The museum invites two artists to present work in and about Vizcaya annually, which is exhibited over several months. Flamina Gennari-Santorni works with a select committee of national curators to elect the artists recruited for commission in a given year. The project helps to make Vizcaya a living, evolving social space. Oroza’s work especially demands self-reflexivity, not only emphasizing how the museum’s efforts to preserve a history itself creates and is created by its present, but that tensile relationships always mark that existence. To be living means always grappling–but, hopefully, not becoming complacent–with paradox.

Mapping Vizcaya
Written By Anne Tschida APRIL 2011
Biscayne Times

IN HIS LATEST WORK, CUBAN ARTIST ERNESTO OROZA NAVIGATES THE FAMED ESTATE’S HISTORY, BOTH REAL AND IMAGINED
Visiting Vizcaya Museum and Gardens is a quintessentially Miami experience. The view of Biscayne Bay is spectacular. The gardens are lush and tropical. And the interior design of the faux Italianate villa is so over-the-top, so wannabe A-list as to be, well, so Miami.
The house was built by one of South Florida’s first transplanted tycoons, a product of the Gilded Age, James Deering. He wanted his mansion to look as though it had been around for centuries, like a real Old World landmark. So in 1916 he had his designer, Paul Chalfin, appropriate a mish-mash of styles from the 16th to 20th centuries for the new structure.
James Deering, a Gilded Age tycoon, found Miami to be the perfect place for his visions of faux grandeur. Photos courtesy of Vizcaya Museum and Gardens.
In 1953 this quixotic specimen of grandeur and excess — really, a Disneyfied version of a European castle, years before anyone had even heard of Uncle Walt — became a museum, run to this day by Miami-Dade County.
This history, simultaneously real and imagined, organic and borrowed, captivated Ernesto Oroza, a Cuban-born artist who spent a year walking the museum. The more he walked, the more he noticed the quirky secrets of the villa — on the floors, the walls, and even in the mix of visitors flowing in and out. Oroza eventually came up with Archetype Vizcaya, the latest in the Contemporary Arts Project series commissioned by the museum.
Oroza has literally mapped out the normally unseen highlights of Vizcaya in an artful brochure, which includes a legend with numbers and symbols. On a sunny, cool day, he points out some of his explorations.
When he first started making his rounds, he says, he noticed what was constantly under his feet: the floors made of marble, terrazzo, wood, tile, different styles all shoved together, sometimes in a single room. In particular it was the marble that really caught his eye. It is, he explains, the ultimately “contaminated” material. Over thousands of years, minerals and weather have infected the stone, imposing on it that unique quality of veins running through it. “To mineralogists, these shapes that we consider beautiful are, in fact, impurities that invaded the rock,” Oroza explains. “Any piece of marble in Vizcaya may be considered the diagram of a similar process of contamination that has occurred during the life of the building.”
And, he adds, marble shouts out wealth, another central theme of Vizcaya. From ancient times until today, marble columns, sculptures, and especially floors have signaled to visitors that money and power inhabit a space. And Vizcaya is covered in it.
Modeled on 17th- and 18th-century Venetian floors, the marble layerings in the villa were imported, likely from North Africa, another way for moguls like Deering to flag wealth “and worldly experience,” says Oroza. “It was from the beginning meant to be a showroom.”
Vizcaya was designed in the era of Cecil B. DeMille, and any resemblance to a larger- than-life movie set is intentional.
As you move from room to room with Oroza’s map, you see the beginnings of Miami as a place where outside influences and manufactured identities dominate. We reinvent ourselves here all the time. “History” is malleable. Pasts are remade or just erased.
Take the Breakfast Room. It is decorated in a pseudo-Chinese style, popular in the late 19th Century, with lacquered furniture (actually crafted by a Cuban team) and a painting of a South China Sea fishing scene (actually painted in the late 1600s by a Frenchman). As the new deputy director for collections and curatorial affairs, Flaminia Gennari-Santori, who is overseeing the art series, quips: “Look closely. One of the fishermen was really born in 1916!” The original painting was expanded to fit the wall, which meant adding figures and subjects. Talk about imposition and contamination.
Other stops on the map reveal subtle points that would go unrecognized without some help from Oroza, such as details in the 550-year-old rug depicting the “Hand of Fatima.” Oroza’s own interventions are few, and are pasted on Plexiglas barriers in certain rooms: silhouettes depicting invasive plants that have been imported to Miami through the years, endangering the native vegetation. The Plexiglas itself is its own, strange intervention, says Oroza — something that jumped out at him, like the floors. When the villa became a museum, these Plexi plates were installed to keep visitors from harming valuable objects or venturing too deep into the rooms. But as Oroza points out, they were haphazardly placed, in some cases protecting relatively unimportant works, while other more precious pieces stood completely exposed.
A third segment of this unconventional art exhibit involves Oroza’s “mapping” of the people who have passed through Vizcaya over the past half-century. Using the Web, he gathered amateur videos of quinceañeras, weddings, parties, and star-studded concerts, which unspool in a continual loop (Oroza adds to it when he can) in the South Gallery. This study of human interventions at the site leads him to understand something else about Miami. As a relatively recent arrival from Cuba, Oroza says he had never visited the museum. But once he started hanging out, he saw how central the place has become to the local Cuban community, another important layer in Miami’s multilayered history.
From Deering to Chalfin, from the property’s African and Japanese plant species to exile families celebrating coming-of-age rituals — and even the hands behind this exhibit (the Cuban Oroza and Italian Gennari-Santori) — Vizcaya reflects so many of the influences that make up the broader cultural terrain here.
Oroza has devised a clever way to uncover all this. As Gennari-Santori writes in the exhibit’s introduction: “The map directs us to look at the surfaces beneath our feet and, in doing so, breaks our normative viewing habits and frees us to participate in an intensive treasure hunt for curious artifacts. Oroza’s map is an object in its own right that can be taken home and enjoyed as a piece of art or wallpaper, or in any way one wishes.”
Archetype Vizcaya is a highly conceptual work from a very intellectual mind, but it can be engaged on almost any level. If you’ve never been to this amazing museum, here’s your excuse; follow the map through the house, or just take the opportunity to wander and stumble on some interesting tidbits.
Oroza gathered amateur videos of parties, weddings, and galas held at Vizcaya, which unspool in a continuous loop.
Circling back to the idea that Vizcaya was, from its inception, supposed to be a showroom, Oroza points out it was designed in the era of Cecil B. DeMille, and any resemblance to a larger-than-life movie set is intentional. “It was made to be photographed,” he says. “It was made to be catalogued.” And of course it was made to be explored.

