Alexander Apóstol, between the modern and the savage.
At the present, many Venezuelan artists have engaged in a reflection on the failure of modernity in the country, perhaps motivated by the accelerated process of decadence and, in some cases, destruction that the capital, Caracas, has undergone in the last few years. During the past five years, Alexander Apóstol has produced a body of work that points precisely in this direction, and which places the spotlight on Caracas not so much as a modern city but as an inventory of side effects of modernity. More than dwelling on this failure of modernity –a recent and somewhat commonplace practice amongst Venezuelan cultural producers—Apóstol’s work addresses the darker side of progress and modernity artfully employing the indexical capacities of photography and video.
The series Residente Pulido (2001) constructs a vision of the city as a ruin but also posits the building, a vestige of modernity on the verge of extinction, as a precious artifact to be preserved. The artist photographed and digitally intervened a series of buildings dating from the 40s and 50s in Caracas, mostly built by Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese masons and developers, who arrived as immigrants to the city during those decades. More than invoking the heroic and monumental aspect of the modernist buildings characteristic of many public edifices in the 50s, and the later interventions on behalf of the Venezuelan kinetic artists along the city, these buildings are modest in scale and aesthetic ambition. Furthermore, they probably reflect the nostalgia of these immigrants for a certain type of working and middle class suburban European architecture. All the doors and windows have digitally been sealed off by the artist, granting the buildings the look of a condemned ruin, but with a certain gloss that evokes the polished surface of porcelain, like the ones that give the title to each of the photographs; Limoges, Sèvres, Lladró, Capodimonte, Meissen, among others. The allusion to decorative porcelain objects is developed in a more complex fashion in later video works that explore the realm of domesticity, of the aesthetic preferences of the middle class, and the private and intimate, thus subjective, experience of the grand narrative of modernism.
The artist again digitally manipulates his photographs in the second part of this series, Residente Pulido. Ranchos (2003), but this time the subject is not the modest residential architecture of the European immigrants in Caracas, but the precarious dwellings in the fringe of misery that surrounds, contains and engulfs what remains of the planned and formal city. The windows and doors of these shanties have also been sealed off digitally—although in some cases they were sealed off in real life by their owners—but the sheen and aesthetic references to porcelain of the previous series have disappeared. However, the process of objectification is intensified here, and the structures begin to drift away from their immediate contexts and transform themselves into monumental sculptures, reminiscent of the volumes of minimalism and the materials of arte povera. In these massive volumes we can also find correspondences with more recent works such as those by Marjetica Potrc, who idealizes this makeshift architecture but transplants it into the museum space, stripping it of its architectural and spatial values, and converting it into sculptural volumes that become aesthetic statements distanced from the functions and meanings of this kind of dwelling in its original social, political and economic contexts. Nonetheless, Apóstol’s interest does not reside in the idealization of the informal, but rather aims to neutralize the stigma that it bears. Somehow, this attitude reflects some of the more recent and significant changes that have developed in the way people address the urban and sociological crisis spawned by the marginal space of the shantytown and its architectural and infrastructural precariousness.
The idea of the building as sculpture reappears in his series titled Skeleton Coast (2005), but this time, the image is not manipulated. This group of photos is rather a register of a visible but not evident urban phenomenon, the “ruin under construction.” Caracas possesses quite a few of these, most notably the ruins of the future Galería de Arte Nacional (in different stages of construction and abandon since the mid 70s) and the future seat of the Palacio de Justicia (likewise, since the mid 1980s). However, Apóstol has chosen another location in which these structures also proliferate: the island of Margarita. Tourist development on the island was intensified after the 70s and 80s, in spite of the economic crisis in the country during the 80s, and its urban growth was mainly in the form of luxury beach apartments, recreational complexes and resorts. Obviously many of these urban developments responded to corrupt practices and money laundering more than to a real demand for this type of housing (basically, costly and luxurious secondary homes). The whole enterprise came to a halt in the early 90s during the bank crisis and to this day those “white elephants” remain unfinished and in ruins all over the island. Apóstol simply presents us with these images of these buildings in mid-construction –somewhat disturbing in light of their significance and of the fact that they will never be completed. Digital manipulation then becomes unnecessary, the image itself is allegorical—and it is—an image of allegory par excellence; the ruin, the carcass, and in this case, the corpse of progress and development.
