GERMAN TAGLE: ATMOSPHERIC SUBLIME
Germán Tagle has created a body of works that explores the dimension of the beautiful and the sublime, the tranquil and the violent, the desired, the imagined and the feared Throughout his paintings, the artist addresses a number of concepts, but there are three in particular that are of significance to this exhibition. The first is Germán’s reference to the history of the use of landscape and its image as a tool of empire. Second is his allusion to Kant’s interpretation of the psychological inflection of the beautiful and the sublime. The third important theme is his relationship to the history of the Baroque not as a European movement but as an American phenomenon. These three ideas are particularly prevalent in the painter’s works, connecting a variety of other related concepts in the process of exploring the forms and meanings of his paintings.
Rocio Aranda-Alvarado, Curator Jersey City Museum, USA, 2009
miércoles, 24 de junio de 2009
The course of empire
Germán Tagle’s work reveals his clear understanding of the historic use of images of the landscape as a tool of empire. This is particularly relevant to the allusion to modernism (and the struggle between modernity and post modernity) that is also present in his works. In his noted works, Néstor García Canclini has constantly explored the relationship between modernity and the will of empire:
The expansive project is a tendency of modernity to extend knowledge and possession of nature, and also the production, distribution and consumption of goods. Expansion tens to be motivated by increase in profit, but we also find it, away from any commercial impulse, in scientific discover, industrial growth, demographic growth and even in alternative trends that seek an expansive conception of human evolution.[1]
Following García Canclini’s lead, I would suggest, that Germán’s paintings also refer to one of the principal motivators of the will towards empire, which is desire. The artist himself has noted the close relationship between fear and desire and between fear and fascination. The figures in his paintings are in a state of contemplation; they are desirous but waiting; their desire becomes poetical and relates to imagination, contemplation and the search for gratification within the landscape.[ii] The searching of the landscape is tied to self-knowledge, to intense thoughts, to desire to become linked through the landscape to the understanding of one’s destiny. As has been established by a number of scholars, the discourses surrounding colonized people—their landscapes and cultures—often evoked narratives and stereotypes that were much more revealing about European cultures than about the peoples they were attempting to catalogue.[iii]
In Germán’s work, the fabric he has chosen to use as the support for his painting is particularly telling and relevant to a discussion of colonialism and the course of empire. Toile fabric with flowers and other decorative elements on it was first created from woodblock and then copperplate prints in Ireland and France in the mid-eighteenth century. By the 1770s, it had become extremely fashionable among the French court and the French Oberkampf factory was proclaimed to be the Manufacture Royale de Jouy by King Louis XVI in 1783.[iv] Eventually, European fabricators became adept at finding images that would sell to a variety of patrons, even commemorating American independence for a French market that identified with this historic struggle.
The images printed on toile fabric represent the ideals, the fantasies, the expectations of European society, often based on long-held beliefs about the role of man and nature and the differences between one continent and another, one culture and another. Not merely decorative motifs, these images also represent the desire to encompass the culture of another (the Asian, the indigenous American), to (literally and figuratively) domesticate it, experience it, own it.
One work in which this concept is readily evident is Welcome to America, 2007 (*Fig. 3). The background includes a landscape of bucolic scenes that feature gentle maidens laundering clothing in a river, a pair of oxen lead by a farmer and a young man watching the scene appreciatively from his relaxed position in the grass. Across these decorative views, the artist has filled his canvas with brash strokes of bold, moving color. The paint, as it spreads across these figures serves as a metaphor for the desire to continue to expand across landscapes, to fulfill fantasies about the simplicity of an idealized life.
The kind of imagery seen on these printed toile fabric helps to maintain the conviction that the multiplication of lands available to the nation is an essential part of its development. Through the hand of the artist, the effect of the paint underscores the idea of a culture clash, in which the sanctity of the gentle landscape is intervened by a powerful unstoppable force, much like the spread of empire.
Two smaller examples in which the print of the fabric becomes the central image or protagonist of the works are Castle and Satellite (*Fig. 8 and 9). These works present a single realistic image, each taken from a fabric pattern and collaged into the painting. Castle features a large, Romanesque structure with a tower and a bridge that stretches across a river. A Romantic ruin, the castle dominates the scene that is painted with a violent storm of colors—a testament to the magnificence of the (European) structure. This kind of representation featuring a ruin surrounded by a nostalgic and romantic interpretation of the landscape is typical of the work of nineteenth century Romantic painters and is critical to reading Germán’s work as a contemporary example of the exploration of the sublime in art.
