Jorge Marín's sculptures in his labyrinth. Essay on the art of creating heroic, self-absorbed, melancholic sculptures. Intentional interpretations and other subjective reflections...
Por Pablo J. Rico
After several gray and cold days, more dreary than wintry, this morning Mexico City dawned sunny, bright, even feverish, hot; it was a gift from the gods, sometimes lavish, sometimes ruthless and merciless. For weeks Elin Luque had wanted me to meet Jorge Marín, to see his works, the selection for his next exhibition at Casa Lamm, to think about the possibility of writing about them and including some of my peculiar reflections on art in his catalogue. Why not? I enjoy the company of artists, "my people", their unusual conversations, whether deliciously banal or transcendent, our common interests: art, its vicissitudes, its anecdotes and essentials, its greatness and misery, which we all share in our own way. Besides, I've kept almost intact my curiosity to know and "recognize" supposed strangers, be they people, objects or things, the naivety to get excited at just a glance, especially if it's an intelligent and sensitive one, let's say an artistic one. After all, I am chronically ill with art, and my homeopathic remedy is to poison myself with art every day, with "enough" doses, but not too much; seeing, thinking, talking and writing about art are my daily tasks, sowing words, artistic projects, something like the tasks of a gardener... In the end, Elin gathered us at Casa Lamm that dazzling morning for a rich breakfast of sweets and fruits; we shared the juice of our own effortlessly distilled smiles, as stimulating as they were hopeful, we got to know each other, gaining confidence under the green gaze of our hostess. What better omen... I met Jorge Marín on a winter day that from the beginning felt like spring.
Jorge's house-studio is just a few blocks away from Casa Lamm, and we walked there as if on horseback, enjoying that kind sunshine, carefree in our newly inaugurated conversations; we arrived there in no time at all. It is an old house restored with care, without arrogance: spacious and capable, with many and varied spaces and environments, cozy, tidy, dotted with details at every step, a place conducive to live and to create, an incomparable space to serenely contemplate the works of its owner and author, a fortunate place for its guests. For some aspects it could be thought of as a house-museum rather than a house-workshop. In each room we find Jorge's works sensitively installed, each one in its own scenography... And in all of them mirrors, an indeterminate network of specular experiences, of reflected gazes, mirrors and more mirrors without solution of continuity, reproducing themselves exponentially with just a blink of an eye...
Oh, mirrors and reflective experiences, one of my favorite subjects, I thought to myself.... Coincidentally, my last text on mirrors was written for the recent exhibition of Demián Flores, also at Casa Lamm. It is not surprising, then, that during my visit to Jorge Marín's house I noticed more than I should have in his mirrors, that is, in Jorge's sculptures reflected in the mirrors, those surprising combinations of sculptural realities and images reflected with unexpected perspectives. I confess that I usually use mirrors not only as instruments to verify reality, but above all as prostheses to symbolically delve into it, even if by means of metaphors and other rhetorical figures. But which reality in this case? The reality of art, of its objects? The reality of the artist? What does "the artist's reality" mean? His truth? What is the artist's truth?
Lacan and Umberto Eco warn that in order to use the mirror properly and positively, to make it work as a prosthesis, we must first discern what and who is in front of us in the mirror over the sink every morning; as long as we do not know for sure there will be illusions and misunderstandings, errors, falsehoods, as happened to Narcissus. This precondition of the specular experience forced me to decide at the outset whether what I saw and wanted to see in the mirrors of Jorge Marín's house were only his sculptures - - so I would use them as mere rear-view mirrors, kaleidoscopic instruments relatively useful for simply creating suggestive visual sequences to assemble in my retina--or if what I wanted to see and know was the artist reflected in his works, the man-artist transfigured into his creatures thanks to the evocative power of the images in a symbolic mirror, and not just out of curiosity. .. --... or maybe myself, now that I think as I write, projected in my subjective visions of Jorge Marin's works, my mimetic interpretations of the author's intentions.... Oh, what problems I always pose to myself in front of the mirror. They should abolish them as Borges, the distinguished master of literary speculation, proposed, not only because of his blindness...
Oh, mirrors and reflective experiences, one of my favorite subjects, I thought to myself.... Coincidentally, my last text on mirrors was written for the recent exhibition of Demián Flores, also at Casa Lamm. It is not surprising, then, that during my visit to Jorge Marín's house I noticed more than I should have in his mirrors, that is, in Jorge's sculptures reflected in the mirrors, those surprising combinations of sculptural realities and images reflected with unexpected perspectives. I confess that I usually use mirrors not only as instruments to verify reality, but above all as prostheses to symbolically delve into it, even if by means of metaphors and other rhetorical figures. But which reality in this case? The reality of art, of its objects? The reality of the artist? What does "the artist's reality" mean? His truth? What is the artist's truth?
