Sala Borrón
Oviedo
A project of COMISSION for LP PROJECTS,
NEW YORK, 2008.
Notes about an identity used during the era of the hyperlink and the mirage.
In The Fight Club, David Fincher, a sequence of the film invites us to simplify human relationships in small doses compartmentalized in minimum time and tiny servings of activities and things like coffee or a plate of pasta. “” When society puts us in a temporary gap in which everything will blend and is minimized as “dose”, when everything is a simulacrum of the real thing, it is interesting to find an artist as Amalia Ulman’s analytical work. Cross research tells us where is heading a part of youth and, therefore, a part of society on which, supposedly, we have set up the fabric of the future. That continuous phase of the fake, that life of ferocious consumption and its paradoxes, as well as mirages that it generates, give shape to the work of this young artist.
The work of Amalia Ulman glides by spaces ranging from initiatory ritual symbolic Father daughter to the digital classification of deconstructed landscape Weeping Mountain piercing or manipulation of the trademark in the critical twist Navy ALPACA wool poncho. His work responds to an investigation formal beginning in its passage through the St. Martins School of Arts in London and continues today in this difficult exercise which is the be another, as mapping a time in which perhaps have to speak of the moment (post) internet, the traveller or the passer-by who feels in many cases as a foreigner. It is perhaps the only one who knows what is the demolition Berger-style in a history of the street. In the video Ladder Climber, Ulman gives us as a visual metaphor to women climbing, that fight that day wins with a huge effort. Who has practiced climbing, know that is not the same to open a route that go back somewhere. Also this image might suggest “climbing”, that contemporary exercise of climbing.
TRAFALUC is not only the title of the project of Amalia, also is the name of one of the brands of Inditex, that great mons – play of sales. Yesterday, giving a tour of one Zara either, I went into its universe watching fascinated as competition within the own shops and its own brands is fierce (Zara woman, Zara basic, Trafaluc and Studio) TRAFALUC area is aimed at girls aged between 16 and 22 years. There are cheap things, clothes and accessories that are no doubt shot of the Haute Couture. It is a fake, a windfall of Zara based in the reproduction chain of a few models very similar to the ready-to-wear brands.
Use terms that respond to the own Thu-go of the fiercest consumerism continues to be a critical nod towards the own capital, but also the most effective way of dealing with the loss of identity that generate the mass media, the already-much-touted globalization and the cai – gives a system that today, more than ever, falls apart at times. When objects are the hallmarks of a gru-social po who neither knows where it is going not even intended it, art can still be a raft of oil. Weave the sculpture based on thongs spider’s Web is a risky approach. Accessories shops smell – make no mistake – sucks to feather and plastic, seems that there there is no place for art. Music techno prints a must do “whatever it takes”, but do it fast: consume, purchase, spend. It is the trans – formation of the consumerist dreams in with – sumidor of hope. The generation of the Ni Ni has arrived. Perhaps we are shining a generation installed in the drill, “it is no longer of imitation or repetition, in – even or parody, but an impersonation of the real by the signs of the real, i.e. of an operation of deterrence of all real by its dual operational process, machine Indo – le reproductive, programmatic, impeccable, offering all the signs of the real and”, short – circuit, all their adventures “1.
The collective PSJM sensed a few years ago with its Marx project that the art and “fashion” can be ideological and that manipulation of the genuine emancipation as supposedly does not stop being another twist of the system. Amalia Ulman knows that working with the fragile identity of adolescence not only has to be ideology, also serves as a practice of sociological analysis (artistic) and makes us a simultaneously stark and very accurate portrait of what is happening or rather what “happens”. Because art has the ability to slip – is for narrow spaces; in transit where it seems that there is nothing interesting, but don-of suddenly appears. Other artists have approached the youth and adolescence, such as Cristina Llanos or Covadonga Macías and studying the parameters of the formation of personality and emotional space. In the case of Amalia Ulman appears a difference in perspective that gives belonging to the pro-pia generation that analyzes. In addition, Ulman makes a stark criticism of how a generation can be manipulated in all respects, as they think that they don’t belong to the social class from which arise. It is definitely an “illusion of class”. The Mirage he referred to Pierre Bourdieu is transform repression in preferences and make the habit of virtue. That is, the taste of need or taste of luxury and not a strong income. It is “habitus that may have what you like that like what you have, this is, the pro-tender mercies which are in fact attributed in the distributions and law are assigned in the headdings” 2.
Amalia Ulman TRAFALUC project an exercise interesting to understand a generational segment that, despite lack of place, struggles to find it. In these strange times which we live, where the deep analysis feature with dropper, appears the work of Ullman as a detailed analysis. And it is not only a question of scratch on the top layers to see what happens. His work is based on a deep exploration, knowing that it is important to leave the space that, by nature, they deserve.
1-Baudrillard, Jean, culture and simulacrum, Kairos, Barcelona, 1978, p. 6.
2-Bourdieu, Pierre, distinction. Criterion and social bases of taste, Taurus, Mexico, 2002, p. 174.