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DARIO ESCOBAR

EXPOSIÇÕES INDIVIDUAIS / SOLO EXHIBITIONS

Composições, 2016vista da exposição [exhibition view]Casa Triângulo, São Paulo, Brasil© Edouard Fraipont

EXPOSIÇÕES COLETIVAS / GROUP EXHIBITIONS

Beleza?, 2015vista da exposição [exhibition view]Centro Cultural Sao Paulo, São Paulo, Brasil [São Paulo, Brazil]© Patrick Hamilton

Fútbol: the beautiful game, 2014 vista da exposição [exhibition view]Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, USA© Studio Darío Escobar

Anverso & reverso XIV, 2013latex, couro, nylon e aço [latex, leather, nylon and steel]Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, USA© Studio Darío Escobar

La experiencia del objeto, 2012vista da exposição [exhibition view]Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Santiago de Chile (MAC), Santiago de Chile, Chile© Jorge Brantmayer

Esculturas Transparentes (Transparent Sculptures), 2012madeira, plástico, borracha e aço [wood, plastic, rubber and steel]dimensões variáveis [variable dimensions]© Jorge Brantmayer

Poetics of the Handmade, 2007vista da exposição [exhibition view]The Museum Of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, USA© Brian Forrest

TRABALHOS / WORKS

Composition No. 78, 2016óleo de motor sobre papel [motor oil on paper]143 x 39 cm © Gustavo Sapón

Composition No. 90, 2016óleo de motor sobre papel [motor oil on paper]80 x 70,5 cm © Gustavo Sapón


Composition No. 92, 2016óleo de motor sobre papel [motor oil on paper]80 x 75,2 cm© Gustavo Sapón


Composition No. 94, 2016óleo de motor sobre papel [motor oil on paper]80,5 x 71 cm© Gustavo Sapón

Composition No. 95, 2016óleo de motor sobre papel [motor oil on paper]80,5 x 71 cm © Gustavo Sapón

Equilibrio No. 4, 2016aço e vidro[steel and glass]14 x 300 x 300 cm© Edouard Fraipont

Obverse & Reverse XXVII, 2016latex, couro, corda, nylon e aço[latex, leather, string, nylon and steel]170 x 320 x 290 cm© Edouard Fraipont

Geometric Construction No. 7, 2015 madeira, pigmentos e metal[wood, pigments and metal]178 x 312 x 121 cm© Edouard Fraipont

Modular Construction No. 6, 2015 madeira, pigmentos e metal[wood, pigments and metal]100x 162 x 9 cm© Gustavo Sapón

Modular Construction No. 7, 2015 madeira, pigmentos e metal[wood, pigments and metal]100x 162 x 9 cm© Gustavo Sapón

Grid No. 6, 2015madeira e metal[wood and metal163,5 x 147 x 10 cm© Gustavo Sapón

Still Life No. 4, 2014 madeira, formica e borracha [wood, formica and rubber]38,1 x 127 x 37,9 cm© Gustavo Sapón

Composition No. 17, 2012óleo de motor sobre papel[motor oil on paper]32,5 x 275 cm

Juego a 13 manos, 2012madeira e metal[wood and metal240 x 200 x 160 cm

Bicho raro, 2011uretano e aço[urethane ans steel]24 x 35 x 19 cm

Círculo sobre círculo, 2011ferro galvanizado e plástico[galvanized iron and plastic]100 x 650 cm de largura máxima [maximum width]

Obverse & reverse IX, 2010latéx, couro, corda e aço[latex, leather, string and steel]dimensões variáveis [variable measures]

Silent Drawning No. 16, 2010 papel (livros e páginas)[paper (book and pages)]120 x 80 cm cada



Turbulence III, 2008-2011pintura sobre poliuretano e madeira [wood and polyurethane paint]80 x 220 x 7 cm

Quetzalcopati, 2004 borracha vulcanizada e aço[vulcanized rubber and steel]500 x 700 x 250 cm

EXPOSIÇÕES INDIVIDUAIS [SOLO EXHIBITIONS]

2016Composições, Casa Triângulo, São Paulo, Brasil

2015En otro orden, Galeria the 9.99, Guatemala City, Guatemala

2014Unions & Intersections, Nils Stærk Gallery, Kopenhaguen, DenmarkBroken circle, CAFAM Museum, Los Angeles, California, USA

2013Pintura abstracta No. 7, González & González, Santiago de Chile, ChileUntitled, Kamel Mennour Galerie, Paris, FranceDario Escobar/ Blacksmith Paintings, Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York, USADario Escobar/ Línea & Espacio, ArteCentro, Guatemala City, Guatemala

2012Dario Escobar/ La experiencia del objeto, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Santiago [MAC], Santiago de Chile, ChileDario Escobar: Singular Plural, (SCAD) Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia / (SCAD) Atlanta – Gallery 1600, Atlanta, Georgia, USADario Escobar - Trabajos Recientes, Baró Galeria, São Paulo/SP, Brazil

2011Dario Escobar/ Revisión, Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno Carlos Mérida, Guatemala City, Guatemala

2010Side and Back, Kamel Mennour Galerie, Paris, FranceAnverso y Reverso, González y González, Santiago de Chile, Chile

2008Playoffs, Josee Bienvenu Gallery, New York, USA

2007La Línea Interrumpida, Centro Cultural Metropolitano [CCM], Guatemala City, Guatemala.Dario Escobar/Project room, Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn, New York, USA

2006Objetos en Transito, Sala Gasco, Santiago de Chile, Chile

2005Serpentario, Centro Cultural de España en Guatemala [CCEG], Guatemala City, Guatemala.

2004Out!, Galería Jacobo Karpio, Miami, Florida, USA

2003Espacios provisionales, Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo [MADC], San José, Costa RicaVisual Entertainments, Museo de Arte Moderno de Mérida, Merida, Mexico

2001Dario Escobar - Trabajo reciente, Galería Jocobo Karpio, San José, Costa Rica

2000Dario Escobar: Selección, II National Biennial of Lima, Lima, Peru

EXPOSIÇÕES COLETIVAS[GROUP EXHIBITIONS]

201510ª Bienal do Mercosul - Mensagens de Uma Nova América, curadoria de [curated by] Gaudêncio Fidelis, Márcio Tavares, Ana Zavadil, Fernando Davis, Raphael Fonseca, Ramón Castillo Inostroza e [and] Cristián G. Gallegos, Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, BrazilTRIO Bienal - Tridimensional Bienal do Rio - Quem disse que amanhã não existe?, Módulo Reverberações, curadoria de [curated by] Marcus de Lontra Costa, Instituto Europeo de Design, Rio de Janeiro/RJ, BrazilDaros Latinamerica Collection, curadoria de [curated by] Katrin Steffen e [and] Rodrigo Alonso, Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires, Argentina5 - RPM (Revoluciones por minuto), The 9.99 gallery, Guatemala City, GuatemalaBeleza?, Centro Cultural São Paulo, São Paulo/SP, Brazil

2014Largo x Ancho x Alto, The 9.99 gallery, Guatemala City, GuatemalaEl día que nos hicimos contemporáneos, Museo de arte y diseño [MADC], San José, Costa Rica

