Orientation is a Transit Hotel
Santiago Villanueva

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Orientation is one of the words that best guides me through the various moments of Oscar Bony’s work (1941-2002). It involves tilting to one side and then the other, akin to the sensation at the start of a fall and, instantly, regaining stability. This sense of flirtation, of insinuating oneself, of presenting without development, was a commentary for each moment: tendency is the most contradictory place to inhabit, but also the one suited to a voice that can be intensified. Bony saw minimalism, conceptualism, painting, and photography in this way. For each moment, avant-garde also meant evading the idea of a personal style.

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Bony spoke about discontinuity in his work, of a fragment of discontinuity. He salvaged the possibility of not choosing, of remaining in a state of doubt, of not advancing, of proposing and stopping. In this sense, his production leaned towards a passive idea of avant-garde, where reaching the point of intensity and concept was simultaneously the moment to abandon: to sink in many directions at once. He said that this same sensation was what Buenos Aires produced in him: a Spanish house, a French building, one from the 50s modernism, a postmodern one. He defined it as a jumble. He likely took something from Luis Felipe Noé’s concept of “chaos.” “I was a romantic fool who thought he was in Fontainebleau. The photos I show really move me; that helpless, skinny, angry boy is Bony,” he says in an interview with Julio Sanchez in 1993. His words contrast with the certainty of his work’s development in the late 80s and 90s. The precision of the shots, the objective conceptualization in some of his appearances, contrasts with the return to an idealized and romanticized image of the artist, embracing and thinking around death and, above all, suicide.

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When Marcelo Pacheco began his text for Bony’s exhibition catalog at Malba, he said: “I try to orient myself.” It seems like a beginning from the haze of never reaching a conclusion or a clear hypothesis, a certainty that identifies an extensive body of work spanning several decades, as a whole or a coherence. I would like to consider here, in the same vein, his work as an incoherent ensemble, which also leads me to affirm avant-garde as disappointment. I also think that the ability to orient oneself and disorient oneself was in Bony a possibility to invent a method. The works from the last years of his life allow me to reveal something of this method and rethink his work from previous decades.

Orientation can sometimes mean arriving at a concrete material, a word, or simply a repeated action. In Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006), Sara Ahmed asks: “What does it mean to be oriented? How do we begin to know or feel where we are, or even where we are going, aligning ourselves with the characteristics of the territories we inhabit, the sky around us, or the imaginary lines that traverse maps? How do we know which way to turn to reach our destination?” These are all questions organic to Bony, from the geographical coordinates of a sky to the intention of finding an objective sense to his practice under the necessity of allowing new beginnings. Ahmed talks about the familiar as a way of feeling space and how it imprints on bodies. Bony had worked on this sense in some of his 60s projects, approaches between conceptualism and minimalism, but always focused on understanding a space. The familiar is the configuration of the effect of experience, which measures the reach and contact with objects. Approaching is a way of reorienting the familiar. Ahmed also speaks of migration as a process of disorientation and reorientation, something that could extend beyond Bony’s work to the movements or displacements between the different cities he lived in or visited, emphasizing the idea of travel as a permanent state in the formation and opening of an artist. This displacement of bodies coming and going determines ways of inhabiting and thinking about spaces. Movement or migration is the sensation of what is unstable, and in that sense, Bony’s work could be considered, beyond geographic location, as a migratory practice. Ahmed refers to that space that falls: “When something is out of alignment, it is not just that the thing seems oblique, but that the world itself may seem tilted, which disorients the image and even displaces the body.” In a 1984 work, Bony had already tilted the plane of a painted sky, which from the lower right corner was attached by a thread to a small boat. He did the same in a series of works from 1992 and 1993, titled Memory Series, where the uses of photography appear through enlargement, manipulation, and staging with another series of objects. For Bony, photography was always the space of greatest security for disorientation, for losing oneself. Orientation is a transit hotel. Bony viewed artistic practice as a transit hotel and the artist as a “visitor-artist,” where there is no sense of belonging.

