RV Sanchez projects and installs videos on spaces otherwise considered bane for artistic expression. On unexpected corners, niches, flat and elongated spaces, he juxtaposes images with uncouth sounds and nuanced language. There, a play of appearances is displayed in guises that represent his uncompromising vision of the truth, anxiously proclaiming that the original desires that motivate our forefathers had already eclipsed mankind. On its stead are the simulated desires peddled by mass media, ferried through electronic and cybernetic constellations. There, culture – otherwise seen as an avenue where humanity exhibits the best of hopes and dreams – is turned into a dystopia where RV hammers epiphany of sorrows down humanity’s throat. Indeed, RV’s act is an indictment of media culture akin to Baudrillard’s critiques via philosophy. His concern is not fatalistic though, unlike Baudrillard’s. Nor is it nihilistic as Dada Art was once believed to be. His art serves to remind us of the seminal gesture of the Situationists. RV, perhaps, still believes that the original revelation that motivates our dreams, the dream of Debord, can never be forgotten. Dada plays and mocks with images because words can never contain and deliver the revulsion that artists felt against the buffooneries of modern war. RV plays (or toys, rather) with our senses through sounds, images, spaces, movements, and atmosphere, to remind us that something more profound could lurk behind the simulated reality of popular media – albeit to remind us that we are constantly at war with images that want to dominate our lives.
In the First World War, the enemies of culture rear hideous heads. Today, the enemies of culture wear masks soaked in cookies and candies. Commodity culture wants every person to remain a child but beguiles them into thinking (through a simulated form of maturity) that they are in control of their preferences and desires like adult. In a system where the market defines habits through popular and social media practices (while it justifies murder through corporate-sponsored wars in other parts of the world), one can no longer claim an un-mediated, independent, and innocent personal voice. To do so is politically and intellectually naive. All human beings that connect and consume through the media are already implicated in the cybernetic machine. The pseudo-individualism that popular media peddles through electronic tubes, advertising panels, and circuit boards, commits a whole generation of fetish-mongers to a narrow alley where every soul claims to have a reliable sense of their conscience (or individuality) but nobody seems to grasp the sense of having one – a pretension which only encourages bigots into thinking that their souls can be insulated from the hubris that begets philistinism (the same pretension which encourages people to believe that flagrant consumerism in the Western world has nothing to do with the rise of Islamic militancy in the Middle East). Point taken, RV disrupts this embodied discourse into a self-validating truism. His point, however, is not the affirmation of the meaning-content of the electronic-mediated mirage. Rather, it is to probe the extremities of images where power exhibits weaknesses that one may exploit to propagate a liberating agenda. By pointing to the circularity of images, and the referents that they intend to represent, RV portends that the recurrent media spectacle can be checked and interrogated. A sense of being trapped is thereby ritualized, magnified through the same electronic devices that deliver convoluted images of reality. Hence the title of one of his video installations: “Piege” (or Trapped). Here, RV juxtaposes a video of buzzing flies with banal images attached on flytraps to suggest the near helpless disposition that one experiences when constantly seduced by fetish-driven spectacles. The images used are deliberately chosen to mock the fixations encouraged by consumerist culture. The installation effects disorientation, reception lapses, encouraged by the repetition of nuanced loud sounds and unconventionally placed projection. In a way, the installation exudes varying and conflicting interpretations, compels spectators to confront a contrived reality, but deliberately ridicules comfortable structuration and narrative. The installation implicates viewers (which is an element characteristic to any installation art) in the construction of meanings but frustrates and bores them because their roles in the whole affair are not comfortably defined within conventional cinematic and domestic setting where usual perception habits are encouraged, egged on, and sanctioned (which is also true even in so called art films). Perhaps, by doing so, RV hopes to outsmart the ubiquitous media machine by articulating the latent irrationality of the whole enterprise; by pressing the point that there are instances where meanings escape the omniscience of power.