Thus, in a single glance, they confirm their sanity while restoring the virtue of having been to what never was... and, blessed visionaries, they enjoy the visual experience of the desired, still intact. Only those who enjoy the pleasure of making and unmaking images so naturally, and who have in their blood the special cunning to confuse what is imagined with what really exists - and to confuse themselves - can celebrate the perversion of constantly looking into each other's eyes without loving each other, Italo Calvino says of its inhabitants. Who else but artists, I think, could have created this mirrored Valdrada? Who else but artists, I think? Who else but artists, who do not possess that immense capacity of creative imagination, that power to invent images out of the absolute emptiness of nothing, out of the unfathomable depths of the heart and mind, and thus to mix them at will? And if we agree that a work of art reflects both the real world seen and interpreted by the artist and projects his own world invented by his imagination, what can we not think of these inventors and collectors of mirrors and mirages? How can we not believe that Jorge Marín's house, like Valdrada's, is immersed in an architectural theory of conventional mirrors, which in turn includes in the same gaze the mirrored objects of art, their projections and reflections, their various mimicries and our interpretations? These miracles only happen with works of art in the familiar spaces of their creators, in a reflective environment, of mirrors, of course?
Umberto Eco warns that the man we see every morning in the mirror over the sink does not exist, even though he is our image. We identify ourselves with the image that is in front of us every morning over the sink, just as we rely on it for our own codes of interpretation of space. The mirror reflects exactly to the left and right where they are. We are victims of an illusion when we believe that raising our right hand will raise our left hand in the mirror. The mirror cannot lie, it cannot translate, it only reflects the incoming rays of light. It reflects us point by point and in perfect symmetry our objectivity. What is subjective and also false is to believe that the image is inverted only to our left and right, while maintaining the accuracy of up and down. "We deceive ourselves, not the mirror," Eco affirms; "the mirror is a thing we use well and think badly..."
This consideration of the mirror as an instrument for verifying reality led Umberto Eco to attribute new values to the mirror, such as its condition as a prosthesis, that is, an apparatus capable of extending the radius of action of an organ, in this case sight. Can we use these "prosthetic" values to expand not only our vision, but also our artistic sensibility, to deepen our interpretations? If we consider that in the image in the mirror we distinguish two different but contiguous units - ourselves and the environment in which we find ourselves - connected by the real time of our observation, can we then extend our artistic perception by reflecting on mirrors, by understanding the works of artistic creation as mirrors, our interpretation as reflective, in an aesthetic environment of mirrors? I am convinced that it is possible and, moreover, necessary. In the phenomenological world, every entity corresponds to an identity. In the mirror, a kind of dual identity would be verified, the presence of two entities, but only one identity, in this case an aesthetic identity. To each of them we can apply general laws of perception outside the mirror, but to assemble them as a whole, to establish their unifying identity, I venture to suggest that the main function of the mirror as an "artistic" prosthesis is mimesis. A "transcendental" mimesis, of course, not only as a conventional imitation of the real world, but above all as an intention-the "hidden" intentions of the creators of these objects we call art-and as an interpretation, our own, whether we are naive or critical observers.
It is curious that we always want to see beyond what is actually seen, or how things seem to become transparent to our will, when in fact they are opaque or at best reflective. Pictorial space, for example, is nothing more than what is seen and exists as an image of a universe of specifically optical perceptions, privileged over the others: that is, a space dominated by light and its visions. We respond to visual stimuli because we have optical devices and optical-visual faculties. The English word "optics" comes from the Greek "optikós" -sight- and is applied to things related to light, vision, or to devices, lenses, etc., intended to perfect the vision of things, "to see more and better", i.e. their prostheses..... Somehow a painting, a sculpture, acts as a prosthesis of our gaze, they make us see more than what is seen, further, deeper, even to see what is not seen, the invisible. It is surprising to find another word in the dictionaries that has nothing to do semantically with "optics" and yet seems to extend its esoteric meaning. I am referring to the term "optimism", which in philosophy would be the attribution to the universe of maximum perfection (as the work of an infinitely perfect being). It is also a tendency to see or hope for the best in things. .... In relation to "optics" and "optimism", it seems as if they want to reveal to us that "seeing and recognizing" things obey the optimism of the one who sees and wants to see beyond what he sees. The pessimistic spectator would be the one who sees nothing, only shadows, strategies of concealment, extravagances? Blessed then are the voyeurs who also make the paintings, complete them, contemplate them, as Duchamp said, and all those optimistic gazes that in their own way dialog with the paintings and even recreate them, that is, the seers, amateurs or professionals? And we must not forget that a mirror is a machine that needs an operator, an operator of images, in this case an artist. The image of the mirror remains and is updated only when it is attended by a seer, no more and no less...
The Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud called in his time for a rebirth in art, a rebirth of the artist: "I say that it is necessary to be a seer, to become a seer. The poet becomes a seer through a long, immense and thoughtful "deregulation" of the senses. He searches within himself all the forms of love, of suffering, of madness, he tries all the poisons in order to retain nothing but the quintessences. Ineffable torture - for which all faith is needed, all superhuman strength - where he will become the great sick, the great criminal, the great accursed, among all.... -and the supreme sage, because he has arrived at the unknown! It is this artistic search for the unknown that Baudelaire proclaims to be the essence of the existence of art, of being and being in the world as an artist: "Hell or heaven, what does it matter / To find the new in the depths of the unknown!" --so ends his poem Le Voyage. The artist feels that he is the only man capable of reaching what has not yet been represented, "the unknown" .... Alas, that urge to search in the imaginary, beyond or on the other side of immediate, desperately contiguous reality, which led Oscar Wilde to argue against aesthetic realism and naturalism, to cry out in favor of "lying" in art....
In January 1889, a literary dialogue signed by Mr. Oscar Wilde appeared in the London magazine The Nineteenth Century, entitled The Decay of Lying. The main characters of this dialogue are two young aesthetes, Cyril and Vivian, who are having a friendly conversation in the library of a country house. Taken as a whole, the concepts revealed in The Decay of Lying are an emotional denunciation of art's effective capitulation, its subservience to reality; the "disqualification" of the artist, no longer an "artificer" but simply a material, mechanical and aseptic executor of the real in painting, literature, etc. With this philosophical dialogue-essay - in the style of the Platonic dialogues - Oscar Wilde made a significant contribution to the aesthetic postulates of "art for art's sake" so dear to modern and contemporary critics, founding the aesthetic current that defends the autonomy of art with respect to nature and reality, claiming its own genealogy, its own territories of expression that are not necessarily representative, documentary or literal.
Oscar Wilde criticized realism for its vain attempt to represent only reality, which for him had no value and, moreover, in time would cease to be plausible and intelligible. For the brilliant Irish writer, the aim of art should be to lie, that is, to make known the beauty of false things - invented, fictional, ideal. When Wilde speaks of lies, we must understand "the reworking of reality," idealization, fiction, the creation of a new "invented" artistic reality, in many ways lies, constructions that are more than descriptive of the nature and reality of the facts that occur. Wilde thus defends the lie in art: "Beauty can only be represented by lying and falsifying reality. Without lying, there is no art; lying and poetry are art.... Even more radically, he argues that in the long run, life and nature imitate art, and not the other way around, as has traditionally been understood. With these premises, Oscar Wilde raises aspects of great interest, such as the primacy of interpretation over fact itself; he even intuits and advances issues related to quantum mechanics, the conditions of observation of phenomena. Reality is not necessarily what we think we see, but what we interpret of it, or how we represent it? --which is why his defense of the artistic gaze, the need for an artistic canon, makes perfect sense above other purely artistic natural considerations.
The Decadence of Lying was one of the favorite texts of Wilde, undoubtedly one of the greatest aesthetic critics of all time. It is a brilliant indictment of the realist art of his time, which, through its "monstrous cult of facts," pretended to be a mirror of life and presumed to be capable of representing it with greater precision. For Wilde, its cultivators "end up writing novels so similar to life that it is impossible to believe in their veracity. That is why art should never imitate nature, for "art never expresses anything but itself" .... Oscar Wilde believed that art is doomed to total failure if it renounces its principal means, the imagination. His suggestion then was to "attempt the renewal of the ancient art of lying" - an inescapable duty, since lying is the highest mode and the proper end of all self-respecting art, he categorically affirmed...