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The short film Submarino Amarillo, which Bony filmed in 1965, evokes something of the dizziness inherent in being disoriented. A group of young people, including Pablo Suárez, Roberto Jacoby, and his little cousin, run naked along the beaches of Villa Gesell without an apparent destination, merely as a simple game among their bodies that evokes carefree behavior and adolescent eroticism. Nature reappears in many images of Bony’s work: in his well-known skies from the 70s, but also in works like Still Life (1996) and The Spiderweb (c. 1998), where shots are made on photographs of landscapes, possibly from Corrientes or Misiones. The image of the spiderweb appears, which can be thought of not only for this image but for all the Suicides and Executions. Contemplation of Absence 3 (1997) presents again a beach landscape, where the silhouettes of three people appear. Bony intervenes in the image with perforations with velvet backgrounds, creating a zigzagging line across the sky, confirming his hypothesis that Lucio Fontana’s slashes should have been horizontal, like the line of the Pampas horizon. Bony’s work is filled with punctuation marks constantly reconfiguring the image, annoying it and making it more receptive.

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In 1959, Franco Di Segni, an artist and disciple of Enrique Pichon-Rivière, published a very particular book for thinking about the relationship between psychoanalytic culture and the analysis of a work of art. In Death and Destruction of a Sammer Makarius Painting, Di Segni intervenes the canvas from the perspective of analytical pressure, from the insistence on turning it around, looking again: ruining it with the eyes. I think of this book, this method, to look again at Bony. Interpretation, awareness, the construction of a coherence network is what traverses a gesture; not the shot, not the perforation, not the dot. Di Segni proposed to a group of people to meet periodically to find other possible interpretations in a Makarius canvas that would detach it from aspects related to the tradition and code of art history. The insistence on the image allowed approaching the same place with different words, where collective experience took a different form over time. The aim was to try out a vocabulary that projects a perforation and traverses the commonplace where the work might remain.

A shot marks a distance between what the artist decides to do and what it can provoke. A distance between intention and mark. The “important” space in Bony’s shootings and suicides is the trajectory of the projectile. The edge is not the frame but the fact that works can be thought of from the inside out. The center of the image, where the bullet perforates, is the edge, and the limits of the work are its centers. In the plural, because they variably build the possibility of containing spatial, formal, economic, and class information. The missing part is that edge, the perforation. What disappears from the image is a point, which does not alter a possible reading, only impacts interpretations. Bony distracts us with the possible metaphorical readings that repetition produces when viewing his work; the literalness generates a pause, a break, to think of all possible strategies to escape it. The viewer who arrives at a personal reading is the one who forgets the action and effect to focus on the distance.

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In a 1994 interview with Hernan Ameijeiras, Bony confesses that he was affected by the death of Liliana Maresca, which occurred that same year, despite not being very close friends or frequenting common spaces much. Bony photographed her funeral, which was like a performance, as a tribute. Maresca had died after being HIV-positive and facing a fragile state of health in the last years of her life. It was a year before Bony began creating his Suicides and Executions and the same year that Miguel Harte created the work Surface Aspirators: an aluminum sheet with a Formica surface around it, with about six holes from which small drops of polyester resin oozed. Harte’s perforations on aluminum coincide with Bony’s perforations on glass and photography, though the former’s imagery later focused on the hole as an entry and exit space, with a more sexual than violent tint, like small gloryholes of fantasies.

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In 1996, Federico Klemm dedicated one of his episodes of El banquete telemático to the exhibition Fusilamientos y suicidios curated by Bony at his Foundation. Klemm, amidst hurried and interrupted descriptions, refers to the attire of the characters in the work La familia obrera from 1968: “All classes dress up as best they can for a social event, just as the working masses celebrated Perón or when they faced the Russian czar, and even more so to present themselves in public, which does not distort their social identity.” Klemm connects moments, focusing more on the surface of things, which is why he takes risks. Suddenly he says, “A weapon in the hands of a fool can turn them into a murderer, a weapon in the hands of an artist can produce a creative act.” He then looks at the camera, aims, and fires, breaking the lens and simulating the action of Bony himself. Once seated in the “private” lounge, Bony confesses that “one needs to feel like a child to do tremendous things,” reflecting on the idea of judgment and his works as a product of the times: “In a disintegrating society, in a century’s end coming too fast, it seems necessary to end the postmodern, to end the light, and to assert.” “Well, the light is almost over…” replies Klemm. “Fortunately,” concludes Bony. That same year, in the catalog of the Bienal del Mercosur, he referred to the impacts of his shots: “As it’s broken, so it remains.” Bony’s actions are precise, but also impossible to conceal; each shot is an indelible mark on the work.