DARIO ESCOBARNASCEU EM [BORN IN] GUATEMALA CITY, GUATEMALA, 1971

VIVE E TRABALHA EM [LIVES AND WORKS IN] GUATEMALA CITY, GUATEMALA,

Gold, Bass Museum of Art, Miami, Florida, USAFútbol: the beautiful game, Los Angeles County Museum of Art [LACMA], Los Angeles, California, USADeslize, Museu de Arte do Rio [MAR], Rio de Janeiro/RJ, Brazil

2013Confusion in the vault, Museo Jumex, Mexico City, MexicoInaugural Exhibition, The Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, Ohio, USA California-Pacific Triennial, (Orange County Museum of Art [OCMA], Newport Beach, California, USA; Coastline [CCC], Community College Art Gallery, Newport Beach, California, USAy... ¿entonces?, The 9.99 gallery, Guatemala City, GuatemalaThe Collaborative: Question in the line, Museum of Latin American Art [MOLAA], Long Beach, California, USA

2012Futbol. Arte y pasión, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey [MARCO], Monterrey, MexicoThe Island/ A game of life, Gallery One, Manarat al Saadiyat, Abu DhabiPlay with me, Museum of Latin American Art [MOLAA], Long Beach, California, USA

2011Now, Colección Jumex, Instituto Cultural Cabañas, Guadalajara, MexicoVideo otra vez, Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Ceará [MAC/CE], Fortaleza, Ceará, BrazilProyecto ideal, Centro Cultural de Sao Paulo, São Paulo/SP, BrazilFrom the Recent Past: New Acquisitions, The Museum of Contemporary Art [MOCA], Los Angeles, California, USA

2010Chapter II: Ruido, The 9.99 gallery/proyecto, Guatemala City, GuatemalaProyecto Ideal, Museo de arte Contemporáneo de Santiago [MAC], Santiago de Chile, ChileOptimismo Radical, Josee Bienvenu Gallery, New York, USAXVII Bienal de Guatemala, Centro Cultural Metropolitano [CCM], Guatemala City, GuatemalaEfecto Drácula, Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City, MexicoSocial Affects: A selection from the permanent Collection of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin America Studies/ Hardvard University, Boston Center for the arts/Mills Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts, USAFour Views from the Permanent Collection exhibition, Museum of Latin American Art [MOLAA], Long Beach, California, USA

2009Los impoliticos, Palazzo delle Arti Napoli [PAN], Naples, Italy10 Springs in the fall, Kamel Mennour Gallery, Paris, FrancePérifériks, Centre d’art Neuchâtel [CAN], Nuchâtel, SwitzerlandMundus Novus: 53 Bienal Internacional de Venecia, Artiglerie dell’Arsenale, Veneci, Italy0.3333333333333333…, 9.99/proyecto, Guatemala City, GuatemalaLa nada y el ser, Colección Jumex, Ecatepec, Mexico City, MexicoVideo otra vez, Metales Pesados, Santiago de Chile, ChilePerforming Localities, Institute of International Visual Arts [INIVA], London, UKDécima Bienal de La Habana, Fortaleza de San Carlos de la Cabaña, Havana, Cuba

2008La invención de lo cotidiano, Museo Nacional de Arte [MUNAL], Mexico City, MexicoObject of Value, Miami Art Central [MAC/MAM], Miami, Florida, USAPlaytime, Bétonsalon/ Centre d’art et de recherche, Paris, FranceWorld Histories, Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, Iowa, USAVisions From Abroad, Flushing Town Hall, New York, USAElefante negro, Museo Diego Rivera, México City, Mexico

2007Fortunate Object, Cisneros Fontanalls Art Foundations [CIFO], Miami, Florida, USASilence & Echo, Arena 1, Santa Monica, California, USAThe Hours: Visual Arts of Contemporary Latin America, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, AustraliaPoetics of the Handmade, The Museum of Contemporary Art [MOCA], Los Angeles, California, USA

2006El esquiador en el fondo del pozo, Colección Jumex, Ecatepec, Mexico City, MexicoStil Biuti, Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Zamek Ujazdowski, Warsaw, PolandThe Beautiful Game: Contemporary Art and Fútbol, Brooklyn Academy of Music [BAM], Brooklyn, New York, USAConstant Disturbance, The Spanish Cultural Center, Miami, Florida, USA

2005The Hours. Visual Arts of Contemporary Latin America, Dublin Museum, Dublin, IrelandLiving for the city, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; Centre International d’Expositions de Larouche [CIEL], Toronto, Canada

2004Newpapers, Josee Bienvenu Gallery, New York, USA

2003Intangible, Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo [MADC], San José, Costa RicaLA Freeways: Latin America, The Museum of Contemporary Art [MOCA], Los Angeles, California; America’s Society, New York, USARAIN Project, Pabellón Cuba, Havana, CubaStretch, The Power Plant, Toronto, CanadaTransEAT, Food Culture Museum, Miami, Florida, USAVIII Bienal de la Habana, Centro Wifredo Lam, Havana, Cuba

2002ARTitsmo, Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo [MADC], San José, Costa RicaContaminados, Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo [MADC], San José, Costa RicaDel centro a la isla, Casa de las Américas, Havana, CubaIntimate/Universal, Ateneo de Caracas, Caracas, VenezuelaMesoamérica: Oscilaciones y Artificios, Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno [CAAM], Canary Islands, SpainZones in Tension, de GANG Gallery, Haarlem, North Holland

2001Continuous Connection, Felissimo Project, New York, USAShort Stories, La Fabbrica del Vapore, Milan, ItalySpaces/Bodies/Identities, Centro Cultural de España, San José, Costa Rica13 Hours, Sala Mendoza, Caracas, VenezuelaI Tirana Biennial, National Gallery & Chinese Pavilion, Tirana, AlbaniaIV Caribbean Biennial, Museo de Arte Moderno, Santo Domingo, Dominican RepublicBarro de América, IV Biennial, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Sofía Imber, Caracas, Venezuela.

20002eme, Biennale du Design 2000, Ecole des Beaux Arts de Saint-Etienne, Saint-Étienne, FranceL’art dans le monde, Pont Alexandre III, Paris, France

1999Guatemalan Art, Sala Oficial Juan Ismael del Cabildo de Fuerteventura, Canary Island, SpainII Iberoamerican Biennial of Lima, Lima, Peru

1998Fotojornada’98, Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno Carlos Mérida, Guatemala City, GuatemalaWithout Title, Plaza G&T; Guatemala City, GuatemalaI Central American Biennale, Centro Cultural Miguel Angel Asturias, Guatemala City, Guatemala; Duke University Museum of Art [DUMA], North Carolina, USAVI International Art Biennale of Cuenca, Cuenca, Equator

