Luis Camnitzer at El Museo del Barrio and Carla Stellweg - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Amanaplanacanalpanama (a man, a plan, a canal, Panama, it reads backwards or forwards) is the palindrome that named Luis Camnitzer's exhibition at El Museo del Barrio, and it put up the work in several ways. Making semantic shapeliness is a game--just the sort of dexterous play that, when applied to social policy, can be cruelly mad. This kind of thinking, Camnitzer allude toed made possible such colossal engineering casts as the Panama Canal, a hubristic program if at any time there was one. But the palindrome, and the canal, were also linked to Camnitzer's possess childhood in Uruguay. A body panel told us that as a small lad he enjoyed digging waterways at the beach--and, presumably, imagining the schemes of power and glory that greatest in quantity grown-ups (apart from, say, Teddy Roosevelt) check against reality.

The installation included a incomplete history of the canal, taken from a variety of sources and etched onto brass plaques that circled the sweep (they were inked, as if meant for printing, allowing not reversed as actual printing plates would be). We read of Balboa and number de Lesseps and of Paul Gauguin's unhappy month in Panama, wielding a pickax and running afoul of the law for peeing in public. Indigenous voices were rare, since Camnitzer's tone was not polemical on the other hand ironic--he allowed the Europeans to build their illusion of a finished (palindromic?) symmetry between colonial agriculture and their own. Bisecting the floor was a watery spill of resin, with Amanaplanacanalpanama written upon it in gold letters. A toy canal fastening at center, made of a two-sided mirror supported by dint of Erector-set tractors, turned the reversible phrase back upon itself twice. Suspended over the extremitys of this plastic canal were sum of two units bottles, one intact and bearing an all-too-familiar phrase: "We bought it. We paid for it. It's ours " The other, overspreaded with tiny bricks, was broken; its anomalous statement, by means of a Panamanian, told of sacrifice and anger.

This tightly argued, single theme work contrasted with the less-specific allusions in Camnitzer's fall installation at Carla Stellweg. Called "Book of Walls," it was a series of small works mountained knee-high. The works were fragmentary or literally shattered: a rent drinking glass, its gelled r liquid satisfieds standing intact (El Muro de la Incredulidad/Wall of Incredulity); a big glass shard, sandblasted with a true copy in Spanish about fiction, shadows and memory (El Muro de las Reescrituras/Wall of ReWritings). Other works were arrested action s of violence or confinement. A knife thrust into the wall, several Uruguayan postage stamps sealed inside simulated ice cubes, a not many dozen pencils lined up in clusters of five, as if counting--all alluded to political repression and torture, longstanding topics for Camniker. If he has sometimes been faulted for relying too heavily upon text in his urgency to analyze complicated political enigmas "Book of Walls" was a reminder that the real story is always rest between the lines.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group