ESSAY / Los Carpinteros: Dismantling the World

by: Paulo Herkenhoff

Published in Los Carpinteros. Handwork – Constructing the World. Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln 2010.

 

One might well start out by imagining all the things engineered by modern man being perverted by Los Carpinteros until the whole of their work coincides with the disconcerting totality of industrial society itself—or at least with such things as bricks and cities or beds and swimming pools. Yet such a prophecy shall never be fulfilled, for the mordant act of perverting everything in existence could never be accomplished in a subject’s lifetime, even if the subject were a group of artists. This is Los Carpinteros’ doomed and carefully planned project. Faced with the impossibility of constructing a voracious work with regard to a predetermined totality, the artists resolve to establish a lacunary order of things. A process of vulnerability, entropy, and reempowerment of the relationship between form and function shall guide that order. This is interrogative art. What would the emergence of these objects disturb? Contrary to what they appear to be—devices for defamiliarization—they operate only when recognized because it is only then that they are able to attack commodity fetishism. Such is the case of the unproductive truck with its ampersand-shaped tank in Cargo grande | Big Cargo, 2004 [p. xx]. The objects provoke discreet laughter as a way of destabilizing every manner of social utopia and affirming the world as irreconcilable place.

Initially there were three artists in the collective known as Los Carpinteros—Alexandre Arrechea, Marco Castillo, and Dagoberto Rodríguez—the first of whom left the group in 2003. The progress of Los Carpinteros’ international career accelerated around 1995 with solo shows and participation in group exhibitions throughout Europe and in Mexico. Cuban artists had begun to circulate in the preceding decade, partly as a result of the Havana Biennial, which started out as a new perspective for discussing art beyond the north-south model that characterized the Venice and São Paulo biennials and Documenta. Certain international exhibitions had already started qualifying their relationship with Latin America as a process of opening up. According to curator Jean-Hubert Martin, the exhibition Magiciens de la terre (1989) opposed ethnocentric practices in the international art system, opened up possibilities for new intercultural relations, and embraced cultural relativism, a problem that was initially defined by Montaigne in his Essays. Under the curatorship of Jan Hoet, the ninth edition of Documenta (1992) was the first international recurring exhibition in which the curatorial vision effectively encompassed all the continents. Artists themselves began to experience globalization, artistic nomadism, and the transterritoriality of ideas.

In an interview conducted in 1999, when Los Carpinteros had already begun their international trajectory, Dagoberto Rodríguez takes into account the fact that Cuba’s socialist revolution was only forty years old: “All of the recent history of the country is colored by this fact. It’s been very difficult to shed this; it has been something that has marked all Cubans these past 40 years. What was our goal? I don’t know, maybe this will sound odd, but the idea was maybe to forget that past, to put it aside.”¹ For all intents and purposes, Los Carpinteros—along with Carlos Garaicoa, Tania Brugera, Sandra Ramos, Antonio Eligio Fernández (“Tonel”), Ibrahim Miranda Ramos, K-cho, and others—belong to a generation that was born after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Art historian María Magaly Espinosa Delgado believes that the ruptures and continuities of that generation of Cuban artists imply fluctuations, declivities, and routes that are often determined by social milieu. “Visual narrative in Cuba is a narrative of the fragment; the city, exile, utopias, and rituals are fragments,” she concludes.²

The artistic activity of Los Carpinteros began with the end of the cold war, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the establishment of Pax Americana as the basis of “Empire,” as described by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.³ The group was formed in an age of speculation regarding the “end of history,”⁴ the topic raised by Francis Fukuyama in the wake of Hegel, developed by Karl Marx and taken up again by Alexandre Kojève. Its emergence occurred after the consolidation of the prestige of the Havana Biennial, which established a dynamic relationship between Cuba and world art that prioritized ties with peripheral regions. The full, worldwide acceptance of Cuban artists revealed by the biennial was confirmed by the exhibition Kuba O.K.: Aktuelle Kunst aus Kuba at the Stadtische Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf in 1990.

The environment in which Los Carpinteros appeared had already consolidated criticism that was then centered on American and (above all) Cuban culture. The Cuban curator Gerardo Mosquera was the paradigm of a critical approach that learned to keep its distance from the state, maintaining ties with the Cuban environment but becoming part of the international theoretical and curatorial scene. Espinosa Delgado says that Cuban art of the last three decades owes a great deal to Mosquera.⁵ Like the system of objects, art history runs through the corpus of Los Carpinteros like a field of experiments that takes the form of an anxiety-ridden Nietzschean delirium, a political mirage that cannot be reconciled with power.

 

Art History

Certain works in Los Carpinteros’ oeuvre instantly remind us of historic pieces of art from modernism to the present, by artists as disparate as Marcel Duchamp, the Dadaists, surrealist René Magritte, Joseph Beuys, Pop artists Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns, minimalist Carl Andre, and neoconcretist Lygia Clark. Of his education at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA), established in 1976 in Havana, Arrechea has said: “At our school in Cuba, the teachers were focused on seventies Dada in America, and the sixties of course. From Marcel Duchamp to Joseph Beuys exists a line, and we always intersect that line.”⁶ At the ISA, Professor Flavio Garzandia introduced the ideas of North American conceptualism to his students.

Los Carpinteros may also be referenced diffusely to fairly recent Latin American art, as exemplified by the work of Cildo Meireles, Waltercio Caldas, Guillermo Kuitca, Jorge Pardo, Carlos Garaicoa, and Iran do Espírito Santo among others. The output of all these artists is reduced to the condition of stylemes that are devoured and metabolized by Los Carpinteros in a discourse of their own, including the form and material conditions of the sign or rule of their agenda by the signifier. An example would be their drawing Casa suave | Soft House, 2008, neither a reinterpretation nor a citation of Kuitca’s Capitonnée House Plan (1989) but its inclusion in the Cuban duo’s formal vocabulary. With Soft House, Los Carpinteros alluded to a history of softness in contemporary aesthetics in response to materials introduced by artists such as Lygia Clark, Piero Manzoni, and Claes Oldenburg, a way of constituting the signifier with materials from art history.⁷ Ironically, there is a material vocabulary with technical connotations that takes shape based on the concept of styling within the system of industrial objects, in which carpentry and watercolor—as well as chrome metal or industrialized tents—all become material and sign. Los Carpinteros’ discourse does not pretend to conceal the “anxiety of influence” that Harold Bloom conceptualized after Roland Barthes introduced the idea of the death of the author.⁸ Arrechea concludes, “We love Marcel Duchamp. But Marcel doesn’t love us. He is dead—he can’t.”⁹ Los Carpinteros’ scopic regime permeates art history itself as a semiotic source that contaminates gigantic projects like Piscina arena | Arena Pool, 2004 [p. xx], or small objects such as the transformed giant hand grenade in Estuche | Jewelry Case, 1999 [height 225 cm]. Yet melancholy haunts the gaze in the prostrated architecture of Torre acostada | Reclining Tower, 2006 [p. xx]. It is therefore a matter of exploring and contaminating the image repertory of modern art. The transverse relationship between the work of Andy Warhol or that of Cildo Meireles and the procedures of Los Carpinteros may reflect the Cuban artists’ relationship to an agenda that includes pop art and the culture of Latin America.

The work of Los Carpinteros allows for a comparison with several classic moments in the work of Meireles. One conclusive meaning of such a juxtaposition would be to show how in the last few decades Latin American art began to feed on itself, becoming a fundamental source of references for its own dynamic. Yet, like Meireles with regard to Brazil, Los Carpinteros do not debate affirmations of Cuban identity; they construct objects and situations under a regime of political-economic crisis. The Meireles perspective implies understanding the crucial matter of how the concept of value is formed in historical materialism as based on the capitalist experience.

If correlations of any sort may be established between the work of Meireles and that of Los Carpinteros, they are of interest only inasmuch as they qualify interpretation of the duo’s output. Topological distortions—for example, the absurd extension of rubber parts—function as a perversion of the thing in the extravagant group of objects in Meireles’s Rodos (1978) and in Los Carpinteros’ watercolor Patas de rana, final | Flippers, Final, 2009 [p. xx]. Accumulation and the gathering of objects of the same class (nails, knives, and razor blades) resulted in Meireles’s Neutralization through Addition and Opposition (1978). Los Carpinteros’ Carretera de tornillos | Highway of Screws, 2003 [p. xx], possesses an analogous logic. Los Carpinteros’ Rojo | Red, 2009, made of a kerosene lamp and painted metal, might also be seen as a modest tribute to Henri Matisse’s Red Studio (1911) and Alexander Rodchenko’s Pure Red Color (1921) as well as to Meireles’s Redshift (1967/1984). Yet a puddle of red ink lies next to the kerosene lamp, as in Spill / Surrounding, the second part of Redshift. Spill / Surrounding is a tiny bottle that spills much more red ink than it could possibly contain, a metaphor for the limit and power of knowledge. On a more immediate level, Meireles’s work confronted a military dictatorship that seized power in 1964, aiming to realign Brazil with the capitalist system at the cost of state terrorism. The propagative redness of Red allowed interpretation of the disseminated ideological color, revolutionary Cuba’s historical task in Latin America since 1959. The analytic shift of the gaze reveals that the kerosene lamp in Red spills color rather than light. And here light could be an unpretentious metaphor for the Enlightenment.

