British art critic Sally O’ Reilly discusses the work of Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, an artist duo based in Puerto Rico.
'Returning a Sound,' 2004, DVD still.
Amphibious (login-logout) 2004, DVD stills
Notes:
Through their video-based works, Allora and Calzadilla explore ideas of public intervention, site, and the elements of humour and absurdity through performance. In my understanding, their works offer a invitation to speculate at seemingly trivial yet amusing events, while position of the artworks in the gallery pose a larger question that the works contain, inviting the audience to unravel its connotative elements. An exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London presented four video works that explored ideas of disruptions within public areas, notably a scenario where a trumpet is attached to the exhaust pipe of a motorcycle, and driven around by a young man into landscapes consisting of “fenced-off military enclosures, scrub lined roads and ocean coastlines,” blasting out a loud, distinctive noise. This brings to mind the ideas of conducting public interruptions in daily life, much like the work of Belgian artist Francis Alÿs and how work Paradox of Praxis I (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing), 1997 where Alÿs pushed a large block of ice around the streets of Mexico City for nine hours, progressively scaling down until it became a small puddle on the street, and more political works like Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys’s I Like America and America Likes Me, which consisted of Beuys’s spending three consecutive days locked in a New York gallery with a coyote, tentatively observing and interacting with the creature.
However, I find that Allora and Calzadilla’s interventions contain a certain emphasis on the works’ formulation and recognition as artworks rather than political statements, as although their work revolves around a number of dense and uneasy political issues, their conversations with the social terrain carry out foremost as a creative response, “…thereby not simply flagging up issues as subject matter but making them a part of their own methods of generating a work.” Through a more nonchalant - seeming approach to issues, but nevertheless very much a well-used element in their works, the works instead offer the idea of a re-exploration of art-making methods and ways to form dialogues within a society. The works explore how to create meaning and context through inventive methodologies, rather than looking at ways to re-iterate what’s already been said. It offers a place to measure out where art sits in society, outdoors, or within a gallery, and how conversations can occur through these ongoing themes and subject matters.