I don’t believe - Abel Bentín (Galería Lucía de la Puente)

Otto; or, Up With Dead People (2008)
Directed by Bruce La Bruce

Bruce La Bruce's film is a brilliant analysis of contemporary displaced people, individuals who live on the margins of society, groups that struggle to obtain validation of either legal or social nature.

"Otto" is the story of an outcast teenager. Now, there would be nothing original about this except for one detail: In a world in which the living dead are humanity's recurrent plague, Otto is a boy that defines himself as a non flesh-eating zombie with an identity crisis.

From the very beginning, the viewer is aware of a narration inside a narration, in a way that would be comparable to Propst literary models. "Up with Dead People" is the movie that lesbian intellectual Medea is filming, with references to Hélène Cixous views on the essential bisexuality of L'ecriture femenine, as well as Irigaray's Speculum of the other Woman (the mirroring of the female body surmounts feminist theory in this film as Hella, Medea's girlfriend, can only appear on screen as a black and white image from old reels of 1910-1920 movies, thus enabling a parallel between these two women and even classic and contemporary cinema).

In the first scene Otto rises from the grave, a classic image that has transcended the 7th art and has forever become part of popular culture. Ever since Romero's "Night of the Living Dead" (1968) filmmakers have toyed with one of humanity's most fierily rooted fears: death or rather the question "what happens after Death?". Romero and others have also explored the living dead as a metaphor of social marginality and the reification of the subaltern thus creating one of the most fascinating sub-genres in film's history.

my sketch / mi boceto

This film proudly assumes this cultural heritage and builds upon it. As the narrator's voice tell us in the first scenes, these dead people have little or nothing to do with the classic flesh-eating, brain-devouring zombie. Those who are alive judge them as "An echo of their own somnambulistic conformist behavior". Normal society is exposed as a tyrannical Lacanian "Great Other", a Great Other that demands adaptation or extinction. Insofar heterosexual normative is carried out the Great Other is satisfied. The symbolic order, that which constitutes what one would perceive as "reality", can never suppress the "real" (id est, the obstacle of the symbolic order). But the real can only exist after the symbolic order (which relies greatly on language, the widest symbolization process known) has been fully inserted in everyone's mind. Then, it's only logical that zombies are finally able to reclaim language and reasoning. If zombies were the outsiders of past decades, they are now entities that can never fit in and that are constantly aware of their own situation. What can be more destabilizing for the heterosexual normative than homosexuality taken to the extreme?, in this case, a new wave of gay zombies that prey upon male flesh, in a very carnal and literal way.

Otto lives, or unlives, eating animals instead of humans. He runs away from those who would seek to harm him. And he finds a way to define himself thanks to Medea and her movie which is full of theory references. As Medea's brother so aptly confirms, here the subject is "the empty signifier upon which you could project any particular gender".

Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory derives from Levi-Strauss structuralism (after Saussure and Jacobson linguistic studies). They would affirm that certain structures have invariably persisted in humanity's development. One of such structures is the dual nature of language. When Saussure defined langue and parole he decided that the entire language was nothing more than a system of signs, signs that had arbitrary value and that would only have meaning in their relation with other signs. If so, the human language can only exist in a dual system of opposition (signifier / signified: signifier as the acoustic image generated by an idea or object and signified as the word in any given language that is utilized to retrieve that acoustic image from our memory). This fundamental duality has its first manifestation in sexual gender (males versus females). And as Lacan explains, the first structure one encounters as one enters into the world is that of sex, one is either a man or a woman, no one can be both or neither. Or at least that's what heterosexual normative would have us believe. There is no place for a third sex and has never been one, hermaphrodites and other variants have been utterly discarded by psychoanalytic theory.

John Chauca Laurente

Lacan, nonetheless, accepts in his sexuation graphic that being a woman doesn't necessarily mean to occupy the female position or that being a man doesn't necessarily mean to occupy the male position. He also accepts that the male and female positions have evolved through history and adapted to social requirements, being a man or being a woman, as gender affiliated roles, is a sign of arbitrariness, in the sense that there is nothing human that can be defined as a masculine or feminine behavior. Everything is a social construction. And as such is an empty signifier. Gender roles are different now compared to recent centuries, or even decades, and they keep changing. Nothing is set in stone.

