The Artificial Paradises of Luis Molina-Pantin
A Conversation with Gabriela Rangel (March-April, 2013)
Since the beginning of the 1990s, Venezuela has entered an uninterrupted social-political crisis, which reached a turning point with the 1998 election of the nationalist revolutionary paratrooper Hugo Chávez Frías as President. The 1990s also marked the emergence of a generation of Venezuelan neo- and post-conceptual artists trained in the U.S and elsewhere, and their insertion into new venues for contemporary art such as the Bienal de Guayana, the Museo Alejandro Otero and the Museo Jacobo Borges, as well as in established but rejuvenated institutions like the Premio Mendoza at the Sala Mendoza and the Salón Pirelli at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas Sofía Imber.[i] Within this condensed narrative, Venezuelan contemporary art collectors and philanthropists in this period began to play a significant role, operating locally in a State-managed museum system shaped by an institutional field in which curators and artists paradoxically interacted without the financial impetus or agency of commercial galleries (at least, of local galleries). As a result, some artists soon fled the country to establish themselves in the international art scene.
Before the nineties, the unique Venezuelan model of state-capitalism funded by oil wealth remained virtually invisible to the gaze of critics and historians of Latin America, who perceived it as an uninspiring territory of a liberal democracy too close to the United States. Curiously enough, its specific art scene was seen during the Cold War as a domesticated realm of Kinetic and Op Art tendencies that accompanied the developmentalist period or the moment of modernization in the 1950s and 1960s.
I met Luis Molina-Pantin (Venezuelan, born in Geneva in 1969) sometime in the mid-nineties, when he graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute and relocated to Caracas, where he still lives and makes art. He promptly positioned himself as an important figure in the local art scene working with photography. Moreover, Molina-Pantin’s work poses a sophisticated critical approach to mass culture, incorporating a variety of neglected subjects, including the invisible apparatus of television, into the Latin American art discourse, as well as photographic practice in the region. He has also achieved a profound capacity of observation for mapping interstitial spaces of power through different sources that trace transversal genealogies of the process of formation of popular taste. Like many artists working with photography who came of age after Conceptualism and its virulent attack on photojournalism, Molina-Pantin chose to work with large-format color prints that targeted architecture and suburban developments as cultural sites for tracing the new paths of capital in a post-Fordist economy. He has also recorded nomadic spaces such as cruise ships and airplanes, and examined a German airline’s branding (Lufthansa) through an operation that Coco Fusco has aptly identified as “framing and focus on geometric perfectionism and morphological uniformity.” In this way, these images stress “the function of modernist principles as visual metaphors in the age of global communication for technology’s transcendence of nature, mortality and organic complexity.”[ii]
Equipped with a dry though not antiseptic sensibility, his images are also equivalent to Joel Sternfeld’s American Prospects’ critical exploration of America by looking at collective sites of “cruel optimism”[iii]: e.g., amusement parks, pools, lawns, and gardens that represent artificial paradises constructed by social utopias. Luis Molina-Pantin’s idiosyncratic, elegant, and corrosive post-nationalist photographs, however, do not function as allegories of globalization, as some critics have prematurely pointed out. By contrast, Molina-Pantin’s images tackle the dark side of Latin America that coexists within touristy heavens through metonymic dérives.
1. Gabriela Rangel (GR): Let’s start with the beginning; your first works, at least in the exhibition where you became known in Caracas in the 1990s when you returned from Canada and the US, were based on appropriated vernacular images. These large color-format photographs were taken from popular postcards that enabled you to formulate your notion of an “emerging artist returning to the periphery” through a kind of identitarian irony. I specifically recall the photos of an oil well burning in Lake Maracaibo and of the souls in Purgatory burning in the fire of their sins. In a way, this beginning marked a distance between your work and photography as a mechanism that registers reality immediately and objectively; in other words, the practice of documentary photography, registering it instead on what could be called a conceptual level.
