Gustavo
Romano:
La tarde de un escritor (The Afternoon of a Writer)
By:
Susan Jane Douglas
Gustavo
Romano shares with other second generation conceptual artists the need to relate
human culture to theories of the sign and sign use by means of technological
devices such as video, projects for the Internet and, more recently, the
satellite photo. Today, Conceptual Art is a kind of degree zero of art, a common
art language with Marcel Duchamp as its symbolic parent. During its heyday in
the 1960s, Conceptual Art re-contextualized the idealizations of past tradition
regarding objects, frequently it abandoned the object completely. Artists
increasingly used analytic processes to "deconstruct" the idea of the
artwork. Their work took several forms. Some conceptual work (in the U.S.
Lawrence Weiner's for example), followed an aesthetic of amateurish denial in
the spirit of radical unoriginality and anti-intellectualism associated with
Dada. Other work drew on investigations of language and science; for instance in
Britain, where Art & Language extracted the idea of art from its material
and discursive determinations. During the same period, Fluxus associates (in
Canada the N.E. Thing Company) worked on time based performances, video, film,
and installation art as well as publications in various forms. Yoko Ono, who
wanted to deal philosophically and aesthetically with the end of painting as a
concept, created pieces that stated that the artwork is a movement in time and
space.
Today's
conceptualism is less tautological and more tactical. Whether its made in Chile,
Uruguay, Brazil, or Argentina, second generation Conceptual Art is the outcome
of a process of abstraction. In its new guise it can be stylishly
cool, intellectual, or exist as a critical window into a global virtual
multimedia world. It can clearly adhere to codes for what Paul Virilio has
called the electro-optical economy.*
Alternately, it can lay bare a satisfying debate regarding what art is to
become. Either way, it keeps reminding us that curiosity and skepticism are
important values to the culture. The Argentine Gustavo Romano contributes to the
debate by relating these values (in the levels macro and micro) to the visual
aspects of the world.
Romano
can be described as a researcher. In his studies he pursues the investigation of
a construction of reality based on an intellectual understanding of a connection
between the scale of intranscendent data, optical devices, visual perception,
and reflection. The idea of relative space and time leads to this particular set
of ontological conjunctions by way of the concept of the artwork as inspired by
the informational field.
In
La tarde de un escritor/The Afternoon of a Writer, Gustavo Romano
explores our human compulsion to put our life into words, to find the narrative
thread which gives meaning to our lives. His work gives us a heightened sense of
what is a normal part of our conscious life and our existence, and while
pointing at the futility of such gestures in the larger scheme of things. The X
ray image records the impossibility of achieving transcendence by drawing on our
desire to make clear, conscious statements.
*
See Paul Virilio, Ground Zero, trans. Chris Turner (London & New
York: Verso, 2002), p. 60.