Oscar Wilde's praise of lying has to do with the justification of beauty beyond its natural reality. Wilde asserts the need for "total artists," complete artists who are also able to be critical of their own expression. He calls for an art outside of morality - that is, amoral, not immoral - concerned with the creation of existential-universal states of being, of mind, that are not mediated by morality or the customs of each age, its conventionalisms. An "amoral" art and aesthetics that operates in the sense of creating the utopia of a society free of practical constraints, dedicated to contemplation, to pleasure. In this amorality, understood as a violation of the rules, would lie not only artistic but also social progress. It would be a non-materialistic artistic society, sustained by joy, pleasure, the artistic values of imagination and invention, with time for reflection and self-expression. Oscar Wilde believed that life possesses the irrepressible impulse of artistic expression, the desire to reveal what neither art nor, of course, science has yet been able to show. Wilde blindly trusted in the human will to self-realization through individual creativity and critical spirit, that is, artistic invention...
According to the Irish aesthete, to compose - poetry, painting, music - is to lie, to follow a method, its codes, its compositional techniques, which are solely the fruit of the artist's imagination. For Wilde-Vivian (his character) this is more decisive for art than the cult of "natural facts", the details of nature, to know scientifically or not its material components, its functioning. A society tired of so much crude and naked reality can no longer continue to see only the exact reproductions of what is already before its eyes every day. It is enough for art to remain in the prison of realism, chained to life, and especially to poor and uninteresting human life, exclaimed the provocative Wilde..... Art must find its meaning and its object in itself, not in external reality or in that ambiguous concept we call "life: "Art finds its perfection in itself and not outside of it. It is not to be judged by external criteria of similarity. It is a veil rather than a mirror. It possesses flowers and birds unknown in all jungles. She creates and destroys worlds and can pluck the moon from the sky with a scarlet thread. His are the "forms more real than a living being," his are the great archetypes of which existing things are imperfect copies. For him, nature has no laws or uniformity. He can work miracles at will, and monsters emerge from the abyss at his call. He can command the almond tree to blossom in winter and make it snow on the wheat field in season."....
In the preface to his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (published in 1898), an excellent chronicle of the struggle between good and evil and an extraordinary psychological portrait of a character comparable to Shakespeare's greatest inventions, Oscar Wilde offers us his peculiar aesthetic credo, a happy synthesis of his thoughts on art, artistic creation, the existential conditions of the artist, and so on. Despite the time that has passed and the generalized disbelief that has infected us, even unintentionally, in these times, his affirmations still move us, we could certainly reaffirm them today. I think they are his best monument, his most memorable statement:
The artist is the creator of beauty.
The aim of art is to reveal art and hide the artist.
The critic is the one who can translate his impression of beauty in a different way or with new materials. The highest form of criticism, and at the same time the crudest, is a form of autobiography.
The one who discovers dastardly meanings in beautiful things is corrupt without being elegant, which is a defect. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are cultivated people. For them there is hope.
They are the chosen ones, and in their case beautiful things mean only beauty.
There are no moral or immoral books.
Books are either well or badly written. That is all.
The century's aversion to realism is Caliban's rage at seeing his face in the mirror.
The century's aversion to romanticism is Caliban's rage at not seeing his face in the mirror.
The moral life of man is one of the subjects of the artist, but the morality of art is to make perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist wants to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.
The artist does not have moral preferences. An artist's moral preference is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
No artist is morbid. The artist is capable of expressing anything. Thought and language are the instruments of the artist's art.
Vice and virtue are the artist's materials. From the point of view of form, the model of all the arts is the musician's art. From the point of view of feeling, the model is the talent of the actor.
All art is both superficial and symbolic.
Those who go deeper, without being satisfied with the surface, expose themselves to the consequences.
Those who penetrate the symbol expose themselves to the consequences.
What art really reflects is the viewer, not life.
The diversity of opinions about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and alive. When critics disagree, the artist agrees with himself.
A man can be forgiven for doing something useful as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for doing something useless is to admire it infinitely.
All art is utterly useless.
On November 30, 1900, Oscar Wilde died in Paris, at the Hotel d'Alsace - 13, rue de Beaux Arts - where he had been staying for some time: alone, burdened with debts, forgotten, desperate, physically and mentally exhausted, incurably ill? They say he died while drinking a glass of champagne. What lies are told about great men by dressing them up as dandies! What dignity to die human, too human...No?