1997La Joven Estampa, Casa de las Américas, Havana, Cuba

COLEÇÕES PÚBLICAS[PUBLIC COLLECTIONS]Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, Florida, USABlanton Museum of Art, Austin, USACentre Pompidou, Paris, FranceCisneros Fontanals Art Foundation [CIFO], Miami, USADaros Latinamerica Collection, Zurich, SwitzerlandHarvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, UKLa Fundación / Colección Jumex, Ecatepec, MexicoMuseo de Arte Contemporáneo de Santiago do Chile [MAC], Santiago de Chile, ChileMuseo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo [MADC], San José, Costa RicaMuseo del Barrio, New York, USA Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno Carlos, Merida, GuatemalaThe Museum of Contemporary Art [MoCA], Los Angeles, USAMuseum of Fine Arts [MFA], Boston, USAMuseum of Latin American Art [MoLAA], Long Beach, California, USAThe Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, USAThe Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, Ohio, USASayago & Pardon, Inc., Tustin, California, USAThyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, Austria

LIVROS[PUBLICATIONS]

Astiasarán, Clara Elena Concepción. “Darío Escobar”, ArtNexus, No. 43, (January-March 2002): pp. 123-24.Auerbach, Ruth. ARCOnoticias, No. 24, (Madrid 2002).Bondone, Tomás. “Problematic and feverish”. ARCOnoticias, No. 23, (Spring 2002).Brielmaier, Isolde. “Double Take: The art of Dario Escobar and Patrick Hamilton”, Exh. Cat. Objetos en Transito, Sala Gasco, Santiago de Chile, (2006): pp. 21–27.Buckley, Annie. “Full Metal Skatebord”, Craft: No. 6, (2008) p. 17.Burkhalter, Laura. “Turangawaewae”, Exh. Cat. “World Histories” pp. 42-45 Des Moines Art Center, Iowa, (2008).Calvo, Enesto. “Espacios Provisionales: Sentidos difusos, significaciones equivocas”. Exh. Cat. “Serpentario” Centro Cultural de España en Guatemala, (2005): pp. 20, 26.Cazali, Rosina. “Play offs”, Arte al Día International, No. 125, (November–December 2008): pp. 54-59.“Ready Made Ready”, Exh. Cat.“Serpentario” Centro Cultural de España en Guatemala, (2005): pp. 20, 26.“Darío Escobar: Fin’ amors for Objects”, ArtNexus, No. 38, (November 2000-January 2001): pp. 76-79.“Le Guatemala: En route.” In L’art Dans le Monde. Exh. Cat. Paris, France: Beaux Arts, (2000).“2nd Ibero-American Biennial of Lima”, ArtNexus, No. 35, (February-April 2000): pp. 92-95.“Contemporary Art in Guatemala”, ArtNexus, No. 32, (May-July 1999): pp. 68-71.“First Art Biennale of the Central American Isthmus,” ArtNexus, No. 31, (January-March 1999) p. 76.“Darío Escobar, El becerro de oro”, Colloquia: Proyecto para el arte contemporáneo, n.d.Cisneros, Dayamick. “Dessicated and Reconstituted”, Arteamérica, (January 2004).Cummins, Thomas B.F. “At Play in the Arts of the Lord: The Early Work of Dario Escobar”, Book. A singular plurality: the works of Dario Escobar. Ed. Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts,(2012).Damian, Carol. “Art Miami 2001”, ArtNexus, No. 40, (April-June 2001): pp. 96-98.Díaz, Tamara. “Art in Central America: The Critical Glance”, Atlántica, No. 31, (February 2002): pp. 40-69.de Santa Ana, Mariano. “Hybrids on the Side”, Lápiz, No. 186, (September-October 2002).Falconi, José Luis. (Editor) A singular plurality: the works of Dario Escobar. Edited by Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts, (2012).Fajardo Hill, Cecilia. “Fortunate Objects”, Exh. Cat. Cisneros Fontanalls Art Foundation (CIFO)., (2007): pp. 66, 67.Gallego P., Pablo. Dossier presented in Monografías, Galicia School of Architects, vol. 1: pp. 52-54.Gallegos, Carina. “Dario Escobar”, ArtNexus, No. 55, (January-March, 2005): pp. 153-55.Gomez Eduard M. “The Unmistakable Touch of the Hand”, Art & Antiques, (October 2007): pp. 157-160.“Hip home for art in Mexico City”, International Herald Tribune, (April 27, 2005).González, Lorena. “The Object´s Evil Genious”, Arte al Día News, No. 5, (2004): pp. 3-4.Herrera, Adriana. “On Out!”, Miami Herald, (June 2004).López Anaya, Jorge. “La fluida geografía del arte latinoamericano”, ARCOnoticias No. 23, (Spring 2002): pp. 52-54.López Ramos, Rafael. “Objetos de Valor”, ArtNexus, No. 72 (March-May 2009) p. 137.Loría, Vivianne. “Marginalidad y transculturación en el arte centroamericano”, Lápiz, No. 177, vol. 20, (November 2001): pp. 18-33.“Mesoamérica: Oscilaciones y Artificios.” In Mesoamérica: Oscilaciones y Artificios. Exh. Cat. Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM). Canary Islands, Spain, (2002).“Dario Escobar: Emblems of Modern Stubbornness.” In Visual Entertainments. Exh. Cat. Museo de Arte Moderno. Mérida, México, (2003).

Navarro, Mario. “Objetos en suspención”, Sol del Río Gallery, Guatemala, Guatemala, (February 2000).Power, Kevin. “Dario Escobar: Simulacro local y glocal”, Book. A singular plurality: the works of Dario Escobar. Ed. Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts,(2012).Quirós, Luis. “En la Era de la Mitotécnia”, La Nación, San José, Costa Rica, (March 2000).Ribeaux, Ariel. “Darío Escobar: The Seductive Perversity of the Road to El Dorado (Step by Step)”, Galería Sol del Río, Guatemala, Guatemala.Ruiz, Alma. “Interview”, Book. A singular plurality: the works of Dario Escobar. Ed. Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts,(2012).“Donde la materia se une al mito” ArtNexus, No. 80, (March-May 2011): Cover. pp. 44-48.“La Linea Interrumpida”, ArtMedia, No. 14, (2007): pp. 46-54. “Poetics of the Handmade” Los Angeles, (2007): pp. 76-85.Sommer, Doris. “Choose to lose: Dario Escobar´s winning game”, Book. A singular plurality: the works of Dario Escobar. Ed. Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts,(2012).Spinger, José Manuel, “Dario Escobar, KBK Arte Contempoáneo”, ArtNexus, No. 61, (2006): pp. 132-133.Valdés, Emiliano. “Striking objects”, Contemporary, No. 66, (October 2004): p. 45.“In the Labyrith of Consumptions and Creation”, Artes en Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, (November 2004).Valdés, Eugenio. “Stories of Alienatives (any similarities to real facts or persons are not purely coincidental).” In Short Stories: New Narrative Forms in Contemporary Art, Exh. Cat. La Fabbrica del Vapore. Milan, Italy: lalitotipo, (March 2001): pp. 41-49.Valdés Eugenio and Keith Wallace. “Introduction”, In Stretch. Exh Cat. The Power Plant. Toronto, Canadá: press, (2003).Viveros-Fauné, Christian. “The Sculpture of Everyday Life: Dario Escobar’s Readymade Sculptures”, Book. A singular plurality: the works of Dario Escobar. Ed. Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University. Cambridge, Massachusetts,(2012).Zamudio-Taylor, Víctor. “La forma como estrategia”, Perspectivas de arquitectura y diseño, No. 3, (March-June 2008): pp. 82- 86.“Objetos Relacionales: Darío Escobar & Patrick Hamilton”, Revista 180, No. 18, (December 2006): pp. 6-7.“Objetos Relacionales: Darío Escobar & Patrick Hamilton.” Exh. Cat. Sala Gasco, (2006): pp. 10-13. Santiago de Chile, Chile.Zaya, Antonio. “Dario Escobar”, Atlántica, No. 31, (Winter 2002): pp. 25-27.

