FUGA

Video Installation / Performance

36 volunteers / 1500 meters of golden elastic bands / 1500 meters of white elastic ribbons / Video 60 min

Patricia Ready Gallery / Santiago / Chile

Photos: Fernanda Maturana / Joaquin Margulis / Josefina Herrera

June 2016

CRITIQUE OF HISTORICAL REASON OF ART

by Juan Francisco Gárate

 

If Yves Klein have had more time to conceive “Leap into the Void” (1960), or if he had coincided with his considerations about the “Klein Blue” colour, he would have made a special performatic suit for leapping, obviously blue, but with difficulty made of acrilic beads. It doesn`t matter. The chilean artist Sebastián Mahaluf is in the performance or social action art direction, jumping through and wearing a suit made of “Mahaluf Red” beads.

 

The fiction about the possible Klein`s suit is not a simple fantasy, is the contemporary connection of the beggining of performance or the use of the body away from the corporal social economies; maybe the most significative issue in art today. Of course, beyond the photographic inmovilization of Klein´s body in the air, beyond the performer`s typical mind-body absorbtion, we encounter with the movilization of other bodies in an art action, which is precisesly the main subject of Mahaluf`s social performance work.

 

The appearance of Happening in this work not only reinstates the considerations of a social art as a possible chilean actual art, very important indeed, as it dont seems to be an answear to the neoliberal recalcitant individualism –mostly supported by the States`s subsidiary politics-, but re-articulates the spaces and objects in a significative way, in other words, integrates every -or almost every- post-duchamp art procedures. Mahaluf gives us the possibility to go outside the hyper authoral chilean artictic ostracism and re-socialize ourselves.

 

How? In addition to the red beads of the performance suit there are elastics, the other main material which takes place at Sebastián Mahaluf`s colective actions. Elastics are dialectical, they are used for the attraction-repultion of the bodies in action. In effect, the participants ceases to be an individual to become a social body, getting apart from each other and inevitably getting attracted by fatigue. The resistance of ones with others it is only momentary and the performers, finally, cannot be avoided, unless in what concerns this breaf social history.