I am absolutely certain that if the resurrected Oscar Wilde had accompanied us to Jorge Marín's home studio on that sunny winter-spring day, he would have admired it and counted it among his own. He would even have offered to write a text for his next exhibition at Casa Lamm. I am more shy, or rather more patient and cautious, like Baltasso. Patient and prudent, as Baltasar Gracian advised. I like to watch and listen in silence at first, getting lost in myself and then getting excited and flowing euphorically and passionately. I ask enough questions, I answer half-heartedly, to some extent hermetically, and then I pour myself out in my writings and literatures, incontinently, sometimes excessively. But I do it with sense and intention, at least that's what I try to do when I write about art, about the works of this or that artist that, for whatever reason, I'm interested in interpreting. I do not like to compose stories that do not correspond in some way to the objects of my evocations, nor do I like to waste words that lack intention, I confess. Everything I have written so far has been dedicated to Jorge Marín, to his works, although I have hardly mentioned him, or even referred specifically and individually to his sculptures...
Jorge gave me a list of the works to be exhibited at Casa Lamm, grouped according to certain formal references: "Figures on Spheres", "Horsemen, Horses", "Fractions", "Scales", "Cliff Divers", "Rafts", "Tightrope Walkers on Cubes"... and also a list of their titles with some significant evocations of their symbolism: "Angel Persélidas", "Kneeling Angel", "Garuda", "Victory (broken, kneeling) on Raft"... "Archer", "Gymnast", "Mermaid", "Flyer", "Surfer".... I thank Jorge for his help in guiding me with these lists through the puzzle of his character sculptures, but I could not resist the temptation to try other groupings as soon as I left his studio, to follow other threads for my interpretations, those of their symbolic iconography, for example, their differential attributes: masks, wings, naked bodies, men-women, boats, horses, bows....
I admit that I like to read the classics, especially those authors and books that have a didactic, classificatory, explanatory purpose, ancient treatises full of ancient wisdom, full of eloquent symbols or other apparently hermetic and obscure ones; yes, those books and authors that some people consider to be erudite, old-fashioned, irrational and, of course, totally unsuitable for our modern life, allegedly functionalist and formally pseudo-minimalist.... And among all of them, I confess my fondness for the Treatise on Painting by Leonardo da Vinci - actually a compilation by his disciple, heir to his manuscripts, Francesco Melzi, who compiled (with some notable errors) the enormous mass of writings and drawings that the brilliant "Master of Painting" Leonardo da Vinci had created on painting. The same thing happened to Dürer, who failed to publish his book on painting...
Leonardo da Vinci, in his Treatise on Painting, is actually creating a new way of interpreting the "dignity" of what is represented and how it is represented. Leonardo points out that "the ancient painters, when they had to paint a king, if he had some defect in his face, always represented him with the greatest resemblance they could, but they did not put the deformity in, but corrected it as much as possible. This modesty and decency should be observed in a history painting, discarding or co-existing with everything that tastes of obscenity. Finally, as I have already said, the greatest care must be taken not to repeat the gesture or posture of one figure in another. And in order that those who look at the painting may be most attentive, it is necessary that the inanimate figures which it contains should seem to be alive and to express the affections of their souls; for it is the most natural thing to cry with those who cry, to laugh with those who laugh, and to sympathize with those who lament, because of the great power which the likeness has for us". .... He went on to dogmatize that "the figures in a painting should have moderate movements, pleasant and appropriate to what is represented; the maidens should have a modest and decorous posture, and with gallantry and simplicity in their ornaments, appropriate to their age; their attitude should be more quiet and calm than excited. Homer, always followed by Zeuxis, was of the opinion that women should always be painted with the greatest beauty; young men with light and joyful movements, with signs of manly and strenuous spirit; men will show more firmness in their movements, their posture should be beautiful and ready to handle their arms with ease; elderly people will show signs of the heaviness and slowness of their bodies, the tired posture, so that they not only support themselves equally on both feet, but also support themselves with their hands on something else. Finally, all the movements of the body must be linked to the affections of the spirit that one wants to represent, always maintaining the dignity that each figure should have. It is also necessary that the faces express with the greatest vehemence the strongest passions of the spirit" ....