The sublime
The finer sentiment which we propose to consider here is primarily of two kinds: the sentiment of the lofty or sublime (Erhabenen) and the sentiment of the beautiful. Being moved by either is agreeable, but in a very different way. A view of a mountain, the snowy peaks of which rise above the clouds, a description of a raging storm or a description by Milton of the Kingdom of Hell cause pleasure, but it is mixed with awe; on the other hand, a view of flower-filled meadows, valleys with winding brooks and the herds upon them, the description of elysium or Homer's description of the belt of Venus cause an agreeable feeling which is gay and smiling. We must have a sense of the sublime to receive the first impression adequately, and a sense of the beautiful to enjoy the latter fully.
—Emmanuel Kant, The Sense of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764)
With this crucial differentiation, Emmanuel Kant described succinctly the difference between two kinds of visual pleasure. For Kant, a simple view of a bucolic landscape would be an experience of the beautiful. Alternatively, a landscape that inspired a certain level of fear and even anxiety would be considered sublime. The relationship between both emotional responses to these varied visual stimulations is at the heart of Kant’s discussion of the two. As evinced by his careful treatment of the Baroque, the tension between the beautiful and the sublime are evident throughout Germán Tagle’s paintings.
The more sublime characteristics of a cliff and a marshy swampland are explored in works such as Birdman, 2008 (*Fig. 17), and Predator, 2008 (*Fig. 13). Birdman, in particular, is an appropriate image for the discussion of the power of the sublime and its significance to the images of landscape. The lone figure in this diptych stands in the upper center of the canvas on the right. Poised as though at the very edge of a cliff, or perhaps on the fine end of a long branch, the Birdman is a precarious figure. Like a view of a monumental series of waterfalls (Niágara comes to mind), this image places the single, vulnerable figure in a precipitous position. Below him are frothy, pulsating strokes of red. In the distance and all around are endless, gloomy drips of cool blue.
These effects are reminiscent of the misty, tragic canvases of J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) and also invoke the romantic beauty and power of the nocturne works of an artist like Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917). Placed in an indefinable, unknowable and boundless space, the figure, small and exposed, is a pawn in the effects of the Sublime as created by the artist. Germán’s figure is surrounded on all sides by the constant possibility of being consumed by the environment.
The finer sentiment which we propose to consider here is primarily of two kinds: the sentiment of the lofty or sublime (Erhabenen) and the sentiment of the beautiful. Being moved by either is agreeable, but in a very different way. A view of a mountain, the snowy peaks of which rise above the clouds, a description of a raging storm or a description by Milton of the Kingdom of Hell cause pleasure, but it is mixed with awe; on the other hand, a view of flower-filled meadows, valleys with winding brooks and the herds upon them, the description of elysium or Homer's description of the belt of Venus cause an agreeable feeling which is gay and smiling. We must have a sense of the sublime to receive the first impression adequately, and a sense of the beautiful to enjoy the latter fully.
—Emmanuel Kant, The Sense of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764)
With this crucial differentiation, Emmanuel Kant described succinctly the difference between two kinds of visual pleasure. For Kant, a simple view of a bucolic landscape would be an experience of the beautiful. Alternatively, a landscape that inspired a certain level of fear and even anxiety would be considered sublime. The relationship between both emotional responses to these varied visual stimulations is at the heart of Kant’s discussion of the two. As evinced by his careful treatment of the Baroque, the tension between the beautiful and the sublime are evident throughout Germán Tagle’s paintings.
The more sublime characteristics of a cliff and a marshy swampland are explored in works such as Birdman, 2008 (*Fig. 17), and Predator, 2008 (*Fig. 13). Birdman, in particular, is an appropriate image for the discussion of the power of the sublime and its significance to the images of landscape. The lone figure in this diptych stands in the upper center of the canvas on the right. Poised as though at the very edge of a cliff, or perhaps on the fine end of a long branch, the Birdman is a precarious figure. Like a view of a monumental series of waterfalls (Niágara comes to mind), this image places the single, vulnerable figure in a precipitous position. Below him are frothy, pulsating strokes of red. In the distance and all around are endless, gloomy drips of cool blue.
These effects are reminiscent of the misty, tragic canvases of J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) and also invoke the romantic beauty and power of the nocturne works of an artist like Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917). Placed in an indefinable, unknowable and boundless space, the figure, small and exposed, is a pawn in the effects of the Sublime as created by the artist. Germán’s figure is surrounded on all sides by the constant possibility of being consumed by the environment.
The baroque and the hybrid
Among the many definitions of the word baroque are these two:
1: of, or relating to, or having the characteristics of a style of artistic expression prevalent especially in the seventeenth century that is marked generally by use of complex forms, bold ornamentation, and the juxtaposition of contrasting elements, often conveying a sense of drama, movement and tension.
