Something I was doing

In a piece soon to be published by e-flux Criticism, Mónica Amor reflects on Gego’s Reticulárea, an environment constructed out of steel nets that surround viewers and bind them into a network. Commissioned as part of a series exploring the contexts out of which significant works of art emerge, Amor’s essay proposes that Gego’s work expresses a nonhierarchical collective experience, its “decentered logic” a model for the emotional and intellectual infrastructure that constitutes a shared cultural inheritance and which must regularly be refreshed in order to survive.

Amor traces the ways in which a work informed by the artist’s life as an engineer and educator in Caracas established a model that has been adapted to the present by the Venezuelan artist and activist Miguel Braceli. By inviting dispersed and often disenfranchised communities into the collective production of new iterations of the work, he proposes an effective means of protesting—and working against—the fragmentation of Venezuelan society.

Fittingly for this month’s editorial program, which features several pieces on how culture might foster solidarities without becoming exclusionary of others, the relevance of Reticulárea extends far beyond the borders of its homeland and the moment of its first exhibition in 1969. Now removed from view, Gego’s work continues to act upon the world, its meaning transmitted through its reinterpretation and reconstruction. It offers a template for how art can hold people in relation even as the physical infrastructures of the society in which they live are broken down, and how the ideas and feelings provoked by those relations can move across nations and through generations.

That art might establish networks that can survive the dismantling of civil society calls to mind Etel Adnan’s recollection of a brief period during the turbulent 1960s when poetry functioned as “the only religion which has no gods and dogmas, no punishments, no threats, no hidden motivations, no commercial use, no police and no Vatican. It was a brotherhood open to women, men, trees and mountains.”1 If it seems hard to map this idyll—a fleeting one, even in the Lebanese-American writer’s experience—onto the culture of today, then we might at least borrow its faith in the possibility of art as providing a means of relating that cannot be instrumentalized by power.

Adnan shared with Gego a commitment to the principle that art is a function of life, and an inalienable one. As the radical collective established by Gego in the small Venezuelan town in which she lived was called Arte y Vida (art and life), so Adnan writes that “my own writing was like my own breathing: something I was doing.” It can in violent times feel difficult to justify the practice of art, and even less the practice of criticism. But Gego’s work shows how it might be possible to understand the world—in both positive and negative terms—through the intricate webs (of money and power, but also sympathy and solidarity) that connect people. Moreover that it might be helpful to hold, as Adnan did, that the production of culture is not a secondary condition of our being but the practice that defines us individually and collectively. And something that we must reflect upon, as we must reflect upon our relations to others and the networks that define them. Because, in the words of another poet, “criticism is as inevitable as breathing.”2