Meireles’s language of numbers includes disparate proportions. Science offers non-Euclidian mathematics, density, relativity, entropy, or chaos theory. His Virtual Spaces: Corners (1967–68) consists of domestic sections with unwonted occurrences: the floor climbing to the walls or an extra corner within a corner. His architecture smiles even as it mocks Euclidian geometry. Los Carpinteros’ Cuarto oscuros | Dark Rooms I and II, 2008 [p. xx], likewise composed this phenomenology of the body’s passage through an impenetrable space, as in the ghostly architecture of Una puerta y dos ventanas | One Door and Two Windows, 2008 [p. xx].

Meireles and Los Carpinteros propose experiments in the synchronic layering of heterotopic things, spaces, and places. Meireles’s project is to challenge epistemological arrogance and scientific rationality. The tape measures in Los Carpinteros’ work return to the problems of the failure of metrology, as reflected in the symmetrical and asymmetrical carpenter’s rulers of Meireles’s Fontes (1992), emblems of the crisis of knowledge.¹⁰ Both are room-size installations, as are the tape measures in Biblioteca I, II y III |  Library I, II, and III, 2001 [p. xx], which are arranged like books. Each one bears a title and the name of its author (the Kama Sutra and the Decameron, along with William Burroughs, Federico García Lorca, Vladimir Nabokov, and Salman Rushdie). Each tape measure contains a few meters of writing of banned literature, the first few lines of text having been censored (in most cases). The transportability of the tape measures refers to acts of smuggling censored texts across the border. As in Meireles’s Insertions into Ideological Circuits (1970), portability and transit are diagrams of political resistance. In them, the Cuban artists and Meireles alike allude to the unfinished project of the Enlightenment, which is the basis of Jürgen Habermas’s conception of modernity.¹¹

The deployment of culture that is common to both Meireles and Los Carpinteros keeps them at a remove from Theodor W. Adorno’s skepticism, a deliberate taking of responsibility.¹² In Los Carpinteros’ work, such direct, transparent citations take on meaning in order to anticipate the failure of modernity in its undecided pendulum swinging back and forth between the collapse of rational order and art’s resistance to the entropic processes of the sociocultural dimension.

 

The Name

Arrechea warns that “the name Los Carpinteros itself is a joke. When people first see us, they think we are carpenters who are trying to make art. Really, it’s the way of conceiving life and organizing one’s thoughts that gives a particular form to a piece of art.”¹³ One of the first conceptual questions posed by the collective was their inquiry into the name of this or that process, which articulated itself fluidly in the meeting of the three original members. Maurice Merleau-Ponty speculates that individuals are constituted by their first (or Christian) names.¹⁴ The choice of the name Los Carpinteros did not precede the subject’s encounter with his own image (per Jacques Lacan);¹⁵ it corresponded instead to the symbolic construction of the artists’ social status. In the case of the Cuban group, the name grew out of the praxis of art, out of that which refused to seek the useless transparency of merely indicating the division of labor, leaving an authorial vacuum. Initially they considered using the initials of their first names (Marco, Alex, and Dago) to make up the acronym Équipo MAD. The name Los Carpinteros was given by other people, however, who identified the work of the three artists with materials, tools, and forms that pertain to the work of carpenters. Arrechea reveals the strategic reasons for the choice of the collective’s name: “The idea of being a carpenter, that is, a common person, without great pretensions of other sorts, reduced the notion of the artist to something simpler. Of course, as artists we always aspire to a greater dialogue; but the concept of ‘a carpenter’ was a form of subterfuge for us; it gave us something to hide behind and therefore to circumvent the prevailing climate of vigilance.”¹⁶ To Rosa Lowinger, however, the matter was more than a way to understand the business of the carpenters guild; it raised social, political, and economic questions from the standpoint of a collective practice focused on a method of producing objects that were socially inscribed as art.¹⁷ For another reason altogether, Andy Warhol called his studio the Factory because of his art production system, with its social division of labor, mechanization, serial production, and so forth. Furthermore, Warhol revealed, his reason for working in such a manner grew out of wanting to “be a machine.”¹⁸

Ostensibly, Romanian artists Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor deal with the problems of the former Eastern Europe. In the film Plus valoarea (Surplus Value, 2009), the duo refers to labor, accumulation, and surplus value in order to retrace the past and confront the principles of historical materialism (above all in Marx) with the historical and contemporary conditions of Romania within a global context. To Cosmin Costinaş, the dissection of ideological representations, the enunciation of the disagreements between theory and praxis, and the exploitation of hardships in collective memory transform Vatamanu and Tudor’s accounts into “stories of us all.”¹⁹ The visual action of Los Carpinteros retains something of the dialectical operation of updating that permeates modes of production, periods, borders, and contradictions in order to establish itself as the collective memory that derails ideology.

The name Los Carpinteros also points to the process by which alienation is engendered in the physical process of commodity production and social history. They design Flipper, Final, an object for swimming, whose exaggerated scale renders visible both its uselessness and the chasm between the swimmer’s physical labor and its own probable inefficacy. In the Grundrisse, Marx explains that alienation is a process inherent in society itself, one that cannot be reduced to the imagination of workers and capitalists. In 1994, when the group’s name was chosen, Cuba could not be considered an “industrial” economy, much less a “postindustrial” one. Because they are neither architects nor engineers, the name Los Carpinteros indicates the specific nature of their work and problematizes manual craft for the execution of ideas in industrial society. This is not only an affirmation of manual labor but also an operation that occurs within the field of the superstructure, at the forefront of which lies the problem of the division of labor and its relation to the production of the exchange value of objects. Thus, the symbolic effort inherent in the name Los Carpinteros would be a removal of some of the causes of alienation from the critical field of artistic discourse.

Los Carpinteros repeatedly present instruments and objects that are related to the profession of carpentry. There are working tools (tape measures or torques), parts, and objects that appear to be produced by carpentry. Screws—used by many skilled tradesmen, including carpenters—emerge as constitutive modules in Highway of Screws. Ironically the Cuatro ciudades | Four Cities, 2007 [p. xx], bookcase is built out of PVC. Furthermore, some of their objects are produced entirely by carpentry (for example, the three versions of Estantería | Shelves, 2008 [p. xx], in maple wood) or combine carpentry with other types of work, such as masonry and electrical engineering. Manufacture is a fundamental element in their work process. Although their group name is Los Carpinteros, in regard to labor, they are also aware that its contribution to the final formulation of exchange value remains concealed.

Los Carpinteros know that the mystical character of the commodity, as argued by Marx in Capital, does not arise from its use value. It would be seemingly impossible to consider use value for things as useless as the bed called La montaña rusa | The Roller Coaster, 2008 [p. xx], the absurd Anfiteatro Bermuda #2 | Bermuda Shorts Amphitheater #2, 2004 [p. xx], or the irrational Shelves, in spite of their false resemblance to the Carlton cabinet (1981), designed by Ettore Sottsass for Memphis. “As use-values, commodities differ above all in quality,” states Marx.²⁰ In this instance, Los Carpinteros problematize the matter in terms of the symbolic value of their “art” product and their way of producing it.

The transmutational operation of the relationship between form and function creates an unsteady field in which all things are dictated by a perversion of use—“the usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value,” declared Marx in Capital, taking his cue from John Locke (“the natural worth of anything consists in its fitness to supply the necessities, or serve the convenience of human life”).²¹ Los Carpinteros question the subordination of useful work to use value as raised by Marx. Los Carpinteros are among those artists who, like Meireles in Money Tree (1969), question the way in which artistic action implies a process of adding value, articulating notions of use value, exchange value, and symbolic surplus value. For these artists the problem is to understand how—beyond objects—the immaterial production of late capitalism includes relations that are interpersonal in themselves, part of the field of biopolitics.²² If, to Los Carpinteros, immaterial production is also the product of social life, their art must produce politics of perception as action in the political field of knowledge.