2: characterized by grotesqueness, extravagance, complexity or flamboyance.[1] [Emphasis added]
I have emphasized various words and phrases in these definitions because they are particularly relevant to our discussion of the paintings of Germán Tagle. As it developed in European centers, the Baroque was an expression of the visual possibilities revealed by a deft manipulation of light, a penchant for narrative drama and a taste for complex compositions. Imported into the Americas, however, the Baroque represented something altogether different, largely because of the vast difference in the social and cultural realities of both places:
From Mexico to the Andes, conquered American Indians, black slaves, elite Europeans and their uprooted nonaristocratic compatriots mixed together, creating societies that were highly inegalitarian and hierarchical, but in which the traditions of many continents were combined. New groups arose everywhere: the mestizos of Hispanic America, the mamelucos of Portuguese Brazil. In response to the Westernization imposed by the Catholic Church, Madrid and Lisbon fostered mestizo cultures that drew freely on Amerindian traditions or the constant flow of influences from Africa.[2]
This hybridization of physical and cultural elements, and the subsequent production of an environment that is a product of varied sources, are at the heart of Germán Tagle’s paintings. The artist himself notes the significance of hybridization in his works as a key element. He describes his landscapes as emblematic of a “larger environment, a totality, something that is inescapable, without end, dual and hybrid.”[3]
The power represented visually by this cultural and conceptual hybridity is clear in works such as Electric Dragon, 2008 (*Fig. 12). This image presents a dynamic relationship between surface and background, between support and paint, between form and content. Metaphorically, it also addresses cultural difference and the effects of the modern mixing of history and present, innumerable cultural elements, and time and space. Among the more recognizable objects in this painting are the “whiplash” form seen in the center and borrowed both from organic forms and from design of the Art Nouveau period. As the solid form of landscape moves down the center of the painting, the sensual, linear form of the whip becomes immediately evident.
Similarly, the imagery in Messenger (*Fig. 5) epitomizes the hybrid relationship between the constructed, idyllic landscape of the toile fabric and the abstraction of the paint. The modernist paradigm of nonobjective form is poured stridently across the bucolic scene in the background, underscoring the tension that the artist has created between both worlds. A woman does her wash below the shade of a tree, while near her two shepherds lead a cow through the scene. Far above, an ominous, formless rain cloud hovers, painted in solid forms of blue and gray.
The palpable relationship between the form seen in the textile print and the artist’s shape underscores the hybridity of the landscape to which he refers. The unending pattern of the Orientalist lines, in Electric Dragon, covers the surface of the work, which is then intervened with a slowly moving but compelling series of references to land and water. In Messenger, a scene from the countryside, European or perhaps American, inspires a feeling of nostalgia, or familiarity, a remembrance of pastoral scenes created by Western artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As an inspiration of the Baroque, the juxtaposition of these very different forms signifies its legacy in the Americas.
By tracing these weighty themes throughout the work of Germán Tagle, we are allowed to follow a visual and intellectual exploration of historic forces, abstract forms, the significance of pattern and image, and a number of other elements. The pleasure of viewing the paintings sometimes belies their deeper signification. With their rich, pearly layers of paint and their formidable strokes, the paintings would invite a contemplation of form most immediately. However, exploring the artist’s signifying use of the figure and the background, form and content, fabric and color, reveals the intimate depth of his bold narratives.
[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/baroque, Feb. 16, 2009.
[2] Serge Gruzinski, “The Baroque Planet,” in Elizabeth Armstrong and Victor Zamudio-Taylor, eds., Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post Latin American Art (San Diego: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2000): 112-113.
[3] Author’s conversation with the artist, February 9, 2009.
Artificial Paradise, Union Gallery, New York 2009
GERMAN TAGLE: PAINTING LESSONS
Contemporary art incurs in the sin of extremism. On the one hand, a certain artistic production seems intent on committing itself body and soul to the dictates of the market. Thus, following the season's fashions, successful formulas and contents are recycled. Art -- its reception and consumption -- are codified according to parameters increasingly disconnected from daily life. This results in the alienation of the public from the artistic undertaking, which is constrained to more or less exclusive circles. On the other hand, we find a production of a different sort, afflicted -- I would suggest -- with transcendence. This production seems more interested in explaining itself than in growing from contact with the public. It flows from the central legacy of conceptual art, the statement, -- that private manifesto of sorts through which an artist tries to explain himself and his art to us. Quite a task! The accident, the organic and natural evolution of things are strangled at their origin. A certain notable artist has even proclaimed the "danger" of intuition in the creative act -- a curious oxymoron.
These two extremes have something in common: the production which they engender bears the mark of the instruction manual. An a priori discourse dictates what is adequate. It lays the basis for an art of verbiage, for a teleprompter which is decorative in the best of cases, that is, "appropriate for the occasion." Be it in the services of the traditional art market, constituted by galleries and merchants, or the parallel market formed by the network of institutions, with their prizes and contests, a significant volume of today's art seeks to please collectors and curators who are, in essence, the principal referees of the game of art. Criticism, which should respond critically to these situations, is far from fulfilling its task. It has opted to justify these idioms sustained by a -- frequently tautological -- superficial sociological analysis.
Let's take two distant examples: on the one hand, in mid-1990s Cuba, Janet Batet proclaimed that cynicism had taken over Cuban art and used all sorts of rhetorical resources to justify it (the irruption of the art market with the dollarization of the economy and the State's withdrawal of support for artists). It was thus endowed with a doubtful legitimacy derived from the economic and social crisis produced by the collapse of the pro-Soviet socialist model. More recently Jan Verwoert, the German critic living in Berlin, has gained notoriety with a series of conferences whose title is simultaneously a brilliant marketing strategy and a jest: "Why are conceptual artists painting again? Because they think it's a good idea." The critic recycles the myth which ascribes the monopoly of "the concept" in the history of art to this current, while justifying, with a harebrained quip, the use of a rightfully prestigious term in the commercialization of artists who are not conceptual. This follows the growing vulgarization of aesthetic debates filtered by public relations and social communication.
In this complex and -- why not say it -- confusing context, it is refreshing to discern a new generation of artists which reacts creatively. This is the case of Germán Tagle, with whom we had the opportunity to work while preparing the Fifth Biennial of the Museo del Barrio / S Files 007 with curator E. Carmen Ramos. Supported by very personal explorations, Tagle has managed to amass a vibrant and sincere oeuvre in a short period of time. He does not seek support in an artist's statement or in an a priori notion of what should be. Every painting or drawing he presents is, in itself, an arrival, a discernment of what can be done with the qualities of the materials he employs. It could be said that a journey through his painting is, as it should be, the journey of a learning process. In his early paintings, collected in the exhibit "Pasajero en transito / in Transit Passenger," his fascination was the stain -- its infinite evocative possibilities-- which didn't restrain him from occasionally recurring to the figure. Subsequently, it was the backdrops of a printed fabric, and the diverse ways in which a form or a color could relate to them. More recently, the plastic qualities of resins, which Tagle manipulates with a controlled freedom, have procured him notably fresh and felicitous discoveries.
During the vanguardist period, the debate revolved around the local and the universal -- today one would say "the global." Many intellectuals arrived at the consensus that in order to insert themselves in the universal, art had to first be local. Similarly, good art passes from being primarily relevant to the individual who produces it, to being relevant to the society that receives it. This is the step that is produced by the verisimilitude in Tagle's paintings. So that if we perceive the evolution of his work as the achievement of many learning processes, it is because that is what it is precisely about; a real thirst for learning the ways in which the material -- be it oil, acrylic, resin, canvas, paper -- transforms itself plastically into something else, into metaphor. And in the course of this process, the artist himself is transformed.
An appraisal of the works allows one to see that they don't respond to a master plan, but that the painter conceives each piece and even each centimeter of canvas or paper as an exploration. Thus, a particular energy latent in the discovery emerges naturally out of the achieved scenes. Because that is what the pieces, in effect, are: achieved, and not planned paintings; points arrived at accidentally and intuitively. In one of the brief texts that the artist has written, he advocates an "open, acute vision, that observes everything as if for the first time .." It is the restoration of amazement, expressed by the poetical facet of every form. From there -- his attachment to nature indebted to the traveling artist -- springs forth the candidness and force of his paintings.
Elvis Fuentes, Curator El Museo Del Barrio, New York, april 10, 2009.
Contemporary art incurs in the sin of extremism. On the one hand, a certain artistic production seems intent on committing itself body and soul to the dictates of the market. Thus, following the season's fashions, successful formulas and contents are recycled. Art -- its reception and consumption -- are codified according to parameters increasingly disconnected from daily life. This results in the alienation of the public from the artistic undertaking, which is constrained to more or less exclusive circles. On the other hand, we find a production of a different sort, afflicted -- I would suggest -- with transcendence. This production seems more interested in explaining itself than in growing from contact with the public. It flows from the central legacy of conceptual art, the statement, -- that private manifesto of sorts through which an artist tries to explain himself and his art to us. Quite a task! The accident, the organic and natural evolution of things are strangled at their origin. A certain notable artist has even proclaimed the "danger" of intuition in the creative act -- a curious oxymoron.
These two extremes have something in common: the production which they engender bears the mark of the instruction manual. An a priori discourse dictates what is adequate. It lays the basis for an art of verbiage, for a teleprompter which is decorative in the best of cases, that is, "appropriate for the occasion." Be it in the services of the traditional art market, constituted by galleries and merchants, or the parallel market formed by the network of institutions, with their prizes and contests, a significant volume of today's art seeks to please collectors and curators who are, in essence, the principal referees of the game of art. Criticism, which should respond critically to these situations, is far from fulfilling its task. It has opted to justify these idioms sustained by a -- frequently tautological -- superficial sociological analysis.
Let's take two distant examples: on the one hand, in mid-1990s Cuba, Janet Batet proclaimed that cynicism had taken over Cuban art and used all sorts of rhetorical resources to justify it (the irruption of the art market with the dollarization of the economy and the State's withdrawal of support for artists). It was thus endowed with a doubtful legitimacy derived from the economic and social crisis produced by the collapse of the pro-Soviet socialist model. More recently Jan Verwoert, the German critic living in Berlin, has gained notoriety with a series of conferences whose title is simultaneously a brilliant marketing strategy and a jest: "Why are conceptual artists painting again? Because they think it's a good idea." The critic recycles the myth which ascribes the monopoly of "the concept" in the history of art to this current, while justifying, with a harebrained quip, the use of a rightfully prestigious term in the commercialization of artists who are not conceptual. This follows the growing vulgarization of aesthetic debates filtered by public relations and social communication.
In this complex and -- why not say it -- confusing context, it is refreshing to discern a new generation of artists which reacts creatively. This is the case of Germán Tagle, with whom we had the opportunity to work while preparing the Fifth Biennial of the Museo del Barrio / S Files 007 with curator E. Carmen Ramos. Supported by very personal explorations, Tagle has managed to amass a vibrant and sincere oeuvre in a short period of time. He does not seek support in an artist's statement or in an a priori notion of what should be. Every painting or drawing he presents is, in itself, an arrival, a discernment of what can be done with the qualities of the materials he employs. It could be said that a journey through his painting is, as it should be, the journey of a learning process. In his early paintings, collected in the exhibit "Pasajero en transito / in Transit Passenger," his fascination was the stain -- its infinite evocative possibilities-- which didn't restrain him from occasionally recurring to the figure. Subsequently, it was the backdrops of a printed fabric, and the diverse ways in which a form or a color could relate to them. More recently, the plastic qualities of resins, which Tagle manipulates with a controlled freedom, have procured him notably fresh and felicitous discoveries.
During the vanguardist period, the debate revolved around the local and the universal -- today one would say "the global." Many intellectuals arrived at the consensus that in order to insert themselves in the universal, art had to first be local. Similarly, good art passes from being primarily relevant to the individual who produces it, to being relevant to the society that receives it. This is the step that is produced by the verisimilitude in Tagle's paintings. So that if we perceive the evolution of his work as the achievement of many learning processes, it is because that is what it is precisely about; a real thirst for learning the ways in which the material -- be it oil, acrylic, resin, canvas, paper -- transforms itself plastically into something else, into metaphor. And in the course of this process, the artist himself is transformed.
An appraisal of the works allows one to see that they don't respond to a master plan, but that the painter conceives each piece and even each centimeter of canvas or paper as an exploration. Thus, a particular energy latent in the discovery emerges naturally out of the achieved scenes. Because that is what the pieces, in effect, are: achieved, and not planned paintings; points arrived at accidentally and intuitively. In one of the brief texts that the artist has written, he advocates an "open, acute vision, that observes everything as if for the first time .." It is the restoration of amazement, expressed by the poetical facet of every form. From there -- his attachment to nature indebted to the traveling artist -- springs forth the candidness and force of his paintings.
Elvis Fuentes, Curator El Museo Del Barrio, New York, april 10, 2009.
Graphic Interventions, Insituto Cervantes NY, Femaco Mexico, Galeria Moro Chile.
Art Agora, an exhibit presented as part of Expediente (S) 007, the Museo del Barrio2019s Fifth Biennial. This show marks the first collaboration between the two institutions, and signifies the willingness to continue to cooperate in future projects. Art Agora presents a sampling of work by new generations of Latin American and US Latino artists. The exhibit reflects upon the vulnerability of words in the context of a world dominated by the language of images. This event is made possible thanks to the exclusive support of BBVA.
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