Santiago Cucullu: Wiyya to Hell Owwa That
The commonplace that artists are the last people one should consult about their work is largely untrue. Most artists have a pretty good idea of what they’re doing–but artists’ statements are often unilluminating, and sometimes hilariously pretentious. Two exhibits well worth seeing are accompanied by statements that diverge wildly from one’s experience of the work.
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A press release from the Julia Friedman Gallery offers a quote from Santiago Cucullu about how his work “revolves around a historically marginal event, sometimes real and often embellished to include my own personal history.” He also writes that the imagery in his show–12 works, including wall drawings, watercolors, and installations–comes from “street barricades that spring up during moments of civil unrest,” which “offer evidence of controls and resistance.” And one watercolor, From Works to Dream Romance, clearly shows a man standing next to a low barrier apparently burning; we also see an upended tire in the foreground and a larger maze of color that might be another barricade. More impressive than any political reference, however, is the characteristic gentleness of the watercolors and the way three areas of color float in empty white space. The effect is less of a “blocking of flows,” in Cucullu’s words, than of a well-integrated design.
There’s nothing wrong with an exhibit that leaves some loose ends–in fact part of what’s interesting here is the disjunction between Cucullu’s apparent intent and the works’ effects. The exhibit feels somewhat improvisational–“drawings” made of thin strips of contact paper against the white gallery walls suggest a playful tentativeness rather than revealed truth. But it seems odd for Cucullu to link his modest suggestiveness with the certitude of those willing to use violence to overthrow governments.
The title refers to a legendary 1972 Vito Acconci work, Seedbed, in which he lay hidden under a ramp he built in a New York gallery and masturbated while whispering his fantasies into a microphone. In his statement LaBelle suggests that his restaging of Acconci’s work makes the ramp the “main character” and a “social space.” He goes on to argue that his ramp constitutes “an idiosyncratic form” that “diagonally cuts across and splits space,” opposing the “Modernist tendency of straight lines.” But his ramp is itself made up of straight lines, and forming triangles and splitting space are not exactly foreign to modernism. More to the point, though his installation–which he calls “architecture’s own moment of fantasy”–enlivens the space, ultimately it’s more playful than weighty and theoretical.
