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SEE REASON - Carlos Garaicoa & Patrizio Di Massimo
18 December 2010 - 6 February 2011
Opening: Friday 17 December, 5 -7 p.m.
The exhibition ‘See Reason’ is the first tentative step of Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam in a long-term trajectory that will define our programming for the coming period. With ‘Project 1975’ (which derives its name from the year in which the Netherlands largely became a postcolonial nation), the programme essentially reconsiders contemporary art in view of postcolonialism. ‘Project 1975’ raises questions such as: what are the criteria for art in today’s new, geopolitical context? Is such a question even relevant in the postcolonial era? Alternatively, should we speak of a transnational era? Is it even possible to formulate new paradigms, new terminologies for art?
‘See Reason’ is named after an artwork in the exhibition, La Razón (Reason, 2010), by Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa. The artwork is literally made out of an antiquarian copy of the book Kritik der reinen Vernunft by Immanuel Kant. The book’s pages have been folded out in an apparently structural yet entirely idiosyncratic fashion, incised with great precision, then folded out again to produce a series of ever-smaller, delicately cut-out pages. An architectural logic appears to inspire the process, although its intention seems solely to render the book unreadable, elevated to the status of laboriously handcrafted object with tactile appeal.
The concept of rationalism has a specific connotation in Cuba. It first emerged with the exploitation of slaves in the rationalised production methods in use on plantations, going on to become a vehicle for the strategic interests of the United States and, finally, an element in the ideology of the communist government. All of these forms were manifest in the oppression of Cuba’s people, and in censorship. The bankruptcy of the communist regime played out during the one-time, mass wave of emigration from Cuba in 1980, when 125,000 Cubans fled for the shores of the US by boat and, most conspicuously, during the collapse of the Soviet Union which culminated in wholesale poverty. In Havana, with its crumbling buildings like tainted shop fronts, the traces of this are writ large. The aging neon signage atop these buildings inspired Garaicoa to undertake textual interventions
commenting on the situation in Cuba; these are also included in the exhibition, in his portfolio Frases.
The work of Patrizio Di Massimo refers to the postcolonial scenario specific to Italy, his homeland, in such works as The Negus said: give me the lion keep the stele!
(2010), a wall-based textual work. The lion of Judah and the Obelisk of Axum, both monuments from Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) were confiscated during the Italian occupation in 1937 and taken to Rome. It was the Negus (emperor) Hailè Selassiè of Ethiopia in the 1960s, who called for the return of the artefacts during the Duke of Aosta’s visit to his country. On receiving an unsatisfactory answer from the Duke, that the lion could be returned – and promptly – but that the stele was too large and hence too expensive to be transported, Selassiè retorted with “give me the lion and keep the stele!” In the end, the stele was returned to Ethiopia, but not until 2005. Di Massimo expanded the conversation between Selassiè and the Italian Duke with other, fictional, conversations in a similarly abrasive vein, and the underlying
consequences for and implications of the restitution of the two monuments.
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