Art, Film, Music & Dance

Alberto Casari Retrospective, 1993 – 2008: Conceptual Art?

Peruvian artist Alberto Casari’s 15-year retrospective (“Alberto Casari & PPPP, 1993 -2008”) , showing at the downstairs ICPNA gallery through May 18 (see gallery listing below), teases the limits of what’s considered Art in conservative Lima. The wide-ranging exhibit showcases, among other objects, a chair impossible to sit on, blank canvases “painted” with ocean water, a pair of rubber diving fins decorated with eyes, and a boiling pot set on a stovetop, which, upon closer inspection, turns out to be a pan of condensed ice kept solid through refrigeration.

Even more titillating is a photo triptych of a gaudy birthday cake decorated with the text, “La Madre de los Conchasumadres Está Siempre Encinta” (The mother of the motherf*cker is always pregnant). Standing at the ready under each identical image is a bright-red fire extinguisher, a joking reference to the cake’s incendiary message. Clearly, a sort of light-handed, provocative sensibility is at work here, but is Casari’s work “conceptual,” as the exhibit’s literature claims?

Compared with that of mainstream conceptualist artists in the United States, I don’t think so.

Casari is too interested in texture, materials, in the thingness of things, to qualify as a true conceptualist. He may flirt with ideas or, in some cases, with process (the ocean-water paintings, for instance), but in the end, Casari is fascinated with producing objects – not ideas – that act viscerally on the viewer. That approach, or obsession, if you like, stands in sharp contrast to the central premise of conceptual art – that of the primacy of concept. Although people disagree on which sorts of works can be encompassed by “conceptual art,” most standard definitions of the term include the gist of the Collins English dictionary (quoted on the Tate Museum’s own page on conceptualism):

conceptual art: (n) art in which the idea behind a particular work, and the means of producing it, are more important than the finished work.

 Back in 1980 or 1981 I viewed a conceptual art installation in Connecticut that illustrated this definition to a T. The featured artist, then head of the University of Hartford art school, was a hard-core proponent of American-style conceptual art — the more conceptual and disembodied, the better. The installation consisted of a recording of dogs barking over and over. The artist/professor hadn’t recorded the dogs himself; he had simply “had” the idea and arranged for someone else (a groveling grad student?) to execute it. That was it. If you were bothered by his not having made the recording, well, then, you obviously didn’t understand Conceptual Art. I remember listening to the tedious doggie soundtrack and feeling bored, as well as irritated, at the artist for wasting my time, which may have been his point. The work’s physical representation wasn’t supposed to matter.

In contrast, when I walk through the Casari retrospective, I want to touch some of the artworks, a response I can’t imagine having toward most conceptual art.

Many of Casari’s pieces are about intriguing surfaces: burned wood, viscous oil, thick rubber, animal fur, paint. Physical identity is everything with these works: the viewer is taunted to touch them as objects, not ideas, and if one ultimately does remain at arm’s length from them, it is because of gallery protocol: Look, don’t touch. That teasing quality haunts the exhibit: Casari plays with viewers’ responses to his art but doesn’t back down on his allegiance to form and materials. Casari, or one of his alter egos, made these things. The finished works do, in the end, matter.

Show details:

“Alberto Casari & PPPP
through
May 18, 2008

Galería Germán Krüger Espantoso , ICPNA,

Avenida Angamos Oeste 160, Miraflores

Lima, Peru

Hours: Tuesday – Sunday, 11 a.m. – 8 p.m.

Free admission

I am an American writer who lived in Lima for seven years (2007-2014), where I covered Andean traditions, melting glaciers and daily life in the capital for Miami Herald, MSNBC and Huffington Post. I now live and work in northern Florida where I champion climate change advocacy and compassionate, affordable eldercare.

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