I am sure that Jorge Marín is as interested as I am in Leonardo's timeless ideas and advice. How suggestive are these reflections of Leonardo to explain and explain to me why people become characters at a certain moment - these sculptures, for example - and why we interpret them as archetypes, endowed with a transcendent symbolism..... Dignity, decorum, and certainly prudence, Leonardo demanded of the representations of painting, and by extension of all art, of the artists. Let us not forget that "decorum" comes from the Latin "decere": to be suitable, to be due, to be right for someone, to be convenient, to be appropriate, to be honest... - from which words such as decent, indecent, decorate, decorate, dignified, as well as decorum and decorate, are derived. Of course, I see no greater dignity and decency than in those who are prudent and practice the art of prudence and patience, for example in art, and who work humbly in their things, without caring about fashions or hegemonic trends, even more so in these times of post-contemporaneity, after the definitive collapse of the "great truths" of modern and postmodern art, their differential strategies... Jorge Marín seems to me to be a post-contemporary artist, he carries his loneliness and self-absorption with absolute dignity and decency, he represents them without shame in his heroic, naked figures, barely disguised by masks and loincloths...
For me there are beautiful masks; they are not only instruments to hide ugliness... Kierkegaard said that ugliness is a form of communication and it helps us to recover the reality of here and now. Naked ugliness speaks for itself of the grotesque, of what is ridiculous, of simulacra, in the human and social... of our delicious or macabre, mean or sublime, subtle or coarse stories, of our big lies and small truths... I do not think that Jorge Marín tries with his masks to evoke reality or hide it; I do not think he is interested in these realist exercises as Oscar Wilde was not interested in them either. Rather, I think we can interpret this scenography of masked and disguised characters with their wings as a pure representation of nihilism, of the loss of sense of values, as Nietzsche would define it: "What does nihilism mean: that supreme values have lost their value. The goal is missing, the answer to the why is missing"... Does this intuition about the lack of values have something to do with the abandonment of the path of truth, of beauty, in today's art? The appearance of the mask is not the opposite of truth, but its expression. What appears --the surface-- has a metaphysical depth in art, it is not just a mere formal appearance.
For Nietzsche, art was a "religion of appearance. Art does not want to impose its limitations, it does not want to "know" or "direct"; it only wants things, each and every one of them, to be able to be.... Art stops copying the world in order to become a "model for life" and stops copying the world in order to become a "model for life". Art is the anti-nihilistic force par excellence, it is the "will to celebrate" that endlessly stimulates life. Unlike religion, which revolves around "devotion", art inspires "creation"...
What is hidden behind the masks of Jorge Marin's sculptures? What do his heroic, deified figures represent, proclaim? I can think of no other answer than melancholy... Everyone knows that the word "person" comes from Latin and originally meant "theatrical mask". Most of Jorge Marín's characters wear his mask, or at least evoke it. Jorge recognizes that it is possible that they are sad, or that they hide their sadness under the mask... I don't think it's sadness, Jorge, it's melancholy...
But what melancholy, Jorge? For the past, for its canonical truths and certainties, for its ideal beauty? Or the one Aristotle wondered about: "Why are all exceptional men melancholy? "... The philosophers and writers of classical Greece understood by "melancholy" the condition of those people who suffered from mood swings towards both euphoria (or mania) and depression; what Kraepelin in modern times would somehow call "manic-depressive psychosis" and more recently, almost at the end of the 20th century, "bipolar disease". The German psychiatrist Hubertus Tellenbach based much of his revolutionary theory of depressive illness both on Greek distinctions and on descriptions of their personality traits by melancholic creators--artists, philosophers, writers--and their characters. For Tellenbach, melancholy consists in the failure of the capacity to transcend the creative work: "Melancholia is to be dominated by the agonizing feeling of not being able to free one's faculties (from a death of imprisonment)"... For her part, Kay R. Jamison, in an exhaustive and recent study on the subject, affirms that a large part of the geniuses of literature, painting and music were manic-depressive or suffered from at least one major depression. Her study is based on the biographies of these geniuses as well as on some genetic antecedents. The cases she has studied most extensively are Lord Byron, Robert Schumann, Hermann Melville, Vincent van Gogh, and Ernest Hemingway -- to which should be added, among other genius creators, Baudelaire and Rilke, and the philosophers Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. There is no doubt that these figures of universal culture suffered from some serious mental illness, most likely bipolar, and almost all of them had hereditary antecedents.