A progress report on the ongoing renovations at Miami’s Vizcaya Museum…
By Beth Dunlop Special to The Miami Herald, 2011/04/10

Vizcaya’s entrance loggia with its interesting floor is on the explorer’s map of the estate that Ernesto Oroza devised as part of his art project, ‘Archetype Vizcaya.’
Ernesto Oroza’s new contemporary art project, Archetype Vizcaya, is a puzzle and a treasure hunt. It’s part of a series that offers artists the opportunity to look at Vizcaya through a unique contemporary lens, a chance to interpret, intervene or even invent: temporary new work — some of it extremely conceptual — layered over aging beauty. As such, Oroza’s work offers an enlightening new way to look at and learn more of an extraordinary and complex house built by James Deering, the heir to a giant farm-equipment fortune, and completed in 1916. Archetype Vizcaya offers a perfect metaphor for the moment, for place and time.
Vizcaya Museum and Gardens is one of this country’s most important historic houses — for its architecture, decorative arts and gardens — and among the most beautiful. It is also one of the most complex. Almost every element bears scrutiny and understanding, and only now are its curators and caretakers beginning to unlock its many secrets.
In many ways, Vizcaya is at a turning point. Just five years shy of its centenary and almost six decades after it be came a key part of Miami-Dade County’s cultural holdings, it is getting a fastidious, piece-by-piece examination and — where needed — restoration. The magnificent Sutri Fountain at the far edge of the garden and long called the Rose Garden Fountain, has just been restored (by Conservation Solutions, Inc.), along with the important, and delightful, garden sculpture surrounding it.
The café and gift shop, much damaged in 2005 during Hurricane Wilma, are renovated (by R.J. Heisenbottle Architects) and will reopen in June. The David A. Klein Orchidarium just outside the café and grotto swimming pool is being returned, by the landscape architects Falcon + Bueno, to a condition more like its original so that a small lawn fringed with ornamental plants yields to a hammock. Two of the quaint Vizcaya Farm Village buildings across the street have been restored, also by Heisenbottle. A cultural landscape report (by Heritage Landscapes) that documents the historic horticulture of the gardens has just been completed.
Within weeks, possibly sooner, design work will begin to replace the heavy-handed black-metal glass space frame roof that covers the courtyard, a legacy from the 1980s. The archives have been organized — for the first time ever — and, even more important, each painting, sculpture, rug, chandelier, sconce, fitting and piece of furniture is being studied and catalogued. Last fall, Vizcaya introduced an audio tour in English and Spanish, which enables visitors to wander knowledgeably at their own pace.
And, from now through May 29, there is Ernest Oroza’s magical map to follow. The map comes in the form of a fold-out brochure. Open it, and there are numbered icons drawn from patterns in the exquisite, intricate floors. The icons in turn relate to 41 different rooms in Vizcaya and, sometimes, to particular objects, forcing the visitor to seek out patterns in the floor and hidden images and iconography in the furniture and architecture. In this engaging and enigmatic work, past is prologue, and the present is multi-layered.
The map is just part of the project. Oroza also has added a layer to certain rooms, Plexiglas panels with designs that pose the question of what’s authentic and what’s not — appropriate in a house in which most of the furnishings and fittings were antiques bought in Europe and shipped to what was, in 1916, still an outpost of civilization in the New World, with some pieces reassembled for uses far from their original intent. Oroza wants us to think about these issues, then take our observations even further.
His project ends in a makeshift gallery where a continuous video loop shows some of the ways that Vizcaya is used now — most particularly in footage of girls bedecked in gowns posing for their Quinceañera photos. All of this is heady and intelligent and, at the same time, capricious and full of joy.
