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extend access to South Central Review
Rosemberg Sandoval
Salcedo and Sandoval began their art careers in the 1980s, an extremely
complex socio-political period during which the internal armed conflict
in Colombia intensified. Sandoval's first exhibition was a 1981 show
by a young artists' collective at the National Museum, while Salcedo's
inaugural solo exhibition took place in 1985 at Casa de la Moneda. Both
exhibition spaces are in Bogotá, the capital city. The two artists studied
art around the same time (Salcedo in Bogota's Jorge Tadeo Lozano
University and Sandoval in Cali at Del Valle University), and they give
credit to some of the same international artists as having influenced their
work: Joseph Beuys, Bruce Nauman, and Gordon Matta-Clark. The "an-
architecture" of the latter is particularly relevant because he dissected
and altered existing objects impregnated with human existence, as do
Salcedo and Sandoval; in the case of Matta-Clark, his interest lay in
buildings about to be demolished, which was related to his desire to shed
new poetic light on fragments of life discarded by economic progress.
Salcedo and Sandoval often work with daily-life materials obtained
from contexts of marginality and violence such as used clothing, worn
furniture, old toys, and in the case of Sandoval, even human remains.
Both deal with suffering understood as a contemporary pathos linked
to the ineffable character of individual pain and death, albeit through
different aesthetic strategies, to be explored here.
Since the 1980's Salcedo has employed recovered objects in her
artwork - mainly sculptures and installations - including industrial
and organic materials which she used as metaphors for the presence in
absentia of the human body. In her 1989 Sin título ( Untitled) series she
entombed old clothing, shoes, and furniture in cement as if they were
frozen in time. These self-contained and quasi-mystical objects evoke
them from their original context, which means that we lose the possibil-
ity of contemplating them with a certain distance (and patience). They
cannot be observed as one would look at a painting or attend a concert.
Since both artists use objects taken from daily life that imply disappeared
human bodies (used clothing, shoes and furniture and fragments of ex-
ploded window panes), they propose a dramatic closeness between these
implicit visual histories and the spectators. After all, the forms given to
these objects evoke pain. While we cannot repeat the experiences these
pieces refer to, clearly they appeal to the spectator's corporeal condi-
tion and sense. In this way they elicit the viewer's identification, albeit
involuntary, with forms of suffering that imply a political meaning in life.
If politics, not necessarily in ideological terms but in terms of concern
for one's fellow human beings, has been a foreign concept, or at least
unimportant, to the spectator, he is forced to confront facts that he might
prefer to avoid.
Returning to the ideas of Lévinas, it is clear that both Salcedo 's Untitled
and Sandoval's In the Way of Emergency seek to transform the spectator's
comprehension and experience regarding the reality of his fellow people.
The majority of these viewers tend to make sense of victims as faceless
numbers or, worse, as the inevitable collateral damage of the situation
in Colombia or Latin America and, therefore, somehow unsubstantial.
Conclusion
As stated above, art for Salcedo and Sandoval does not have the power
to redeem. In her artist's notes Salcedo wrote, "The time of the massacre
is: unrecoverable, immemorial, unrepresentable."30 In a 2007 interview,
she stated the same idea with a crucial caveat, "Art does not have the
capacity to redeem. Art is impotent in the face of death. Nevertheless,
it has an ability and it is to bring to the realm of humanity the life that
has been desacralized and give it a sort of continuity in the life of the
spectator" (my translation).31 Sandoval, in turn, notes that he creates art
because it allows him to invest "other, superior spaces and magnetize
them [. . .] turning our barbarism into an intelligence regime, since art
is the only thing that allows us to live with death" (my translation).32
The meaning of art for both artists consists of emphasizing human
vulnerability and in building a parallel language that allows for transcen-
dence over a wound which cannot be cured, only shared. The work of
art is understood as a limit of humanity because it allows the spectator
to experience alterity as extreme closeness to the reality of the Other.
These artists remind us that our human condition is the same as those
whom we look down upon or see as enemies, the same as the indigent,
the poor, the guerrillas, the disappeared, the relatives of the victims. And
even if we want to look away, there is art to remind us that the pres-
ence and anguish of those other lives are an essential part of each and
everyone's existence.
NOTES
9. Manuel Toledo, "Doris Salcedo: canto contra el racismo," BBC Mundo , October
9, 2013, http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/spanish/misc/newsid_7035000/7035694.stm.
10. Paul Celan, "Shibboleth," in Paul Celan: Selected Poems , trans. Michael Ham-
burger and Christopher Middleton, (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1972), 41.
1 1 . Sarah Lydall, "Caution: Art Afoot," The New York Times , December 1 1 , 2007,
http://www.nytimes.eom/2007/12/l 1 /arts/design/ 1 lcrac.html?_r=0.
12. Richard Dorment, "Doris salcedo: A glimpse into the abyss," The Telegraph ,
October 9, 2007, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3668416/Doris-Salcedo-A-
glimpse-into-the-abyss.html.
1 3 . http://www.rosembergsandoval.com/mugre.htm.
14. See the book review of Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Finan-
cial Market by Noah Horowitz (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013). The
following excerpt summarizes the links between the financing of art institutions and the
global market: "The story, as he tells it, takes us back to the 1950s, when leading muse-
ums, flushed with post-war prosperity, started growing in size and power. The powerfu
institutions acquired all the old art, giving a fillip to prices. Gradually, collectors were
drawn to the contemporary art market, as a result of which prices rose. According to him,
the art market is not much different from other international markets, when it comes to
behind-the-scenes activities and investing tactics involving a network of an investment
consortium of collectors, art museums around the world, dealers and auction houses,
with art buyers completing the chain." "Art of the Deal by Noah Horowitz," The Arts
Trust , 201 3, http://www.theartstrust.com/Magazine_article.aspx?articleid=345.
15. Lévinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969),
251.