Darío Escobar’s desire to bring together Guatemala’s past and present first came to the fore in the early 2000s in a series of works exploring the country’s Baroque past and the enthusiasm for sports that predominates among its population today; these well-known pieces include skate-boards and other sports equipment covered in silver and painstakingly imprinted with religious symbols in the seventeenth-century Baroque style. Examples of such handicraft are still found in Guatemalan churches in altarpieces and a multitude of objects used in Catholic rituals. With his 2009 Kukulkán and the works that precede it, which carry titles such as Serpiente No. 1, Kukulkán, Quetzalcóatl, Quetzalcóatl II, Quetzalcóatl III, Serpiente, Serpentario, etc., Escobar continues his conversation with the region’s history. He returns to Guatemala’s past—this time focusing on the country’s indigenous (and specifically, Mayan) roots—and integrates it into objects such as bicy-cle tires and balls used in a variety of sports.

Escobar’s interest in line as reflected in his variations of the feathered serpent form is combined with his exploration of the tridimensionality of objects. All of these works can be defined as draw-ing-sculptures: they are neither one nor the other, but an amalgam of both. This way of working, fairly common in the field of contemporary art, has always been the process best suited for the expression of Escobar’s ideas. The combination in his projects of several media—such as painting and sculpture or drawing and sculpture—gives Escobar the necessary freedom to create works that are not subject to the limitations of any single genre. In some cases, the process also means that he does not have to manufacture pieces himself. Like many artists working today, Escobar organizes the production of one work (or several) by selecting the scale, color, and materials and then leaves the execution of the piece to a number of assistants. Here the artist acts as a project coordinator guiding a team of workers who faithfully execute his instructions; the purpose is not to hide the artist’s hand but rather to use any available means to make his thoughts concrete. In Escobar’s sculptures, color is usually provided by the materials: the metallic silver of supermarket carts, the black hue of rubber combined with yellow in bicycle tires, and the white and green of soccer balls. While the artist adds nothing, he does select his materials carefully, realizing that these found objects will undergo a metamorphosis in their form and meaning as they become works of art.

The recontextualization of the object is an inherent part of Escobar’s work. A more recent exam-ple of this process can be seen in the series Crash (2009), which debuted with three works (I, IV, and V) at Galerie Kamel Mennour in Paris in early 2010. The twelve remaining works were included in the Bienal de Arte Paiz in Guatemala City in April of the same year.1 All fifteen works in the se-ries are made of chromed iron and steel; there are small variations in size, but they all measure ap-proximately 39.3 by 27.6 by 25.5 inches, and as is usual with Escobar’s work, some are placed on the wall and some on the floor. Although they are perhaps less spectacular than Escobar’s room-sized installations, their twisting, anatomical shapes are immediately impressive. Reminiscent of the orthopedic corsets worn by Frida Kahlo as a result of her injuries in a traffic accident, their relationship to suffering and death is expressed not only through their contorted shapes—the concrete result of an accident, perhaps—but also in their titles. Suffering and death, so present in pre-Hispanic cultures, are also an important part of Guatemala’s Catholic colonial past.

1 Info on Fundación Paiz, Bienal

I first met Darío Escobar during a trip to Guatemala in early 2001 when invited to lecture at Proyecto Colloquia; I was conducting one-on-one meetings with local artists.2 Impressed by Es-cobar’s artistic output, I kept in touch with him. I have followed his career through frequent email exchanges, sporadic encounters at art fairs and biennials, and visits to his exhibitions both in Gua-temala and New York. In 2006 I invited him to participate in the exhibition “Poetics of the Hand-made,” which took place a year later at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.3 One of eight Latin American artists whose work was included in the exhibition, Escobar’s presentation consisted of six works: a basketball hoop, a surfboard, a ping-pong paddle, two skateboards—all sheathed in ornate silver—and a landscape made of baseball bats.

This interview is one of the many ways in which, as a curator, I continue to explore the different facets and meanings that frame Escobar’s work.

Alma Ruiz: Your professional training is in architecture, not art. Tell me, how did you decide that a career in art was a better fit for you than being an architect? Darío Escobar: I don’t think I ever actually made a decision. I think everything was falling into place, and for some reason I started to feel more comfortable doing art projects. In fact, the change was hardly noticeable to me because I think that the way both disciplines operate in-volves very similar conceptual structures and formal operations—I didn’t abruptly go from black to white.

AR: What do you think an environment such as that in Guatemala, which has no infrastructure, has contributed to your formation as an artist?

DE: Learning to solve everything by myself: this is what I’ve gained from living in an environment where the infrastructure (in terms of visual arts) is practically nonexistent, There aren’t any spe-cialized museums or galleries with serious programs, plus the critical apparatus is very weak and poorly informed.

AR: What does it mean to develop as an artist in a country like Guatemala? DE: Well, the Guatemalan visual arts scene is, as I said, practically nonexistent except for a very small group that shares this particular interest. Being from Guatemala and developing an inter-national career in the visual arts is a very complicated matter. On the other hand, Guatemala is a country where literature is really well supported—it enjoys, to some extent, certain advantages.For example, there are national awards, special publications, and publishing houses that publish young writers; there is more “engineering,” so to speak. On the other hand, there is also a small readership, but this hasn’t stopped a solid and internationally recognized literary tradition from developing.

AR: Why haven’t the visual arts had the same luck? Guatemala has a great artistic tradition, above

2 Info on Proyecto Colloquia 3 Info on “Poetics of Handmade” at LA MoCA

DARÍO ESCOBARINTERVIEW

all in the Mayan and Colonial periods.

DE: That’s an excellent question. But let’s start by recognizing that the universities in Guatemala don’t offer higher education in the visual arts. This implies that these institutions of higher learn-ing do not recognize that the visual arts are important for a country like ours. If this is what educational institutions think of the visual arts, what can we imagine other sectors that make up Guatemalan society must think? In general, if someone needs more complete and professional training, he or she should leave Guatemala to get it.

AR: This was the case for architects Roberto Aycinena, Carlos Haeussler, Pelayo Llarena, Raúl Minondo, and Jorge Montes, who built International Style buildings in the city’s Civic Center: City Hall and the Guatemalan Social Security Institute in the fifties, the Bank of Guatemala and the National Mortgage Bank in the following decade.4 They were educated in Mexico and the United States. All of these buildings have interior murals and exterior mural-reliefs by the great masters Roberto González Goyri, Guillermo Grajeda Mena, Carlos Mérida, Efraín Recinos, and Dagoberto Vásquez.5 The integration of art-architecture-city planning was an essential reference point for the generation that was trained at that time. Are these artists and architects and their work still important reference points for contemporary artists?

