Posthumous. What is ultimately disconcerting, and also paradoxically contemporary in these works, is their anachronistic anxiety over identifications and references that already are experiencing their definitive extinction. The creole, the regional, the national even. An epochal twilight that nevertheless confers a visceral currency and presentness to primordial questions. And to archaic techniques.

"In the origin" Heidegger said, "lies the most horrifying, and the power of most extreme violence". In contrast to what happens in Peru or Mexico, the primal scene of certain Argentines is built not out of the muted clamor of the Conquest
or in the glorified struggles for Independence, but in the 19th century civil wars, prolonged until the extermination of the indigenous peoples. The ghosts of those fratricides accompany writers such as Marechal - obviously in his "traditional" pampa tragedies (Antí­gona Vélez), but also in the "modern" katabasis of Adán Buenosayres.

The descent into the underworld. It is suggestive that, among the references for her Neocriollo, Giron alludes in a privileged manner to Rodin’s Gates of Hell. Above all because of her other incisive links, though perhaps unconscious, to a closer derivative of that sculptural group: the monument for Buenos Aires that,
at the end of the 19th century, the French sculptor dedicated to Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, the paradigmatic enemy of Rosas.

Of interest here is not so much the effigy in itself as the structure "factual and ideological" that upholds it. Its art-political condition, inscribed even in the site-specificity that erects it on the location of the disappeared Caserón de Palermo, built by the caudillo for his residence. And turning Sarmiento’s back on the "aromo del perdón", the acacia aroma of forgiveness, the legendary tree under whose humidity and shades Manuelita Rosas, it is said, softened the deadly wraths of her terrible father.

The partisan intention of the placement chosen for that monument is projected in the iconographic program of the work, whose fullest meaning is finally cyphered not in the darkened bronzes of the main figure but in the luminous complementary reliefs of its marmoreal base. At one end, Phoebus emerges heraldic over the national coat of arms, amply inflated to reverberate the radiance of dawn. On the opposite side, another sun "Apollo" defeats Python, the monster of ignorance and darkness. The mythical sublimation of the supposed dichotomies between "civilization and barbarism", Sarmiento’s emblematic maxim.

The intentionality of that representation was surely accorded with Rodin by Miguel Cané, a liberal Argentinian writer and politician who accompanied closely the making of this work and had an important role in the determination of its site ("Palermo is a monument to barbarism and to the tyranny of the tyrant", he proclaimed with deliberate redundancy during the unveiling of the statue).(1)
But that literary meaning also becomes visual as it takes the form of a liberation of the corporeal line struggling to shape itself by emerging from the mass that traps it and keeps it indistinct ("let our Apollo being to come out of its marble cloud", Cané wrote Rodin in 1896).(2)

The Olympian figurative combat with the ctonic serpent thus materializes in the mortal matteric battle with the telluric magnetism of brute form. Also in symbolic terms: Python is the daughter of Gaia, the Greek Mother Earth. And for the gesture and outline of Apollo, Rodin took from his Gates of Hell the representation of Mercury, the psychopompic god that conducted the souls of the dead Romans to the underworld - one of the details most closely related to the shapes and forms of the Neocriollo.

But this digression might seem esoteric in view of the apparent extinction of everything, almost everything that has thus been codified. When, in 1975, Enio Iommi and Ignacio Pirovano propose the sculptural translation of Sarmiento’s monument into modern geometric lines of force, their vectorial gaze penetrates and cuts out only the dynamic semblance of the hero, his progressive sense of history. Giron, on the other hand, works the mythical sediment of its accessory images. And their larval reemergence as latency, as psychic matter, viscous and putrid and germinal.

The artistic implosion of the Real as an unconscious effect of the political hypertrophy of the Symbolic, its explosive oversymbolization. Sometimes literally: Rosas’s residence was dynamited - not demolished - in 1899, the same February 3 on which decades earlier he had been defeated at the battle of Caseros. And a year later, for the national anniversary at the turn of the century, Sarmiento’s monument was erected on what had been the private sleeping chamber of the so-called Restaurador.

History of art, hysteria of the world. There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism, Benjamin reminds us. And Giron somatizes in the unctuous craving body of her wax museum.

(THE END)

Notes:

*Courtesy Malba, Gustavo Buntinx and Mónica Girón. Corrected version of the text for the Neocriollo exhibition presented at the Malba Costantini Foundation.
1. El Paí­s. Buenos Aires: 26 May 1900. Cit. in: Marí­a Teresa Constantin. "El Sarmiento de Rodin". In: AA.VV. Rodin en Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires: Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes and Fundación Antorchas, 2001. p. 70.
2. Ibid. p. 6