INTERSECTIONS
THE ART OF LILIANA PORTER & ANA TISCORNIA
by Pedro Cuperman

Last September I visited the artist studio shared by Liliana Porter and Ana Tiscornia in Rhinebeck, New York. It was as if I was walking into a mystery-ridden world. Photography, prints, collages, toys and all of it baring figures I had seen before. I knew quite well the work of Liliana, since I have written several essays about it, and the same with Ana, who for some time now has been the Art Editor for Point of Contact . On one hand, the search for metaphor, on the other, memory, annexations, appropriations, in other words, the whole spectrum of what happens in contemporary art. And yet something was different.

“In order to say where our work intercepts,” they tell me, “first we should establish that both artworks are different. While one is more philosophical, related to recurrent questions (Liliana), the other is more political and relates to current events (Ana). While one is dramatic, the other confronts human tragedy with humor. We do not pretend to erase that diversity but to use it as material for the new constructions. What we want is for the fusion of both languages to give birth to a narrative that could be for all intents and purposes fictional and mysterious, where the visual ambiguity opens new ways of interpretation and uncovers unexpected conflicts.”

Unexpected conflicts…. Yes, there, I said to myself, lies the puzzle proposed by this show: figures on the wall or on the floor reciting their own individual, personalized metaphors—each one allowed to plead it's own case and together radiating something else, lets say, something new. Is this something new, this “unexpected” supposed to be a supra-metaphor made of previous metaphors, a unifying newness finding it's own artistic form?

Liliana Porter. To speak about her work requires some incarnations; I will mention a few among the possible many: mirrors, toys, animated objects, figurines that are already part of Porter's signature. Reality, everyday life, even if schematically, is always present in her work. Solitary beings, devoid of background—as if they would fear that any concrete attachment to a given space might deprive them of universality. Even the absurd dialogue of a miniature figurine, a poodle facing a mirror in a sort of calm rapture ( Red with Dog , 2005) retraces our melancholic conflicts between what one sees and what one may actually be. But “figurine,” as reality principle here, is not a naive substitute—where you see frog or bird or dog think human. Nor an arrogant humanistic parody—they are toys, we are real. In contrast to that soul-less creature called Golem, Liliana's characters are social, down to earth human creations, created in society's image and likeness; actors as doubling, utilizing an expressive set of gestures that confesses its origin. Each one of Porter's characters is first an imaginary object; second, an object in a work of art; and third, a stand in, a pointer referring to something else, and, in so far as it does this, in the words of the philosopher Charles S. Peirce, a sign , a representation. In that sense they play as imitations…figurines imitating figurines imitating… you and me— all of which points not only to the actor but also to the acting. T o be is to act , a scenario already designed by Shakespeare and recalled by Borges (although Borges wasn't interested so much in metaphysics as in words).

The engaged observer—you, me—perceives these figurines as parts of the art world only insofar as he or she observes them from the uniquely engaged standpoint of the gallery or the art catalogue (unless we postulate a cold objective gaze, somebody seeing everything from everywhere…. God?) To enter the space of the gallery is to realize that the territory of everyday objects has been left behind, and that we are greeted by other objects (or perhaps the same ones) visible and recognizable according to the rules of the imaginary.

The dialogue between what we see and we actually are, in Ana Tiscornia becomes an indictment, among other things, of the painful years of our past. What we were, especially Latin America's recent history, and what we recall, is a broken sequence, broken at some critical point, broken in our imagery, in our memory. Ana's most recent art, I am referring to her 2005 show in Montevideo (1), brings into the foreground an itinerary that starts from a given place treated in architectural terms, a place she probably saw, she probably forgot—the habitat of the homeless, of the missing— and arrives, via digitalization or diagrams, to an empty vacant world. One wonders, what does the word “home” refer to? Memory, her own memory, and the collective versions of the past, are the starting point of each of Ana's quest. But usually the project is frustrated— because, time and again the road is marked by erasure, fragmentation, silence. The visual world of Tiscornia is made out of digitalized photography, intermingled with maps, fragmented objects, rolled pieces of paper, leftovers…. Her relationship with those materials is apparently distant, un-emotional; it is more than anything an allegory in diagrammatic terms of what is dysfunctional, of “what we remember and others forget-what we forget and shapes our remembering.” Our daily erasures. But, who remembers? Who forgets? Ana Tiscornia is no Marcel Proust. (“One of my selves” says the narrator of A la recherché de temps perdue , “had kept his social scruples and lost his memory. The other self—the one which has conceived this world—on the contrary, remembered.” (2)