DE: The 1950s were really an exceptional time in the history of art and architecture in Guatemala because there was a lot of interest on behalf of certain groups in starting to design a modern country. This interest was very prevalent in several Latin American countries after the ideas of Os-car Niemeyer and others began to circulate in the universities, and Guatemala was no exception. 6The outcome, the Civic Center of Guatemala City, was an interesting convergence of the modern thinking about national progress through architecture and the “indigenista” aesthetics present in the art that were circulating at the time. This great promise of modernity unfortunately fell apart after the armed conflict started in the late sixties and early seventies.

However, in the late nineties a new generation of artists and audiences started to establish closer ties to what was happening outside of the country, and independent projects began to emerge as information circulated. One example was Proyecto Colloquia (1998–2004), which organized very simple exhibitions and workshops with international experts and sought to strengthen con-versation about and analysis of the situation of art in Guatemala. Unfortunately, most of these initiatives lacked continuity, including Colloquia, perhaps because for many of them their fund-ing came from non-governmental organizations (NGOs). NGOs provide this funding to cultural projects that strictly comply with issues in which they are specifically interested—such as armed conflict, historical memory, gender issues, domestic violence, and violence against women—and not necessarily the visual arts themselves. So there isn’t much room for aesthetic and theoretical research on art, unless it is approached from these axes.

Going back to the Civic Center, I don’t think the synergy that occurred in the fifties and sixties exists today. There is still a need to generate architectural infrastructure, but the current priorities involve simply building the project itself, getting the money to make it happen—creating four walls, a floor, and a roof—and not formulating a more responsible intellectual discourse.

AR: What are the top names influencing young Guatemalan artists these days?

DE: There are no national reference points for young Guatemalan artists because most of them get information through the Internet, special interest magazines, etc. The lack of serious galleries

4 Info on Architects and on the buildings they established 5 Info on artists (when refering to Merida refer info on Note on Merida) 6 Info on Niemayer and his influence

and the lack of a solid and professional critical apparatus causes artists to find themselves a bit adrift: They focus on projects of little significance to their intellectual interests, such as participat-ing in small festivals or exhibiting in bars and cafes—all of these activities are relevant to a very local circuit.

AR: Guatemalan art has not lacked talented artists, but few have excelled internationally. Among the latter is Carlos Mérida (1891–1984), with whom “modernity” in Guatemalan art began but who, for personal reasons, developed his career in Mexico.7 There is also Rodolfo Abularach (1933– ), who has been in New York since 1959.8 More recently we can cite Luis González Palma (1957– ), who received a lot of attention in the 1990s;9 he currently lives in Argentina. Seeing the lack of important artists within the national scene, do you think that for a Guatemalan artist to set himself apart today he or she’d still have to consider leaving the country to live abroad?

DE: No. What artists really should do is erase the mental boundaries they sometimes uncon-sciously erect. Today, living in a country like Guatemala can be quite beneficial: even with very few resources, it gives you the opportunity to explore methods that you couldn’t investigate from the other side.

The poor visibility of Guatemalan artists is not due to their artistic production. In fact, I think Gua-temala has a vast tradition of interesting artists. The big problem is that there aren’t any art critics who have the ability to put Guatemalan artists in a dialogue with the rest of the world. There is an enormous difference between artistic production and art criticism. To this disparity— the first obstacle to Guatemalan art circulating in the largest global venues—let us also add the lack of local structure and lack of state interest and private initiatives.

AR: Are there art schools in Guatemala? And is that where most Guatemalan artists develop?

DE: There are schools of visual arts founded at the beginning of the twentieth century whose academic structures are now outdated. Their programs are quite inadequate to form the artist of today; they actually function more like “trade schools.”

AR: What is the role that the artistic institutions created between 1945 and 1951 by former Presi-dent Juan José Arévalo—who gave the country a constitution that ensured the people the enjoy-ment of culture—have played in the development of the visual arts in Guatemala? I am referring, for example, to the Department of Fine Arts and Cultural Extension, the Department of Aesthetic Education, and the Standing Competition of Sciences, Letters, and Fine Arts that was established to take place annually.10

DE: I know a little about these institutions’ policies, but they no longer exist. It’s interesting that the Ministry of Culture and Sports was made strictly inoperable from the start, because it doesn’t have a budget for anything other than paying its employees. So in terms of contributions by the state, I don’t see any opportunities at the moment.

AR: In Guatemala there is now a contemporary art movement that emerged with renewed strength more than a decade ago. Has this phenomenon produced new public or private institu-tions that support the artist and help him or her develop a career by means of exhibitions, schol-arships, and other opportunities?

7 Info on Carlos Merida 8 Info on Rodolfo Aburalach 9 Info on Luis Gonzalez Palma 10 Info on the President and the institutions he created

DE: No. In recent years projects with a special emphasis on contemporary art have developed sporadically, but these organizations seem to go under quickly due to a lack of funds and little public interest. These projects may leave a certain mark, but they lack continuity, and this creates a very fragmented story of what has happened and is happening now. There have been projects that have lasted longer and generated some hope in the public and amongst local artists, but they have not managed to exceed the interest in artists who grow and thrive at the international level.

The only event that has taken place regularly during the last thirty years is the Bienal de Arte Paiz. The Paiz Foundation has worked diligently to bring panels of judges and sizable audiences to this event,11 but unfortunately this is not enough. You cannot delegate this responsibility to a single event or organization: many more contributors are needed to strengthen the art scene in Guatemala.

I have participated in this biennial several times. I think that the event’s continuity is very impor-tant in a country where much is started and little is finished. Of course, after thirty years of exist-ence it would be interesting to professionalize the event—make it more accessible to international audiences—and turn it into a space that would enable them to see what is being produced in Guatemala right now.

AR: Is there a visual artist in Guatemala who has been important to your artistic development?

DE: I’ve always been really interested in the work of Luis Diaz (1939– ) and that of Margarita Azur-dia (1931–1998) because they cultivated more complex critical possibilities than other artists who only worked figuratively.12 Really, they were part of a generation that broke out and is even now—thirty years later—being reviewed (they worked in the sixties and seventies). The most interesting thing about Luis is his attitude towards the art object: he has a way of rethinking structure from a new viewpoint. In terms of Margarita’s work, I was interested in the energy and that really close connection she had with Guatemala. She didn’t sacrifice universality; her work could speak of Guatemala in international terms. AR: And what about literature? Who are the Guatemalan writers you admire?

DE: There has always been a really great energy in Guatemalan literature. Listing names off the top of my head, I’m sure that I’m leaving out really important writers, but for starters I have al-ways been interested in Enrique Gómez Carrillo’s crónicas (1873–1927) and short stories by Rafael Arévalo Martínez. Recently I’ve been interested in some of Mario Roberto Morales’s ideas (1947– ), well, I can give you many names.13 In the work of Gómez Carrillo, I like the idea of the first Guate-malan who fell in love with the world and put aside provincial thinking and lived in Paris with all the craziest stories in the world. He taught us that being born in a country as small as this one isn’t disadvantageous for entering into dialogue with the world. From Mario I’m drawn to his critical idea of the construction of Guatemalan identity. Mario really made us look in the mirror, at our-selves. You can find more recent writers such as Rodrigo Rey Rosa (1958– ) who can speak from slightly more defined spaces within a fresh international narrative.14

AR: What were the first works you created?