Within the historical context of Cuban art in 1994, adoption of the name Los Carpinteros apparently had less of a direct political connotation than the activity of artists such as Ana Mendieta and Marta María Pérez Bravo (photography as original space in the correlation between the feminine and Afro-Cubanness) and K-cho (the balseros, extraterritoriality, and the symbolic mutation of the rafts). In Cuba, as in Brazil under the military dictatorship, artists needed to create a dense critical process: critical art, complex strategies for inscribing the work that would enhance its real presence in the environment with a program that included circumventing the optical gluttony of censorship while simultaneously retaining the political and communicative potential of a critical agenda and creating an audience.²³ “We did not want our work censored. So we disguised it. We cloaked it in a mantle of manuality and manufacture.”²⁴

For Los Carpinteros, awareness, subtlety, conceptual disguise, and irony were strategic responses to democratic obscenity in the conspiracy for the autonomy of art and freedom of expression. This may be why the name initially proposed by the acronym MAD involved direct references to madness, the order of the state, and the regulation of bodies in social space. The allusion to Michel Foucault and his archaeology of “mental alienation” in The History of Madness (1961) was always inevitable. The frequent questions about how his work comments on communism or socialism led Rodríguez to respond through the slippage of the signifier: “When we get asked that type of question, we sometimes think it’s a joke. Cuba is pure energy for us, not a point of reflection. There are things in our work that refer to Cuba, but they are disguised and subtle.”²⁵ In spite of the theatrical aspect of his art and Rodríguez’s political denial (Freud’s Verneinung),²⁶ it is, however, an acknowledgment of the repressed, the name Los Carpinteros and their labor.²⁷ The sinthome occupies its place. Thus, the work needed to be a residue of the ob-scenus, that is, of being outside the scene of power.

 

Linguistic Sign

In the logic of Los Carpinteros, objects of personal or domestic use take on a public quality as a form of “communicational reason” in a state of collapse. The label of Cildo Meireles’s Money Tree (1969) specifies that the object is formed by 101 cruzeiro banknotes and that its value is 2,000 cruzeiros.²⁸ The operation exposes the added value of the “art” factor (which Los Carpinteros would also do later on). By adding everything (currency, price, exchange value, work of art, labor), Money Tree questions the “discrepancy between exchange value and use value, or between real and symbolic value,” says the artist.²⁹ In confronting the Marxist concepts of use value and exchange value, Meireles casts light upon the operation of the art object’s imaginary constitution as a sign—its exchange value. Artists—and Meireles and Los Carpinteros understand this—dismantle the monetary illusion of value as a secret exploitation of the labor force, for their task is one of revelation. Contemporaneous with Money Tree, Jean-Joseph Goux’s article “Marx et l’inscription du travail” points out the homologous relations between writing and labor and between meaning and value, denouncing the complicity between logocentrism and the fetishism of currency and merchandise that includes art.³⁰ Finally, it should be noted that the parallel hegemony of linguistic meaning and the exchange value of merchandise is a question that occurs in the work of Los Carpinteros.

Both the objective and subliminal actions of Los Carpinteros imply disorientation of the idea of usefulness. Because the modern experiments of surrealism and nonsense have become commonplace, it is difficult to describe their work as “unfamiliar” (unheimliche), according to Sigmund Freud’s definition of the term. The psychoanalytic notion of the Unheimliche (uncanny) has had considerable impact on recent critical discourse. The intellectual operation of nonsense is the antieconomic operation of certain laws of nature (e.g., gravity) and ideology of modern society (functionality) in their model for use value exploitation. “There is always something fundamentally humorous in the work,” says Rodríguez, “given the fact that we create objects that look one way in reality, but are really something else.”³¹ A semantic approach to the work of Los Carpinteros indicates that the historical matrix of dissonance between signifier and signified that they proposed could already be found in Francis Picabia’s dadaist Portrait of an American Girl in a State of Nudity (1915), in which the girl is a spark plug, a metonymic representation of the body machine. The drawing El gran picnic | The Great Picnic (2008) resembles an ad for a barbecue grill. The neutral object exists—especially where there is anthropomorphism. An army of barbecue grills moves through space with the hallucinatory impetus of consumers and hungry stomachs.

Within the context of the system of objects of Los Carpinteros, all things sacrifice their own possible validity in favor of disconcerting linguistic operations. Signifier and signified would appear to coexist in a state of scission. Marx discussed some questions in a discreet footnote to Capital concerning the consequences of the features of linguistic systems with regard to referents.³² For Marx it is a matter of understanding that the use of Teutonic words would point toward the actual thing, while Romance words—this is also the condition of the referent in Los Carpinteros’ visual discourse—point to its reflection. Like every sign (and, therefore, like every product), art is also use value. Arrechea compared the relationship between the drawing and the object represented to the “conversations between Wittgenstein and his disciples in the forests outside Cambridge.”³³ And yet in the work of Los Carpinteros the linguistic sign permeates art history as well as the order of design. The fact that we are able to find a network of historical references in specific works by the artists means that each object, whether it is a two-dimensional project or its actual execution, is always part of a corpus, the purpose of which is not the achievement of a major catalogue raisonné or a taxonomic order of objects that cannot be reconcilable with reason. After all, what is a swimming pool in the shape of an aircraft carrier? There is a game of density here (the place of flotation) and a strategic inversion of logic: diving into the landing field. The referent is seldom a single firstness, for there is also a secondness (that cannot exist without firstness). The work configures itself as a thirdness. Recourse to the second object occurs through inscription of the other. It is the compulsive relationship that Los Carpinteros establish in order to inscribe dependency, independence, and negation. Charles Sanders Peirce understood the meaning of trichotomy in mathematical logic: the first must always be totally separate from any concept or reference to any other thing.³⁴ After leaving him perplexed, the result leads the spectator to unanswerable questions.

 

Economy of Pure Visuality: Manual Labor

The index that exposes the ideological dimension of objects is based on the morphology impinged upon them. The cynicism of contradictions within the bourgeois discourse of Cuban director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s classic film Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) is now inverted. The deliberate contradictions of the artistic practices, technical processes, images, and things produced by Los Carpinteros—in their double condition as artists and artisans—are inscribed within the historicity of collective existence. In the social process of knowledge, the art of Los Carpinteros chooses to replace cynicism with irony.

Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha states: “On paper the written word is one thing. You imbue it with ‘thingness’ and edit. Shakespeare’s blackened hands, sullied with ink, that is important to architects: to understand the adventure between the idea and the thing.”³⁵ Like Mendes da Rocha, Los Carpinteros attack the separation between manual labor, technique, and imagination in the aesthetic object. The choice of the name Los Carpinteros emphasizes the “labor” factor in producing works of art—an evocation of the Aristotelian relation of techné as poiesis. The availability of materials in each place is a decisive factor in defining the form of an object constructed by them. A lighthouse can be a tent in Belgium, because the material is found there, or it might be a product of carpentry because wood is available in Cuba. What they have in common is that, to Los Carpinteros, all materials must be correlative to human labor with regard to vocation or traditional trades such as plumbing or carpentry. Mutatis mutandis, it is a form of constructing visual language out of the cultural history, technological stage and economic situation of each place in which the work is constructed. In these terms, Los Carpinteros’ visual discourse, based on the conditions of production of each place, bears a certain resemblance to the “generative grammar” of Noam Chomsky.

Los Carpinteros invert the notion of “speaking architecture,” which lies in expressing the purpose of a building through its formal structure, as in Étienne-Louis Boullée’s designs for Newton’s Cenotaph (1784) and for a phallus-shaped brothel. Social alienation as a consequence of the separation between mental labor and physical labor is exposed and dealt with by Los Carpinteros in works such as Casa en forma de alicate | Pliers-Shaped House, 2003, which clearly has the form of such a work instrument. In Los Carpinteros’ dialectic strategy, that work proposes a “speaking architecture” that is defined not according to a building’s function but according to its production process, for its shape is that of a work instrument.

The architectural sign in Bermuda Shorts Amphitheater #2 or in Arena Pool upsets the debates on form and function in modernity through heteroclite associations. One example of this is the obnoxious conflation of a utilitarian form (e.g., a bread bin) with a construction whose form serves a real purpose (e.g., a garage) in Garage (Bread Bin), 2002 [p. xx]. The result is an antieconomical, practically useless form. By virtue of their very disparity, these projects are antinomic to the idea of “speaking architecture.” In architect Louis Sullivan’s classic formulation, form follows function, whereas to Frank Lloyd Wright form and function converged toward unity. The form of a building or object must be considered in terms of its function and purposes. Form ignores function in the praxis of Oscar Niemeyer, which therefore arrives at an opposite result to that of Wright.³⁶ Marjetica Potrč has produced institutional criticism of Niemeyer’s architecture of power in her series of drawings Modernism Takes Root (2007). Far beyond Niemeyer, Los Carpinteros’ ironic disregard exacerbates the dysfunctionality of form and detonates a heterotopic perversion of architecture. Form annihilates function, a contextual metaphor for problematizing the autonomy of art devoid of social tasks and political functions.