In his other work, RV installs a television set which plays regular programs from national and local stations. Watching the familiar programs in a gallery – one realizes – is no different from watching them at home. Awareness of this patent insight offers redemption from the uncomfortable impasse that usually accompanies the experience of contemporary art. It seems that no disruption is required between experiencing the installation as art and experiencing the installation as a regular television set playing regular television programs. There is no difficulty assimilating the television set into a location which sanctions objects to be art. In the first place, RV installed his work in the same space that houses traditional fine art formats like painting and sculpture (the philosopher, Arthur Danto, had in fact spent balls and brains over this matter in the 60s but it seems that, nowadays, the practice is no longer controversial). In a way, the artist merely re-animates the classic trick of Duchamp’s ‘ready-made,’ which already persuaded the artworld (rather convincingly) that any object can be re-contextualized as an artefact of art. Here, however, the ‘ready-made’ pertains not only to the object (the television set) but also to the structure of the experience that one elicits from the environment that contextualizes the meaning and use of the television set. Duchamp’s ‘ready-made’ appropriates objects as art but leaves their utility outside the gallery space. This enables institutions and spectators of art accrue aesthetic value (or the potential of having one) on things that are unlikely candidates for the status “Art.” The “Urinal” of Duchamp, for example, assumes a utility different from ‘ordinary’ urinals that people use outside the gallery and museum spaces. RV’s installation, on the other hand, appropriates both the object and the utility that contextualizes its meaning and use. His practice, in a sense, appropriates familiar forms from a domestic domain to a site where it could be seen from a slanted angle; where a particular segment of contemporary life can be interrogated or enjoyed in a similar but different context; where Art and life can be experienced coextensively. The installation strays away from RV’s approach in “Piege.” It invites participation from the audience (by implying their presence like “Piege” does) but converses at a level where it commands a different kind of attention. The installation does not bore the audience because the content of the programs shown by the television set comfortably supports and encourages familiar expectations. The installation pays towards the spectator. The manner by which the ‘ready-made’ is positioned facilitates the ease in the delivery of program contents. It does not demand a more sophisticated reaction from the audience other than the usual giggles and excitements that they illicit from watching late afternoon news and prime-time soaps. In other words, the installation is a theatrical device. It facilitates a comfortable conversation with the audience and does not, in any way, subvert the perception habits that they have already mastered. On the other hand, it also communicates something else. Something more than mundane gravitates around the installation space. A hallowed sound lingers around the site, echoing a familiar voice long ignored by pedestrian ears but never forgotten. It activates a very old device, which misses our notice because the phenomenon is too ordinary. It enlivens an old apparatus which is not entirely alien to contemporary life. It enlivens ritual. The installation brings spectators to the realization that the daily routines of contemporary life are properly ritualistic and largely ceremonial; that a secular form of religion engulfs sacrosanct and profane spaces. Watching television soap, or late afternoon news, for example, is a ritual sanctioned by commodity culture. Brushing one’s teeth, taking a bath, commuting public utility vehicles, checking a social media account, are also rituals. They navigate a religious life to and fro sacrosanct and profane spaces that enliven a commodity- driven system. They are parts of the aggregates that make the whole system work. The mall, together with its movie houses, show rooms, and merchandizing spaces, approximate the function of the church. It is a major sacrosanct space where people practice the rituals proper to the market place: buying and selling. The mall, in fact, is one of the holiest places of capitalism. The virtual space of the social media functions as extensions of merchandizing spaces. The gallery space is also a sacred place for commoditized fetish-objects called “Art” (a reality that the art of installation resists but fails). Every person that logs into a social media account, or visits a commercial gallery, consumes something and thereby participates in the operation of the whole schema. Any person can qualify as avatar and can be digitized as cogs of the cybernetic machine. Any person can be a body incarnate of a digitized religion. RV’s Art is a commentary on rituals that make the operation of this religion possible. RV’s practice is therefore an injunction of the thesis that art looses aura through serialization. Art did not lose its magic in transformed reproducible copies. Art is serialized in tangible, contrived, and virtual spaces but, by being so, it is also ritualized in pedestrian form. The domain of art has always been and always will be mediation, the very thing that rituals celebrate. Lest we forget, the human being who painted animate creatures on cave walls is the same human being who installs inanimate site-specific constructions in public spaces. The human being who performed rituals with their bodies through tattoos and totems is the same human being who paints graffiti in urban spaces. These practices not only invite conversation or dialogue. They imply and suggest the existence of social or communal beings. In the first place, social beings create art precisely because their location within a social structure inclines them to converse and mediate. Conversation and mediation are among the core structures of life. This means that the installation of RV merely actuates the space that implicates the life of a community, much like in rituals. Serialization did not cause the “death of art.” Instead, it strengthens art’s potential to carry out a dialogic function because it is now able to reach the margins of power where sincere discourse can finally be performed. We go to church to mediate – perhaps to converse with something that is truly profound or transcendent – but the act of mediation there is autarchic. The didactic structure of the Church is mono-logic. As such, it limits discursive spaces and practices. It revels in exclusions. The very constitution of sectarian religion frustrates the promise of dialogue. Art, on the other hand, proceeds further. It can go beyond institutional limitations. It is dialogic because it rejoices in mediation through metaphors, meanings, and symbols. In fact, the Catholic Church defended Art from heckling iconoclasts in the 17th century by sanctioning Baroque Art because they believe that Art assumes an indispensable part in Evangelization; because they believe that Art can succeed where they might fail. Serialization makes Art more potent. This is why Homi Bhabha believes that the role of the artist is more important today than before. Lest we miss a recent discovery in contemporary thought: meanings are unbounded. They revel in disparities, dislocations, and deferrals. They revel in mediations.