Tellenbech introduces a very interesting concept, the German word "Schwermut," a term that defines a peculiar state of melancholy. An example of this could be the philosopher Kierkegaard, who described his depression in these words: "I am so depressed and devoid of joy that not only do I have nothing to satisfy my soul, but I cannot even imagine what could satisfy it. Nietzsche also uses the German term "schwermütig" several times, which is derived from the adjective "schewer," meaning heavy. It is interesting to relate this theme to the so-called "spirit of heaviness" that plagues Zarathustra. The spirit of heaviness would be the genius of other people's values, while Zarathustra invites us to "bear" ourselves, to "love" ourselves. In German, melancholy is also called "Melancholie," a term Nietzsche used at many points in his work. In Baudelaire's work, "spleen" - "Quand le ciel bas et lourd pèse comme un couvercle" - took on a central role, resembling the German and Nietzschean "Schwermut" in many ways: "Spleen" will be the vital listlessness that afflicts the inhabitant of the big cities, the disease of modernity... Is spleen what afflicts your masked characters, Jorge?
Whenever I think and write about aesthetic melancholia, I can't help thinking of Berlin, a beautiful city that has always been privileged by art and artistic creation, by writers, philosophers, musicians, actors, visual artists, etc. Berlin was and is a city of art and great artists, that is to say, a melancholic city. Berlin represents for me in many ways the ideas that I have been unpacking about melancholy, both in its meanings as "melancholy" and, above all, as "sadness." .... And not only because of its historical and current condition as a refuge for artists and a city conducive to creation, but also because of its concordance and exact correspondence with many of the melancholic conditions I have mentioned above: A city of almost successive depressions and euphorias, a city that romantically looks to the past to recreate itself and search for the thread of its hope, a phoenix rising from its ashes -and at the same time an allegory of Sisyphus-, a city of ruins and emptiness that it tries to fill with history, culture, art, almost archaeological restorations, melancholic images? An indolent and hardly productive city from the point of view of the German industrial tradition, a city of large parks and melancholy promenades, an endearing, gentle, self-absorbed city...
It is strange, to say the least, that when I think of Berlin, of the melancholy of Jorge Marín's masked figures, especially the winged ones, I immediately recall some sequences from one of my favorite movies: Cielo sobre Berlín -also known in Spanish as Las alas del deseo-, a moving and disturbing film directed by Win Wenders in 1987. Two angels-Damiel and Cassiel-look out over Berlin from the heights of their "golden angel"-erroneously interpreting as an "angel" the figure of Nike that crowns the Victory Column in Berlin's Tiergarten, a mistake similar to that made by the Mexicans with their own Angel of Independence in the Glorieta of the Paseo de La Reforma, in reality a magnificent representation also of the goddess Nike, the Victory, sculpted by Enrico Alciati. Wenders' angels are invisible to people, they can neither make themselves known nor change their fate, they can only instill in them the will to live... Cassiel, unhappy with his naked immortality, wants to become human, to feel "too human", to experience life - absolutely convinced after falling in love with a circus trapeze artist - Marion - and learning about the example of another angel - Peter Falk - who had preceded him in his decision to become mortal... Are these coincidences, Jorge? Does the melancholy of your angels come from their immortality as artistic figures, from their representational state as angels? Are they angels or demons?
Of course, not all winged beings have to be angels or demons. Mythologies provide us with numerous examples of winged beings. For example, the Hindu Garudá referred to by Jorge Marín in some of his titles, a gigantic anthropomorphic divinity with wings and an eagle's beak, messenger of the gods, Vishnu's mount, enemy of the serpents, also the symbolic divinities, their most terrible predator... As in the case of your angels, Jorge, does this Garudá have anything to do with Mexican symbolisms? Is it just a coincidence, a mirage? And the masks with eagle or hummingbird beaks? Are you referring to Ehecatl, the wind god of Aztec mythology, one of the manifestations or avatars of Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent, from which he derives his name and multiple powers as Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl? Does he represent something else, Jorge? Love, perhaps? --Ehécatle fell in love with a young human girl, Mayáhuel, and for this reason he endowed mankind with the virtue of love, so that she could reciprocate his passion... Oh, these gods in love...