Los Carpinteros’ object Embajada rusa | Russian Embassy (Part of Downtown), 2003 [p. xx] asserts Soviet bureaucracy’s distortion of Russian constructivism. The simulation of the state’s architectural grandiloquence and the regime’s aesthetic order is visible in the work of Cuban artist Glexis Novoa, as in the installation of paintings Etapa practica (1991). Within the context of Los Carpinteros’ La Habana as it appears in Downtown, the modern architecture of Someca (a title lifted from the name of a city building) is contaminated by architecture’s idea of an official image. The transhistorical problem posited by Los Carpinteros for social space is a jumble of ideology, representation, utopia, its countercurrents, and social entropy. In fact, Los Carpinteros’ architecture is always the critical-poetic constitution of a countersite, a place in which utopia seems to establish itself only to fail.

Not only did philosopher Konrad Fiedler’s ideas influence Theo van Doesburg’s concrete art; he also developed the theory of pure visuality and articulated relationships between art and concept, between preimagined form and its full execution. To Giulio Carlo Argan, Fiedler posited art as “productive contemplation” and influenced the thinking of Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius. To Argan, the contrast between manual crafting and industry—so intense in Los Carpinteros’ objects—was the unresolved internal antithesis of modern society’s productivity that so worried Gropius.³⁷ Los Carpinteros appreciate unresolved relationships. Their task is the nonconsignation of forms as answers. They prefer profound explorations of doubts and questions.

System of Objects

The universe of Los Carpinteros is centered on objects produced or constructed by man, that is, on commodities. Occasionally the transference or distortions of functions are modes of mutation of the logical regime of such objects. The mechanisms of perception are challenged. The title of the watercolor Tsunami, 2008 [p. xx], refers to a sea made of waves of sheets of industrialized material that more closely resemble rubber flippers than water. The rubber in Flippers, Final undulates like the surface of a calm sea. In the final analysis, the objects in the drawings and three-dimensional constructions do not escape the regime of commodity fetishism, the same one to which labor is submitted within the capitalist production process. And yet such objects always present themselves as things in a perverse state of becoming.

The logic of Los Carpinteros must be confronted with the ideas of Jean Baudrillard in The System of Objects (1968), The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (1970), and For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972).³⁸ The System of Objects developed a critical program of social practices through commodities in industrial capitalism and consumer society. Now institutionalized as “art objects,” Los Carpinteros’ objects are contaminated by a fetishizing drive that is all the more complex because it stems exclusively from their prestigious status as art. The artists afford spectators the possibility of critically deciphering industrial production and the consumer experience.

Los Carpinteros’ economy of signs is historically based on the island of Cuba, but Baudrillard offers a few keys for understanding their syntax. They established their discourse around 1995, a dramatic period in the life of that country, what with cold war Soviet protectionism suffering a collapse that was reflected in Cuba’s social dynamic and the U.S. boycott reaching maximum levels of effectiveness. Food and electrical power shortages resulted in rationing and long daily blackouts. In some cases the objects do not deal with technical deficiencies but with an economy of improvisation and precariousness, as in the tent-buildings of Ciudad transportable | Transportable City, 2000 [p. xx]. Affluent consumer society can be seen only as the antithesis of the society of minimal, marginal, and rationed consumption. The use of famous brands such as that of fashion designer Donna Karan in DKNY bota | DKNY Boot, 2004 [p. xx], is a recent and sporadic occurrence in Los Carpinteros’ corpus. Their fixation on objects does not aspire to glamour, as in the economy of Warhol’s window displays (1961), his work for purveyors of luxury goods such as Bonwit Teller and Tiffany, his Diamond Dust Shoes canvases (1980), or interviews with celebrities such as international fashion icon Diana Vreeland on his television program Andy Warhol’s TV (1982). Hence the uselessness—that is, the inconsumability—of these objects by Los Carpinteros—from sandals, beds, and work tools to trucks and premolded swimming pools. The metacritical operation of Trash Shopping Cart, 2008 [p. xx] conflates the recognizable form of an (originally plastic and closed) trash cart with the open wire structure of supermarket shopping carts, which are given closed lids. The irony and paradox staged by Los Carpinteros are constituted in the consumption/trash binomial that is planned obsolescence and the ecological imbalance of waste. Furthermore, like a cage, the closed cart still evokes the severe limitations upon consumption on the island. Warhol investigated the fantasies of North American society (which a good Marxist would describe as alienated). Los Carpinteros rouse certain phantoms of socialist society. From such a perspective, Trash Shopping Cart is a parodic inversion of consumer society imbricated with the society of extreme social control.

Objects such as bricks possess the ability to emphasize their own technical deficiencies: Ciudad perfecta | Perfect City, 2005 [p. xx], depicts piles of houses and buildings as if they were some sort of junior architect’s toy. Were this real, it would be the aftermath of a major disaster. And yet the very same brick object may emerge as a factor of pure irrationality when used in the design and construction of trailers (Untitled, 2009 [p. xx]), imposing a strange mobility as a result of that material’s weight. Some objects are designed as chiasmata, others as arrangements of chaos.

Many of Los Carpinteros’ ideas and projects are unrealizable in their condition as objects. Regardless of the form that their works take, the artists place art, conceptual approaches, and their works in the weft of discussions about corporative capitalism and situate them in the passage between material and immaterial production. Their crucial question is: what place does art occupy in this process? According to Slavoj Žižek, “In immaterial production, the products are no longer material objects, but new social (interpersonal) relations themselves—in short, immaterial production is directly biopolitical, the production of social life.”³⁹ In any situation, beyond arguing about immateriality and about the relationship between the mental and the physical, Los Carpinteros create oppositions to biopower, a problem raised by Foucault in his History of Sexuality. Performing a critique of social relationships, their art is a pure product of biopolitics; hence their physically inappropriate, antiergonomic objects and their architecture for rigid social control.

To Los Carpinteros, the place of art is the place of the ruins of industrial logic’s production of objects, that is, the ruins of reason. They reveal that the empirical philosophy that disturbs them is the spontaneous philosophy that emerges from the Cartesian nature of things themselves.⁴⁰ “Nothing pleases me more than vulgar sentiments, vulgar expressions, vulgarity itself. Nothing vulgar can be divine, that’s true, but all vulgarity is human,” wrote Guillermo Cabrera Infante in Infante’s Inferno.⁴¹ If, to Los Carpinteros, things elude us in a Kantian way, they then produce phenomena—things to facilitate our access to them through their ontological crisis.

Los Carpinteros’ objects resist functional domestication (as in the case of gadgets or kitsch) or the extemporaneous, gratuitous associativity of forms and functions. They are operations in counterdesign. After all, revolutionary Cuba was never known for its industrial (or even graphic) design work. Los Carpinteros assemble heterotopic monsters by using ambivalent objects that can simultaneously be aircraft carriers and floating swimming pools, as in Portaaviones | Aircraft Carrier, 2005 [p. xx]. This unacceptable combination articulates historical militarism (the territory of Cuba as the object of economic and geopolitical disputes between the United States and the Soviet Union) and the current tourist industry, a Cuban “destiny” before the revolution and subsequent to the cold war. Rarely, as in the watercolor Ameba I | Amoeba I, 2008 [p. xx], do the Cuban artists resort to the concept of the informe (or formlessness), the term that Georges Bataille used to declassify the world.⁴² It is that situation perceived by Adorno in which “in semblance nonsemblance is promised.”⁴³ No matter how confusing the object’s identity, the convulsive beauty of these works does not stem from abjection or from the surreal quality of their structures but from the discomfort that they cause by establishing a world recognized as plausible but executed as the failure of a certain kind of instrumental reason.

