a couple of days before I found out the crosshatch of a sculpture RA that was in front of the Museum of fine arts, Federico Assler. I googled images and really had no idea of the work, its shape, sense. I had to consult with the contemporary Oracle (google) who was the Lord. In my head was the stupidity that was the Formula E through the streets of downtown Santiago. The event, along with endemic bad taste nut and the appropriation of the space of all, had crowned his step for our country with rupture, which is perhaps the most representative work of our city: “United in glory and in the death” of Rebeca Matte which was not yet answer.
To see their references, I remembered that years ago I saw one of his works at the waterfront of conception and another against the currency, in what is today known as “Plaza de la Ciudadanía”: that piece of grass surrounded by railings of containment, with linear paths of white tile in the aesthetic of mall that, like a watery modernism than under the umbrella of the dogma of simplicity and function, it hides its infertile concept. But that’s another story. I had seen him there. A piece of cement (we now know it’s concrete), which varied their tracks and created a set of staggered continuities, that after passing through the first impression of coarseness, opened to the eye a message of continuous repetitive but not identical Majesty and miracle of stand up, stand.
I do not think that this reflection – now that I write it – have date in that experience, or that work exclusively, I clarify. Nostalgia and time, make that you founded far impressions.
I met the work even more scratch from what he read in the press, the originality of the “cool” (perfectly pointed) passed through the fine arts in phosphorescent yellow in previous days, were other spellings, indecipherable to me, by both sides in a less spectacular, but just as evil red. In that I look at and by my side is Federico Assler (who did not know) and Francisca Delano, also artist, his companion. I looked at him directly to the face from up close and in an instant I could take all the grooves that inhabited it, constricted, angry. His eyes contained the millimetre particle of moisture that holds the human psyche between hatred alive and crying. Enough condensation in its final form, the tear, so that scaffolding of securities and will that floods in their time limits, collapsed. But Federico wasn’t there for that, was a day of decisions.
But look what they have done man by God! -Repeatedly said, the work left her there a year ago, almost exact. Francisca, while shared rage that it meant a damaged work, she was calm, warm irony. He told me that he had a harmless in front of the Museum, they were about to celebrate his first birthday since they brought it. Unlike that had placed against the currency, which had made them pass through that mud administrative leguleyo of which we are so addicted to bread or wine, with the authorization of the institution and a sober ceremony, had left it there to live their fate. Someone may say that he does not have all the paperwork and administrative safeguards, both municipal of quartermaster, as well as proper coordination with the brand new institutions of Arts and cultures, sealed their fate. Well, days later, reopened the works of Rebecca Matte, with its pomp and deploy communications, with its decrees and triple certifications but be archived on a shelf in the Office A, B and C, it would face the same fate.
About it that seven October a few drops of this petty rain City baptized it, and the Sun greeted her every day, dropping its light so sculpture played with his shadow. The work has a elefantiasico, rinoceróntico, clumsy and solid appearance. It seems an animal monumental lost in the city, facing the parque forestal, static, kneading the idea that in this Green destination where your view is lost, there is some of it found. Rough back which gives the Museum, if one observes it well, is not a contempt, is only a gesture “that is not my place,” also could be your guardian why not?. It has both infantile and monstrous. His force the compacts and the express concrete, is a technical wonder – the idea that sustains it, the distribution of its forms-, as a constant question, would there be? What need had to deliver to the vast stream of stock, one more? He wondered how Borges what is the need for a this or that more the sum of beings that populate the world? These are not questions to answer at that moment, I look to Federico and I think that perhaps spitting in the face would have been less tortious the show which is witness at that time. It is not the time to talk about how the urban heritage live a constant affront, that there is no camera, decrees or police officers who can give you solution, having criminal optimism with which these destructions faced more than rhetoric to cash. Is not exclusive of his work, that the perjury that have made it concentrates all the banality and contempt you can imagine, but that is no different to the destination of Santiago, Concepción, Linares or Valparaíso, where the veneer, that spelling illegitimate daughter of the yanaconismo He insists be the scar on the face, metastasis that scale the hills accusing a city that lives its decline intoxicated in the perfume of his myth.
tag, graffiti, scratch, veneer, as all human work, can and aspires to be a vehicle, symbol of the author, expresses his world. They don’t ask to be anonymous, but irrastreable. It is also a disease, chaos and subversion.
The mural has its ethics, even though the black skimmer is not in the same category as the creator, both move in the dynamics of the outside, in the agora, “urban culture”. It is already common walls or surfaces of our city (in good time), will become the new canvas in which lives the art in our days, away from the dictatorship of the cool with their bland circuit of galleries and patronages, curatorias and aperol. They understand it, it is the unspoken understanding of the tribe, is the taboo that founded them: “ape does not kill ape”. Doing so is to show the vileness, abjection as action engine, is to make explicit the mediocrity that defines them. Why the sculptures do not share the same ethics, are expelled in the parentheses of the untouchable? Is it a message, an affront? Units and his creations daughters institutions helpful to power, the capital, to taste, are threatened, their facades and sacred stones, their symbols and their uses, whimsical styling for creation, the canon against which we disclose, fire that we outbursts you? do the gods of symmetry, abstraction and the spatial sensitivity, and that hypocritical distance that have adorned with his concept of respect, “I prefer chaos to this reality as charcha”, as said Redoles? I have no idea.
francisca told me that in 78 they had done something similar in Madrid, at the Museo del Prado. They had caught one of the works it had carried and installed opposite the Museum, inaugurating it secretly, as an act of defiance and courage, ego and detachment. Perhaps all that together. “No one lights a lamp to hide it, or to put it under a drawer. “Quite the opposite: puts in a high place, so let it shine to all who come in the House” (Luke 11:33) after note was even more scratched than previous days we could talk a moment, then came the restorers. It said to feel like in an operating room, in intensive treatment. The news of the specialists were favorable, the work could be restored even if they had to take it to another site. Federico spoke of the South, I think that it named Chiloé.
It was lunch and a small army of office workers and passers-by observe the scene, I wouldn’t say shocked or injured. Perhaps that increased the pain of Federico, indifference.
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