TOTEM AND RESIDUE

(Preliminary notes on Mantos, an exhibition by Alice Wagner Suito)
(Work in progress) 

Gustavo Buntinx 

The radical sense of Mantos, Alice Wagner’s upcoming exhibition, could perhaps be summarized by the minimal but decisive orthographic play on words inscribed into its title. Almost a slip of the tongue, in which, however, a subtle revelation is implied: the complex ambiguity ––the ambivalence–– lurking beneath the banal appearance of certain atavistic iconographies scattered amongst modern everyday objects. Objects all too frequently disregarded for being all too quotidian, utilitarian, even “vulgar”.

Those popular Peruvian blankets, for example, beneath whose routine decoration Wagner perceives a disquieting menagerie of ancestral latencies. Ordinary contemporary cloaks (in Spanish, “mantas”) that unconsciously yearn for the ritual function of ancient sepulchral shrouds (“mantos”): the funerary mantles, the ancestral textiles, often splendid, used by the Andeans to embosom their dead, and to clothe them, and accompany them, in their transition into renewed forms of existence.

A mallki, that crucial Quechua category in which three apparently confronted meanings are condensed: cadaver, fetus, and seed.

A sense of the sacred that has now been fractured, vanquished by our modernity all too profane ––or profaned. Nevertheless, various remains of that lost complexity survive in the anxiety for a certain ornamental over-symbolization that emanates from the bristling furs of these blankets. Remnants of a lost aura retrieved and evinced by the artificer when she translates into broken ceramics the contemporary textile iconography of the tiger, the llama, the condor… But also, to be sure, an updated version of the prehispanic “checkerboard” design. And that of the ominous “tumi”, related to archaic sacrificial practices: a once ritual knife, now transformed by the tourist industry into a decorative token, fully assimilated into the most trivial forms of mass culture. From whence, however, some lingering insinuations of holy terror infiltrate ––and disturb–– the aimless wanderings of our present lives.

 As with the naive paintings often displayed on the mudguards used by interprovincial transport vehicles, we might glimpse in these popular representations a symbolic threshold. The iconic passage, perhaps, between the rural mental landscapes and those of the urban shantytowns that incorporate the peasant migrants into hybrid forms of modernity.

In those transfigurations a certain mythical reverie is still extant, no matter how shattered or torn asunder. Like a residual totemism.

The dislocated afterlife of an anterior psyche. With the added intensity of other reminiscences integrated into the very fabric of these blankets, these cobijas: a Spanish noun that, turned into a verb, also conveys the vital notions of giving cover; providing refuge; offering shelter, love, protection. Unknowingly ––but with keen intuition–– the dictionary of the Real Academia Española thus alludes to certain primordial definitions of art advanced by Martin Heidegger. Radical concepts associated with some of his major philosophical categories: dasein; wohne; sorge.

Being; dwelling; caring.

Essential conditions of existence in which art performs ––performed–– a critical role:  to give home and haven. Sanctuary.

But that cardinal function has now been broken and dispersed. As in the sacrificial crisis theorized on by René Girard and now projected onto the infinite violence of our times.

This intuition may well define one of the distinctive aspects of Wagner’s endeavors. Her work undoubtedly recognizes other intermittent appearances of the popular blanket in Peruvian art (Moico Yaker, Enrique Polanco…). But at the same time she processes that homage through the physical evidences of a trauma.

In their state of deliberate fracture, the principal pieces now exhibited do not illustrate but rather incorporate our grand contemporary breach. The breakdown of myth, of ritual, of the notion of meaning itself. Of sense, even of the sentient. A universal motif made all the more poignant by Wagner’s decision to elaborate on it in a key that is incisively local and current ––post-Andean, so to say. And yet, paradoxically primitive at the same time.

A primordial turn preciously assumed in the precise moment in which the very category of the primordial stumbles. And falters. 

A withering category, but also a mutating one. What these mantles ––these Mantos–– thaumaturgically propose is the transubstantiation of cloth into clay.

A materiality of ancestral prestige that modernity has debased.  And these artworks attempt to redeem by incorporating that symbolic frailness into their factual physical presence. And out of their melancholic breath.

Each of the central pieces now exhibited ostentatiously displays the ruptures that are inevitable in that forced transition of volumes and techniques. And each one of those fractures extols the traces of its repair ––a mending never complete, and for that exact reason all the more expressive.

That rupture, however, is also the breakage of the human condition.
Which is everywhere in agony.
A termination, in existential and historical terms that Wagner redeems in a poetic vein.
But none the less political for it.
And spiritual.

( THE END ).