This series of photographs sets the pace in terms of the use of photography and video in later works, especially those presented in this exhibition: Documental (2005), Av. Libertador (2006), Don Carlos (2005), Ghost City (2006), Soy la Cuidad (2005) and Moderno Salvaje (2005). There is in these works an interest for the strategies of documentary video, of the interview, of “reality TV.” Nevertheless, they are fictions that subtly reveal the other side of progress and modernity. Documental (2005), as its title indicates, highlights an actual documentary, recontextualizing it, in the current reality of the country. The video takes us inside a shanty where one of its inhabitants watching a documentary on modern Caracas on the TV set. This documentary is narrated by Renny Ottolina, a TV show host turned presidential candidate in the 70s (he died in mysterious circumstances in a plane accident at the beginning of his presidential campaign) whose slogan was “it is worthwhile to be a good citizen.” The precariousness of the dwelling contrasts with the contents of the documentary, to the point of becoming a paradox; in the documentary there is special mention of the mass exodus of people from the countryside to Caracas during the 50s and 60s, those local immigrants are, in great part, today the residents of the shantytowns. In the video, two realities are confronted, they respond to different times, but they contradict and annul each other, challenging the veracity of each “reality.” Did a “modern” Caracas really exist? Can the other Caracas, that of extreme poverty and shantytowns coexist with the modernist pursuit of becoming a “formal” capital of a so-called developing country? Or perhaps this idea of modernity and progress is a complete invention, and Venezuela indeed fits a recent description in a Paris travel agency ad for the World Social Forum, “come to Venezuela, an authentic third world country…”
Moderno Salvaje (2005) undertakes a subtler interaction in regard to these two realities, and attempts to allegorize the forces that give shape at present to a city that oscillates between the civilized and the barbaric; its modern monuments have progressively given way to street anarchy and the chaotic proliferation of informal commerce has all but erased any trace of public civic space. The video was made inside the Villa Planchart in Caracas, designed by Italian architect Gio Ponti in the 50s, and one of the icons of modernist architecture in Caracas. The interiors and furniture of the house were also designed by Ponti. Noteworthy among these designs is a room that contains a somewhat particular display device, conceived to exhibit and hide at convenience the hunting trophies of the owner of the house. Apóstol’s video shows this display at work; its gyrating panels with geometric shapes on one side rotate to reveal the heads of animals. In a way, the duality implied by this device, and the idea of concealing the animal heads –which were definitely not compatible with the aesthetic program of the house—mirrors the dynamics that operate in the city at present, where murals are painted everywhere to “conceal” or, rather, divert, attention from the increasing decay of the city.
In Soy la Ciudad (2005) and Av. Libertador (2005), the artist employs other resources including interviews, and places his characters so that they directly face the camera. However, it is not their words or opinions that are expressed here, but a carefully orchestrated script, with phrases taken from emblematic texts on modernist architecture or names of prominent figures of Venezuelan modernity. In Soy la ciudad, a man dressed as a woman, whose makeup shifts from the discrete to the grotesque as the video progresses, sits on an elegant sofa reciting fragments culled from Le Corbusier’s 1927 Towards a New Architecture. The phrases selected from the book range from the famous, “the house is a machine for living in”, to statements comparing man’s confinement inside his dwelling to the confinement of an animal within a cage. These references to the “animal realm” reflect the dualities examined in Moderno Salvaje and are accentuated in the video by the transvestite’s garments of leopard print and the cushions on the sofa made with cowhide. On the other hand, the changes in the makeup of the transvestite allude to the ruin and decadence of the city: in the process of applying excessive makeup to the transvestite’s face, the image of an elegant lady gives way to that of a cheap prostitute. Apóstol resorts again to the transvestite as discursive strategy in Av. Libertador, in which he films the transsexuals who work along the avenue at night presenting themselves before the camera as emblematic figures of Venezuelan art of the 20th century such as Armando Reverón, Jesús Soto, Alejandro Otero and Gego. This takes place against the backdrop of the murals that have recently covered the avenue’s walls and divide it ideologically –though in a superficial way, as in the makeup of these transvestites—once again between the desire for the modern and the return to a savage state.
Don Carlos (2005) is perhaps the most atypical of these videos. Made with the collaboration of fellow artist Mariana Bunimov, who performs as interviewee, this work is a cross between an interview and “reality TV.” In the video, we see the protagonist sitting in the living room of her apartment, inside the Don Carlos building, in Chuao, Caracas. She speaks about neighborly and family conflict that has arisen due to renovation of one of the apartments that consisted on the modification of the façade and thus compromised the architectural integrity of the building. This made the owner of the apartment party to the “informalization” of architecture in the city at large, which has also extended to the residences of the middle and upper middle classes who alter their homes in search for more space by closing balconies; and building annexes that are sometimes just as precarious and badly finished as the shanties of the poor neighborhoods in the city. At the end she confesses that she herself has made a change to her apartment that also modified the building’s façade, but towards the rear of the building, which, in practice, rendered it invisible from the street. This video portrays some of the anguish of the petit bourgeois in regard to the city’s progressive path towards informality, revealing itself to be a somewhat ambiguous attitude, as evidenced by the fact that the wealthier classes have also contributed to the decay of the city, albeit in a more discrete manner, and with some sense of guilt. Perhaps the bourgeoisie also feels trapped inside their houses—much like the annulled beings described by Le Corbusier in his book—and resign themselves with melancholy and nostalgia to the fact that modernity is no longer on their side, so as if to say: “This house lived the modern.”
Julieta González
