It is said that postmodernism -that repositioning of the epochal look, become already rhetoric rather than real sensitive mutation (or “state of mind” as pointed Lyotard)- turned out a sort of shock to the gray modern thought. In midst of a perfectly structured world that fantasized with control of life and time, a crack broke through inexorably. Rational discourse, excess, inappropriateness and alternate stuffs appear not without perplexity; disengagement as a sign. The man of the late twentieth century would change, no one doubts; however, the deepest senses of these changes are still today not completely legible.
Much has been discussed about the process of dismantling the modern project. It is not advisable going back on the matter, especially when considering -how easy do we forget it-, that it is the condition in which we retrace our daily lives. However, we should show some interest on it in the most transparent way, without sensationalism or rigmarole, in one of its most expensive elements, namely, the desire to understand everything as quote or reminiscence. The greatness, the irrepressible yearning to take individualism as mosaic, forget about the unhealthy obsession of singularity. Let us move from the epicentre.
Roland Barthes says in his essay on the death of the author that this person -the author- is nothing but a modern construction; a character, he says vividly. As a result of his stabilizing need, the modern man reinvented creation. He became in the core of the universe and forgot the rest. However, we all suspect (despite this axiom is very disconcerting) that we are much more fragmented than it looks, continuation of what precedes and surrounds us. We are, it is clear, the culture to which we belong, the language with which we think. Any other idea is pure illusion. The illusion of originality is impacted, one and thousand times, against the hereditary nature of reality.
This view on the authorship, it is fair to say it, is not too fascinating for the creator of our time (no matter what scene we are seeing). The modern ego, that hunger of control continues, takes us to a more comfortable shore, the imaginary space in which men leave traces, unmistakable marks of our creative DNA in history. We have arrived to such pathos. The funny thing is that the work, which can not lie, shamelessly exposes us.
This is the feeling that encourages a sample such as Karaoke, which questions art, a project that is intended as a collective writing. In the midst of the most algid dynamics of Havana Biennial, the noise, the show, the ideal situation (and ephemeral) for the distinction, Karaoke points to the reminiscent character of writing, the writing of today which is no other thing than crosses.
The exhibition is made up by a number of artists (Levi Orta, Lester Alvarez, Wilfredo Prieto, Yornel Martinez and Ezequiel Suarez) who revisit the notion of authorship from different angles. In some cases reflection stops on the binomial thought-performance, category highly debated throughout the history of art (we keep wondering: what is the work, the idea about itself or its implementation?). In others –most of them-, artistic phenomenon is analyzed from a cultural approach of waste and confluence; combinatorial gesture, not infrequently fortuitous, contingent, fickle, as real methodology of everything that emerging. This perspective, without being in any way new, is interesting to the extent that access to shake; I believe that sincerely, the falsified imaginary of origins.
Located in the nascent space of the apartment, and dated for May 18, Karaoke wants to become, by its management ideas, the work of its artists, the accent of its own, in a reminder of the limited scope of man, his irrelevance to really essential things. After all, we are just a recurring invention in the mind of God, or history, no matter; results of another, treacherously aleatory random creation; that melody emptied of specific signs that a divine voice, in its spare time, accompanies with a verse that is repeated again and again, again and again.