Oroza’s fascination with the balance between a venerable historic house and its perception (and use) by the larger public points up some universal truths, most fundamentally that humans are drawn to beautiful places and spaces and when something like Vizcaya can be theirs — even for a moment — they make it so. A century, a culture and much more separate James Deering from the 15-year-olds in the Quinceañera photos, and yet both have borrowed from the grandeur of another era to make it their own. In Deering’s case, the borrowing was for a lifetime; today, often, it is for the hour spent shooting a portrait.
Oroza wants us to think about this. Follow his map, follow his path, watch the videos, and you will.
The Contemporary Art Project is funded by foundation grants and private donations. Artists are selected by a prestigious jury, most of them curators from widely regarded museums across the country, in conjunction with Vizcaya’s deputy director for collections and curatorial affairs, Flaminia Gennari-Santori.
“We’re not a contemporary art institution,” she says, “but we see this as a way to reinforce ourselves. The context here is so strong that it can create a way of re-thinking.”
Gennari-Santori. and Vizcaya’s director, Joel Hoffman, have Ph.D.s in art history and are dedicated stewards of the rich treasure that is Vizcaya, and they also fully understand that dichotomy between the once-private, grand mansion of one of this country’s richest men and the public museum that it is today, preserving the all-important work of its architect, F. Burrall Hoffman; designer, Paul Chalfin, and landscape architect, Diego Suarez, and paying homage to their collective brilliance. Even more, they are public stewards of a building and collection of enormous scholarly and aesthetic importance — and learning . Theirs is a rigorous and daunting task.
The magnificent Sutri Fountain, for example, had been installed incorrectly in 1920 (Gennari- Santori. suspects that the workmen confused inches and centimeters) and thus always leaked. Restoration involved not just cleaning it but also removing and re-setting it to fit. The fountain, which Deering and Chalfin bought from an antiques dealer in Rome in 1916, had been in the piazza in the small Italian town of Sutri, just north of Rome, and was most likely was designed in 1722 by Felippo Barigioni whose other work included the fountain in the Piazza de Pantheon in Rome.
This detailed level of scholarship importantly provides a basis for understanding not just a specific piece but also the whole intricate interrelationship between house and garden, furniture and art. Moreover, it provides a base line for restoration work and for decision-making — for example, in the refurbishment of the storm-damaged café.
In the café and gift shop, which have been operating from a tent, diners and visitors will get a glimpse (woven wicker, dark wood, leaded glass) of what would have been Deering’s gaming and smoking rooms and can see some details of the original (sconces, rails, marble), but the rooms are more or less a necessary adaptation to a new use. Peer through the windows to see the grotto pool (look, but don’t swim) which has seamlessly gotten new flood-control engineering.
Time and wear, weather and climate all play into the decision making about Vizcaya’s future — that delicate balancing act. After Hurricane Wilma’s damage, Hoffman convened a charrette to look at alternatives to the almost 30-year-old glass canopy over the Vizcaya courtyard. Several options were explored — among them a glass wall dividing the courtyard from the house, a lower glass “ceiling,” the zoning of the house to air-condition rooms — under the theory that technology has advanced enough to allow for a more minimal and elegant solution than the ugly black space frame. Ultimately, the simplest of alternatives emerged: replacing the roof with a lighter, closer-to-invisible glass roof. It’s a much-needed step, and a critical one, paying homage to the real architecture once again.
In the meantime, there’s an entirely absorbing and entertaining way to look at Vizcaya — through an artist’s eyes and through your own. It’s a testament to the power of Deering and the men who created this remarkable house and gardens that it is all, always, a discovery, be it new scholarship, restoration revelations or simply the product of close examination. What’s clear is that going forward into its second century, Vizcaya is in good hands — cherished and honored and celebrated. And cared for and conserved. What more can we ask?

