Cultural Nexus Creator – Page 2 – Creation system for the MSU Broad Cultural Nexus

Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis

These photographs document one of the first public actions performed by the artistic collective Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis (The Mares of the Apocalypse). Here, a nude Pedro Lemebel and Francisco Casas ride a mare into the University of Chile alongside three poet friends. Lemebel recalls that certain fields of study in the university were denied to women, queer and transgender communities, and other minorities. Because of this, Casas suggested that they “re-found” the university. The action cites the founding of Santiago de Chile in 1541 by Spanish conquistador Pedro de Valdivia and the legend of Lady Godiva, who allegedly rode nude through Coventry, England, in a deal with her husband to reduce taxes on her subjects. The performance eroticizes and critiques the virile masculinity of the military officer and conquistador.

Libro internacional

Libro internacional is a collection of works by various international artists, including Guillermo Deisler and Graciela Gutierrez Marx, sent to Edgardo Antonio Vigo via the postal system. Vigo began the three-volume mail art project in 1976, a year of political and personal significance in which the Argentine military coup d’etat occured and the artist’s son, Abel Luis, was disappered under the new regime. Mail art emerged in latin America in the 1970s as a transnational network that sough to overcome obstacles to the exchange of artistic ideas imposed by military dicatorships. Vigo, a pioneer of the movement, writes:

“DISTANCE COMMUNICATION (MAIL ART) should not only transgress the regulations of the post office. It should also create COUNTER-INFORMATION, transforming its practitioner into an ACTIVE COMBATIVE PARTICIPANT” who denounces the aberrations of national and international systems that enslave men.“.

Arte Correio (Mail Art)

Paulo Bruscky was part of an international network of artists working performance, painting, sculpture, poetry, experimental music, and correspondance art, or mail art. Mail art uses stamps, seals, telegrams, and envelops as mediums to make artworks, which one then sends through the mail to friends and colleagues, potentially all over the world. Under oppressive regimes, mail art can be a strategy to subvert state censorship and articulate resistance. The postal system, ironically an apparatus run by the very government he opposed, allowed Bruscky, a pioneer of mail art in Brazil, to create networks for the free circulation of messages that extended far beyond his home in Recife. The artist states: “With the mail art, art regains its principal functions: informing, protesting, and denouncing.”.

XXII History of the Human Face (Trueque): Airmail Painting No.123

Eugenio Dittborn began producing airmail paintings — collaged works that he folded and mailed through the postal system — in 1983 amid the “cultural blackout” brought about by Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship in Chile. The works simultaneously resisted censorship by circumventing regular forms of art production and circulation, and practiced a form of self-exile at a time when exile was imposed on a large number of Chilean citizens. The series Histories of the Human Face (1998-ongoing) compiles faces from disparate sources: mug shots from Chilean crime magazines, photographs from anthropological compendiums of South American ethnic groups, and drawings by people institutionalized for mental health reasons, as well as the artist’s daughter. The work is always shown alongside an envelope tracking its exhibition history. It points to photography’s use as a tool of police surveillance, but also as a tool for making visible the faces of the oppressed, for instance activists, criminals, and indigenous peoples.

Para um tempo de guerra (For a Time of War)

Regina Vater created Para um tempo de guerra while living in the United Stated during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. The installation is comporised of the mosaic-like stones that pave pedestrian streets in Portugal and its former colonies such as Brazil, and Brazilian-style French rolls, an inexpensive and popular food staple. The mandala shape, a widely recognized symbol of peace, responded to the escalation of the Cold War and Reagan’s massive buildup of military troops and weapons. The poem by Peruvian writer Cesar Vellejo speaks to a collective desire for empathy and social justice

And in this cold hour, when the earth

Transcends human just and is so sad,

I would like to touch all the doors.

And plead to I do not know whom, sorry,

And make him pieces of fresh bread

Here, in the oven of my heart….!

Walk through Walls (Triple Pane)

Much of Oscar Tuazon’s work is informed by systems theory, a field of knowledge trained on understanding the inner workings of complex systems through analysis of their parts and their operation over time. His interest in water is certainly one example. But on a smaller scale, he also looks to the systems that organize human life and the function of the home. Here, he combines seemingly disparate architectural and consumer elements into a new, speculative system. The work is paradigmatic of Tuazon’s engagement with the built environment, and how he attempts to rethink (or unthink) spaces and the systems they support. It also exemplifies the artist’s interest in the form of the window, the material and aesthetic dimensions of which he continue to investigate.

Beadwall

Many of Oscar Tuazon’s sculptures are prototypes– iterations in an ongoing process of research, development, and refinement. This work precedes Curtain Wall (2013), also on view in this gallery, and gives insight into this particular series of material and mechanical investigations. Many of the artist’s experiments remain hidden from view, privately conducted in the studio, but on this occasion he has decided to show this never-before-exhibited work and thereby reveal aspects of his research and development processes. As with the larger Curtain Wall, this sculpture is based on an invention by Steve Baer and represents Tuazon’s early attempts to recreate an adaptable window insulation system.

Curtain Wall

Oscar Tuazon has long been interested in and inspired by the many inventions of Steve Baer. JHe has even attempted to model some of Baer’s invetions, the results of which often become new sculptural works. Curtain Wall is a case in point, and part of a larger series of works that attempted to develop window treatment systems that could convert a window into a well-insulated wall, and back again. In the original designs, small polystyrene beads are propelled into and vacuumed out of a dual-pane window, essentially “opening” and “closing” the window while providing a thick layer of insulation. Tuazon’s Curtain Wall is a now-static incarnation of the artist’s attempt to re-create this system.

Winona LaDuke (Honor the Earth)

In 2018 Oscar Tuazon transported part of his Zome Allow (2016) to Minnesota and began erecting a new Water School on the homestead of Winona LaDuke, a prominent social, political, and environmental activist who heads the Native environmental advocacy organization Honor the Earth. The organization has been deeply involved in protests against the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline, and was a major presence in 2016 at the confrontation between private and public security officers and protesters that took place near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. Tuazon also traveled to Standing Rock at this time to protest, an experience that deeply affected him and continues to inform his present work. The artist will complete construction on LaDuke’s property in 2019. There, the school will support the activities of Honor the Earth and local Indigenous communities.

Drumwall Water Window

This major new work was produced in collaboration with the MSU Broad, Guardian Glass LLC, Lansing Glass Company, and MSU’s Infrastructure, Planning and facilities unit. it began with Oscar Tuazon’s interest in reconsidering the passive solar architectural system devised by Steve Baer as part of his Zome Home. In the original design from 1972, drums of water installed in large bay windows collect solar energy over the course of the day, to heat the house at night. Here, Tuazon envisions the water inserted between panes of heat-tempered glass, while also transforming the static window into a massive, partially rotating door. This prototype is a potentially revolutionary design, which the artist will continue to develop as part of his longer-term efforts to establish a permanent Water School on a property in southern Nevada.