The market from here, interpretations

  Between Art and Anthropology by Fernando Calzadilla and George E. Marcus Edited by abdel Hernández San juan Introduction (Marcus) By the mid-1990's, I had just about given up hope that the aesthetic issues that were implicated in the so-called Writing Culture critique of anthropology during the 1980's (1) would be developed by anthropologists themselves. Beyond the critique of the authority of ethnographic texts and of the conditions for the production of knowledge in the traditional mise-en-scène of fieldwork, these issues might have defined the ground for rethinking the longstanding forms and practices of anthropological research (the emblematic and defining fieldwork/ethnography paradigm of the discipline) that are so much challenged at present as anthropologists involve themselves with more complicated conditions and objects of inquiry (2). For anthropologists to have explored the aesthetics of inquiry would have required styles of thinking, rhetoric, and practice--keyed ...

  Art Market Review By Patricia Johnson The Market from Here, an installation by Venezuelans Abdel Hernandez San Juan and Fernando Calzadilla, is among the most significant contemporary Works to come our way in many years. It is poised at the crossroads of art and anthropology. The two disciplines, powerful tules for the analysis of culture, are the source as well as the subject of this work, which reproduces and interprets a Caracas marketplace. Walking into the enclosed, cruciform sculpture is not unlike stepping into a diorama, those old fashioned “stages” western Museums once used to add context to artifacts of past lives. But this one is about people here and now. Abdel Hernandez San Juan, art critic, curator and conceptual artist in Caracas and Calzadilla Scenographer, devoted more than three years to the planning research and execution of The Market. Everything in it has meaning. Most of the objects in the installation are those used and sold by the vendors in the Caracas Ma...

Art Editor Commentary By Terrell James Edited by abdel Hernández San Juan The authors I has selected for this issue of Gulf Coast are engaged in the transformative activity in art. Process drives discovery. Image is evoked rather than described. The viewer is offered a direct experience of subjectivity, finding an emphasis on the openness of interpretation and beyond, exploring alternative empathetic-relationships. In exploring subjectivity, memory, time, mapping, the body and text merge as research. Implied is the invitation to “complexion” by the Viewer. In Walter Hopp’s light drawings, apparent accident and incidental mark create an inevitable form. The delicate tracing that result literally are drawn with light on photographic paper as particular and unrepeatable as the immediate gesture that caused it, recording time and the body’s movement. We may name images: twig, cell, cloud, but these things are felt, intuited, not represented. The Light drawings are contained in a slender bo...