Time, in Ana's work, is space, lost space. The original photograph of Ted Kaczynski's cabin, the so-called Unabomber, was framed by The New York Times as his hiding place. In Ana's digitalized treatment of the same photograph, it is the progressive blurring of the image that brings the meaning of loss to the foreground. Her take is visualized time, so to speak. (3)

Neither is she rewriting history. Her photographs, her installations, her fragmented objects—branches, chairs, etc.—are not necessarily references to partial truths, things withheld. Ana makes rolls of papers, draws inhabited spaces, draws itineraries, organizes the world, and ends up finally in the vacant land of things erased, forgotten. In no man's land. In a way, one could inscribe Tiscornia's art in what Mark Augé called an ethnography of solitude … “If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place” (4)

At the same time one could also say that there is in her work a sort of game, in the sense Wittgenstein gave to that word: the meaning of a term, or a phrase or a sentence— or an image, I should add— will emerge from the way it functions in society. Ana's work, in my opinion, might also be read as an ideological instrument, not because she predicts anything, but because as we unravel memory what is left is politics, morality….

Untitled, 2005. Collage on paper. 22" x 14"

Dialogues and Solos. Liliana Porter and Ana Tiscornia's collaborative work is marked by the logic of visual narrative. Framed sequences of unities of action, articulated in retentive ways, suggesting some sort of suspense. There is this piece by Ana, Other Side , which is the inside of Untitled, a rabbit. Collage, originally is supposed to be a composite work, made out of different materials. Here it is a collaboration, or as Ana says, a collage of ideas, and at a closer look, one can see Liliana's menacing traces of the cutting knife— the wounded side of the image.

News Forced Labor, 2005, Newspaper, black tape, and figurine on shelf. Dimensions Variable

In an installation piece titled News Forced labor, a man is shoveling a paper ball that here works as a sort of allegory of our information era. The whole scene—gesture, intersections, angle of action, etc.—becomes a narrative sequence where the rolled paper is about to fall to the ground. The connection pushes the visual signs to a new perception, that is, to a meaning that is still not there. From the intersection of what previously belonged to two apparently distant worlds, between a roll of paper and a figurine, an event will result. The signs will somehow give up their solitude— what they were before— to become actors in a developing story. Will they change? Yes and no. What previously were Liliana's figurines and Ana's special allegories are now signs grounded in action, made to look deliberate by the change of scale—something may happen before our very eyes…at any moment. Beware!

Black Shoes, 2005. Archival digital photographs. 27" x 38".

In Black Shoes , the little girl (one of Liliana's figurines) is only a pair of legs intruding timidly an alien space (one of Ana's layouts). A space that previously represented what was missing, what may still be lurking around. One frame shows her walking into a multiple layered world, another shows her coming at us, as if exploring her own reflection, yet another shows her from above… and then she is leaving. Where is she going? And why is the rest of her missing? Will she too end up missing? The answer, if any, must surely lie outside the text, in the world of the viewer, to go back to some of reception aesthetics, like Umberto Eco's Opera aperta (1962) which in a way favored an opening to the spectator; or to Wolfgang Kemp's, the viewer is inside the picture .

Dialogues and Solos is just an art show. Of course, it may or may not mirror what happens once you leave the gallery. But the materials are transfers—those are our sighs, our hopes; that's our information-ridden world. In a way acting and forgetting go hand in hand, and are perhaps the two faces of a world where people with non-faces are wrestling to survive in a world of non-places .

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1 See Patricia Betancur, “Percepción, ética y producción.” Sin Aviso, Ana Tiscornia, catalogue edited by the Centro Cultural de España en Montevideo, (Montevideo, June-July 2005) p.11.

2 William S. Bell's Introduction to Un Amour de Swan , The Macmillan Company, (NY1965) Pg 29.

3 Ana Tiscornia, “Once Upon a Time” Point of Contact , Vol.5, No.2 (2001)

4 Marc Augé , Non-Places , Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity , Verso, (London-New York, 1995) p.78.

Photo Tere Paniagua
From left to right, Ana Tiscornia, Liliana Porter and Pedro Cuperman
during a visit to the artists' studio in Rhinebeck, N.Y.