THE GLASS WALL

Dora Garcia is a Spanish artist familiar with major events in contemporary art: with joyful insolence and equally flagrant sense of what is relevant, she is constantly shifting between different means of expression, sculptures, books, actions, posters, and films without ever sticking to a single way of using these media. If, however, we were to point out a few recurring elements in her work, these would relate to text, and especially a predilection for literature (The Joycean Society, FID 2013) and psychoanalysis (The Glass Wall, FID 2004 and Zimmer Gespräche, FID 2007).
Both are summoned here around a mythical figure of the intellectual, artistic and psychoanalytical history of pre-dictatorship Argentina: Oscar Masotta. Having introduced Lacan’s thought in Latin America as well as structuralism, having taken action in defense of Pop art, and having himself initiated legendary performances, Masotta is at the heart of that wonderful Fifties and Seventies effervescence. But for as distinct a character as this one, Dora Garcia neither films the biopic, nor does she merely deliver the servile reconstruction of an anthology of his « actions ». Better still, and through an impure mix of both, with other elements at the forefront, she proposes floating evocation, much like psychoanalytical listening. Evocation of the times, of the political complexity surrounding Peron, evocation of the spectators’ reactions to his performances; in short, a somewhat disorderly yet always clear way of letting the thick of the fog rise without ever wishing to dissolve it. As a result, the title’s « second time » – an allusion to a Julio Cortazar short story, contemporary of Masotta’s – only claims to be derivative so as to present itself as entirely new. (JPR)