Luis Molina-Pantin (LMP): Good observation; that show was the 7th Edition of the Premio Mendoza at the Sala Mendoza (Caracas, 1996) where I showed the Apocalyptic Postcards made that same year. It was one of my first works using appropriation. This was a point of departure for my conceptual work, moving away from traditional photography. It also arrived as a transition in my work from the Fine Arts Department at Concordia University (Montreal) to Tony Labat’s New Genres Department at the San Francisco Art Institute.
In the end, most people didn’t understand the Apocalyptic Postcards, the jury at the Premio Mendoza even less, as they thought these works were my “incredible digital manipulations”; but they were simply ready-mades found during a residency in Paris in the summer of 1995, bombarded by the tourism industry, the power of the single image summing up the tourist’s trip that the postcard possesses, and the arrival of the supposedly apocalyptic end of the century with Y2K.
2. GR: To what degree was it important for you to distance yourself from documentary photography? Although it has lost prestige as a vehicle for stereotyped repetitions of poverty and violence, documentary photography has an important and rich tradition both in Venezuela and in the continent as a whole. For instance, in 1996, Alfredo Jaar inventoried the collective photographic imaginary of a popular sector of Caracas (Catia) in the Camera Lucida project, commissioned for the inaugural exhibition of the Museo Jacobo Borges. Before Jaar, the Venezuelan conceptualist Claudio Perna resignified domestic photography by transforming it into a catalogue of anonymous fictions seeking civic recognition in his project “Fotografía Anónima de Venezuela”. Were you aware of these frameworks?
LMP: It was something that came naturally… I believe since 1992, I simply didn’t like the presence of the human figure in the landscape. Also, it dealt with the fact that working with color was more realistic and less crafted than black and white, where the technique is more important than the content. I was interested in the culture of power, instead of following the tradition of the visual ethnography of poverty. Of course, I knew about Jaar’s Camera Lucida in 1996, when it was created, and Perna’s about five years ago -- great examples of public photography. They anticipated social networks and the democratization of photography through digitization.
3. GR: Your observation about the absence of people from the landscape is curious, because it coincides with a construction of the gaze whose point of departure is the landscape tradition of the so-called Caracas School, which only rarely depicted a human being next to a Bucare tree, the Monte Avila, or a meadow. I’m referring to the emblematic landscape paintings by Manuel Cabré, Pedro Angel González, and Antonio Edmundo Monsanto, who in turn were professors in the generation of Carlos Cruz Diez, Alejandro Otero, and Jesús Soto. How do you situate your landscape work within this kind of pictorial genealogy?
LMP: As a Venezuelan artist, it’s very hard not to be attracted by these two powerful schools. There’s no doubt that they were the most important movements in the history of 20th-century Venezuelan art. Cinetismo (Op Art) put Venezuela for the first time in the international art scene in the 50s with Jesús Soto, Carlos Cruz–Diez and Alejandro Otero. In fact, it is so strong in Venezuela that it’s still considered a religion among many artists and historians, also because it’s commercially successful… I have various works that pay tribute to the landscape, among them Untitled Series, (1995), New Landscapes (1999-2000), St. Moritz (2006), and North Korean Landscapes Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 (2008), and engage directly with Op Art in the series Chelsea Galleries (2001-2006).
4. GR: So presumably the series on Chelsea art galleries is an ironic commentary on the domestication of contemporary art.
LMP: It could be. These gallery spaces sometimes compete with the art being exhibited. An exquisite architecture. But more than anything else, it’s my contribution to Op Art, taken from the archives of the most powerful New York galleries.
5. GR: And what’s exactly the relationship of Chelsea galleries to Op Art?
LMP: In deriving the optical effect from the repetition of artist’s portfolios displayed in perfect order along important spaces in the gallery.