In the end, Los Carpinteros defend the existence of the world of objects at the brink of a total collapse of logic that affects the functioning of the world and the economy. Adorno wrote that the “indelible in resistance to the fungible world of exchange is the resistance of the eye that does not want the world’s colors to vanish.”⁴⁴ Meireles’s appropriation of capitalist circuits of distribution and consumer goods and Los Carpinteros’ distortion of objects in consumer society are ways of violating violence, the expression of an omnipresent Foucault. Yet in their case it means (above all) the violation of ideological violence. With a vast corpus of skeptical images, Los Carpinteros take on world disorder as denoted by objects. It is not a skepticism that resolves itself in nihilism, however, but a continued belief in art’s task of taking on the entropy of the world.⁴⁵

 

Architecture

The architectural corpus of Los Carpinteros includes a group of works that constitute the entire political scopic regime at the levels of the visible and the invisible. In putting together a possible metafunctionality, Los Carpinteros simulate the exhaustion of panoptical functionality in Reclining Tower and in the disarticulation of several such constructions as an integrated group in Sistema | System, 2006 [p. xx]. Lying towers would appear to negate the attention necessary to their scopic regime through the absence of surveillance or a privileged point of view (height). The scene is one of exhaustion, as in Beckett. Gilles Deleuze argues that “tiredness” in Samuel Beckett’s work can no longer achieve anything at all.⁴⁶ The stillness in the repose of the observation tower merely simulates the nonexistence of a system of repression. The Deleuzean exhaustion of the towers is tantamount to an indirect indication that no longer makes surveillance possible. The irony of the drawings thus corresponds to approaching the operation of the official denials issued by totalitarian regimes with regard to their use of methods of oppression.

The drawing Las luces del estadio del pueblo | The Lights of the People’s Stadium, 2007 [p. xx] refers to the lights of the people’s (or the town’s) stadium and proposes a confrontation with large, threatening light towers that suggest the forceful thrust of a penis.⁴⁷ The point of view adopted by Los Carpinteros in the drawing emphasizes the grandiose quality of the architecture even as it suggests a certain fascist intentionality. The searchlights suggest of the use of light in an inquisitorial torture session, even as the reference to “the people’s stadium” reiterates the linguistic instance of architectural spectacle for fascist mass manipulation. The monumental architecture—a threatening phantasmagoria—of Los Carpinteros’ stadiums must be likened to the quasi-abstract yet oppressive and almost prisonlike structure of Warhol’s painting Stadium (Zeitgeist Series) (1982). As if adapted from a play by Beckett, the lights of the people’s stadium are ready to shine the blinding “shadowless light” of modern absolutism.⁴⁸

The drawing Puente almendrado | Almond Bridge, 2008 [p. xx], analyzes the structure of a work of engineering in which reinforced concrete has been replaced by chocolate and almonds. Physical transmutation overcomes visual play so as to exhibit material proof of the corruption that has become a commonplace in our contemporary world with the appropriation of state resources by alliances between politicians and companies in public construction projects. The social engineering of Piscina con reflejo | Pool with Reflection, 2004 [p. xx], displays the shameless political staging of progress and collective well-being. In Los Carpinteros’ drawing, architecture itself becomes a “prison warden,” a construct of the social superego according to the terms in which a Freudian Bataille discussed culture in Documents (1929).⁴⁹ Michel Foucault’s criticism of architecture may be found in works such as The History of Madness and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975). In a sense, Los Carpinteros’ architecture might have been drawn from Foucault, for it contains concepts such as the panopticon, heterotopia, and disciplinary institutions, all of which seek to make man predictable—a necessary quality for his domination. Los Carpinteros refute the tamed gaze.

In the twenty-first century, the obsolescence of the classical panopticon prison as proposed by Jeremy Bentham in 1785 and examined by Foucault in Discipline and Punish is a consequence of sophisticated developments in electronic surveillance technology for social control. To update Bentham’s prison architecture, Los Carpinteros proposed their Rediseño de cárcel con comedor central | Redesign of Jail with Central Canteen, 2007 [p. xx]. There is something disingenuous and jokey about the fact that the original panopticon’s structure is now reduced to circular closets, hundreds of drawers, and a central refectory. More disingenuous still would be the reduction of architectural language to Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenology of the drawer in The Poetics of Space rather than an updating of its political character. For this philosopher, the drawer is the place in which man, that “great dreamer of locks,” “contains or conceals” his secrets.⁵⁰ The problem lies in knowing who is contained in cell-drawers and what is concealed in Redesign of Jail with Central Canteen. Furthermore, to Bachelard, concepts are drawers, dead thoughts (p. 68). Just when it is in danger of being reduced to a banal type of furniture and receptacle, Los Carpinteros propose to reactivate the concept of the panopticon.

Henri Bergson speaks of “memory diseases,” although the brain is not formed by boxes of memories in which the past is abolished.⁵¹ In another instance, Jacques Derrida deals with “archive fever,” in which existence is consigned to oblivion by the archive and, furthermore, operates the topology of an “archive without outside.”⁵² The drawers in Redesign of Jail with Central Canteen are external because the refectory occupies the center, the place of the tower of panoptical vigilance in Bentham’s model. Surveillance has been replaced by collective coexistence, were not Los Carpinteros’ principal gesture the establishment of the refectory as a basic need: food as a primordial geopolitical factor for survival. Discussing malnutrition in general or hunger in Latin American prisons is taboo. It is the body ob-scenus, the “offstage” being that is at stake. Hunger was already taboo when Josué de Castro wrote The Geography of Hunger in 1946. To Los Carpinteros, body politics begin not with desire but with the stomach. Subtly, the empty space in the “central dining room” of Los Carpinteros’ quasi-panopticon raises the problem of biopolitics within the penal institution—which includes the simple withholding of food as torture and the hunger strikes of political dissidents—as a mechanism for the domination or resistance of bodies in state-controlled terrorist societies. According to Josué de Castro, hunger is both delicate and dangerous.

In its remounting of the panopticon, the structure of Redesign of Jail with Central Canteen dismisses any surveillance: each drawer operates as a closed cell. They are isolated compartments that “enclose and dissimulate” their own contents as a way of producing social oblivion and political obliteration. The furniture is a structure of solitary prisons, that is, of closed-off drawers for the purpose of inflicting physical and psychological trauma. In a regime opposed to the rule of law, the drawer is the solitary cell, the space of homo sacer. In Giorgio Agamben’s reconsideration, homo sacer is identified as the outlaw, the banned one, the exile.⁵³ The drawers could well be “refrigerators,” the tiny torture chambers used by the Brazilian military dictatorship of 1964, squat cubicles that prevented prisoners from standing upright. Disturbing noises were piped into these cells, along with alternating blasts of heat and cold, and the occupants were deprived of food and water. The torture and political imprisonment binomial as a definition of homo sacer’s space in Latin America appears in the works of Meireles (Tiradentes: Totem-Monument to the Political Prisoner, 1970), Bruce Nauman (South American Triangle, 1981), Luis Camnitzer (the Uruguayan Torture print series, 1983–84), and Antonio Dias (The Electrician, 1986). Redesign of Jail with Central Dining Room is the very image of the secret hiding places of the sectarian (or even totalitarian) state that sullied modern civilization. The drawers reveal themselves as spaces for liquidation of the subject rather than spaces of confinement or surveillance. They are the hidden stages upon which state terrorism performed. Better yet, they are landscapes of the eclipse of Western reason.

 

The Urban Planning of Transterritoriality

“Whatever the need, a pool gives opportunity for self-expression in its design, or individuality and eccentricity in its use,” writes John Dawes in The Swimming Pool and the Garden, an introduction to the history, architecture, and idiom of swimming pools. A swimming pool can be functional or ornamental, as Dawes points out,⁵⁴ but Los Carpinteros suggest that it can also be absurd and political, as in Arena Pool, Pool with Reflection, Aircraft Carrier, Piscina infinita III | Infinite Pool III, 2006 [p. xx], or Piscina compartida | Shared Swimming Pool, 2007 [p. xx], a perverted model experiment in socialization based on division by a wall, the result of which is a pool that is partly filled with water and partly dry. This inegalitarian wall may allude to contemporary walls such as the ones at the borders between Mexico and the United States or Israel and Palestine, as well as invisible (albeit no less closed) borders such as those of the Caribbean Sea around Cuba.

In Mapa mundi (Havana Biennial, 2003), Costa Rican artist Federico Herrero painted an orange map of the world at the bottom of a blue public swimming pool. In hypothetical transit through the world, people swim in this watery “planisphere.” The pool’s syntax depends less on its architectural shape (as in the case of Los Carpinteros) and more on water itself. Painting does not exist without water. Herrero says that he wanted to make something “that was useful for the locals and for people who did not necessarily care that much about art specially but who had very strong feelings regarding their political situation and a lack of optimism about a better life, as in the case of many Cubans.”⁵⁵ The pool-painting negotiates freedom of movement with this border. In Cuba, to use Herrero’s metaphor, swimming in the pool above the map of the world is an imaginary experiment in the freedom to come and go in any direction the world over. That pool “had to do with enhancing the possibility to have dreams for freedom,” says Herrero.⁵⁶ His pool-painting is a political habeas corpus.

