|
The collective effort of pushing the giant ball as performance is an endeavor that is re-framed from singular artwork as installation in the exhibition, to where it morphs into a mobilization of forces, an amorphous field of energy, an organic constellation of willed power. Even the title of "You are Here" is heterotopic and multi-spatial, since one is never "here" in the sense that the giant ball is always in a state of movement, of dynamism, of rhizomatic exuberance.
Operating between the global and the local, Téllez has worked within the mode of site-specificity, albeit as post-studio practice, in international locales such as England, Brazil. Japan, Peru, Venezuela and other countries as well, and an undercurrent through these projects is a contingency on contextual locality, reciprocity, and mutual engagement that is innately dialogical. In a way that gives his work an idiosyncratic resolution that is left open-ended, Téllez has more often than not returned to the site of his projects with his completed works to present to his collaborators, further extending the notion of context-dependent work in an altogether different modality of what has historically been called social sculpture. In other words, there is a conscious insertion of his work into the local that then fans out into the global and vice-versa. Unlike social sculpture, however, Téllezís projects are prone to a level of social engagement reminiscent of what the art historian Rosalind Krauss has called the "expanded field" (6). Both social sculpture and the notion of the expanded field operate outside the parameters of the institution. Téllez, however, broadens the notion of the expanded field by creating work that refers to what the critic Nicolas Bourriaud has termed "relational aesthetics" (7). Bourriaud has formulated the notion of "relational aesthetics" as artistic operations theoretically anchored in human interactions and their social contexts: "The artist produces connections with the world broadcast through works of social gesture, sign and form." Javier Téllez has similarly voiced this concern in an interview about his art: "the aesthetic mode is a condition that manifests less in things than in their relationships; it is in these that my work finds its battleground." Notes
*Gilles Delueze, "A Theory of the Other." The Deluze Reader, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
1. Jacques Derrida, "Differance" The Margins of Philosophy, Chicago: Univeristy of Chicago Press, 1982.
2. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, New York: Pantheon, 1965.
3. Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: On Thinking of the Other, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
4. Hans-George Gadamer, " The Hermenuetics of Suspicion" Hermenuetics: Questions and Prospects, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984, p. 57.
5. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousan Plateaus: Capitalism and Schzophrenia, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
6. Rosalind Krauss, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field" The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985.
7. Nicloas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, Paris: Les presses du reel, 1998.
|
