Guillermo Kuitca
By Fred Camper
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The contradictions in modernist works are in part intended to make the viewer play a more active role in determining meaning. And for minor artists, producing contradiction-laden art has become almost a parlor game. But Kuitca’s images, which seem overfilled and vacant at once, open up a yawning gap–between the almost too literal mattresses and the almost too suggestive maps–into which a veritable panoply of contradictions can enter. In the quest to make sense of this art’s disparities, the viewer either invents narratives or vibrates between pairs of contradictions: the gap between public and private spheres, for example, or between individual lives and society.
In three of his four paintings Kuitca depicts vast theaters. One untitled work from 1995 shows multiple tiers of seats from the vantage point of the stage. Each seat is numbered, but the numbering doesn’t resemble any system used in a real theater–for one thing, the numbers sometimes repeat from row to row with no letters to differentiate them. Glowing with intense white light against the painting’s dark blue background, the seats are like banks of light floating in space. These quintessentially public but unoccupied spaces are as evocative of the human presence as empty beds, giving them a similar power. While each seat suggests an individual viewer, the blurring together of seats by smearing the paint or repeating the numbers implies that the audience is an undifferentiated mass. And of course the performers’ whole purpose is to lose their individuality to their roles.
Number 21 shows a bed whose surface resembles a stairway; a baby carriage is poised at the top–a reference to the famous moment in Sergei Eisenstein’s film Potemkin when a baby carriage falls downstairs during a massacre by cossacks. Kuitca refers both to the real massacre and to the filmmaker’s representation of it. History and culture flow through this ordinary household object, with its connotations of safety and privacy–like all of Kuitca’s best pieces, this one acts at once as a sudden illumination and as an invitation to meditative thought.
But what if Ahtila isn’t trying to create a traditional aesthetic experience? It’s a disturbing thought but worth considering given that she’s been influenced by music videos and commercials. Having her characters speak primarily to or for the viewer is crucial: sometimes they face us, but even when looking away or offscreen, the subjects seem to be speaking to an imagined audience. Trying to enter the characters’ psychology the way you might with a narrative film gets you nowhere: this work is all on the surface. The characters focus on capturing our attention, focus on being looked at, rather than evoking an imagined life.