 

Topology

The word infinity is derived from the Latin infinitas, or “unboundedness.” In Piscina infinita | Infinite Pool, 2002 [p. xx], Los Carpinteros suggest that water is a situation of non-Euclidean geometry within a fourth dimension that refers to Marcel Duchamp’s Three Standard Stoppages (1913–14). The concept of the Möbius strip inscribes Los Carpinteros’ image of a swimming pool within the Western constructivist tradition, along the lines of the work of Max Bill, Lygia Clark, and Hélio Oiticica—a rare experiment in Cuba. The topology of the Möbius involves half-twisting a strip once and then joining its ends to form a loop. The result is a continuous surface without a right side or a reverse, with no inside or outside, a thing that presents only one side. Bill contradicts the crystalline form of the Möbius strip in his works in metal and stone. In Tripartite Unity (1948-49), he attached a cylindrical bar that fixes it onto the pedestal, interrupting the trajectory of the gaze upon the strip’s unilateral surface. The weight of the stone strips eliminates manipulation and, once again, the visual and tactile experiment of Möbius’s topology. In the 1960s Oiticica organized his Parangolés as structures that fuse with the body as sensorial, linguistic, and political experiences of the other. The Möbius strip is always an experience of becoming. In Going (1963), Clark proposed that her public make a Möbius strip out of paper, inserting the tip of a pair of scissors into a piece of paper and cutting away longitudinally. The act creates an awareness of time and immanent experience. “I re-encountered Going, an interior itinerary outside myself,” she said.⁵⁷ Los Carpinteros understood that the Möbius strip is both imago mundi and forma mentis. Their images and objects establish antithetical relationships with the world, for—beyond affronting the logic of the design and utility of things—these structures contradict all of physics, from the law of gravity to the laws of fluid mechanics.

As used by Los Carpinteros, Möbius topology is a paradigm for differences in density between the exile of some and the “insile” (interior exile) of writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, including the internal “pressure” of boundary controls circumvented by the balseros (those who leave Cuba on rafts or small boats). Therefore, the exile/insile binomial would make Cuba a place without an inside or an outside, per the topology of Möbius. Cabrera Infante fought many battles in revolutionary Cuba. He opposed Andrei Zhdanov’s Stalinist tendencies. He derided the literature of the communist Alejo Carpentier and the Catholic José Lezama Lima. To Che Guevara, the task of the new political class was to prevent the intellectual generation to which Cabrera Infante belonged from being displaced by its conflicts or perverting the new ones.⁵⁸ In Mea Cuba, Cabrera Infante declares: “A revolutionary always digs graves. In fact, he does nothing but dig graves—most of the time other people’s graves.” In El camino | The Road, 2003 [p. xx] and Salón de reuniones | Meeting Room, 2003 [p. xx], Los Carpinteros draw fields of open holes in cement floors that resemble “empty graves.” If the water in Infinite Pool takes the form of a Möbius strip, the structure’s balance simulates a hypothetical game between speed, density, and pressure—one that resembles the nature of the concrete political process within which they are inscribed.

 

The False Rule of Truth; or, The Necessity of Lying

The linguistic density of Los Carpinteros’ work lies in the abyss between modern visual grammar and the rhetoric of power. This abyss is a region of sarcasm and of the symbolic dismantling of power operations. The change in the rule of truth comes about in the middle of a digital age in which the numerical image defines itself upon the computer screen and configures itself in postproduction. Perhaps the work of Los Carpinteros should be expunged from the art system in order that it might be submitted and inscribed within Jeremy Campbell’s The Liar’s Tale: a History of Falsehood and other kindred works.⁵⁹ Los Carpinteros did not return to art history until later—as a necessary condition. Yet drawing and constructing objects is a deliberate choice for rendering methods of producing art obsolete in light of digital technology or of truth as permanent virtual becomings, a choice that implies an insistence upon the ancien régime of truth. Thus, to Los Carpinteros, the sign retains the power of analogical photography manipulated by the regimes of the left and the right in their constitution of an ideological program of the image through cropping, erasure, collage, or montage as party methods for submitting truth to political interests. For more than a century, the regime of truth of analogical photography faced up to the growing crisis of its role as evidence of the truth. Los Carpinteros’ caustic humor resorts to methods of the totalitarian image in order to enhance the sign in the task of corroding the regime of that power’s truth.

 

Ideology

In discussing a work with a lighthouse, a commonplace construction along the Cuban coast, Dagoberto Rodríguez declares that this object “works from an ideological point of view. The lighthouse, for us, is not just the light that guides, it is much more than that.”⁶⁰ What does he mean when he says that a lighthouse can be more than “the light that guides”? In order to understand the way in which Los Carpinteros relate to ideology, one must consider it from the perspective of Louis Althusser’s concept of the “ideological state apparatus” (ISA). The psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan led Althusser to displace the understanding of exclusively analytic ideology onto Marx’s initial point of view as “false consciousness” in order to conceptualize it as a representation of the imaginary in the presence of the real—the real world. Marxist theory created a spatial metaphor in which the infrastructure (or the economic base, implying the “unity” of productive forces and production relations) supports the upper level, which is the superstructure (the legal-political and the ideological levels). The objects idealized or constructed by Los Carpinteros restructure Althusserian topology (topique, in the original French), which experiences frictions and develops strategies and platforms with regard to the ISA. Althusser situates the ISA between the base and the superstructure of society and considers it less repressive or violent than the state apparatus (SA). Museums and public galleries are classified as cultural ISAs,⁶¹ but art is not necessarily determined by the economic base or the SAs. The ideological state apparatus can act through pressure, censorship, and other forms of repression. What, then, is that force that “guides”? The lighthouse itself? Ideology? Or all this and more: the lighthouse as art object?

The material existence of objects (or designs for them in drawings) creates fissures in the idea of “social wholeness” as an edifice in which ideology rests atop the economic base. Yet ideology (still according to Žižek) “is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupportable reality; in its basic dimension it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our ‘reality’ itself: an ‘illusion’ which structures our effective real social relations and thereby masks some insupportable, real, impossible kernel,” but its function is “to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel.”⁶² Thus, Los Carpinteros’ project remains within the field of knowledge—that is, the lighthouse is “the light that guides.” If what they do violates and renders the system of objects useless, the question posed by Žižek in The Sublime Object of Ideology is quite apposite: “Why is there something instead of nothing?”⁶³

Michel Foucault exposed the perverse logic of the necessary relationship between power and truth, between power and knowledge. This relationship is so radical that it permeates legal formalities themselves.⁶⁴ Near-Surrealism, nonsense, and crazy logic appear to inculcate the sign of unexplained functional aberrations in the objects. In Los Carpinteros’ inversion, the order of discourse would be to examine power and its (un)truth. Thus, they became engaged in the “lying truth,”⁶⁵ art’s paradoxical potentiality that counterpoints ideology. Cabrera Infante assesses the effect of politics on the magical realism that devastated Latin American literature: “Writing is essentially literary: it is neither political nor pamphletary. Literature’s greatest enemy is politics.”⁶⁶ Los Carpinteros cautiously steered clear of subordinating their work to any political force or ideological vassalage. “Cuba is a socialist country, a leftist country. The art which was being made in the ’80s was very revolutionary in political terms. It was an art of the left,” said Castillo, “We [Los Carpinteros] wanted to do something that would collide with that atmosphere. So how do we make work that would be aggressive in that socialist climate? Quite simply, we decided to make pieces that appeared conservative.”⁶⁷

A comparison between the strategies of John Heartfield’s resistance against Nazism and the structural system of Los Carpinteros’ objects points to ways and possibilities of challenging censorship. Heartfield’s photomontage O Christmas Tree in German Soil, How Bent Are Thy Branches (1934) consists of a Christmas tree whose branches are twisted into the form of a swastika, accompanied by a caption. The tree is rough and forbidding. Its functionality is corrupted by the distortion of its anatomy, which betrays the universal association of Christmas with peace. There is an architectural quality in Heartfield’s topiary and in Los Carpinteros’ perverse designs that comes together in works such as Jardín francés | French Garden, 2007 [p. xx], a set of beds arranged to resemble the symmetrical designs of the eighteenth-century formal gardens that demonstrated aesthetic control under the guise of vegetation. French Garden introduces the subject of topiary. The art of topiary, the etymology of which lies in Latin (ars topiaria, “the art of landscape,” topos meaning place) dates back as least as far as the Natural History (AD 77–79) of Pliny the Elder, who disapproves of it (12.6). The art of topiary is widely represented in the sculpture, drawings, and prints of Louise Bourgeois, who also makes use of the panoptical regime to discuss forms of social domination over women’s bodies based on eighteenth-century European traditions. At the opposite end of the spectrum from Bourgeois, Puppy (1992) by Jeff Koons is a large-scale sculpture that was assembled in New York’s Rockefeller Center (2000) from seventy thousand flowers. To Koons, the form of a puppy is an image of “love, warmth, and happiness.” If topiary can be violence against nature, Los Carpinteros seize upon it in order to violate it as an idea of art: the flower beds trimmed to make up a French garden are actual beds. Control therefore refers to the space of sleep, a locus in which dreams—the language of the unconscious—emerge untamed even as they remain a hypothesis for control. Here Los Carpinteros lead to one of the extremes of the modern totalitarian state: disciplining the unconscious as a form of controlling individual and collective will.

