“Apolítico is the title of one of Wilfredo Prieto’s earliest works, which he presented at the 8th Biennial of Havana (2003) and has since become the artist’s most exhibited and acclaimed work. It is a ‘sculpture’ of huge impact which he made out of an object as ordinary and symbolic as a flag, and subjected only to the slightest of interventions. Comprising a series of masts and squares of cloth waving in the wind inside a Spanish military complex ― the site of the biennial ― it caught people’s attention because of the flags’ anaemic, washed-out appearance which was a result of their having been stripped of all their colour and reduced to tones of grey and finally converted into neutral, ambiguous objects.
Despite the visual simplicity of the installation, Apolítico is one of Wilfredo Prieto’s more complex works in terms of its fabrication, because of the industrial processes the flags are subjected to in order to obtain the ‘bleached’ effect. The opposite happens in another early piece, a performance called Paseo (2000), in which he took an ornamental plant on an ‘excursion’ in a wheelbarrow around the Caribbean island of Curaçao. The action of liberating the plant from its enclosure can be understood as a transposition of a similar sensation the artist experienced when he first left Cuba, although any political reading drawn from Prieto’s work is not so much because the artist deliberately seeks this but rather because of the connotations associated with some of the elements and materials employed in his pieces which, particularly in earlier work, come from his native Cuba, such as chícharos [peas] or the ‘official’ daily newspaper Granma. ‘Although I do try to make a purely poetical work, there is always a political undercurrent’, the artist confesses in allusion to Francis Alÿs, one of the most constant influences in his work.
As can be deduced from the two pieces just mentioned which, while formally quite distinct, are both susceptible to readings of a political or absurd bias, Wildredo Prieto’s work oscillates between the grandiose and the minimal, between the realm of the unachievable (for example, converting a football stadium into a pond where ducks paddle about freely, or building a motorway twisted in the manner of a Möbius strip on which cars go round and round without getting anywhere other than back to their departure point) and that of the unnoticed in any context other than the artistic, so unobtrusive are they. He has carried out actions and works involving heavy machinery, such the crane that lifts itself up (Sin título (Grúa), 2006), and the helicopter attached to a table leg and flying stationary over the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Móstoles, Madrid, (Amarrado a la pata de la mesa, 2011), while some of his most hard-hitting pieces use the heart of a watermelon (Políticamente correcto, 2009), puddles of rum and Coca-Cola (Cuba libre, 2010), and two superimposed Euro coins (Eclipse, 2010).
In 2008 Wilfredo Prieto covered the floor of the Annet Gelink Gallery in Amsterdam with hundreds of pieces of chewed gum arranged evenly in a square (Smart Gum (Chicle inteligente), 2008). As with the other materials he appropriates for the realisation of his work (peas, bananas, soap, eggs, coffee, water, excrement, straw, clothes), the pieces of gum remain mostly intact, being barely altered by the artist’s hand; it is only their usual meaning they are stripped of. He strategically uses a combination of humour and the absurd and Duchampian decontextualisation to construct an ambiguous discourse – by dint of formal simplicity and complexity of meaning – the starting point of which is the spectator who ‘does half the work’, as Duchamp would say.
Wilfredo Prieto understands the spectator to be an intrinsic element of the work, just as its title or any other communicative element is. He confesses that, while he has no particular interest in knowing or interpreting the public’s reactions to his work, their behaviour and conclusions add new readings to each piece and open them to multiple interpretations.
Echoes of Gabriel Orozco, for example in the interpellation of the spectator or the choice of materials and titles, and of Francis Alÿs in the opening up of meanings are a feature of Prieto’s work. Conceptual in character and minimal in form, although ironic and narrative too, his ‘interventions’ overcome minimalist self-referentialism ― the temptation to allude to themselves ― and instead carry profuse references to our immediate, social and political context. The red carpet he laid in one exhibition (Sin título. Alfombra roja, 2007) contains a reference to power. It is a ready-made which functions as a mere objet trouvé until we realise that it has something that transcends the symbolic, a modification, and this is the rubble left deliberately under the red fabric. The rubble functions as an anti-symbol or a contradictory element, a counterpoint which we also find in pieces such as Uno (2008): a heap of 28 million false diamonds among which there is one real one. The artist’s intervention characteristically consists of a minimal and at times imperceptible gesture such as this, which is revealed to us in the title or in the description of the materials used. They are ‘experimentational acts’, as he himself defines them, the fruit of the freedom with which he approaches work, eschewing categories and definitions.
Left / Right
The two-sided symmetry of the exhibition space functions as the starting point of Wilfredo Prieto’s intervention, created specifically for the MARCO, Museo de Arte Contemporánea de Vigo. The two galleries, situated on the first floor, determine the sense of the visit and put the spectator in the dilemma of having to choose in which direction to proceed, whether to the left or to the right.
If we decide to go left, we will proceed down a corridor that leads to a monumental sculpture, a rectangular parallelepiped, a simple geometrical shape executed on a large scale from a model made by the artist. And if we proceed to the right, we come to a sculpture measuring the exact same dimensions in a space identical to that opposite.
To work ‘with a space’ rather than ‘in a space’ is what defines all site-specific art, which generates its meaning from the relationship it establishes between work and site. This is a piece which responds to the architecture of the place, as well as to some of the assumptions characterising the return to form on which 1960s minimalist art rested. Formal simplicity and monumentality, coupled with the industrially-produced modules that shape the pieces, would place us before a minimalist cuboid were it not for the povera nature of the constructional element: barley straw. The allusions that Donald Judd was rejecting when he said ‘no illusions, no allusions’, are evoked in the material Wilfredo Prieto uses, in their odour, their texture, their places of origin and in their narrativity which are all so relevant in his work.
The intervention points us to one of the most commonly cited paradoxes in Philosophy. According to Jean Buridan, a 14th century French scholastic philosopher who maintained that freedom is not necessarily based on rational principles, when we find ourselves before two desirable alternatives we choose the better, and when they are equally desirable, the will delays this choice to analyse the consequences.
Buridan’s satirists, in their defence of free will and their reflections on the limits of the freedom of choice, expounded on the ‘inaction’ that supposedly befalls us when we equate reason with will and created a paradox involving a starving donkey who, when faced with two equal and equidistant piles of food, perishes because he is unable to choose between one or the other. The reductio ad absurdum of the philosopher’s theory, borrowed from Aristotle and popularised as ‘Buridan’s donkey’, serves Wilfredo Prieto to create Izquierda / Derecha (Left / Right), reinterpreting the paradox and echoing the formula the art critic Gerardo Mosquera invented to sum up his work: net idea (+) simple work (=) maximum meaning.
[Extract of the curatorial text for the exhibition catalogue]
