Art market review

 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 Markets of Las Flores de Katia and of the Barquisimeto. Some sections, like a stall of herbal and magical potions, with its rish display of medicinal bottles, votive images and dried curative plants are accurated recreations. Others, including a display of ladies dresses, proffer inventory borrowed from the Venezuelan sellers. Some of the protective plastic bags in this section are empty, representing, Abdel Hernandez San Juan said, a feminist critique of the patriarcal and machism institutions. Unlike most art installations, which maintain and even insist on dividing the observer from that which is observed, The Market envelops the viewer to erase those boundaries.

Set in the sunken sculpture court behind Rice University’s Sewall Hall, The Market has boundaries defined by a plastic skin, painted like parchment and discolored by additional markings and weather. The thin permeable material serves as both container and carrier of meaning. The floor is made from uneven, scarred Wood boards that shift and creak under visitor’s feet. The ceiling, like the outlining walls, is plastic, with clotheslines, ropes and other elements criss crossing it in an echo of the improvised shelters of an open air affair. Its power resides in the fact that sifted through an artist’s eye, this re-created environment is tough and true.

There ‘s no need for embellishment, for fiction. Ways to perceive and understand the enclosed world become apparent the minute the threshold is crossed and the visitor is encased in its plastic wrap. Here are narrows aisles crowded with tint stalls, the noise of a market reproduced faithfully and echoing from a hidden boom box to great effect, the cackling of a live hen, and the old sounds made on the plastic sheeting by falling rain or a breeze, or another visitor rustling past. More important the deceptive modesty of the gods and their presentation beighten awareness of their singular—and collective contents and meaning. Markets are places where things are bought and sold.

Historically they’ve also functioned as communal spaces, where social and civic nourishment could be had. And markets serve as metaphors for the way one culture looks at another. The installation aims to soften, if not entirely dissolve that sense of “otherness”. Entering this space consecrated by both authors at the behest of their collaborators from the Caracas Markets, the visitor bridgest tat abyss and becomes one with the “other” represented here. Unlike most art installations which maintain and even insist on dividing the observer from that which is observated, The Market envelops the viewer to erase those boundaries to.

La obra es la presentación final de las lectures y la serie de exposiciones discutidas aquí en Rice University y en Houston por Abdel Hernandez San Juan, co-sponsored por la Facultad de Antropología de la Universidad de Rice y la Fundación Transart de Houston. The Market from Here: An Installation by Abdel Hernandez San Juan and Fernando Calzadilla, Where, Sculpture Court at Sewall Hall, Rice University, entrance 1 off main street, 713-5242289 when-5-8:30 p.m. Mondays-Saturdays. Through April, 1997, photos E. Joseph Deering/Chronicle, The Houston Chronicle, Section D, April 5, 1997, Houston Lifestyle and Entertainment, Art Review, Pp 1D-5