A year later, in 1997, when he created La barrita de Quilmes and La familia del barrio, it seems he is aiming at his own working-class family. It is almost a repentance, a shooting at the very gesture of past decades, where the feelings of humiliation and abuse of power appear, as Pacheco points out. That year, the rooms of the Centro Cultural Recoleta inaugurated an exhibition that also, but in a different way, closed a decade full of dire consequences for our lives, which would become even more apparent in the years to come. It was Jorge Gumier Maier’s El tao del arte, opening as Bony completed this series of shootings that imprinted new meanings onto his previous work, like an ouroboros gradually stopping and abandoning its motion.

Artists: Roberto Aizenberg, Juan Battle Planas, Marcelo Canevari, Aída Carballo, Cynthia Cohen, Sandra Guascone, Misterio Tarot (Geraldine Lanteri y Aldo Benítez), Ornella Pocetti, Xul Solar, Osias Yanov y Rosario Zorraquin.

Curator: Lara Marmor

De noche el fuego nos ilumina (1971), Los límites del sueño (1970) y Quieto diálogo del insomnio (1968) by Juana Butler (1928-2017) lead us to a universe in which everything underlies, where the unconscious glimmers, revelations take place and the occult shines. Butler opens the doors of the surreal, mystical and ecstatic night.

On the surface of his paintings can be seen the active work of the thin layer of oil that simultaneously darkens and brightens the original pigments. Butler made use of the power of the mental emancipation of surrealism and also, when painting, he knew how to go through different states of consciousness from the alteration produced by the practice of meditation.

The works of the group of artists that today give life to Las noches blancas take us away from the limits of reason. Without psychic or moral repression, they bring us closer to the encounter with productions filled with enjoyment, dance, stimulation, multisensoriality and epiphanic discoveries that rise up at night. El llamado de la noche (2024) by Marcelo Canevari, together with Las edades (2024) by Ornella Pocetti, are timeless paintings, or instead they seem to have the indeterminate temporality of dreams. The meticulous contemplation of nature and also the collection of visual information from the Internet are some of the sources that give rise to these productions, where the shift between fiction and reality is brutal. In her works, the human figure is the main character, and in his, the landscape is usually the protagonist. The painting of both, indistinctly, condenses high doses of enchantment and mystery, enchantment and sensuality. At night for Cynthia Cohen, hallucinations are real. Vivac and Vivac #2 (2023) represent the moment when the artist participates in the opening of portals in northern Argentina. A few months later, near the Antarctic end of the Earth, in Chubut, Cohen picks up a bunch of stones. It is said that Quartz cleanses impurities and that Ruby represents the strength of passion. What could be the therapeutic quality of a black faceted stone that looks like a constellation? Sandra Guascone moves with fluidity between the fields of astronomy, chemistry and biology; between life and death; light and shadow; living and non-living matter. To materialize his drawings, like Cohen, she enters into a state of sensory openness in which he receives messages, allowing herself to be traversed by that elusive thing called energy. Thus her powerful and magnetic assemblages of insects, astral matter, vegetables and animals are born.

Between 2012 and 2021, Rosario Zorraquín made a series of drawings from which she created a new alphabet based on an automatic graph. These symbols were later carved in Braille to be perceived in sessions where the guests had to decode the signs with their impressions, while the painter, medium and explorer

of matter, translated them into new paintings. Osias Yanov’s artistic practice is also crossed by the creation or resignification of symbols, many of them taken from Xul Solar (recognized by Yanov as the first cuir artist producer of languages). Desire, esotericism and collective care are some of the keys to his artistic practice made up of objects, gatherings, parties and performances.