In all mythologies there are gods who fall in love with men. For example, Zeus, the father god of the Greeks, is in love and obsessed with the most beautiful and naive girls of humanity-Leda, for example-and with young men of extraordinary grace and beauty, such as the Trojan Ganymede. At this point in our symbolic interpretation, nothing is accidental, nor can it be called mere coincidence. Ganymede is kidnapped by Zeus, transformed into an eagle, and brought to Mount Olympus to become his lover and cupbearer to the gods, who all celebrate, fascinated by the young man's beauty - except Hera, the "legitimate" wife of Zeus, so often despised and betrayed... Oh, how delightful these stories of gods in the image and likeness of men, their creators and "theographers". How is it that no one has ever thought of writing soap opera scripts with such precedents? Fortunately, there are intelligent and sensitive artists like Jorge Marín, who remind us of them and evoke them with their "polysemic" creatures, hidden but not hidden in their sculptural fables, disguised with only a mask and some prop wings. Ah... I forgot... And why not Daedalus or his son Icarus, both winged men, but with artificial wings, flying machines? Daedalus, architect of the Labyrinth of Crete, made wings of wax and feathers for himself and his son so that they could escape the prison in which King Minos had imprisoned them. Daedalus' invention proved effective; father and son were able to leave their prison and fly to freedom... But an unexpected tragedy occurred: young Icarus, thrilled by his newfound ability to fly, recklessly soared toward the sun - which his father had warned him was dangerous because the heat would melt the wax and loosen the feathers... Icarus plunged into the sea from the heights of his desire, the vanity of his unconscious pride... In some ways Icarus, though naive, is a precedent for the fallen angel, that favorite angel of divinity who is later cursed and, as Milton sings in his Paradise Lost, "for his pride he falls, cast out of heaven with all his hosts of rebellious angels, never to return"...
Where do your winged beings look, George, so absorbed in their contemplation? To the empyrean, like Milton's fallen angel? --Or are they like winged daffodils, melancholy in love? --In the most popular version of the myth, Narcissus observes himself in the watery mirror, believing himself to be another, and sees that this other in turn observes him and falls in love with him. But there is another, older version of the myth that Pausanias writes about: Narcissus had a sister who died drowned in a lake. His love for her was so great that every evening he went to the lake to comfort himself with her memory. One day, thanks to certain reflective conditions of the water's mirror, he thought he saw someone on the mirrored surface... It was his beloved sister! who seemed to be emerging from the waters of the lake... Narcissus spoke to her, it even seemed that she answered him by moving her lips even in silence... One of the versions says that Narcissus died of drowning when he threw himself into the lake to try to free his sister from the prison of the lake; another says that Narcissus returned to the lake every afternoon to see if the miracle of his sister's apparition would be repeated. What Narcissus didn't know was that he and his sister were twins...
Brotherly love, compassion and empathy, sentimental melancholy, what do mirrors teach us? I believe that Jorge Marín's mirrors, his works that look at and contemplate themselves in mirrors, do not do so out of simple narcissism (in its most conventional sense), but for other reasons, with other intentions. Perhaps the versions rescued by Pausanias give us the key, the meaning of the supposed mirrored self-absorption... Our perception of the world requires a spectator to authenticate it, and with it all our meanings, impregnated with subjective experiences and "experiences-with-others"... The "other", the "others", being in the same world as me, "incarnating" it as me, become my accomplices, even an extension of myself, to perceive the complexity of the world. I, the perceiver, am an "extended" in others, through others-this is nothing more or less than what we experience in the mirror when we feel ourselves multiplied next to Jorge's sculptures... This is what the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty was referring to when, starting from the study of perception, he realized that one's own body is something more than a thing, something more than an object to be studied by science; it is also a permanent condition of existence...
For Merleau-Ponty, "perception" is something alive - beyond the purely physiological and sensory - through which man is in constant relationship with what is perceived and with others. The philosopher affirms that sensibility is the product of a certain attitude of curiosity or observation, a questioning of "what exactly am I seeing", a questioning of myself "in others", rather than leaving myself to the unique response of my senses... By perceiving, I also question my senses, which are transformed into my existential being in each situation. The "situation" is the cog of every human relationship with space, so we must understand every experience of my being with "the other" as an always spatial action. To the extent that space is thus constructed with "the other" on a daily basis, "my being in the world with others" is woven out of "threads" of perception that are continuously interwoven...
This is what I have tried to do in this long essay on the work of Jorge Marín, telling my experiences, confessing my evocations. Language, of course, is also an element of exchange through which we perceive and share the world, like our own body... Jorge speaks through his works, his volumes and his images; I do it with words that want to be reflections of them... The readers reflect them... The readers reflect them.
The readers reflect in their pupils, in their convex mirrors, my words and Jorge Marín's sculptures... All of us - the artist, his creatures, his spectators, me, his interpreter - are happily involved in this art party. Something as decidedly nihilistic, paradoxical as it may seem. Sharing the act of creating meanings, significations, even if they are subjective, diffuse, partial, intuitive, is an act of love as well as of compassion... Desire and melancholy in isostatic equilibrium... The phoenix of imagination is reborn from the ashes... Ah, the miracle of art... making visible what was previously invisible... What else?
Mexico City, January 2010