DE: More than actual works, I made some pieces on paper that allowed me to establish a relation-ship with my country in a way that was more substantial and less attached to the local artistic parameters. These pieces especially led to the development of several aspects that allowed me

11 See info on Note 1 12 Info on Luis Diaz and Margarita Alzudia 13 Info on Enrique Gomez Carrillo, Rafael Arévalo Martinez and Mario Gomez Carrillo 14 Info on Rey Rosa

to get to know, and of course, recognize myself.

AR: Can you give an example? In what year were they made?

DE: These works were actually small collages. From them developed shortly thereafter the works that began to circulate outside of Guatemala, such as the McDonald’s cup (Untitled, 1998) coated with gold in the style of the nineteenth century. This series of works date from 1998.

AR: Let’s talk about these works and their connection to Guatemalan colonial art. How did you come to think of joining two aspects of Guatemalan life as supposedly disparate as popular cul-ture and Catholic tradition but which are nevertheless closely linked to Guatemalan idiosyncrasy?

DE: In fact, these early works emerged as I sought to contrast two periods that are different but also very similar. At that time I had a very close relationship with the country, above all with its past (I went back to study the restoration of movable and immovable property in Spain). I realized that the past and the present were exactly the same even though almost 500 years had gone by, and I was eager to show that through pieces such as the skateboards and baseball bats embossed in silver. I saw that the colonial model was still in force, and that as a nation, although we were within a subordinate cultural tradition, we were apparently very comfortable. These first pieces began with that energy and through that experience.

To look at the past is to go back on an already traveled path that does not present any risk or con-flict: it is a comfortable position in relation to the experience of art. That is why people continue to loot Catholic churches and steal paintings and sculptures from them. These thefts mean that there is high demand for Colonial art: there is enough of a local market that thieves are willing to take these risks.

AR: The works we are talking about were produced early in your career and were an instant suc-cess. Why do you think they had such an impact?

DE: From the start they were very seductive. I played with this idea of the province, but I wanted to enter a more global dialogue. They were true time bombs: no one could discredit them because they were well made—true to the gold and silver techniques of the Colonial era—but no one could qualify them because they went against what “Guatemalan art” implied. They were very critical works, in many respects.

AR: What advantages did the international renown that these works gave you bring?

DE: It meant that I could leave the architectural firm where I worked and pursue art full-time, and that gave way to my need to grow as an artist. More than visibility, these early works gave me the opportunity to discover a new path, the world of contemporary sculpture. In fact, from that point on, new objects came about that said a lot by themselves, and I slowly began to “strip” them: starting in 2000 or 2001, I began to remove the gold and silver, and I was left with only their meanings and forms. The body of work I am thinking about now basically started at that point.

AR: Have you continued this search for meaning in mass-produced objects?

DE: Yes, and in their decline as merchandise. I am very interested in the ideas of Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, which seem to me quite accurate as they relate to contemporary art: the object as a cross between an industrial object and a sculpture within the fine arts tradition. 15

15 Info on Benjamin B.

I’m very interested in analyzing the relationship between production and consumption, especially in these times in which objects are mass produced, and in their production in factories, individuals alienate themselves from the items: they distance themselves, but they are then reconciled in the exercise of purchase/consumption.

However, to incorporate the object into an aesthetic operation, such as art, leads us to a nar-rower and more revealing space for reflection—it does not simply place the object within these mechanical operations of manufacturing and buying.

AR: After stripping the works of their connection to the country’s Colonial past, you have turned your gaze to an even more distant past—the pre-Hispanic period— with works such as Kukulkán (2005 and 2009) or the series of works that you entitled Quetzalcoatl (II, III, etc.). This past is also very present in everyday life in Guatemala. What was the impetus behind this new reflection?

DE: My interest in the pre-Hispanic past actually lies in the question of form, and I take this as a pretext to investigate the major issues that informed art in these lands for centuries. When I made these works, I was really excited to discover a sculptural model that would show certain qualities that traditional sculpture doesn’t show, and one of these factors was the behavior of the mate-rial. I was interested in starting to work with light, with shadows, and with materials that move freely without obeying the forms that I give them as a sculptor. It was a true exercise in freedom. I thought this idea was touched upon in some way in pre-Hispanic architecture with the shadows that form on staircases … I’ve always been particularly interested in archeology as well.

AR: What projects are you working on now?

DE: I’m always investigating objects and always exploring the possibilities of their traces with drawings. Right now I’m in a dynamic of constructing sculptures from basic operations such as collecting different objects, cutting and sectioning them. I am interested in working in the most poetic and fragile spaces.

AR: Have you ever thought about how your work fits into the history of Guatemalan art?

DE: Many times . . . I think my responsibility ends, for the moment, with the creation of the work. The experts will see how it fits—or not.

Alma RuizApril 15, 2011

DARÍO ESCOBARTHE SCULPTOR OF EVERYDAY LIFE: DARíO ESCOBAR’S READYMADE SCULPTURES

Latin American artists today occupy an increasingly privileged place at the table of global culture. Everywhere you look, the history of modern and contemporary art is in the process of being rewritten. Geometric abstraction, minimalism, postminimalism, conceptualism—movements many have previously treated as exclusively North American and European in origin are today recognized to have developed throughout Latin America, often on their own steam and while significantly advancing on their more central counterparts. This process of inclusion is even more dramatic when we consider contemporary art. Certain key Latin American artists have achieved with their current practices what many modernists would have likely given their eyeteeth (if not their entire careers) to achieve—namely, acclaim unqualified by a geographical asterisk. The greatest contribution made by these crucial generations of Latin American artists to global contemporary art can be defined in a phrase. What they have wrought, from Gego’s chilly geometric abstractions to Kcho’s superheated balsero installations, can accurately be pegged as conceptualism with a difference.1 That difference turns out to be both political and sensuous in orientation, as charted by an artistic tradition teeteringly founded on social and economic instability, a historic paucity of high culture, and, most importantly, a genius for scrappy solutions to the region’s ongoing underdevelopment. Starting with Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 Manifesto Antropófago—which made a virtue of literally “cannibalizing” invading (read more advanced) cultures—to the geographically indiscriminate use artists make of global culture today, visual creators from Latin America have become especially expert at squeezing invention out of necessity.2

It goes without saying that specific historical contexts account for this characteristic resourcefulness. In the volatile 1960s—as the U.S. experienced its most profound economic boom ever and the liberated lifestyle of America’s youth clashed with official culture—a particularly monkish brand of New York-style conceptualism fiddled with formal reduction and what later came to be enshrined as the “dematerialization of the art object.” Meanwhile, in Latin America’s capitals, mass politics met the age of social protest head on. The ensuing civic instability swung the region’s conceptual artists away from the prohibitions of formalist minimalism and toward a passionate embrace of the world. As artist and theorist Luis Caminitzer put it: “Latin American conceptualism emerged as an aesthetic more concerned with reality than with abstraction.”3 Born of conflicts more terrible than anything experienced in North America since the Civil War, Latin American artists of the 1960s and beyond developed an aesthetics that brandished politics and social critique as their weapons of choice in at times personally risky, often utopian, manifestly dynamic engagements with society.