6. GR: Along with the Apocalyptic Postcards, you developed early works depicting Parisian and Canadian corporate buildings, if I’m not mistaken. The monumental, and ambiguous spaces of corporate architecture presented in copies in color pictorial format were a topic very close to your preoccupations when you had just left art school. I would guess that these works sought to establish a dialogue with the so-called Düsseldorf School of the New Objectivity (Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, and Andreas Gursky).
LMP: Yes, the staging of generic and futuristic landscapes was also carried out during the residency in Paris. Dealing with the importance of the vertical landscape was my small contribution to the “new objectivity.” Subsequently, this way of seeing became too popular in the art world. The influence in my work was more towards Bernd and Hilla Becher with their series of composed worlds, which altered my way of seeing things.
7. GR: But it was the Inmobilia series – images of scenes fabricated for telenovelas (soap operas) and programs from a local TV channel (Venevisión) – which marked an important change and opened up your work to a singular and personal language which enabled you to articulate a gaze on the popular vernacular and the practice of photography as an archival system or a collection of images of our era. You chose there a mode of presentation that corresponded to a concise, elegant, tautological, and above all very ironic title, in the style of a real-estate catalogue.
LMP: Inmobilia (1997) was my first individual show in Venezuela, also presented at the Sala Mendoza. I’d recently created it in the studios of Venevisión (the TV channel that produces the country’s big dramatic productions) during April 1997. It is a series of photographs of the telenovela sets representing the architectural and environmental stereotypes corresponding to the different social classes in today’s Latin America. TV plays a kind of university role in several developing countries. I also see them like classical still-life paintings.
I remember that, hours before the opening, Gustavo Cisneros (the owner of Venevisión) showed up personally and bought up the entire series. He was interested in buying “his creations,” and Ms. Patricia Phelps de Cisneros in incorporating them into her collection.
8. GR: What I find particularly interesting in this series is its presentation in the form of typologies, like the Bechers’ series (what you concisely defined as composed worlds). But it is in its exploration of television’s dominant role in the modernizing processes of developing countries and the class vision projected in its architecture that this catalogue of stage-settings brings a grain of difference to the New Objectivity. We could say that Inmobilia is also in dialogue with the project Ricas y Famosas (Rich and Famous), which the Mexican artist Daniela Rossell developed between 1994 and 2001.
LMP: It could be; both works are very theatrical. They criticize vanity and social stereotypes.
9. GR: With regard to stereotypes and theatricality, after Inmobilia you made a series of photographs in the house of Cuban-born stylist Osmel Sousa, the man behind Miss Venezuela, a beauty contest that’s produced the most beauty queens in the world (also a Venevisión production). The project was commissioned for a group-show ironically entitled 90-60-90 -- the perfect body dimensions for a beauty queen. Unlike the other artists who participated in the show, you went right to the origin of the phenomenon.
LMP: El Apartamento de Osmel Sousa, Presidente de la Organización Miss Venezuela (2000), was a work carried out for 90-60-90, an exhibition produced by the Goethe Institute in Caracas at the Museo Jacobo Borges. I wanted to get away from the iconographic feminine image of the “Miss” and go to the source of this cultural phenomenon. In this case, I personally asked Osmel Sousa to allow me to photograph his ultra-decorated baroque apartment in Caracas, and after a lot of insisting he gave me 45 minutes of his time to photograph it. The project it’s a triptych: living room, bedroom, and bathroom corridor. At the opening of the exhibit, Osmel was very proud of the final product; obviously he didn’t understand the discourse.
10. GR: But to what extent are these stereotypes manifested in the Royal Caribbean series and in the Narco-architecturas? Both series explore internal and external constructions of identity through a kind of theory of taste.
LMP: Both series are ethnographic projects: architectural stereotypes based on the culture of money, comfort, and bad taste. Royal Caribbean Cruise Line (2006), originally created for the City of Miami (the Mecca of cruise-ship companies), shows the duty-free floating city that practically goes round the island of Cuba, and my informal study of Colombian narco-architecture that shows the creative side of narco-traffickers with their homes and public spaces.
