4 Commentary of daily Página 12 - 16 of February of 2003

Supported in a call of more than 35 artists, Anxiety and devotion reunite works of diverse - oils, photographies, facilities, urban interventions that both explore great axes that have crossed the Argentina of the last years: the social and economic transformations and the hegemony of popular and football mythology in the collective prayer book.

By Laura Isola

When I think about the imbecilidades that really one heard repeat during decades and that timidly repeated or they did not even refute about the relation between the art and the policy...", it emphasized Rodolfo Walsh in a news article that offered him to Ricardo Piglia in the Seventies. And it continued saying: "To think that here until recently there was one who maintained that the art and the policy did not have anything to do, that an art based on the policy could not exist, a thing that once again comprised of that unconscious one in the measurement in which the social structures also work like unconscious; it is part of that game destined to clear all danger to him to the art, all action on the life, all real and direct influence on the moment. I do not conceive the art today but it is related directly to the policy, with the situation of the moment that is lived in a given country, if he is not that, for me him lack something to be able to be art ". To tie this exasperated and forceful commentary of the Argentine writer with the recent inauguration of the sample Images of the present. Anxiety and devotion, cured by Rodrigo Alonso, it is not a whim. Somehow in the selection of artists and works that Alonso made to give its version of the present images is present one long tradition that discusses to the entailments between the art and the policy. In the case of Walsh, although it sounds radically extreme in its conception, also it lets glimpse the same debate that is not solved in the mere formulation of the dichotomy between form or content. Because from little the happy expression of Jean-Paul Sartre when it affirmed: "I have seen die of hunger to children. In front of a boy who dies, Nausea is something without value ", and dust cloud that raised in a sparkling controversy (to see "the others against Sartre", in Between Sartre y Camus, of Mario Vargas Llosa) , until more appropriate reflections on how it must give to account the art of the moment that corresponds to him, the nexuses between art, policy and society have been and, it seems will continue being, than more interesting, mainly if it is made comprise active of the artistic task. In the text that Alonso wrote with regard to the project it explains the interpretation of these images: "One of the hypotheses of Anxiety and devotion it is that the artists do not react to the crisis that ends at the events of December of the 2001 but that they accompany with its reflection, incarnated in works, the process in that they are developed some of his causes, partly by an own interest, but also, because the conditions of the artistic field caused such approach ".
The sample that exhibits in the Foundation Prow is crushing. Not as much by the newness, since the works that integrate it have been exposed in other occasions, but because the meeting for this project determine the proportions its symbolic capital. Divided in two great groups, the chosen works are framed, low a sense of the word anxiety and others under the one of devotion and crosses two even itineraries. First they give account to its way of the social and cultural processes of transformation, like the disappearance of the national industry, the migrations, the loss of the public space and the institutional decomposition.
In the second group, the devotion is the umbrella to think a work set that "reflects on the restoration or the intensification of popular myths and the forms of the collective passion". Here it is good for noticing that terms neither, although strongly connected in other senses, they do not comprise of the semantic field of the policy nor of social sciences. This election seals a task that, also, it exhibits intelligence and originality.
As far as the meaning of the word anxiety, in this context anguish or fatigue is defined in its meaning of that causes to restlessness or violent agitation. In the ample and heterodox phantom of the materials of the works that work in this scope stand out oils of remarkable painter Magdalena Jitrik, that it recovers an expression almost and could say that a moral in the faces of the Socialist Series; the impression on polyvinyl of Leonel Moon on an Episode of pole in sank banks of Barragán; la box of “La encomienda perfecta”, of Perez Armendáriz and the virtual company of Fernando Trigo; happening through the photographies, the posters, the objects and the performance Of excrement, where Alejandra Bocquel and Carina Ferrari form, live, phrases with the juxtaposed “excrement” expression, to only mention some of the works.
The Argentine prayer book, they seem to say some artists, one distributes between the religion and soccer. In the wood boxes with the aid orders that distribute the children in transport means public of Horacio Zabala appear the religious icons and the evidence of the poverty and the marginality. Also in the photographies of Martín Weber on the Gauchito Gil he appears another one of the flanks of the veneration, that they work of complementary way with those of Cavinato on the popular manifestations in San Cayetano, where the photographer creates to see a relation between religion and policy by the ways of occupation of the public space. Marks Lopez make clothes and give an image that differ of the imaginary one of the same meditated sport: there are bodies of perfect no musculature, there are sponsors nor no sport journalists requesting notes. On the other hand, There Goldenstein locates to the players in the field and of its series the small court, between some of the so many works that integrate the multitudinal sample.
In order to return to the initial discussion that in case of Walsh none does not imply the abandonment of the art, as somehow it suggests Sartre, this work collection tries to suture the abyss that sometimes thought to the separated art of the reality, as much in its independent sphere as in its meaning of "useless".