Nicolás Guagnini
"Wrong"
March 14th - April 25th, 2009
Opening reception and performance by the artist, March 13th, 6 - 9 pm
COMA is pleased to present the first solo show in the gallery by Argentine-born, New York-based artist Nicolás Guagnini. The show will be comprised of three graphic works, one DVD, one photo piece; and one film installation by Union Gaucha Productions, Guagnini’s longstanding collaborative film enterprise with artist Karin Schneider.
“Argentina Potencia” 2008
Photocopies with serigraph ink on archival paper, unique, 63 elements 27 x 21 cm, installation dimensions 300 x 577 cm.
The images of this work come from Argentine publications from the 1964 - 1983 period, in which two military dictatorships “disappeared” 30.000 people in the frame of the cold war and the emergence of guerrilla organizations in South America. Guagnini was born in 1966 and his family was heavily prosecuted during his childhood.
The nightmare of history is conjured using mainstream media, publications of the revolutionary organization Montoneros, and soccer photographs. Over these ever-returning themes (Generals, priests, soccer players) the image of a pin-up of the period, Graciela Alfano, is superimposed in bloody red. Alfano, a medicine student catapulted into easy fame through dictatorship-friendly television shows, was the lover of one of the cruelest Junta members, Emilio Massera, now incarcerated for human right violations.
For the COMA install, this work will be juxtaposed with Guagnini’s Discharge, a 2005 , 9 minutes, 16mm film, transferred to DVD, shot at Orchard Gallery in NY. Previously shown at the gallery in “Mannerfantasien”, a group show curated by Ellen Blumenstein about contemporary positions for masculinity, the recontextualization in front of this graphic work brings about connotations of torture and emotional distress.
“State of the Art” 2008
[21 intervened posters of the past 4 art seasons in New York]
CD with version of ABC song by Nutria, arranged by Nutria and Nicolás Guagnini; appears courtesy of Hueso Records
In the artist’s own words:
“In Dada and Surrealist collage, assisted chance or deliberate chance created new meanings. In Cubist collage a critique of the code of representation is enacted. Collage forces a confrontation between one element, idea, and another. It's a fundamental act of negotiating difference.
So I decided to confront elements with themselves instead.
In “State of the Art” I collage posters onto themselves. I needed a regular shape, so that anything I would take away from one place could be replaced elsewhere, where there is a hole of equal size and shape: a zero sum game. To flee from meaning it seemed to me it would be best not to collage specific figures or words. It had to be a shape. That was easy: the indivisible circle, the most idiotic, ideal shape.
Once I managed to destroy a good deal of meaning in the posters, which are designed to advertise productions, institutions or galleries, and their concerted production of meaning, I noted certain areas of the posters still carried some meaning. I then decided to spraypaint a template of the alphabet, with its potentiality of all meaning and its own lack thereof. The results, which have failed insofar as they are not totally devoid of meaning, are not unlike our recollections from dreams: something that could very well be real, but we know it's not. The intervened posters highlight the fragility of all orders, the power of the chaos within. They are anarchistic.”
“Wrong” 2009
Laser prints on archival paper, edition of three.
A disturbing work about pedagogy and childhood, with sexual undertones. The piece is a détournement of a popular series of books used to train children for the highly desirable “Gifted and Talented” kindergarten programs in New York city. The books are called “What’s Wrong With This Picture”. Under the unquestionable cover of stimulating intelligence in toddlers by means of enhancing the powers of observation and concentration the books also impose a sanitized ideology of the normal or “right” against the “wrong”, and an attendant worldview. In Guagnini’s carefully crafted intervention the naturally compressed space of the originals is expanded into vast horizontal landscapes, which also conjure romantic painting.
“I Use Value” 2008
21 Polaroids, unique.
Polaroid announced that its classic line of products for instant photographs will be discontinued in 2009, strangled by both digital photography and the financial crisis. Guagnini kisses goodbye this already obsolete --and classic-- medium with a series of photographs in which the color has been enhanced applying different temperature conditions to the Polaroids as they came out of the camera. The pictures feature the phrase “I use value” using various punctuation and colors, altering the meaning and the position of the subject without altering the order of the words. This piece acts as an interpretative key to the operations of manipulation of preexisting meanings (and values) and détournement, essential to the strategies used by the artist for this exhibition.
Sledgehammer
16mm film, 2’45, looped, 2009.
Edition of 2 with one artist proof.
Union Gaucha Productions.
A Bolex camera which has been hammered into pieces is reconstructed, using the device of reverse action. The Bolex is the fetish camera for experimental filmmaking in the USA. As 16mm becomes obsolescent just like the Polaroid, an affair for art galleries and installations, the time reversal calls for a mixture of melancholia and destruction, collapsing in a sequence utopia and the knowledge of the inevitable. For its COMA version the film will be presented with live performances by Thomas Hug and Camille Azaïs of Eric Satie’s Gnossiennes. Guagnini will perform to the music at the opening. The performance is structured around his fascination with the number 7: he will perform with 7 lightbulbs or neon tubes of 7 different types, that is a total of 49 units.
This exhibition was kindly supported by Klavieretage, Alte Schönhauser Str 44,10119 Berlin.
Leipziger Straße 36
10117 Berlin
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