In contrast to the sort of conscientious objection Sol LeWitt deployed as an argument for political agnosticism in 1968—“The artist wonders what he can do when he sees the world in pieces around him,” he mused in a seminal interview, only to answer anemically “as an artist he can do

nothing except be an artist”—engagé artists (often obliquely engagé, mind you) from Mexico City to Buenos Aires established vigorous practices in response to urgent social issues. Take the Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica. A figure preoccupied, among other things, with the idea of what it means to make art with something other than someone else’s objects in mind, he captured the creative anxieties of his generation in an age-defining nutshell: “In an underdeveloped country, how does one explain the advent of an avant-garde in such a way as to justify it not in terms of a symptomatic alienation, but as a decisive factor in collective progress?”5 Despite its tortured critical theory syntax and period–inflected sociologist’s lingo, Oiticica’s basic question—Can advanced art and economic underdevelopment coexist?—turns out to be just as important today as it was fifty years ago.6

“Small countries have big politics,” the poet Joseph Brodsky wrote.7 Guatemala and its shockingly violent, topsy–turvy history is a perfect case in point. The second–poorest country in the Western Hemisphere after Haiti, more than half of its population currently lives under the poverty line. A nation with the lowest median age in the Americas—a factor that indicates low life expectancy resulting from disease, illiteracy, and lack of social advancement—Guatemala also boasts one of the highest murder rates in the world. An average of sixteen people are slain every day on its city streets and country lanes, far more than the three or four killed daily in Iraq. Most of that violence—a mocking echo of the brutal civil war the country suffered between 1985 and 1996—is directly tied to drugs and gang activity, with grotesque mutilations and decapitations standing in as signatures for the local gangs or maras.8

A fragile nation–state with colossal problems that would confound its much larger northern neighbors, Guatemala has also produced something else that may be rarer still—especially if you factor in the country’s clamorous comparative disadvantages. That is, namely, a disproportionate number of sophisticated visual artists to have recently graced the world’s top galleries and museums. They are the flowers that bloom from the killing fields. Among these artists, the most notable is a lifelong Guatemala City resident who also happens to be among the world’s foremost foragers of readymade objects: the sculptor Darío Escobar.

Just as New York minimalism in 1965 was all Soho lofts, square rooftops, and dying blue–collar businesses and its West Coast variant tripped out on Venice Beach haze and shiny plastic, Darío Escobar’s art has been similarly influenced by a set of memorable cultural references that connote an enduring sense of place. That place is modern–day Guatemala: a heartbreakingly poor country whose bedrock of ancient and colonial heritage is sedimented by a long history of corruption and institutionalized violence; that tragic geology having been more recently laminated with a veneer of global corporate and pop culture. A country that is more McOndo—to take a cue from Chilean writer Alberto Fuguet’s cynical updating of magical realism9 —than the Macondo once

popularized by Gabriel García Márquez’s sleepy cliché, Escobar’s Guatemala runs the gamut of history to include the country’s newfangled backcountry cosmopolitanism (as up to date, it turns out, as anything wielded by the Arab Spring). As a sustained feat of the imagination, Escobar’s artistic blueprint encompasses worlds: from age-old pre-Columbian empire to plugged–in twenty–first century bush. Escobar’s sculptures—which regularly address the ubiquitous appeal of sport as its subject—cover more bases than Cal Ripken Jr. in giving full play to his country’s unresolved cultural contradictions. Combining the baroque and the contemporary, the Mayan and the postmodern, the art historical as well as local disposable kitsch, Escobar routinely fashions objects that both reflect and refract his nation’s dazzling cultural variety. The fact that these specific objects—to take a judicious line from the gnomic Donald Judd—also pull apart the cultural assumptions underlying Guatemala’s underdevelopment (as well as, conversely, fingering the role of other entities in styming the country’s growth) is precisely what makes Escobar’s trenchant works such a distorting mirror when held up to the reality of globalization. To dust off Baudelaire’s rarely reread treatise on Constantine Guys (usually ascribed, wrongly, to Édouard Manet), one could easily say that the Central American’s sculptures represent the breakneck pace of ideas in everyday, modern life—vertiginous even at the edges of what today’s economists call “the global consensus.”10

“What is most important is not so much what people see in the gallery or the museum, but what people see after looking at these things, how they confront reality again,” Gabriel Orozco sagely told Benjamin H. D. Buchloch on the occasion of his 1996 show at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.11 Few commentaries prove as illuminating when considering the work of Darío Escobar, an artist whose constant recontextualization of everyday objects at once echoes and updates the example of the older Mexican. Where Orozco—a significant touchstone for contemporary artists (especially Latin Americans) since the early 1990s—has previously unearthed poetic gestures in unexpected places, Escobar has sought out objects that relate less to poetry (at least its rhyming, lyric function) than to how his truncated doodads function critically in the world.

Since the late 1990s and the evolution of his “Baroque Meets Today” series, Escobar’s prose constructions have cast loaded metaphors from easily recognizable objects that critically assay the way we live today. Where Orozco and his spiritual forefather Robert Rauschenberg employed found materials for their intrinsic value, Escobar’s use of largely manufactured products—throwaway McDonald’s cups, cut baseball bats, gilded skateboards—mine deep connections to the ever–present, nearly invisible structures that govern everyday life: consumerism, serial production, work, free–flowing international trade. Where minimalism and its late adherents celebrate the perceptual qualities of steel boxes or fluorescent tubes, Escobar has deftly turned his understanding of the commodified nature of these freighted objects into a set of far more urgent revelations—ones that speak to the myths and realities that ruthlessly govern the order of things.

Building alternate meanings from everyday objects, Escobar has effectively appropriated the readymade from its art for art’s sake context, only to deposit it squarely in the dominant sphere of global culture. One of a handful of (mostly Latin American) artists who have turned sculptural projects into significant ideological critiques of globalization and its negative effects—these include figures like the Argentine Judi Wertheim and the Chilean Patrick Hamilton—Escobar is at least partly responsible for updating the relevance of Marcel Duchamp’s relocated urinal.12 While the Frenchman’s storied gesture gave way to a century of anti–retinal works chronically stuck on

their condition as objets d’art, Escobar’s found sculptures invoke a historically felicitous gambit. Less simple recontextualization and more Situationists détournment—which Guy Debord defined simply as “turning expressions of the capitalist system against itself”13—Escobar’s sculptures address the monstrous tangle of social, economic and cultural relations that envelops not just art, but the larger universe of human exchange. In the lingo of the frustrated progressivism of the 1980s, Escobar’s sculptures function much like the culture jamming or subvertising of yesteryear. Whatever its name today, this stratagem suggests, among other things, that we have may have finally arrived at a Readymade 2.0.