11. GR: Then, do you consider this type of creativity as bad taste? Would this schema of taste be equivalent to that of telenovelas or any other mass media product?
LMP: I emphasize it, but I don’t judge it; taste is really in the eye of the beholder. I try not to be so didactic in that respect. Everyone has his own concept of “bad taste.” My job is to show it and then the art does its own work. The same goes for the telenovela studios; they’re images that are so familiar that often you aren’t aware of their subliminal importance.
12. GR: The appropriation of vernacular images and the “found ready-made” have led you to accumulate an inventory of landscapes imprinted on everyday life objects like lamps, cigarette lighters, and spray-cans (New Landscapes series). You’ve also collected mass-market books with covers featuring autocrats and dictators alike (Best-Sellers National and Best-Sellers International series). Is this all about an alternative ethnographic look at poverty and underdevelopment by presenting things out of context (as in a collection presented in a museum space)?
LMP: I’m not at all interested in exploiting the image of Latin American poverty that was done often enough during the 1960s and 1970s with documentary photography. It’s basically an urban archaeology, seeking those banal objects that unconsciously have things in common. My Modus Operandi is to find them, put them together, and exhibit them.
Gabriela Rangel is a Venezuelan writer and curator based in New York. She is Director of Visual Arts and Chief Curator at the Americas Society.
[i] The then-newly-created Instituto Universitario de Estudios Superiores de Artes Plásticas Armando Reverón (IUESAPAR) located in Caracas also played an important role in the art education of middle-class cadres of this generation.
[ii] Coco Fusco, “Modernity Deferred: The Work of Luis Molina-Pantin”, http://luismolinapantin.com/LMP_texts_03_eng.html
[iii] For Lauren Berlant, “Cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a problematic object in advance of its loss.” DIFFERENCES: Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Volume 17 No.3, 2006. Brown University. P.21
Luis Molina-Pantin, born in Geneva in 1969, lives and works in Caracas, Venezuela. He received his BFA at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada in 1994 and his MFA in New Genres at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1997.
Selected solo exhibitions include Valores Humanos, Faría-Fábregas Galería, Caracas (2012); Nuevas Adquisiciones, Periférico Caracas | Arte Contemporáneo, Caracas (2009), Estudio informal de la arquitectura híbrida Vol. 1, La narco-arquitectura y sus contribuciones a la comunidad, Cali-Bogotá, Colombia, Valenzuela Klenner Galería, Bogotá (2011); in Federico Luger, Milano and Galería Marta Cervera, Madrid (2008) and in Sala Mendoza, Caracas (2007) and Confort 1996-2000, Museo Alejandro Otero, Caracas (2000).
His work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions, such as: A Different Kind of Order: The ICP Triennial, International Center of Photography, New York (2013); Del Buen Salvaje al Conceptual Revolucionario, Travesía Cuatro, Madrid (2013); Tres Perspectivas: Contemporary Art from Latin America, Carnegie Hall, New York (2012); The Politics Of Place: Latin American Photography, Past and Present, Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona (2012); 6ta. VentoSul, Bienal de Curitiba, Brazil (2011); Islands+Ghettos, NGBK and Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin (2009); 7th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2008); Urgente! 41 Salón Nacional de Artistas, Museo de Arte Moderno La Tertulia, Cali (2008); Mapas Abiertos, Fotografía Latinoamericana 1991-2002, Palais de Beaux Arts, Brussels, Belgium (2008); Positions in Context: 2007 CIFO Grants program exhibition, CIFO, Miami (2007); Jump Cuts: Arte Venezolano Contemporáneo, Colección Mercantil, Americas Society, New York (2005) XXV Bienal Internacional de Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil (2002); Buried Mirrors, Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York (2001), and the VII Bienal Internacional de La Habana, Havana, Cuba (2000).
His work has been acquired by the following institutions: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville; Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, New York and Caracas; The Museum of Latin American Art, (MOLAA) Long Beach; Galería de Arte Nacional and Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas.