by Alicia Kopf
“Kid, organize your closet.”
The Prize
The gallery calls to tell me that I’ve been awarded a prize for my first solo exhibition, which I mounted the previous year. The ceremony is on Tuesday at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art. I have a sore throat and I’m emotionally exhausted after a Christmas of arguments with R. An hour before the award ceremony I get out of bed, put on a white shirt buttoned all the way up and some black jeans. The shirt is semi-transparent and is patterned with tiny black lightning bolts. I keep losing weight. I take the metro there. When I arrive, I find the press there ready for a photocall. A television host is wearing a dress that looks like it’s made of aluminum foil. I stand in a corner like the catering staff. The hall is filled with infinite white tables, elegantly set for the dinner with no one seated at them. They remind me of the story of Goldilocks—I’m an imposter, they’re going to kick me out of the house. I look over at the photographers on a dais with a black backdrop covered in logos. They wait impatiently; no one has stepped up yet. I don’t know any of the few attendees who’ve arrived. A guy as solitary as me stands waiting in one corner. We received the same grant for young emerging artists a couple of years ago. When he had won every grant available in this city he went to a country in northern Europe. We greet each other and he says, “Do you mind sticking with me? I’m feeling lost.”
We go outside to smoke. He smokes, I just pretend to (I don’t know why I can’t refuse this cigarette). He was awarded this prize the previous year, this year he’s a member of the jury. They pay for his flight and a hotel room as big as an apartment—he shows me photos on his mobile. He voted for me.
“Congratulations on the show. Why don’t you apply for the same grant and come up north?”
He looks naturally elegant, not in a phony way, in his white shirt and jacket bought for the occasion. He has a small, already greenish, tattoo over his ear. A revolutionary star. I ask him how he ended up in Barcelona, moving from his home country.
“I’d heard good things about it. I lived in a squat for a few months, and I ended up sleeping on the street. Until P gave me the chance to show my work.”
His art is a commentary on capitalist society, from the outside. It deals with the recession in Spain, politicians’ false promises, the paradoxes and perversions of the neoliberal system.
“That led to MA asking for all the work I had. Soon he had sold it all at various international fairs.”
That night I dream that we do it, him entering me from behind, standing on the white steps of the museum.
Objects
I find the clothing you gave me everywhere, R. It envelops my body, contains my feet and when I go to pay, it’s the leather wallet. In winter, shoes; in summer, trousers; when I pull out the coat I rarely wear, a shirt appears hung underneath it. Perhaps you don’t even remember all these things that embrace me, that were “ours.” When you were out of work, I worried about you impulsively buying things you thought would please me. Despite that, I accepted those gifts with the same equivocal feeling I had when my father, on the dole, would take us to a restaurant. That sense of excitement mixed with uncertainty and guilt. How could I accept them? Why did you give me all those gifts? Now I regret not having been the one to give them to you: clothes, shoes, perfume. Everything that could prolong my presence in you.
Because objects last longer than feelings.
Berglust13
13 Derived from the German expression “Wanderlust”; here it’s “Berglust,” the lust for mountains.
Ice shrinks the veins and capillaries that bring blood to an injured area. As a consequence, the hematic flow—the blood—lessens. To put it another way, the ice calms the pain of knocks. Perhaps that’s where tormented souls’ preference for icy places comes from, the peacefulness of the snow falling. The indifference of the mountains. The beginning and end of Frankenstein, at the North Pole. Life in the mountains is trapped by something more serene and stable, purer and more elevated than life by the sea could ever be. In The Philosophy of Landscape, Georg Simmel states that the sea acts out of empathy toward life, and the Alps do so out of abstraction. This effect increases progressively as the rocky landscape gives way to the snowy.
Mini-breaks to the snow, like those to the beach, usually juxtapose the magnificence of the landscape against human banality. There is a common element in the way we inhabit these places: a stretch of nature is domesticated so we can imagine that we are exploring it without much risk—the less apparent danger, the more mass tourism. You queue up for the ski lift, or to get a table at the bar; there are families and people dressed in bright colors. Music echoes through the snow. Silence must be avoided. The music is the same at ski resorts as in beach bars. You can go freestyle off-piste or swim past the buoy. Sometimes there are avalanches. Or a giant wave. The music tries to get us to forget about that. Obscuring our ephemerality in the face of the eternity of the seas and mountains, chopping up time into tiny pieces, as brief as a rhythm, a rhythm that gives time another meaning, one that is much more livable and fun.
Ice calms the pain of knocks, but if you ice a wound too long, the result can be detrimental. According to the British Journal of Sports Medicine, ice “does anaesthetise the area so that the patient does not feel pain, but nor does he feel that he is freezing the affected area of skin.” The insensitivity can damage the healthy skin around the wound. I need to finish this project soon.
Black Mirror
R apologizes, appeals, advances, retreats, pleads. He is the protagonist of a big performance, acted out in solitude behind the screen. No one, not even him, knows what’s hidden behind the curtains of that show. His suffering, amplified on the social networks, attains catharsis 2.0 with a large number of likes.
Alps
There was an airplane accident today in the Alps. A hundred and fifty people died. The plane crashed in the mountains. Peaks emerging in the passengers’ windows. No natural or human landscape is invulnerable to terror anymore.
February, Again
New visit to TD. He’s changed offices to a main floor apartment uptown. Visiting that part of the city reminds me once again that this service, just like the stores on the corner, is a luxury. The room where we talk now has more light. The African masks have traveled from his other office. The shelves bulging with books and the divan have also come with him; my suspicion that it could be a shared office goes up in smoke. All the staging elements have been carefully selected. The red curtains are new, giving the large room a theatrical air. Beside the armchair where TD sits, right behind the psychoanalyst’s face, hangs a particularly long mask with pointed features, and deep hollows for eyes. Magical elements far from the aseptic settings and positivism of Western medicine convert the visit into a ritual act. I ask him about the masks:
Etymologically, person comes from the Latin persona, mask, and is linked to “per-sona,” that which sounds, relating to an actor’s voice projection in a stage play. It references the particular role we occupy in life, unlike “human being,” which alludes to what we all have in common.
TD is a mediator between a person and what is behind the mask. That hidden part is reached through that which sounds, the word.
“Okay … I’m listening.”
“… [I tell him about my breakup with R.]”
“R is merely a representative.”
“… ?”
“Those pros and cons were a reprise.”
“… ?”
“Perhaps by identifying the limits that are fundamental to you: Yes/no, white/black. And not only in relationships, also in other realms.”
“… ?”
“Realizing how much and how it affects us. Then knowing what place one occupies.”
“… ?”
“It seems to me that not adapting is being able to express what one feels.”
“… ?”
“It’s clear th
at taking refuge is valid, but, with all due respect, it wasn’t enough.”
“The two relationships are very relevant. They both involved a certain refuge-taking. Refuge from what?”
“Refuge from my family.”
“That is a very strong emotion. It has been controlled for a long time. But while dikes can remain in tension for a long time, one can liberate oneself, allow for flow … What would happen if I were to tell you that your paternal family has to do with a representation that perhaps has to do with one of a maternal family and that they converge in you? In the maternal one, you cannot be vulnerable, and therefore protected, in the other, there is no place for the possibility of self-expression.”
Two tears stain my blue dress.
A Trip to Antarctica
Icebergs’ colors tell us something about their ice’s origin and longevity. Gray icebergs could denote they were formed in a volcanic region, while intensely blue ones show that the ice is very old, since the immense pressure pushes the air out from inside (making the ice filter out all the colors except blue). I have seen several blue icebergs, and one in particular caught my eye because it was shaped like a dragon and was struggling against the waves during a rough storm that was trying to devour it. But one day I had the privilege of seeing something truly exceptional. Sailing around Antarctica, it is rare for scientists to come across a green iceberg. Their emerald color almost turns them into precious stones, with tones that acquire, depending on the slant of the light and its penetration, a wide spectrum of greens. […] What in the past had been a green giant (at least at its base), was being tossed around, licked by waves in a slow but sure extinction. It was an old iceberg, about to be definitively consumed by the implacable persistence of the sea, which finishes off each and every iceberg by gradual erosion. Those who have had the opportunity to study these icebergs have found iron, copper, and other metallic elements within them. Young icebergs can trawl along the sea floor picking up particles that can remain inside them. It is not clear how this process occurs. Little by little, they erode and, like all icebergs, end up turning over. Then they reveal their bellies, which hold these metals. But that is not all that is found inside them, since a series of microscopic organisms seem to also give them part of their color; diatoms and benthic foraminifera, small fibers …
Another possibility is the existence of a series of parallel layers of green feldspar. Strong deep water currents and sediment resuspension—in other words, the fact that mud clouds the water at different moments—may have facilitated the incorporation of those elements, which would also explain why the layers are not uniform or homogenous. The icebergs’ trawling and subsequent freezing due to temperature and pressure changes favor this incrustation.14
14 Sergio Rossi, Un viaje a la Antártida, pp. 57–60.
Benthic foraminifera from south central Chile (36°s–44°s).
Source: the scientific journal SciELO http://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=So717-65382005000200013.
Within the seemingly arid and barren environment of an iceberg, live beings with voluptuous, nourishing forms.
The Illogic of Arco
I show up at the art fair on Saturday morning. Paradoxically, being an art professional means I have to miss the days of the fair dedicated to art professionals. Like any other artist in this country who’s beyond the post-adolescent phase and hasn’t escaped a rent bill either via a family-owned apartment, squatting or Airbnb, I work during the week. These days artists have to be their own patrons. Apart from bankrolling my art, that slight petit-bourgeois delay will allow me to see the fauna who, like me, attend on a Saturday as part of the general public. When I arrive, my gallerist comes to greet me. We shake hands professionally and he hands me my accreditation. He reminds me that artists’ presence at the stand is not particularly useful, ARCO is primarily a commercial event. But I’m not there to present my work, I want to see new things. We cover almost a kilometer on a moving walkway to reach Pavilion 9, where the gallery stand is located. He pulls out a Ducado; the tobacco choice of a generation that’s giving way to the next. Once we’re at the stand I’m received by his daughters, who give me water and practical tips to survive the crowds.
My work is located in front of a sketch of the project that Cabello/Carceller will do in Venice, and a painting by Lola Lasurt looking sidelong at a Julião Sarmento. The ultramaterial presence of another painting beside my piece provokes a certain repulsion in me—I can’t help it: the material figuration is redundant. I note the viscous vibrations of the painting expanding out toward my fragile drawing. Like the franchise artists that are usually at ARCO—for example Julian Opie; I think I saw the same piece of his, in the same spot, ten years earlier—the fair is now well stocked with the franchises seen in most towns, including a Zara Men VIP Space converted into the Garden of Eden. The message is clear: you can only get to Eden if you pay more. Certain Catholic recollections appear in my little head, which was educated in secular schools. As I get older, I see that precisely because of that I am supremely naïve. That’s real cynicism, not like Santiago Sierra’s installations. Speaking of cynicism, I stop at ADN and ask for more details on a piece by Adrian Melis: a video in which a paper shredder does its job on reams of paperwork. The systematic destruction has a sadistic charm. Sadism can be erotic, the pages are precisely and intermittently sliced into strips. The gallerist tells me that the documents are résumés. The young woman destroying them was selected for the job through a listing posted by the artist himself: her job is to destroy the résumés presented by the other candidates. Like much of this kind of art that underscores power relationships in our society, what intrigues me most is the position of the subject—the young woman—in the action. She is a Bartleby-subject, someone who “would prefer not to” as he read the letters returned by the post office, letters which will never reach their intended recipients, likewise her résumés will receive no response.
There are several artists currently exposing the dynamics of capitalist work. Is exposing them while taking part in them cynical or does it somehow lead to greater awareness? Is there any critical form that has not been absorbed by the system? This question raises a series of reflections in my mind, making me walk distractedly, sidestepping the Madrid bourgeoisie and families who’ve come to see the glass half empty/half full (depending on how you look at it) by Wilfredo Prieto, all happy to see a work that is so easily reproducible at home. Without a predetermined itinerary, I walk in circles constantly stumbling on the same works and ignoring others that surely deserve more attention. Like in life itself, we always seem to be tripping over the same damn stone. This time I stumble upon Jonathan Millán at Estrany-de la Mota; his installation speaks to me snidely about the difficulty of autobiographical expression in the artistic environment. The title: Awkward Family Moment. A striking occasion pulled straight from the creator’s life.
Awkward Family Moment, Jonathan Millán.
At Pavilion 7, Helga de Alvear presents us with the megalomaniacal paintings of Katharina Grosse. That artist, who was a teacher of mine during an exchange fellowship in Berlin in 2005, has evolved from a certain pictorial formalism to this current neo-sublime extravaganza. In the center of the space is a tree fallen onto pieces of polystyrene spray-painted in neon colors. Her personality and work is magnetic, exclusively “made in Germany” in both the aesthetic and the economic tradition. While with the former I’m clearly referring to the Romantic tradition, with the latter I mean the fact that she studied Fine Arts twice and then was hired by the university to teach without having a doctorate. (In Germany one’s artistic trajectory is valued more than one’s degrees.) A solid foundation for working, plus the Teutonic country’s creative infrastructure; that’s what I’m referring to when I say that the German cultural and economic tradition supports her. Her artistic résumés rarely mention that she teaches and is still studying. I wonder
what prejudices are behind that omission, or whether including it would somehow cloud her hagiography.
March 21, 2015
A German friend told me that Alicia Kopf sounded like the name of a Jewish émigré. I was fine with that.
March 24, 2015
Today I had a dream in which R confessed to me that he’d worked as a gigolo. Once, he told me, a man paid to watch me masturbate. In the next scene of the dream I was using his computer and found a folder of photographs of cut-up bodies with wounds. The images were details, there were no whole bodies or faces. Only pubic areas, buttocks, and thighs of indeterminate gender, of pubescent individuals with cuts and scars. I wondered why he collected those photographs and suspected a perverse use. Later, I found myself stroking his face gently and telling him:
“Don’t worry, I love you just the same.”
March 24, 2015
I start taking dance classes; I see things clearly when I’m dancing.
The Choreographer
In class I fall on the spins, I lose my balance. I can’t find my axis.