Escobar’s sculptures are nothing if not revelatory. Not objects that turn their back on their aesthetic responsibilities—being well ordered and beautiful, after all, is the essential way to maximize an artwork’s compelling traits—his sculptures established early on a continuing interest in both Guatemala’s tradition of colonial baroque as well as in the military culture that underpins the country’s fragile stability. A work like Happy Birthday! (1998) is a case in point—a conical party hat decorated with a camouflage pattern and matching streamers, its child’s birthday party motif works as a ruse to comment on the trivialization of violence as well as the “let them eat cake” attitude adopted by Guatemala’s wealthier classes toward the human costs of civil war. A second work, Becerro de oro [Golden Calf] (2000), quite literally exalts a synecdoche of social status by covering a stationary bicycle in gold leaf. An obvious conflation of the country’s profound religious culture with gym culture (which in Guatemala is not exactly democratic), this sculpture and others like it identify Escobar’s subject matter as being visual representation and social representation, both.

Other works of Escobar’s that also take full advantage of their objecthood to upend familiar meanings include his series of tin and silver covered skateboards. Sporting embossed filigree more characteristic of seventeenth–century Central American cathedrals than bougie skate parks, these slight sculptures (they are often presented not on plinths, but directly on the ground) invoke mall culture and its discontents—those who either abhor (for religious or philosophical reasons) or are excluded from the rampant consumerism generated by this marketready, U.S.–spawned subculture. Then there is the artist’s repeated use of soccer balls. An ongoing exploration of the mother of all sports metaphors—fútbol, as is well known, is the leisure time lingua franca of most of the world’s population— Escobar regularly displays clusters of soccer balls he unstitches and then restitches in reverse. A literalization of his entire artistic practice, his treatment of the world’s most recognizable object (soccer, to echo John Lennon, is way bigger than Jesus) turns the artist’s found envelope inside out to reveal through its upending an entirely new message.

In this way, Escobar transparently lays his cards on the table as he goes about establishing what is crucially both a critical as well as an immanent practice: that is, an unfolding series of highly aesthetic immanent critiques. As a philosophical, sociological or artistic strategy, the idea of the immanent critique zeroes in on certain key cultural forms in order to unpack their pregnant contradictions—either as forms themselves or as processes of production. So it is, then, that we arrive at the essence of Escobar’s artistic method: this artist’s sculptures not only contextualize the object of their investigation, they also decidedly expose the ideological undercarriage of his found objects. A slaloming curve of 75 supermarket carts, for example, does not merely describe a sclerotic row of metal and rubber parts—it represents Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec serpent god, or, alternately, the Trojan horse that hides the baleful reality of a grocery–aisle Hernán Cortés.

The artist’s 2009 display of 950 flayed bicycle tires at the fifty–third Venice Biennial did not, certainly, just lay out a used bike shop’s worth of inventory. It displayed, instead, an inspired image of Kukulkán II (2009) as contained within a roomful of unspooling black rubber snakes. Riffing on Mesoamerican mythology, Escobar’s celebrated sculpture also laid bare a very contemporary global circuit of trade: its constituent parts, sourced entirely in Guatemala City, were manufactured on the island of Taiwan from rubber extracted from Guatemala’s Petén forest.14

A case of what the Marxist theorist Robert J. Antonio would term a “critique within historical reality,”15 this work and many others in Escobar’s ouvre present evaluations of late capitalism that are inscribed firmly within Frederic Jameson’s implicit preference for parody over pastiche (parody requires “a moral judgment or comparison with societal norms,” while pastiche represents, in his formulation, “the cultural logic of late capitalism”).16 In art lingo, Escobar’s readymades qualify as complete aestheticized objects whose form and function meet and greet—in a phrase, their way of meaning meshes intimately with what they mean. Trenchant, wide–ranging works they—like so many pairs of Calvin Klein jeans and grande cups of Starbucks coffee—may be “Made in Guatemala,” but they reach out to the world and its history way beyond the boundaries of a single nation, region or place.

Endnotes

1 For more information on K’cho, one of Cuba’s foremost contemporary artists, see Giandranco Maraniello, ed., K’cho: La Jungla (Torino: Hopefulmonster, 2002) and Coco Fusco, “Bridge Over Troubled Waters,” Frieze 30 (Sept–Oct 1996). For more information on Gertrude Goldschmidt, better known as “Gego,” see Mónica Amor, “Another Geometry: Gego’s Reticulárea, 1969–1982,” October 113 (2005): 101–130 and Nadja Rottner, ed., Gego 1957-1988 Thinking the Line (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2006). —Ed.

2 First published in 1928 in the Revista de Antropofagia 1, the “Manifiesto Antropófago” has been published countless times since then, as “cannibalism” became the hegemonic discourse of cultural affirmation and creation of an authentic national Brazilian culture over the twentieth century. For more information on “antropofagia” see Raul Bopp, Vida e Morte da Antropofagia (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1977) and some of the essays included in Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture, ed. And trans. John Gledson (London: Verso, 1992). —Ed.

3 Luis Caminitzer, Conceptualism in Latin American Art (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2007), 72.

4 Caminitzer, Conceptualism, 18.

5 Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea, eds., Inverted Utopias: Avant Garde Art in Latin America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 433.

6 For more information on Helio Oiticica, perhaps Brazil’s most recognized artist in the international scene, see Mari Carmen Ramírez, Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2007). —Ed.

7 Francisco Goldman, The Art of Political Murder (New York: Grove Press, 2007), 140.

8 For more information on Guatemala crime rate, economical climate, median age and murder rate, see Human Rights Watch, World Report 2011–Guatemala, January 2011, available at: http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/4d3e801cd.html.

9 McOndo is a 1996 literary anthology of new Latin American literature edited by Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez in response to an American editor’s claim that Fuguet’s short story was not “Latin American enough” to publish. The authors in the collection all distanced themselves and at times attacked the exotic and magical view of Latin America in part inspired by Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo, exploring instead the cultural and social effects of globalization. For more information see Jorge Eduardo Benavides, “Del boom a McOndo ¿Y la generación anterior?,” in Entre lo local y lo global, eds. Jesús Montoya Juárez and Ángel Esteban (Madrid: Iberamericana, 2008) and Claudia M. Milian Arias, “McOndo and Latinidad: An Interview with Edmundo Paz Soldan,” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 24 (2005): 139-149. —Ed.

10 Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (London: Phaidon Press, 1995).

11 Gabriel Orozco: Clinton is Innocent (Paris: Paris Musées, 1998), 59.

12 For more information on Patrick Hamilton, an important voice in the Chilean contemporary arts scene, see Patrick Hamilton, Proyecto de arquitecturas revestidas para la ciudad de Santiago (Santiago de Chile: Universidad Diego Portales, 2009). For more information on Argentine–born, New York–based contemporary artist Judi Werthein see Gabriela Rangel, “Instructions for the Use of Brinco Shoes,” Review 77: Literature and Arts of The Americas 41–42 (November 2008): 201–203. —Ed.

13 Douglas Holt and Douglas Cameron, Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 252.

14 Caucho, also known as “hule”—rubber derived from tree-extracted latex—has been historically extracted in Guatemala for over a thousand years, since Mayan times. It became a major crop for export in the twentieth century, to the point that the country is now the second–largest producer in the Americas. For more information see Revista Agroinegocios (Guatemala City: Akianto Publishers, 2008). —Ed.

15 Robert J. Antonio, “Immanent Critique as the Core of Critical Theory,” British Journal of Sociology 32–3 (1981): 333.

16 Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990).

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