Does "Otto" attempt to disrupt the Lacanian structure? Otto has experienced idealized love (indisputably visible in his flashbacks as a living boy), savage and destructive sex with a costumed gay that thinks Otto is disguised as a zombie, and the possibility of a more complete relationship with Fritz, the movie star. He deals with the masculine position in his first love, he assumes sex as the ultimate manifestation of a consumer-based capitalist world (to consume and cannibalize are here synonyms), and finally accepts the failure to insert himself into society (after his brief relationship with Fritz) and wanders towards the north, hoping to find people like him, hoping to find, perhaps, a Utopian gay civilization in which the living and non-living can finally divert their basic and seemingly irreconcilable natures.
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Abel Bentín

El día de ayer se inauguraron cinco interesantísimas muestras de arte en Barranco. Abel Bentín, un artista joven y sumamente talentoso, presentó “I don’t believe” en la Galería Lucía de la Puente. En una muestra anterior, “Candyvore”, Abel había trabajado con figuras como los cráneos de caramelo o la violencia casi sangrienta del fudge con chispitas de caramelo, y se trataba de piezas tan apetecibles que provocaba devorarlas. Ahora, no obstante, las esculturas de Abel nos traen rezagos de la ternura de los animales y la inocencia de los dibujos animados; tenemos, entonces, las manos de Mickey Mouse o el imposible cráneo del Pato Donald.

Simultáneamente, también en Lucía de la Puente, la artista Sandra Gamarra presentó una serie de cuadros que juegan con ciertas estructuras, o desestructuras (también podríamos hablar de deconstrucción aunque la propia artista utiliza el término destrucción), y por ejemplo utiliza el lugar de enunciamiento del artista o juega con originales combinaciones de imágenes realistas en situaciones totalmente irrealistas o hasta surrealistas. Dos muestras maravillosas y dos artistas extraordinarios, aunque lo mejor de la noche, indudablemente, fue la presencia de mi amigo Max, que por fin se animó a asistir a uno de estos eventos.

Abel Bentín

En el transcurso de la noche nos encontramos con bastante gente, varios visitantes asiduos de la galería como Christian Fuchs, Hugo Alegría, Carmen Alegría y José Medina (editor de ArtMotiv) además de artistas como Dare Dovidjenko y Mariella Agois. Luego de las copas de malbec de Navarro Correas y los vasos de Johnnie Walker Black Label, me di cuenta que el sempiterno pisco Ferreyros había sido reemplazado por el nuevo pisco Portón, que por supuesto me animé a probar. También, desde luego, me encontré con amigos de mi colegio como José Aturo Lugón y Rafael Velásquez. Fiel a las siempre atinadas recomendaciones de Rafael, Max y yo decidimos ir a Domingo Laboratorio Creativo, aunque pasamos antes por la Galería Yvonne Sanguineti.

En Yvonne Sanguineti se inauguraban dos muestras, “Al fondo… ¿hay sitio?” de John Chauca Laurente, y Les fleurs du bien de Estrella Levy Gazit. Los cuadros de Chauca, siempre irreverentes, subvierten imágenes icónicas tanto de la historia peruana como del arte universal, así, tenemos a un conocido prócer de la patria saltando de un acantilado, no en el caballo emblemático con el que aparece en todos los libros escolares, sino con una moto; de igual modo, la Mona Lisa tiene el rostro cubierto con el sticker de una carita feliz, y el Hombre de Vitruvio, de Leonardo Da Vinci aparece reinventado.

Sandra Gamarra

En palabras del propio Chauca: “Se dice que la práctica hace al maestro. Yo agregaría: la práctica y mucha observación. Porque: ¿Qué es uno? ¿Un interdenominacional predicador del “Malogrando se Aprende” en cinco lecciones y por correspondencia?,  ¿Un insípido degustador de ideas almacenadas en las papeleras de reciclaje de las memorias del Señor Peter Kam Troupus y para colmo Erectus?, o acaso ¿Un enredador de historias incivilizadas con final feliz, más IGV y romance incluidos? A lo mejor, un sumo pontífice de lo absurdo que reclama para sí los restos fósiles y mancillados de La Oreja de Van Gogh, masterizado en disco de vinilo de 45 R.P.M., o simple y llanamente, un aprendiz de artista -en pleno estado de ebullición- cuya efervescencia rebalsa, incluso, los límites de lo que hasta ahora  ha conocido,  y quien harto de enmudecer ante tanto cuestionamiento irrefutable, solo se permite balbucear: ¡Qué fácil es pintar difícil y qué difícil es pintar fácil!”. Las fotos de Estrella Levy Gazit son, como explica el conocido fotógrafo Piero Pereira “objetos que reflejan o traslucen otros objetos que además se reflejan entre sí”.

En Domingo, Max y yo pudimos pintar con crayolas las innumerables fotocopias de los trabajos de Abel Bentín, y es que como parte de la muestra Sketch, podíamos intervenir libremente un largo corredor completamente tapizado de imágenes de Abel. Mientras pintábamos con la crayolas, como niños chiquitos, Max y yo nos tomamos un par de vasos de vodka, ahí sí como niños grandes, ofrecidos gentilmente tanto por mi amigo Rafael como por Gabriel Lama (Rafael me lo presentó hace años y desde entonces somos amigos), director y promotor de esta innovador espacio cultural. Fue una noche realmente divertida.