Los Carpinteros, a trio of artists functioning as a unit, fashions works whose humorous veneer overlays an elusive commentary on what we hold dear.
By LENNIE BENNETT, Times art critic
Published May 1, 2005
[Images from the USF Contemporary Art Museum
Los Carpinteros, The Creative Hand, 2000, wood.
Los Carpinteros, Hot Sofa, 2001, powder-coated steel.
TAMPA - If the somewhat fragmented celebration of Latin American and Caribbean culture known as Arte 2005 did nothing more than provide a pretext for "Los Carpinteros: Inventing the World," it would be worth it.
The exhibition of sculptures, installations, drawings, paintings and prints by the Cuban collective of Marco Castillo, Dagoberto Rodriguez and (until 2003) Alexandre Arrechea at the University of South Florida's Contemporary Art Museum is a cultural coup for the Tampa Bay area. The three artists, who call themselves Los Carpinteros (the carpenters), have operated internationally for several years, the darlings of biennials, big-name collectors and museum curators. At the opening of the new $548-million Museum of Modern Art in New York, one of the Carpinteros' large drawings was featured prominently in the contemporary art gallery as a recent purchase for the permanent collection. You don't get much better validation than that.
The survey at CAM spans the mid 1990s to 2005; most of it is art completed before Arrechea decided he wanted to pursue more work in video and amicably split off. Curated by Margaret Miller and Noel Smith, both of USF, and Corina Matamoros of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana, "Inventing the World" is that rarity in exhibitions, a scholarly romp that simultaneously makes your forehead crease in thought and your mouth split into a grin.
That duality comes from the works' hybrid nature. Los Carpinteros' meticulously crafted objects flout the utilitarianism of craft by their transformation into conceptual vessels containing ideas rather than matter.
So just when the furrows on your forehead threaten to become mountain ranges as you consider that 88-inch set of drawers shaped like a hand grenade and blessed with the metaphorically loaded title Jewelry Case, you see - aha! - the drawers don't explode when you open and close them and the collector who owns the work actually keeps scarves in it. What's not to love about art that can say and be so much at once?
Equally appealing is Library II. (Actually, there is nothing here that isn't appealing.) Thirty-six tape measures are attached to a wall in precise rows like book bindings arranged on shelves. Printed on each shiny metal container is the title of a work of literature and its author. The tape spools out a few inches to reveal the opening words of the play, novel, poem or essay. The installation invites reverie - how many different levels of meaning does "measure" have, anyway? And fun. Remember those school exercises in guessing the work by identifying a quote? Examples: Shakespeare's Hamlet (of course), Wole Soyinka's The Open Sore of a Continent (a Nobel Prize-winning writer in case you didn't know), On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (Copernicus!), and Charles Silverstein's The Joy of Gay Sex (hmmm).
Imagine, you folks old enough to remember early Saturday Night Live skits, Chevy Chase's physical slapstick melded with Bill Murray's knowing irony and you get the philosophical stance of the exhibition.
A roll-armed sofa is flawlessly constructed of steel coated in shiny white and inlaid with gas burners where cushions would be (hot seats, get it?). The domestic objects share associations of comfort, respite and communal gathering. As reinvented by the artists, the sofa-as-stove or stove-as-sofa is not like its mass-produced inspiration. It's one of a kind and useless - as useless as, well, art. The artists thoughtfully added temperature dials as hard-edged passementerie in case we want a more heated discussion about function versus frivolity.
The exhibition is full of such nuanced ruminations on how we live and what we value. Elegantly spare breadboxes would delight any Shaker master-carpenter. That they are assembled as the multicompartment cargo hold of a 10-foot-long guided missile would earn them a dada membership card.
Accompanying some of the sculptures and installations are watercolors, prints and drawings, two-dimensional studies of a work in progress that also serve as narratives to explain how the ideas swirling around might be resolved.
Most of one gallery is devoted to Los Carpinteros' ruminations on water, the stuff of life. In these large works on paper, the artists control the substance and treat it as a commodity. A sensuous curve of aquamarine is engineered like a highway. It looks sullenly gray contained in a concrete cavity suggesting a swimming pool with no recreational appeal. The culmination of these sophisticated doodles is an aquatic "pool" table, a miniature replication of an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Except the water in it is frozen solid, locking the pool in time like an urban fossil.
These are visual puns that would not rise above their wit and charm but for their serious ideological underpinnings. Drawers and sofas and swimming pools - only things - become transformed as repositories of our needs or desires, our vices or virtues, when we invest in them emotionally.
Two exterior installations bracket the exhibition. Three tall watchtowers brood at the museum's entrance and a tent city encamps across a bucolic green behind the building. The tents, titled Transportable City and one of Los Carpinteros' famous works, debuted at Havana's 2000 Bienal and has traveled throughout the world. Like all the art here, it evokes many associations. The 10 canvas structures approximate specific buildings in Havana - the capitol, a church, the university, a lighthouse, a prison and warehouse, for example. We recognize many of them by their architectural details: the church's spire, the prison's small, high windows, the capitol's self-important profile.
Like Watchtowers, they are empty, a gypsy ghost town that will pull up stakes and move on. Both address specific political issues with the artists' homeland, but they resonate as global messages of a nomadic rootlessness that is sometimes literal and sometimes just a moral hollowness. Nobody's really at home anymore.
Los Carpinteros' art may decry the increasing depersonalization of the way we live, but they, perversely, depersonalize the way we view it. They work within the anonymity of their generic name, never hinting at individual contributions to any of their art.
But we're brow-furrowing again.
As I stroked my chin during a recent visit, students strolling past Transportable City on a beautiful spring day looked at the items, and smiled as if seeing a brave new world.
The most personal work is a painting from 1994, a portrait of the three artists, friends since childhood, standing behind an old Spanish colonial building that was once a country club, now closed. It contains hints of how their art will evolve during the next decade. The young men stand in relaxed collegiality like golfers, holding branches like clubs in the tall grass that might once have been a manicured course. The painting is framed elaborately with wood into which Havana Country Club, the painting's title, is carved in a retro-style script. The nostalgia permeating it will yield over the years to more cerebral interpretations of loss and longing. The joyous and wry transformation of a humble object or material into art with high purpose has only been refined.
There is an anomaly among all the mutated objects. A wall structure of a large wooden hand is a precious puzzle of flaps, carved like one of those old charts tracing lifelines for palm readings. The point of The Creative Hand might at one level be obvious, in the same way the sofa or watchtower is obvious. Nothing about Los Carpinteros is pat. It's easy to see that the hand is the tool of the artist, the connection between an idea and its realization. We try to divine the connection as a palmist might read one's past and future. But the Carpinteros' handful of closed compartments, full of everything or nothing, keeps their secrets.
"Los Carpinteros: Inventing the World" is at the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, 4202 E Fowler Ave., Tampa, through July 15. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday. Free admission. 813 974-2849 or www.usfcam.usf.edu
