For Amorales
Interim
When we look at the work of Carlos Amorales, it is easy, straightforward and
doubtless legitimate to refer to the world of wrestling.
Legitimate to the extent that it is somehow reassuring to watch an artist who
responds critically -- one hopes -- to a phenomenon which is invading the media
and even the political arena. Within the space of a few years, American wrestling
has taken over transatlantic television screens, populating viewers' imaginations
with masked models who are as inflated as they are violent, as macho as they
are vicious. This is a genuine culture with codes for clothing, language, body
language and music and it is attracting an increasingly younger audience. So
young that the magazine New World Order, which is dedicated to these new gods
and their Olympus, is sold quite innocently in the toy shop Toy'R us without
anybody taking offence. The codes are clear and they are doubtless the key to
success: bodies with proportions which owe more to hormones than harmony, loud
costumes which leave no detail of anatomy to the imagination, distorted expressions...
The factor which seems to bring together the various protagonists of what has
become an enormous, lucrative and flashy industry is undoubtedly its simplicity
and simplism: good/bad, loser/winner, black/white, moral/immoral. And this simplistic
approach is equalled only by the pseudonyms of these new gods of the arena:
Hollywood Hogan, Chris Jericho, MachoMan, The Dog-Faced Gremlin, The Total Package...
It is difficult to refrain from judgment, to suppress a cry of "bread and
circuses" and to avoid making accusations of populism. But the temptation
is even greater when, offstage, outside the ring, certain participants are elected
to government office, manipulating the ambiguous nature of their past, no longer
knowing whether they are gladiators or senators, or gladiators who have become
senators .
Even if the world seems to have been transformed into an amusement park which
it is certainly healthy to question, Carlos Amorales is no Andy Kaufman . His
work is critical but it does not target the phenomenon described here. At most,
he borrows its structure, as well as its value as a culture and a cult. These
two words seem almost contradictory when talking about World Championship Wrestling
which, incidentally, is entirely American. But this is undoubtedly a view of
the world which is becoming increasingly common.
The reality which circumscribes the work of Carlos Amorales is that of the Other,
of the dominated rather than the dominating, of a bias of modesty. It refers
to a real popular culture which is the domain of a group more than that of the
masses. The structure which he borrows is not that of World Championship Wrestling
but that of Lucha Libre, the professional wrestling circuit in Mexico.
As can be seen in Ralph Rugoff's excellent description , Lucha Libre is not
a sport but a journey to the heart of a mysterious universe where we witness
the collision of approximately 2000 fictitious, mythological and masked characters:
Ulises, El Angel Azteca, Vampiro Casanova, Hannibal, Kung Fu...
Lucha Libre has been a genuine national pastime since the thirties: approximately
80 million tickets are sold every year nationwide. ??80 million tickets for
a drama in which the outcome is determined beforehand and in which the concepts
of moral/immoral/amoral crumble in the face of the charisma of the protagonists
and the quality of the show.
The coupling of the enormous popularity of Lucha Libre and the political situation
in Mexico gave birth almost a decade ago to the phenomenon of "social worker"
wrestlers, of whom the most prominent exponent is undoubtedly Super Barrio.
Super Barrio, a superhero with a beer belly, agitates against corrupt politicians
and illegal evictions. He fights to assert the rights of the technicos (those
who respect the rules) in the face of the attacks of the rudos (those who do
not respect the rules). His strength is his mask and the difference between
him and a superhero is that he is real, that he actually exists.
Carlos Amorales imbibes this reality, using it as the basis for a work which
varies in form from video to performance and real-life documentaries. The last
of these seems to have been the justification for his invitation to Super Barrio
to come to Amsterdam in 1988: interview on local television, "full dress"
walkabout in rundown areas, and meetings with local associations who did not
speak his language. The process verged on cruelty. Having been stripped of his
local context, Super Barrio lost his credibility, reminding us more of Christopher
Reeves than Clark Kent. In return, the project itself acquired the flavour of
a bitter critique of well-meaning multiculturalism without any real meaning:
no more than an unmasked human comedy. Paradoxically, it is precisely this bathos
which gives Carlos Amorales' project its real critical significance.
