Behind the Looking Glass

Fyodor Dostoyevsky launched the reverberating question after visiting London in the mid-19th Century: "What would be the good of a 'Palace of Crystal' if there could be any doubt about it?" It was not a lack of confidence regarding the solidity of its metal frame, but about the other side, the other side of the glass, the social model that these buildings were alluding to and perhaps also presaging. The main character from Notes from Underground feared the second industrial revolution's image of complete, indestructible and perpetual planning. Faced with that dream of an eternal Spring of consensus, he in turn proposed a direct, bodily response: to stick out his tongue at the glass and raise his fist in secret against the steel.

However, these same constructions capable of evoking visions of imaginary futures can also be read as image devices. On the one hand, these buildings were entrusted with demonstrating the economic and technological splendor of modern nations. On the other, there were particular aspects of their construction that they had in common with new image-creating technologies, especially photography. The principal role played by light, transparency, mobility and continual technical advances made up a territory shared by both photographic and architectural innovations.

They represented two sides of the dream of modernity. Today, these constructions and images no longer contain the dystopian dreams that passed through Dostoyevsky’s mind and that fairly fall to pieces in the face of a gesture made in the dark. But what would happen if we were to see them again in the visual archive our own abandoned projects? What would we see reflected there? And if we were to think of them as image-creating devices, what responses would we come across for contemporary art?

This set of questions has guided our reading of Viviana Zargón's work. We do not consider the architecture of abandoned factories and ports to be circumscribed within the composition of a visual archive of social and economic transformations in Argentina, but that they provide her with a model for constructing her own images and in that way to establish a specific relationship with viewers.

Why did Zargón decide to incorporate the buildings that defined the steel and glass profile of modernity into the visual archive of Buenos Aires' abandoned industrial constructions at the close of the 20^th Century? Let us assume that it is a case of breaking away from a homogenous temporal fabric in order to reinsert them into a contemporary visual sense. Just as Dostoyevsky’s underground man mixes into our own text, these buildings filter into the abandoned dreams of an industrialized Argentina. It may not make sense to stick out tongues or raise fists against them any longer, but this architecture can still at least return the present’s gaze.

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Though a chronology of architecture's first appearance in Viviana Zargón's work would trace back to her paintings from the ‘80s, it is only with the onset of the following decade that they take on a primary role. This change would imply resolving two challenges to her own artistic language: the first was related to the reference and the characteristics that the architectural image would adopt and the second, associated with the specific place this representation would occupy on the picture plane.

In Viviana Zargón's work, the first question seems to have been decided with relative ease. At the beginning of the decade, images of fictitious architecture with a certain affinity to metaphysical language appeared, where structural elements like beams and rivets remained simultaneously in view. This type of architecture was gradually replaced by representations of diverse port-related spaces, many of which were in the process of disappearing as the result of processes of urban gentrification. These were no longer imaginary spaces, but paintings that emerged based on the artist's photographs of different industrial buildings in Buenos Aires as their point of departure. ¹

The first images of cranes fallen into disuse were followed by others of buildings pertaining to Vias Navegables, sand plants, the Abasto market and abandoned factory constructions, such as those pertaining to the Bash safe factory, Bagley cookie company or Hudson brewery. Her interest in these aspects of the city of Buenos Aires then extended to other places, as seen in the series of photographs taken in the old Flandria textile factory, outside Luján.

In this archive, images of companies or sectors of the State that had not resisted the neo-liberal policies of the 1990s were included on the one hand, and on the other, factory spaces that had been abandoned due to internal re-structuring carried out by the firms themselves. It was the end of a particular period of labor relations and production structure, and as was the case with Julio Steverlynch's project in Flandria, marked the disappearance—in the face of intentional declarations of obsolescence—of organizations that had been pioneers in the area of workers' social rights.

The second aspect to be resolved—the place that architectural images would occupy on the picture plane—evolved along a path that was much less linear. In her first paintings from that decade, imaginary representations were located in the middle of the canvas, framed by large spaces, most often covered by geometric patterns. At times, this composition seemed to make the painting itself into an architectural element, making subtle reference to tiles or mosaics. The tension that existed between the object and its representation would persist during this entire period.

