Alexander Apóstol
October 4-October 27, 2007
Curated by Jose Luis Falconi, Harvard University Latin American and Latino Art Forum, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.
In Lieu of Modernity: The Works of Alexander Apóstol
For all its concreteness, modernity has felt as fragile as imported chinaware in Latin America. Irremediably foreign and incredibly costly to the societies it was meant to crucially transform, modernity, in our neck of the tropics, might still feel so detached from the norm and so impossibly delicate that it needs to be handled with the care only reserved for the luxury tea set kept just for guests.
It is precisely from the paradoxical condition in which modernity inhabits in Venezuela, through which the works of Alexander Apóstol acquire their powerful effect, as they continuously address and expose the limitations of the process of modernization in his native Caracas. By systematically preying on the grandiosity that accompanied the modernist architectural projects envisioned since the 1950s, Apóstol’s photographs and videos formally critique the process and sustainability of the accelerated modernization process in which the country embarked since.
The celebrated Residente Pulido and Residente Pulido: Ranchos series –displayed here across from each other, as the exhibition’s primordial line of tension—are perhaps the clearest examples of how Apóstol has pushed modernist architecture’s monumentality to the limit in order to show the fragility of the modernization process. Each of the photographs of Residente Pulido presents a recognizable modernist building in the city with no windows or doors on their façades.
Apóstol carefully selected emblematic buildings across Caracas, which bear the names of some of the most luxurious chinaware of the time. But by intervening and transforming the image in such decisive ways–by “sealing” any entrance/exit into the structure, and by printing and presenting them in an oversize format—he effectively transformed these buildings into monuments, erasing their functionality and rendering them as useless and sumptuary as the expensive chinaware they are named after.
Thus, if the grandiose architectural projects were meant to transform Caracas from a small village on the periphery of the Western world into the hemisphere’s most modern polis during the middle part of the century, Apóstol’s photographs reveal not only the contradictory terms on which the endeavor was based but, most importantly, the subtle, fragile ways in which this village has survived and morphed until the present. These “monuments” of Caracas are the most evident sign that the city now stands as the ruins of a modernity which was never fully achieved.
A similar reading can also be sustained for the provocative videos such as Them as a Fountain, El Helicoide or Los Cuatro Jinetes in which, once more, the artist’s detailed focus on an architectural icon—a fountain, an emblematic commercial mall or a residential decorative stand by Gio Ponti, respectively—serves as the point of entrance to question the modernization process that has failed to occur completely but for which Venezuelans are already nostalgic.
This veiled, complicated relation with modernity that Venezuelans (and Latin Americans in general) experience should not come as a surprise. After all, and as Apóstol seems to suggest by his incessant quest for the character and gender of the iteration of modernity he happened to born into, when it comes to modernity in the tropics, the china is certainly very expensive, but the dish has yet to be served.
José Falconi
Curator
*
Considered one of the most prominent artists of his generation, Alexander Apóstol (Barquisimeto, 1969), lives and works between Madrid and Caracas.
For over a decade, he has exhibited widely in Latin America, Europe and the United States in numerous major solo and group exhibitions in some of the most relevant venues, including: the Museo Nacional Reina Sofia (Madrid), the Sala Mendoza (Caracas), the Batiment d’Art Contemporain (Geneve), the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Sofía Imber (Caracas), the MUSAC (Castilla León), the Fundación Telefónica (Madrid), the Americas Society (New York City), the Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango (Bogotá), the Casa de América (Madrid), the Museo del Barrio (New York City), the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo (Santiago de Compostela) and LACE (Los Angeles, CA).
He has participated as well in the São Paulo Biennal (2002), the Prague Biennal (2003 and 2005), Istanbul Biennal (2003), Printemps de Septembre (Toulouse) and the Cuenca Biennal (2004) where he was awarded the first prize of the jury.
His works are included in important collections around the world such as the Tate Modern (London), Daros-Latinamerica (Zurich) and the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (Miami). His work has been featured in numerous publications and surveys of contemporary art –such as Vitamin PH (Phaidon, 2006), Art Photography Now (Thames an Hudson, 2005) and Blink (Phaidon 2004), and a number of essays on his work have appeared in leading art journals and magazines.
This is his first show in Boston.