In this way Lucha Libre and its rites become critical tools of revelation. Carlos
Amorales, as an artist with Mexican roots living in Amsterdam, has established
the necessary distance between himself and an element of his cultural identity,
Lucha Libre, allowing himself to use it as a mirror of the human condition.
His approach means that he ends up questioning the validity of this tool as
a model for describing the ways of the world. From this point onwards, we find
ourselves far away from wrestling. Here, Lucha Libre would seem to be, for Amorales,
no more than a prop, a mask which emphasises the ambiguity of his approach.
He plays at leading play away from its primary function: "rehearsing the
seriousness of life on the stage of irreality while relieving it of all burdens..."
. He returns play to the reality of the world, while undermining a mimetic and
playful view of play.
Behind a light-hearted image – the artist who has worked with Super Barrio
- Carlos Amorales seems to locate his thinking at the heart of a wider and more
complex analysis of play and of its relationship with the world. This process
of reflection modifies the structure of play piece by piece, setting the stage
for ontological questions.
The video Amorales Interim (1997) therefore presents a wrestling match in which
the two opponents, with their heads together in a slow-motion choreographed
movement, push each other backwards and forwards inside and outside the confines
of the screen. The two opponents wear the same mask: Amorales, the effigy and
the alter ego of the artist. In addition to its obvious message, the confrontation
of self and other, the confusion of the principles of good and evil, of morality
and amorality (Amorales) within a single character, this work is the echo of
a tradition of ambiguity, the tradition of the mask, which has its roots not
only in Mexico with El Santo, Zorro, and the Astec and Olmec civilisations,
but also in pre-Colombian civilisation or the masks of ancient Greek tragedy.
Traditionally, the mask is a primitive cult form and it is one of the ageless
props of human play. Even in its making, the mask is a cult act which must be
located in the context of respect for esoteric knowledge transmitted by tradition
. The process of manufacturing the cult props is also a full part of the essence
of the cult.
It should be pointed out that, whether or not he is aware of these concepts
developed by Eugen Fink, Carlos Amorales made detailed records of the production
of his masks by a former wrestler who had been initiated in the tradition.
If the fundamental intention of the human mask is not to fool others, not to
seem to be something one is not but to present a multiple appearance for oneself,
what is the significance of a simplified mask with an effigy of oneself?
?? Under these circumstances, what is the ambiguous, equivocal nature of a prop
of this kind?/Under these circumstances, when does a prop of this kind become
ambiguous or equivocal? There is the loss of self in self, the forgetting of
the ability to lose oneself in play in all innocence.
There is the "serious" awareness or the fear that the person who is
playing is not thinking and that the person who is thinking is not playing;
the fear of being unable to reconcile oneself with the world beyond all moral
judgments.
Perhaps we are seeing the awareness that "self-representation is the true
nature of play"?
In that case, Amorales is questioning concepts of representation, of mimesis.
He is what he plays and what he represents merges with reality. In the space
between the game, its rules (wrestling / Lucha Libre), its subject, its content
(symbolic or moral value) and the transformation to which they are subjected
by the imperfect imitation of Carlos Amorales, the world emerges and play becomes
the genuine agent of revelation for the tragedy and the comedy of human existence.
However, at an even deeper level, Amorales puts forward questions about the
possibility of creating a critical form or of returning to reality a form of
production which is perhaps becoming exhausted in the closed field of art.
In the attempt, he also tries to break down the distinction between play and
ordinary life, working as children do without shame or a guilty conscience.
The identical masks of Amorales devastate the distinction between the serious
things of life on the one hand and play as the theatre of inauthenticity on
the other. In doing so, the artist encourages us to adopt an aesthetic approach
to life as much as he suggests a critical attitude towards contemporary, alienating
forms of spectacle . Amorales’ work produces a different dimension of time,
an ambiguous space which is difficult to pinpoint. He creates a form for an
interim in which the subject can rediscover freedom.
Philippe Vergne