Some of Los Carpinteros’ works appears to call upon the spectator’s mental apparatus in an unconscious dimension and in its four forms of manifestation, even though it may not be possible to speak of an absolute adjustment between the work of art and the concept of the slip or parapraxis (Fehlleistung), dream (Traum), joke (Witz), or symptom (Symptom) in Freud. Freud dealt with dissimilar problems—in the eventual manipulation of memory by his patients or the erroneous anthropological interpretation of customs⁶⁸—as modes for the construction of truth and its understanding. Theorist Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen has written that, to certain theorists, there is in Lacan “a sort of privileging of the lie, and this is because the lie, being inadequate to the thing it speaks about, is better able to reveal the truth of the subject.”⁶⁹ It is a matter of the possible encounter between the artists’ topology and the Freudian topic. In the work of Los Carpinteros, which barely touches upon Freudian and Lacanian psychology, there is a measured freeing of psychological energy through humor (the visual joke)—one that surprises and acts through a mild elimination of inhibitions.

The Freudian slip emerges as a compromise between conscious intention and the repressed—one reveals the other. In the works of Los Carpinteros, the intentionality of art (as suggested by Edmund Husserl) stimulates the repressed, which exists at the collective level of political censorship. The basketball stadium column in Aproximación de contrarios, vista de perfil | Approaching Opponents, Side View, 2008 [p. xx], has the form of the ball’s movement in the pass dribbled across the court. There is a dynamic, futurist quality in this register of things, such as the simulated movement of the scoreboard and the basket. This changing of the target in flight is an inverted form of the libido’s plasticity, that is, of the ease with which it changes both its object and its mode of satisfaction. As for the column in The Lights of the People’s Stadium, it is quite clearly a deliberate ideological manipulation of the unconscious, as previously discussed. By making the ideology of architecture and the objectives of power explicit, Los Carpinteros reveal the repressed (Zensur), not through a lapsus linguae but by intentionally confronting spectator and “slip” with that which is or eludes political prohibition.

For Los Carpinteros the potentiality of written language is situated in titles, as opposed to texts inscribed within the works: Frío estudio del desastre (muebles) | Cold Study of Disaster (Furniture), 2005 [p. xx] and Redesign of Jail with Central Dining Room. Through a friction of logic, their titles accelerate hesitations and induce the attribution of critical meaning to the image. Here Los Carpinteros do not hold back from paying tribute to the René Magritte of La trahison des images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe) (1929), which Foucault describes as a “nonaffirmative” painting. The caption in Heartfield’s photomontage O Christmas Tree in German Soil blends mythological and political fact: “By decree of Reich Food Minister Darré, as of Christmas 1934, propagation of the Christian fir tree, an alien intruder, is forbidden on German soil, in future only the brown ‘standard fir tree DRGM,’ cultivated in Valhalla, will be allowed.”⁷⁰ Valhalla is the hall of the Valkyries in the celestial regions. A leader of farmers and the minister of food and agriculture, Darré developed the ideology of “blood and soil,” which celebrated traditions that articulated German peasantry and the Nordic race. Even though he was already under pressure in 1934, Heartfield still enjoyed freedom of expression—a circumstance that would be unthinkable under contemporary totalitarian regimes. In order to imbue their work with universality, Los Carpinteros often maintain visual information at a generic level unaccompanied by any text that might specify place. Whereas Heartfield argues rhetorically, Los Carpinteros choose to argue nonverbally (except for the use of titles, which are almost always neutral). Thus the task of the object’s or drawing’s irony requires subtle tactics. The photography in a Heartfield photomontage needed to be patently mendacious in order to expose his analytical arguments about the rawness of Nazism’s objective facts. The transparent faking of the photographic image made the opaqueness of National Socialism crystal clear. Los Carpinteros simulate a pseudo-functionality of sorts when they may have wanted to indicate a disparate transdisciplinarity inscribed in an identical object, as in the bed-shaped Roller Coaster [p. xx]. Knowing the original Spanish title for the installation (La montaña rusa, which literally translates as “the Russian mountain”) is essential because the very first roller coasters did, in fact, appear in Russia. A bumpy bed, a place for resting and dreaming, presents a bumpy, “Russian” trajectory, as it were, quite aside from being in itself a metaphor for the relations between revolutionary Cuba and Russia—in other words, the Soviet Union—during several periods of its history. In recent history the dismantling of the Soviet bloc and the process of instability, disorganization, and ultimate disappearance of the Soviet Union in 1991 had structural consequences for Cuban society. Cuba was led to review its production goals as a result of the loss of its privileged market and newfound international trade competitors. The crisis in the Cuban sugar production sector led to the closing down of the ministry of sugar and imposed other macroeconomic strategies upon the country’s economy. Symptomatically (as in the historical Russo-Cuban roller coaster), the bumpy toy administers energy: potential energy, kinetic energy, and the loss of energy caused by entropic attrition. Within this tradition, Los Carpinteros’ linguistic base intersperses signs of truth, signs of lies, and signs of irony.

In the “Arrows and Epigrams” section of Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche proclaims, “‘All truth is simple’—Isn’t that a double lie?”⁷¹ As proposed by Nietzsche, the paradox invites us to compare certain strategies used by Warhol with those of Los Carpinteros. The electoral campaign poster with the portrait of President Nixon in abject color combinations bears the caption of its title Vote McGovern (1972, serigraph). Warhol proposes a disturbing contradiction between naming and representation, between the image of the negated figure of Nixon associated with the imperative to vote for his opponent McGovern. Rodríguez has remarked that Cuban artist Jorge Pardo “designs a space and makes it livable, and we try to do that as well, but in a false way. Our designs always have a point at which you realize they are fake.”⁷² In the deliberately explicit dialogue of cynicism, Los Carpinteros’ stance of presenting a simulacrum as the real, crystalline face of the fake in liberal democracy is as disturbing as Warhol’s work. Is it an assertion of truth? Los Carpinteros invest in the currency of the Epimenides paradox about the liar,⁷³ restructured by Nietzsche (for whom lying is more natural than telling the truth): is a liar’s confession of lying or a lie by Los Carpinteros a form of truth? Do they deny or confirm the status of the liar?

Nietzsche’s question concerns the cognitive status of art, its ability to produce “truth.” To the philosopher, science and philosophy are less well equipped than art to produce objective truth. The trajectory of Nietzsche’s reflections on the subject includes essays such as “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (1873). Within the context of his book Nietzsche as Philosopher (1965), Arthur C. Danto attempts to define memory as “a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, a sum, in short, of human relationships which, rhetorically and politically intensified, ornamented, and transformed, come to be thought of, after long usage by a people, as fixed, binding, and canonical.”⁷⁴ To ponder the corpus of Los Carpinteros is to come and go among this mobile army of phantom objects that enunciate human relationships, as in the watercolors Psycho Hayward, 2008 [p. xx]; La gente | The People, 2008 [p. xx], which depicts an auditorium made up of empty podiums; and Free Basket, 2009 [p. xx], a basketball court with constructions of columns that cross one another in space like a diagram of the ball’s trajectory. The deliberate structural rhetoric of Los Carpinteros’ objects leads to another one of Danto’s conclusions about Nietzsche: “Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions.”⁷⁵ Things exist in functional trance. Every object by Los Carpinteros is a doppelgänger of the subject.

To Ludwig Wittgenstein—and Los Carpinteros now appear to be situated in some proximity to his philosophical positions—the role of language (that is, of words) is not to refer, to name, to allude, or to make statements about things or facts, but to construct the use within which words are situated in language games. During his 1934 visit to the Soviet Union, Wittgenstein was not impressed by Stalin. “Lying is a language-game that needs to be learned like any other one,” he wrote in the Philosophical Investigations.⁷⁶ Or one that needs to be invented like any other, think the artists. Furthermore, it needs to be reinvented constantly in order to keep itself from becoming style or canon—territories of predictability. As in the work of Los Carpinteros, it is inconstancy against crystallization that supports the ironic power of the lie. The improbable design and engineering of Aircraft Carrier lead their work to converge toward Harald Weinrich’s synthesis in The Linguistics of Lying: “Truth and lie are not opposed in irony.”⁷⁷ Art is what destabilizes truth and lies.⁷⁸ Such is the aporia within which the gaze finds itself in Los Carpinteros’ visual traps as it hesitates before recognizing truth and illusion.