Corazón de madera (2022) and Mitominas (2023) are assemblages where autobiographical elements are related to historical ones and in which sexual toys coexist, resignified objects such as the spoon that, against the techno-heroic imaginary of the knife or the sword, is a tool that does not prick or cut, but contains and moves.

White nights are repeated at each summer solstice in the regions near the poles. They are clear and luminous. The twilights are eternal and in them the glow intertwines with the twilight. I imagine that the music accompanying this phenomenon is that of The Poem of Ecstasy, the composition by Aleksandr Scriabin (1872-1915) about which Henry Miller wrote: It has that distant cosmic itch. Divinely fouled. All fire and air. The first time I heard it I played it over and over again (…) It was like a bath of ice, cocaine and rainbows. For weeks I was in a trance. Something had happened to me (…) Every time a thought took hold of me, a little door opened inside my chest, and there, in this comfortable little nest, sat a bird, the sweetest and tamest bird imaginable. Our own white nights also have their own music. Misterio Tarot, the duo formed by Geraldine Lanteri and Aldo Benítez, made the sound design of the room based on the personal arcana of Juana Butler, Xul Solar, Juan Batlle Planas, Roberto Aizenberg and Aída Carballo. Perhaps the visible is overrated, suggest Lanteri & Benítez, who sought the syntonic tone of our southern nights to let in the invisible, other ways of being, opening the threshold to new senses.

Eduardo Costa: 1966-today

Professor of letters, editor, proto-conceptualist (Alberro, 2001), genre creator (Herrera, 2008), sound poet, fashion novelist, journalist, essayist, volumetric painter are some of the titles Eduardo Costa has been defined with throughout his career: Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro and New York, from 1966 to the present.

Tireless in his search for new paths in art, this admirer of Duchamp has the ability to find his artistic materialities in the unthinkable: a few stolen dialogues in the street to create the first oral literature, a fictional happening for a mass media art, a fake and unreachable gold accessory to infiltrate the mass media of fashion, semen itself as organic acrylic and acrylic as sculptural clay to expand the possibilities of painting.

Sound realisms and visual fictions. Eduardo Costa: 1966-hoy proposes a non-linear journey through the artist’s career in the gallery’s three rooms, using as reference points three events that took place in three spaces that are as emblematic as they are disparate: an iconic fashion magazine, a traditional fine arts museum, and a legendary rock record.

Anatomy lesson

“Don’t suffer, don’t suffer, it’s only fiction!”, Eduardo Costa requested to an audience that alternated between surprise and astonishment at the dissection of each of the works and the subsequent exhibition of their entrails. Presented on November 22, 2004 at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, La biología de la pintura n.° 2: La lección de anatomía was a didactic performance conceived to explain the invisible in the works belonging to a new genre developed by Costa since 1994: volumetric painting. Referred to by the American critic and poet Carter Ratcliff, volumetric paintings are composed not only of external surfaces but also of internal spaces. A volumetric painting of a watermelon is green on the outside, white and red on the inside. A head portrait contains both the organs, muscles and bones, invisible to the viewer, as well as the visible features traditionally manifested in flat painting or sculpture. Geometric abstractions are usually pure monochrome, painted in the same color from beginning to end. Without any other materiality than acrylic pigment and an occasional thickener, volumes are obtained by adding layer upon layer. The volumetric paintings free themselves from the traditional material supports of painting and sculpture to support themselves in each brushstroke with the aesthetics of modernism and the historical avant-garde. Thus, the pigments dissolve, thicken and solidify when mixed with constructivist, neoplasticist, concrete, perceptualist, minimalist or “pop” molecules. “For the (volumetric) paintings are the result of a wide range of concepts and legacies whose complex synthesis provides insight into how modernist paintings can be productively reformulated in the 21st century” (Alberro, 2001).