Villa Vizcaya transfigurada: entre la quimera y el diseño
Janet Batet. El nuevo Herald, Publicado el domingo 17 Abril del 2011

Como parte del programa Contemporary Art Project (CAP), el Museo de Vizcaya presenta hasta el 29 de mayo, Archetype Vizcaya, proyecto del artista cubanoamericano Ernesto Oroza.
En Archetye Vizcaya Oroza creó una cartografía que transfigura la mirada del visitante proponiendo una nueva lectura de la famosa villa italiana en Miami.
Para el proyecto, Oroza escogió el plexiglás como elemento central por dos motivos esenciales. La primera, histórica: cuando la villa devino museo en 1953, las láminas de plexiglás funcionaban como frontera limítrofe que delimitaba el espacio y los objetos exhibidos de los visitantes; segundo, por ser el plexiglás el material más contemporáneo empleado en la construcción del edificio.
Las láminas de plexiglás devienen estructura arquitectónica provisional, pobladas con la silueta de plantas consideradas hoy “invasivas” que, posiblemente, hayan sido introducidas en la Florida por James Deering, dueño de Villa Vizcaya, y que actúan a un tiempo como elemento decorativo e interferencia en el proceso perceptivo.
Construida en el mismo momento en que se elevaban los rascacielos de Nueva York y Chicago, Villa Vizcaya contrasta como poder simbólico escapista que mira a Europa y al pasado. En este sentido, Oroza sustantiva el extendido uso del lugar como mero decorado y quimera para ocasiones como es el caso de las populares fiestas de quinceañeras.

Ernesto Oroza. Viscaya Museum and Garden, Miami
by Janet Batet. Arte al dia International
As part of the Contemporary Art Project (CAP) program, the Vizcaya Museum presented “Archetype Vizcaya”, an exhibition by Cuban-American artist Ernesto Oroza.
Ernesto Oroza is well known for his incisive commentaries on contemporary urban culture. With a background that includes deep conceptual roots and a solid training in design, Oroza appropriates a space or an aspect of the urban environment and, through a deconstructive process, he returns the object he has manipulated entirely transfigured.
In the specific case of “Archetype Vizcaya”, the artist explores the shift in meaning which has its point of departure in the de-contextualization and redirecting of the gaze. To this end, Oroza created a “provisional space” delimited by Plexiglas panels that function as a “parallel” structure within the museum’s architecture. There are two essential reasons behind the choice of Plexiglas as a central element in his work. The first is of a historical nature: when the villa became a museum in 1953, the Plexiglas panels functioned as a frontier that kept the space and the objects exhibited separated from visitors.
The second reason, associated to the synthetic nature of the material, imposes an essential contrast with the rest of the build- ing which stands out for its escapist vocation. Built at the begin- ning of the 20th century − coinciding with the start of construction of the New York and Chicago skyscrapers − the marvelous villa stands out for its evasive character, revealed by its appropriation of 16th century Italian Renaissance architecture at a time when architecture and design opted for technological advancement and the incorporation of ultra-modern materials. Oroza sets his use of Plexiglas against the use of marble as an invasive and contaminating element. As the artist rightly points out, marble is “the result of a process of contamination of limestone rock by a flow of magma.” Based on this concept, Oroza devotes himself to a compilation of all the invasive processes the villa has been subject to throughout its one hundred years of existence. Within this process, he highlights the inventory of “invasive” plants from the most remote confines that populate the villa and emphasize the notion of escape that distinguishes the venue. From this detailed classification, Oroza utilizes the formal element. The leaves, reduced to silhouettes, invade the crystalline surfaces of the Plexiglass, acting at the same time as decorative element and interference in the perceptive process. “Archtype Vizcaya” is accompanied by a map in which Oroza reveals historical details of interest, articulating the building’s dual function. Since while the complex was conceived as a summer house commissioned by James Deering, its designer, Paul Chalfin, cleverly used it for his own self-promotion, transforming the mansion into his own personal
portfolio.
To illustrate this “parasitic” use of the building, Oroza draws attention towards the extended utilization of the place as a mere décor and chimera for the popular fifteenth birthday celebrations, reducing the complex − in the same way as Chalfin did − to a décor for personal purposes. To emphasize this effect, the map-catalogue created by Oroza fulfills a double function. On the one hand, the fundamental one of guiding the visitor in this unusual tour of the Vizcaya Museum; on the other hand, there is the mere decorative character. The symbols used at the back − as an indication of the language employed − become a mere ornamental pattern, in such a way the catalogue displayed on the wall may be used as a decorative wallpaper.