ALICE-VILLE
by Belén Gache
MUSEO DE ARTE CONTEMPORANEO ROSARIO
2005
Alicia
Herrero
ALICIA:
THE CITY, THE WORLD, THE BOOK
Alice-Ville.
The City of Alicia. A city that functions as much as a museum
as it does as the world. Alicia’s own world, an obligatory
inter-textual quote from Alice in Wonderland. As is the case
in Lewis Carroll’s work, where the text envelops us in
a labyrinth of word games and linguistic paradoxes, here we
also find ourselves faced with an inversion of the laws of perception,
without being able to designate one point of view as having
priority over others.
But another characteristic dimension of the city as museum also
appears in Alice-Ville: the city as a book. If the city of Alicia
is the museum where her visual and anamorphic games are displayed,
the museum is also a book that opens out in space. It is a country
of text, just as Wonderland is, where the reading space is similar
to the reading of space (to employ a Carroll-esque play on words),
Alice-Ville is like one of those pop-up books, that undergoes
metamorphosis as it unfolds, full of surprises. Each one of
her works would be like a page, a chapter, and also an event.
WORDS AND THE EFFECTS OF MEANING
- Which way? Which way? – Alice asks herself in Wonderland.
In both ways at the same time, Giles Deleuze would say in his
text Lógica del sentido. Deleuze, who analyzes philosophical
aspects of Carroll’s work in said text, suggests a logic
based on the absence of meaning in discourse, in language and
generally speaking, in all symbols.
Meaning is immaterial and disembodied. Meaning is only a superficial
effect like an optical effect or a mirror effect (effet de miroir).
And here the inter-textual quote comes from Through the Looking
Glass and What Alice Found There. The first work in Alice-Ville
is a poem with two words presented along side one another: FUGAZ
– INSCRIPCIÓN (fleeting – inscription). The
word “fleeting” is a shadow projected on the wall.
The word “inscription” is etched into cement. Roland
Barthes spoke of two kinds of writing: that of inscription,
incision, mark and that which corresponds to irreversible writing
(cuneiform letters, hieroglyphics; that of the Law, History
and Monuments); and that which caresses a surface (ideograms
traced with brush or felt). Just as in Alice in Wonderland,
the series unfold in both ways at the same time: eat-speak,
body-language, body-disembodied, in Alicia Herrero’s work,
meaning unfolds towards both opposite ends: inscription (the
word-substance, thing or re-presentation of the thing) and fleeting
(the disembodied word, a mere effect of meaning).
THE
CASTLE AND THE FOREST. SHADOWS
Far from presenting us with a universe of innocence, fairy tales
present us with existential conflicts and associate them with
fears, dreams and above all, nightmares. Fairy tales are full
of castles and forests. Castle and forest are also presented
as a pair of opposites: the castle is the center; the forest,
its periphery. The castle represents the interior, a refuge
but confinement as well, with its towers and walls. The forest
represents the exterior, the dangers and inhospitableness of
the outdoors.
In fairy tales, however, castles as well as forests turn out
to be enchanted, and each presents their traps to us. In Alice-Ville,
we are also confronted with a series of traps and optical illusions.
We are shown, for example, that the castle must be viewed in
a particular way; a cone of vision will determine its perspective.
On the other hand, the cut-out forest in Alice-Ville projects
its shadow and turns into a mythical space, gloomy and hidden.
Like in fairy tales, the changing shadows lead us to suspect
that this space is inhabited, mysterious and menacing.
In 2002, Alicia Herrero created the piece titled Bosque (Forest).
It consisted of a notebook with blank pages. Beginning with
the action of drawing and re-drawing the same vignette of a
forest with continual, progressive movement that adds, repeats
and differs strokes, Herrero converts its pages into spaces
with an infinite number of ways to follow, confuse with one
another and lose. The book-forest. In the end, perhaps all books
are nothing more than forests of words.
The shadows:
In Turkey, the Karagoz exists. In Java, the wayang purwa. The
theater of shadows has been developed in many countries, including
India, China, Indochina, Persia and Asia Minor. Its practice
is often associated with services for the dead.
In Film, a work from 1999, Herrero presented five vignettes
of scenes from fairy tales cut out of sheets of aluminum. Light
directed upon the metal sheets projected distorted shadows onto
the wall. The shadows, disembodied phantoms, invite the activation
of the imagination and dream narration.
WORD GAMES AND PLATE GAMES (SETS)
In Alice-Ville there are games played with meaning, with light,
and there are also games with plates. Once again the pair material-immaterial
appears and once again the Deleuze-esque pair, eat-speak and
body-language.
Lewis Carroll’s works refer back to the Victorian social
context, which enjoyed inventing parlor games as well as sports
– cricket, rugby, tennis, football and croquet. Alice
in Wonderland is a text full of games: card games, chess, croquet,
races, and above all, linguistic games and also the famous tea
game from the famous episode of Alice and the tea party.
In Victorian and Edwardian England, afternoon tea was a formal
ceremony, a ritualized encounter that motivated the use of the
house’s best porcelain dishware and the faction of different
cakes, sweets and cookies.
