THE
SINGULAR AND THE MULTIPLE
Román Gubern
ToMarisa González
from Román Gubern
The evolution of the Fine Arts in the last three decades of the 20th
century is inseparably linked to the accelerated evolution of technology
in both the context of its hardware and its software.
The eruption of
the polaroid camera, the video, the photocopier, the laser, the computer
and the digital image has produced an earthquake in the creative strategies
of the visual arts, waiting for the still headstrong holography to end
up joining the new panoply of technology-based arts of our times.
If the invention of the perspective in the Quattrocento was the fruit
of including the laws of geometry, optics, and mathematics in the art
of painting, the new technologizing of art is the result above all of
the manipulation of light by the fancy wares representing the paradigms
of electronics and photonics. In a slightly hurried and simplifying
way the new plastic arts form is classified as digital art, or multimedia,
or multidisciplinary, or tehcnoart. None of these categorizations is
satisfactory in the case of Marisa González, an artist that has
travelled from electrography to videography, and photographic sequences,
and whose starting point was the theoretical-practical matrix offered
by the Generative Systems in which she was educated during her time
in Chicago. Though the concept of digital art, which carries within
it the principle of discontinuity, reaches almost all provinces of contemporary
Fine Arts.
The concept of generative systems, which would have greatly pleased
Walter Benjamin who reflected upon technical reproduction as a form
of aesethetic creation, is the foundation of Marisa González´s
strategies which are influenced by her early musical formation and evidenced
in her serial photographic structures whose metamorphism is not very
distant from that of musical sequences. This is as far, therefore, as
the principle of discontinuity reaches, worked on and mastered by the
artist through the use of analogical images. We cannot forget that in
digital culture discontinuity exists to be disguised and hidden from
the observer´s eye in order to effect with this hiding the astonishing
transformation of its images. Marisa González does the same using,
however, as artistic material analogical images, images which have built
up a century and a half of visual culture.
In the Heraclitic tradition, art involving sequentiality and change
have, as an added effect, a pedagogical and cognitive value since they
cause us to capture something which is part of the reality that surrounds
us and that sometimes slips away unnoticed right before our eyes. Between
the cronophotography of Marey and the iconic sequences of Marisa González
more than a century has passed, a panopticon century characterized by
its iconic prodigality. In this tradition of modernness, in which the
singular is multiple, we must include the production of this artist
from Bilbao whose work we can now admire in this exhibition.
Gubern, Román:
Professor of Audiovisual Communication and writer.
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