Of visual fictions and sonorous realisms

“The most exciting thing I’ve seen in recent years” proclaimed Alexander Liberman, art editor of American Vogue magazine between 1941 and 1962, after his meeting with Costa thanks to the intermediation of gallery owner Leo Castelli. On February 1, 1968, a strange accessory was published in its pages: Oreja. Photographed and commented by Richard Avedon and modeled by Marisa Berenson, granddaughter of surrealist fashion icon Elsa Schiaparelli and renowned art critic Bernard Berenson. Made in gold on the mold taken from Argentine model María Larreta in 1966, this object is part of Fashion Fiction I, along with other jewelry in the form of phalanges and hair. Costa was trying to broaden its audience, reaching out to the fashion mass media with a strategy that included fictionalizing a luxury product as well as making use of the visual and written languages characteristic of these publications. In the months following its print appearance, the object would be transformed into several real jewels at the request of a group of the magazine’s readers.  Oreja is a bottle launched into the sea of media that has been and continues to be a reference and source of inspiration. In fashion, Gucci and its creative director, Alessandro Michele, will produce a ready-to-wear version in 2019, which was also featured in Harper’s Bazaar magazine on Serena Williams’ ear, shot by Alexi Lubomirski. Also, in the field of art, several artists have cited it as is the case of the work Untitled, 2021 photograph by La Chola Poblete where the artist adopts the same position and framing of Berenson’s photo and replaces the materiality of gold with that of bread; with this operation “the prosthetic jewel acquires its luxury character, not from the shine of the metal, but from the homey warmth of bread” (Martínez Depietri, 2021).

At the same time, Costa continued to explore oral language, ethnographic realism, sound and the possibilities of the stereophonic recorder in his search for new materialities and media. This path had taken shape for the first time in 1966 in the project Poema ilustrado for the exhibition El Poema y su sombrura, curated by Mercedes Álvarez Reynolds at the Galería de Arte Joven de Radio Municipal; finding in this oral ready-made an objective and external memory to the artist who surpassed photography in her ability to achieve greater realism, inaugurating another new genre: oral literature. In 1969, together with artist John Perreault, a tape that includes the work of fifteen artists and poets from Latin America and the United States, accompanied by a manifesto written by both of them. For the authors, “the works exist entirely in terms of auditory phenomena, rather than in terms of visual sign systems, thus beginning a new art of the tape recorder that has in common with written literature the fact that it refers to real language” (Costa-Perreault, 1969). “While Oreja had materialized the anatomy of sound reception-the aural with the auditory-Tape Poems focused on the material storage of sound outside the body” (McEnaney, 2016).

For Costa, oral language is an immersed historical ocean in which he will remain diving throughout his career. The appearance of an ear made of gold can be read as a tribute to the human organ that receives and decodes this ancestral expression of culture, an auricular-auric-auratic object.

A honeymoon in the hand

“I want you to write a lyric for Virus – did you think it would be about any particular issue? Yes, about masturbation”. On October 25, 1985 the album Locura is released, the fifth studio work of the group Virus, the most successful of the band in sales and the favorite of its leader Federico Moura.  Costa is the author of the lyrics of Una luna de miel en la mano. Inspired by the fictional play Everyman His Own Wife Or, A Honeymoon in the Hand: A National Immorality in Three Orgasms imagined by Buck Mulligan’s character in James Joyce’s most famous work Ulysses. Some works made at different stages in Costa’s production contain the male body as a theme or as a source of plastic material. With an ambiguous, delicate and poetic sexual charge, these works resort to the torso, genitals and semen to try out new genres in art. A soft and sinuous rectangle next to an erect cylinder constitute a pornogeometric painting, the ejaculations are gestures of an orgasmic informalism on the canvas, the perforations on the stretcher bars resemble spatialism à la Fontana. Under the light of a honey-colored acrylic moon, a hand holding a cucumber, a roll of toilet paper and a small notebook with a poem written by Costa in his adolescence, compose an intimate still life captured minutes before self-satisfaction, a moment mori that foreshadows the petit morte.

Joaquín Rodríguez

Buenos Aires, October 11, 2023