In addition, visitors and guests would be present. In the chapter
A Mad Tea-Party, there are a series of peculiarities. Given
that it is always six in the afternoon, the table is continually
set for tea. The guests, on their part, are far from being reasonable
people: a hatter (it was common to associate hatters with madness
at that time, given that mercury was used to treat felt and
this element has toxic effects on behavior, going so far as
to imply madness in cases of prolonged exposure), a March Hare
(there was a saying at the time, “mad as a March hare”,
because the mating season for hares began in that month) and
a dormouse, a character who practically speaks in his sleep.
In a piece produced for the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam,
2000-2002), Alicia Herrero presents a series of dialogues that
take place between giant cups and saucers, similar to the human
body in their dimensions. Is it the utensils who have grown,
or it is the human beings who have been reduced in size? In
Alice in Wonderland, Alice eats a piece of a magic mushroom
and, while awaiting the effect it will have on her organism,
she asks herself: Which way? Which way? The body will shrink
or grow but, in constant metamorphosis, it will never remain
the same.
A tea set also implies a finite collection of elements related
to one another, a structure of kindred objects. Herrero would
set this off with her piece called Conversaciones (Conversations),
a work based on dishes that the public will contribute to the
work as it progresses, while we note a progressive, exaggerated
and potentially infinite accumulation of different pieces. Quite
the opposite from a traditional tea set, here the pieces are
heterogeneous, without pedigree, illegitimate, “multi-racial”
and “multi-generic”, questioning what is the same
as well as that which is different and what is successive versus
simultaneous. Conversaciones is nothing if not a forest of teacups.
A
VANISHING EMPIRE
In chapter V of Through the Looking Glass, Alice suddenly finds
herself in a shop. Just like that, the Queen has become a sheep
who attends the place while knitting a wool garment with fourteen
knitting needles at a time.
What do you want to buy? – the sheep asks Alice. Alice
looks at the shelves, full of all kinds of curious things, but
the strangest thing of all is that every time she tries to fix
her gaze on a particular shelf, that shelf in particular seems
to be empty. In vain, she tries to decipher what the shiny object
is that is on the shelf right above the one she is looking at,
which seems to be a doll at times and a toolbox at others.
In the video Imperio (Empire), a still image seems to construct
and deconstruct itself before our eyes, always vague and diffuse.
Just as in a Rorschach test, we take pains in the attempt to
reinstate its contours, imagining its forms. With a bit of luck,
we realize that it is a photograph of a set of Empire porcelain,
taken from a Christie’s catalog.
THE KEYHOLE AND THE MIRROR
As Martin Gardner points out in his famous text Annotated Alice,
a meticulous study of Lewis Carroll’s work, secret rooms
and doors were common themes in the Victorian era. Houses were
built with hidden spaces and passageways and the fantasy of
looking through the keyhole was commonplace, as evidenced by
the romantic novels of the era. The space where the video Imperio
is projected yields a surprise: there we discover a connected
secret room where a ceramics studio has been set up.
The action of spying through hole in the wall maintains strong
similarities with looking into a mirror: in both cases a space
opens up before us. In both cases we are confronted with the
fantasy of passing through to the other side. The wall and the
mirror are not constituted as limits, but rather as passageways
between a here and a there, between one logic and another.
The immateriality of the video image is juxtaposed with the
materiality of the ceramicist’s real body. Empire porcelain,
fetishized as sumptuous objects in auction houses, here is turned
into evidence of production conditions, hand crafting, into
work.
SOWING SEEDS OF TIME
The Administration area of the Museum is intervened with a series
of plant nursery boxes, a kind of mini-garden that will be installed
on the day of Alice-ville’s opening and that will remain
there until the end of the show, monitored and watered with
technical assistance.
To continue with fairy literature, we have, once again, a frequent
theme, that of the castle that disappears engulfed by the disproportionate
growth of the surrounding forest’s vegetation. Here also,
it will be growth, the logic of the process, that will predominate,
but in this case the museum castle city will be invaded from
inside, at the very heart of its administration. Process, growth
and movement imply becoming, and time. It is time that will
go on occupying, gnawing away at and asphyxiating the museum
castle’s will to eternity. Chronos and Aeon: everyday
time (bodily time) and the disembodied time of Eternity enter
into conflict here.
WHICH WAY?
In Alice-Ville, real space and real time are fictionalized.
Real time, that of accumulating utensils, of work, of organic
plant growth, or of the body is converted into the works’
motive and materials. On the other hand, as happens with the
White Rabbit’s watch in Wonderland, time’s very
logic is subverted: the work Conversaciones, being conceived
of as a process, will wind up concluding on the last day of
the show and not on the day of the opening, as traditionally
happens. In addition, the exhibition involves a series of changes
in the institution’s cyclic routine, among them, a change
in the hours during which it is open to the public.
As regards real space, like on other occasions when Alicia Herrero
worked with paper museums (constructed out of images of works
taken from art books and catalogs), here space becomes a spatialized
book, just as the Magazine in situ (2004-2005) project also
becomes a spatialized magazine, in real time and space.
Questioning the limits between reality and fiction brings us
to question the space-time effectuation of events. Following
Deleuze’s logic, it is not the space-time occurrence itself
that constitutes it as such, but rather the added plus of signification
that the viewer provides. The event is constructed like an ensemble
of singular, sensitive and critical points.
Disembodied and immaterial, meaning is only the effect of meaning.
How should the castle be viewed in order to really see the castle?
How can you look at the forest of shadows? “Which way?
Which way?”, asks Alice and asks yet again Alicia, the
other Alice.
BELEN GACHE 2005