Coral Reef - the Sequel

Pope Francis, like his sainted namesake, loves the birds and beasts.

When I travel – especially in cities - I am constantly reminded of coral reefs.  I suppose there are a few analogs: cities are accretive, there’s a lot of deconstruction and reconstruction continuously going on, and they are environments for a whole host of species – many of whom are just taking advantage of the niches that present themselves in the neglected spaces created by some of the hosts. They are sites for both dead and living. They are layered – painted and changed by unconscious action over time – a canvas of circumstance and accident whose image will never be finalized.

Graffiti in San Telmo, Buenos Aires. 2015

The graffiti images I am collecting in photographs are inspiring and they completely connect (to me) to more conscious artistic endeavours we see in museums.  Sometimes it’s hard to determine what is art and what is defacement. We went to an exhibit at the MAMBA here in San Telmo – actually a series of exhibits.  For me they had a few things in common – they featured South American, mostly Argentinian artists –  density and chaos; which evoked the richness and complexity of life and language and the rich stew that exists in the human mind – the logical and irrational hemispheres that contribute to creative thought and scientific revelation – but that density and complexity in the exhibits also served as a means of obscuring dangerous, seditious messages.  Much of the imagery was abstract but created from found items.  Collages of imagery taken from improbably different sources.  One artist, Leon Ferrari, created dense tonal canvasses.  The tone was created by reams of written words.  The content of the words was probably seditious but they were so layered upon each other that it was difficult to ‘prove’ what the message was.  It was as if a crowd was whispering and one could discern occasional words – words of discontent, revolution, anti-religious sentiment – but who was whispering those words?  One couldn’t be sure what the precise message was but, too, one knew what was implicit.  Ferrari japed religion by combining classical images of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden with explicit images from the Kama Sutra and Japanese 19^th century woodcuts depicting graphic sex – all lacquered together in raunchy collages. Pornographic Monty Python stuff. Was this reflective of the artist’s need to obscure his message to survive through all the political turmoil of the past decades?  Hiding in plain sight – camouflaged by an overabundance of visual information. Very crafty.

Leon Ferrari . MAMBA- Buenos Aires

Leon Ferrari - Buenos Aires artist

And the graffiti.  It is an accretion of the actions of different humans with different intents and agendas, all using one common surface for anonymous expression.  The graffiti often contains ideas of revolution, oppression, political action.  Who wrote what, when? So the graffiti ends up being a fantastic kluge of ideas, funny images, threat, call-to-arms.  Abstract but also meaningful and potent with anger, humour and banalities. Often, I think, the random, potent emotion of the graffiti is more powerful than the more intellectual stuff that is framed and curated in glass and marble halls.

Graffiti in San Telmo, Buenos Aires. 2015

Of course a tour of Buenos Aires wouldn’t be complete without a diorama of a life-like, full-size Pope Francis blessing an acre or so of sizzling meat on a massive parilla. These bizarre juxtapositions provoke strong sentiments of how upside down – literally – the culture here is.  Religion and politics are both more tangible and more abstracted – they are pervasive yet, for me, unintelligible because of their unfamiliar associations and different social context.

I hear and read the language, I understand snippets of it but I am never sure what I am receiving and how to respond – what fits where. Always learning.  Siempre. I sense the verbs and nouns, like coral fauna, populating and navigating the coral of my pre-frontal cortex.  It’s kind of wonderful and it’s a complete mess.

I haven’t fallen off the underside of the planet yet.  I’ve been hanging by my toes for nearly three weeks now.