 

Notes

1. Rosa Lowinger, “The Object as Protagonist: An Interview with Los Carpinteros—Alexandre Arrechea, Marco Castillo, and Dagoberto Rodriguez,” Sculpture Magazine 18 (December 1999), http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag99/dec99/carp/carp.shtml.

2. Maria Magaly Espinosa Delgado, “Las narraciones del nuevo arte cubano,” in Pensamiento crítico en el nuevo arte latinoamericano, by Kevin Power et al. (Teguise, Canary Islands: Fundación César Manrique, 2006), 201.

3. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).

4. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

5. Espinosa Delgado, “Narraciones del nuevo arte cubano,” 212.

6. Trinie Dalton, “Los Carpinteros” (interview), BOMB, no. 78 (Winter 2002), http://bombsite.com/issues/78/articles/2441.

7. See Paulo Herkenhoff, “A aventura planar de Lygia Clark—de caracóis, escadas e Caminhando,” in Lygia Clark (São Paulo: Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 1999), 40–44.

8. See, respectively, Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), and Roland Barthes, “La mort de l’auteur” (1968), in Le bruisement de la langue (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 63–69. Barthes’s text has been published in English translation as “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), 142–48.

9. Dalton, “Los Carpinteros.”

10. Fontes combines four different types of (im)precise rulers in (a) normally spaced numbers in normally ascending numerical order, (b) irregularly spaced numbers in ascending numerical order, (c) normally spaced numbers that are out of sequence, and (d) irregularly spaced nonsequential numbers.

[1]1. Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity: An Unfinished Project,” in Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, ed. Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 38–54.

[1]2. See Jürgen Habermas, “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno,” in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 128.

[1]3. Dalton, “Los Carpinteros.”

[1]4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, ed. Claude Leforte, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 6.

[1]5. Jacques Lacan, “Some Reflections on the Ego,” cited in Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996), 115. The reference is to Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage.

16. Lowinger, “Object as Protagonist.”

[1]7. Ibid.

[1]8. Cited in “Warhol in His Own Words,” selected by Neil Printz, in Andy Warhol: A Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), 457.

[1]9. Maria Hlavaloja, foreword to Mona Vatamanu e Florin Tudor, ed. Cosmin Costinaş and Jill Winder (Utrecht: BAK, 2009), 7, 30.

20. Karl Marx, “The Commodity,” chapter 1 of Capital (1867), trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), vol. 1, 128.

21. Ibid., 126; John Locke, “Some Considerations on the Consequences of the Lowering of the Interest” (1691), in Works (London, 1777), vol. 2, 28, cited by Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 126. Marx explains, “In English writers of the 17th century we frequently find ‘worth’ in the sense of value in use, and ‘value’ in the sense of exchange value.”

22. See Hardt and Negri, Empire, as discussed in Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 261–64.

23. Régis Debray, L’obscenité démocratique (Paris: Flammarion, 2007), 37.

24. Dagoberto Rodríguez, in Lowinger, “Object as Protagonist.” 25. Dalton, “Los Carpinteros.”

26. The term negation—Freud’s Verneinung—does not possess a univocal meaning. It may pertain to logic and psychology among other things. It is employed here in terms of psychological confutation—that is, it appears as a representation that becomes conscious under the condition that its origin is denied. It is related to Lacan’s “no” as the unconscious recognizing the place of the unknown.

27. Marx preferred use of the English word work over labor, which he considered bourgeois. Yet in the translation of the present text, the author has specified the use of labor as a means of conveying greater precision with regard to physical and mental effort in the process of production, given that work, when used in reference to the activities of Los Carpinteros, can mean both “labor” and “art piece,” or “work of art.”

28. The cruzeiro was the Brazilian currency of the periods from 1942 to 1967 and from 1970 to 1986.

29. Cildo Meireles, in Cildo Meireles (Rio de Janeiro: FUNARTE, 1981), 28.

30. Jean-Joseph Goux, “Marx et l’inscription du travail,” in

Théorie d’ensemble, by Michel Foucault et al. (Paris: Seuil, 1968), 191–98.

31. Dalton, “Los Carpinteros.”

32. Marx, Capital, 126n4.

33. Lowinger, “Object as Protagonist.”

34. Charles Sanders Peirce, “A Guess at the Riddle,” in Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic, ed. James Hooper (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 187–202.

35. Paulo Mendes da Rocha, conversation with the author, January 20, 2010.

36. This is what occurred with the buildings designed by Oscar Niemeyer for the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói, the Museu do Índio, and the Museu Nacional de Brasília, all of which are inefficient structures in terms of their museological functions.

37. Giulio Carlo Argan, Walter Gropius e la Bauhaus (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1951), 34.

38. See Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 1996); Baudrillard, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, trans. Chris Turner (London: Sage, 1998); and Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis: Telos, 1981).

39. Žižek, Parallax View, 262.

40. Castillo said, “It’s not that we renounce philosophy; it’s that the philosophy that we try to convey is that which arises from the nature of the object” (in Lowinger, “Object as Protagonist”).

41. Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Infante’s Inferno, trans. Suzanne Jill Levine and the author (Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 2005), 262.

42. “Formless,” in Georges Bataille, ed., Encyclopaedia Acephalica, trans. Iain White (London: Atlas, 1995), 51.

43. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (1966), trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), 404–5.

44. Ibid.

45. See Mário Pedrosa, Untitled (“Maio de 1970”), in Antonio Manuel (Rio de Janeiro: FUNARTE/Instituto Nacional de Artes Plásticas, 1984), 16.

46. Gilles Deleuze, “L’épuisé,” afterword to Samuel Beckett, Quad et autres pièces pour la télévision, trans. É. Fournier. (Paris: Minuit, 1992), 57; published in English translation as “The Exhausted,” trans. Anthony Uhlmann, SubStance 24, no. 3 (1995): 3–28.

47. See George Hersey, The Monumental Impulse (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001).

48. Samuel Beckett, “Heard in the Dark 2,” in The Complete Short Prose, 1929–1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove, 1995), 251.

49. Georges Bataille, “Architecture,” in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), vol. 1, 171–72. Statements regarding Bataille in this paragraph are indebted to Denis Hollier’s comments in Against Architecture: The Writings of George Bataille (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), i–xxiii.

50. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. M. Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 74–76.

51. Henri Bergson, La pensée et le mouvant (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1946), 172.

52. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, a Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 11–12.

53. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 104–11.

54. John Dawes, The Swimming Pool and the Garden (Edinburgh: John Batholomew & Son, 1975), 20, 22.

55. “El Ofício de Pintar: A Conversation between Federico Herrero and Jens Hoffmann,” archive of the artist.

56. “Immersions in Mental Landscapes: A Conversation between Federico Herrero and Pablo Leon de la Barra,” archive of the artist.

57. Lygia Clark, “Caminhando,” in Lygia Clark (Rio de Janeiro: FUNARTE, 1980), 25–26.

58. Ernesto Che Guevara, El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1971), 118.

59. Jeremy Campbell, The Liar’s Tale: A History of Falsehood (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).

60. Dalton, “Los Carpinteros.”

61. See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes toward an Investigation),” trans. ???, in Essays on Ideology (London: Verso, 1993), 1–60.

62. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 2008), 45.

63. Ibid., 77.

64. Michel Foucault, “La vérité et les formes juridiques” (1974), in Dits et écrits (Paris: Gallimard, 1994).

65. See Anne Dunand, “The End of Analysis II,” in Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 251.

66. Geneton Moraes Neto, interview with Guillermo Cabrera Infante, March 23, 2004,  http://www.geneton.com.br/archives/000035.html.

67. Lowinger, “Object as Protagonist.”

68. Jean Pouillon, “Manières de table, manières de lit, manières de langage,” in Destins du cannibalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 10.

69. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan, the Absolute Master, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), 112.

70. In David Evans, John Heartfield AIZ: Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung, Volks Illustrierte, 1930–1938 (New York: Kent Fine Art, 1992), 280.

71. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 156.

72. Dalton, “Los Carpinteros.”

73. Michael Clark, Paradoxes from A to Z (London: Routledge, 2002), 99–106.

74. Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 38–39.

75. Ibid., 39.

76. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003), 76.

77. See Harald Weinrich, The Linguistics of Lying and Other Essays, trans. Jane K. Brown and Marshall Brown (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 57.

78. See Campbell, Liar’s Tale, 248.