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NOMAD V, ETERNAL JUMP PENULTIMATE

Performance

Silver plated elastic / Stone suit

Variable dimensions

Hall of Contemporary Art

Rancagua / Chile

2007

Mahaluf has precisely set out to persevere with the problem and has to do stylistic exercises in the contemporary art hall of the Rancagua House of Culture. Here some issues regarding our second point of interest. After the National Fine Arts Museum (MNBA) exhibition, where we could understand the historical performatic effect starting from the organization of the process-related objectivity of Mahaluf’s work, is that we can comprehend the emphasis put on the “small history of procedures” of contemporary artwork production. I refer to examining the art of the second half of the twentieth century. I refer to the resistance of resistance of the materials with which works were produced and which gave way to new approaches on art, basically of a performatic order. Therefore I am establishing a map starting with dripping and Action painting, passing what –according to Danto- is what is “unperceivable” of the objects of consumption regarding Pop art works, or rather the dismissing  despair of works like “Buddha” by S. Levine, until reching the performatic objects of Janine Antoni.

 

In other words, the present piece by Mahaluf, Nomad V - Eternal Jump/Penultimate, is a work criticizing the media by which an artwork would have turned into one, in a recent history and precedent of the art of today. This is, like making the implicit relations in its own performatic work (de)genealogic to rearticulate a notion of art. One has then to imagine Nomad V – Eternal Jump/Penultimate as a scale model of the history of contemporary art under constant examination and requiring some kind of –performatic- effort to trace its own history, a matter, let it be said, of a tragic humor.

 

*Extract text from "Humor and What is Imperturbable" by Juan Francisco Garate

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