Her images of cranes and port-area spaces would subsequently occupy the upper portion of vertically oriented rectangular canvases, in a compositional resolution with references to British pop art. ² The lower section contained abstract textures or references taken from a wide range of books on math and geometry. This was neither the verticality of modern painting on the wall, nor the horizontality that Steinberg had recognized in Rauschenberg: what she seemed to be articulating in these works was a relationship with the viewer based on didactic technology, the chalkboard, where the structure of the hard sciences' laws—and the possibility that this knowledge might be transmitted—was set opposite the decadence of images of the abandoned port area.

Toward the end of the decade, architectural representation began to occupy not only the entire canvas—which it would often exceed, overflowing across several canvases—but also aluminum structures at times, in dimensions similar to those of the canvas, accompanying the painting. A juxtaposition arose between the precision and perfection of industrial production in the block of aluminum (a material paradigmatic of 20^th Century industrial development) and the manual transposition of the photograph of the abandoned workplace, executed using acrylic paint and brush.

In 1998, Viviana Zargón would present a polyptych made that same year titled Serie de Olam (Olam Series) at the Centro Cultural Borges. The piece comprised five stretched canvases showing parts of different architectural structures. The title refers to Cuban artist Wifredo Lam—with whom the plastic handling of her paintings is also associated—and also to the Hebrew word Olam (עולם), or world. The work's most notable particularity, however, resides in its combination of elements from the Palais des Machines—a pavilion from the 1889 World’s Fair—and photographs of architecture that Zargón had taken along the northern coast of greater Buenos Aires. For viewers, it would nevertheless be impossible to distinguish between the nineteenth-century construction and steel structures from the port area.

The Palais would not be the only building to infiltrate her archive of images of Argentinean factory buildings: the aforementioned Crystal Palace—constructed for London's Great Exhibition in 1851—and the Gare d'Orsay, today a museum, also appear in different works by the artist. ³

Referencing these images has been interpreted as an attempt to expand her early interest in urban circuits and the buildings where her father had worked into a broader perspective in both geographical and historical terms. However, this could be less a question of expansion than it is a veritable rupture, where archival order is altered in order to re-codify images from the present by way of the past and in turn, to also re-codify those of the past by way of the present. To better explain this procedure, we should once again return to Dostoyevsky.

Any visitor arriving in London during the 1860s would have encountered the Crystal Palace in all its' splendor, already consolidated with years of accumulated prestige, yet recent enough to still dazzle as a technical marvel. In the face of this impressive display, Dostoyevsky felt the urge to raise his fist against the perpetual peace that he saw being imposed from within the palace. The end of history would be reached in this tension-free greenhouse according to Sloterdijk: any occurrence would wind up being converted into a merely domestic matter. ⁴

In Marshall Bergman's classic interpretation, however, there is a further twist.⁵ In his view, fear goes beyond that of this asphyxiating capitalist order: what it at risk is the disappearance of the city itself, replaced by the repetitive structures of constructions in steel. What would make Dostoyevsky tremble was not only an imposed consensus, but ultimately the end of all cities, that his own St. Petersburg might disappear.

In the first place, the images selected by Zargón differ from the buildings the Russian had seen on a systematic level: she avoids photographs that show a moment of splendor. Instead, they pertain to phases of construction or concrete events in which the architecture suffers damage of some sort (like the flooding of the Gare d’Orsay, for example). In some cases, the buildings are finished but empty, as if having been recently abandoned. ⁶ Seen as a group, the architecture represented in Zargón’s works is situated at one of the two extremes in the life of any building: either in the phase of project under construction or in a phase of abandon and ruin. Everything is either on the verge of happening or in the midst of the epilogue of what has already taken place.

If Dostoyevsky was able to read these buildings as an order that would permeate all, Zargón's view of architecture demonstrates just the opposite, they are spaces that contain only remains. And if Sloterdijk sees in them the end of history, when conflict will no longer survive, in these images they are being left outside history's narrative, the result of a kind of eternal present where even their most ephemeral aspects have been abandoned and they remain practically petrified: tools left on the floor, panes of glass just barely hanging on in window frames or static reflections in pools of water.

In some way, the city has also disappeared. Zargón's architecture consists of isolated buildings that have ceased to participate as part of urban life, and as is the case in her works on objetos inútiles (useless objects), they seem to have fallen off the edge of history. Lights that exist outside the buildings allow barely a glimpse—in very specific cases—of silhouettes of some aspect or another of the city. Most of the time, however, they only reveal a void, sustained by the structure that surrounds it. ⁷

These constructions do not return to recover a nostalgic vision of modernity or a longing for labor relations that implied disastrous working conditions. What these frozen buildings would seem to show is their other side, their other histories, the efforts in common that would be necessary to complete their construction, rescue them from a disaster or bring them back to life after having been abandoned.

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An attentive look at Serie de Olam (1998) leads us to discover that we are faced with a mix of different constructions, although it may be impossible to distinguish each one. In other cases, as in Once Orsay (1998), viewers know the building that is being referred to, but must mentally reconstruct its image, changing the order presented by the canvases. Zargón demands that viewers fulfill an active role in relation to the image. Whether this involves reconstructing it on the basis of fragments provided—that never fit together exactly—or recognize that the image is a painting—and not a photograph—on the basis of minimal marks of color that appear on the canvas.

If buildings' other side was the set of conditions lacking in the common project necessary to finish constructing, rescue or reactivate them, the other side of the image also asks viewers to play a role involving construction, perhaps that which the real architecture is lacking.

During this particular period, analog photography is a fundamental point of reference in constructing a relationship with viewers. Zargón carried out the majority of her survey of spaces using an analog camera with T-MAX P3200 film. This film, which allows for photography in very low light, has been discontinued by Kodak. The photographic prints that served as the basis for the paintings have not only the grain characteristic of a highly sensitive film, but also the strong contrast that results from the overexposure of exterior spaces, a luminous contrast that Zargón carries over to the paintings. The effect of an excess of light combines with the completely black space that usually frames the images, as if no effort is spared toward achieving an equilibrium between the overexposed and the underexposed, even within the same painting. The buildings find themselves trapped in that lapse when photography had not yet been fully formed, or when a precise moment in exposure or developing has passed. Even the narrow, vertical form of the canvases might vaguely refer to the test strips of photographic paper that analog laboratories used to employ to calculate exposure times.

From the Objetos inútiles series to the Serie de la industria (Industry Series) sequence of photographs to new works with three-dimensional images—like, for example, the Palais des Machines pieces—the role of the viewer appears to have changed: she no longer proposes that viewers construct the image, but that they move through it. As such, walking along in front of a series of photographs or visiting a 3-D space in some way present the possibility of returning to circulate inside these buildings, albeit only via the imagination.

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If we were to take one of the panes of glass used in the Crystal Palace, we would not find its other side. More specifically, we wouldn't be able to distinguish between front and back, and what we observed would depend on the position in which we found ourselves. Perhaps due to this capability to take away dissimilar meanings, crystal became one of modernity's most frequently recurring metaphors.

In this text, the place where we situated the transparent plane established a relationship between constructions in glass and Buenos Aires’ abandoned factory buildings. From there, the place that the artist has proposed for viewers by way of both types of construction has been sustained.

Nevertheless, if we were to modify our position, the other side of the crystal would show us something completely different. Just the opposite might also be read into this architecture: exhibition spaces as opposed to work spaces, construction sites as opposed to those in ruins, the clarity of colossal structures juxtaposed with somber industrial spaces.

Though each perspective would offer a different image, this is not due to incongruent logic, but to the very properties of crystal instead. Perhaps this is why Vivana Zargón has been able to level her gaze on these structures by way of an archive of abandoned factories in Argentina. Perhaps this is why we can return to Dostoyevsky's view and think once again of fists raised in the dark.