"I dream of the intellectual who
destroys evidence and generalities, the one who, in the inertias and
constraints of the present time, locates and marks the weak points, the openings,
the lines of force, who is incessantly on the move ... who, wherever he moves,
contributes to posing the question of knowing whether the revolution is worth
the trouble, and what kind (I mean, what revolution and what trouble.)”
Michel Foucault, Power and Sex
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| Francisco Masó http://archivoartstudio.com/about/ |
SURREPTITIOUS STRIPES: FRANCISCO
MASÓ
Surreptitious
Stripes brings together two
polyptychs from the series An Aesthetic
Register of Covert Forces that Cuban artist Francisco Masó has been
conceptualizing since 2016. The works have been conceived as volumes of twenty
pages in which paintings of an abstract-geometric configuration are individually
displayed. Structured in horizontal and parallel lines of flat and vivid colors
that follow a repetitive scheme, the works update elements characteristic of
geometric painting, which places Masó as one of the few exponents of this trend
within current Cuban art.
Formally, An Aesthetic
Register falls within the line of research of “cold” abstraction,
reiterating its orthogonal resolutions and intense contrasts of color. Masó’s
work has a connection to a long tradition in Latin American art which has
important production centers in Venezuela, Argentina and Brazil and, to a
lesser extent, Colombia and Mexico. In Cuba, this work continues the
investigations inaugurated in the middle of the 20th Century by the group “The Ten
Concrete Painters”—Pedro Álvarez, Wifredo Arcay, Mario Carreño, Salvador
Corratgé, Sandú Darié, Luis Martínez Pedro, Alberto Menocal, José Mijares,
Pedro de Oraá, José Ángel Rosabal, Loló Soldevilla y Rafael Soriano— as well as
those carried out in exile by artists such as Carmen Herrera and Waldo Balart.
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| Francisco Masó. De la serie "Registro estético de fuerzas encubiertas", página 6, volumen II, 2017. Cortesía del artista |
In spite of the abstract formulation of its language, Masó’s work does not look to the formal self-referential, optical-kinetic, or transcendent aspirations that have evolved from the programs of the already-extensive tradition of international geometric painting.
Instead, Masó uses his artistic skills to develop a
methodological platform to carry out a critical observation of reality that
allows him to unveil some clues of standardized sociopolitical phenomena.
Discipline and Punish
Following clues arising from the complex psychosocial framework that is part of the mechanics of totalitarianism, Masó has identified in the previously-mentioned audiovisual documents a continuing recurrence of linear color patterns in the clothing worn by the agents of social control. These garments are polo shirts imported by the government and distributed among workers of the various political bodies. Their use is common, and it establishes a quiet, subconscious, difference between those who wear them and those who do not. Somehow, they represent “correctness,” an adherence to the norm or to an imposed truth. In the context of the vigorous control episodes, the polo shirts become undercover uniforms although they are not identified as such by the public.
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| Francisco Masó. De la serie "Registro estético de fuerzas encubiertas", página II, volumen 1, 2017. Cortesía del artista
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Examining the control apparatus that utilizes them, the polo shirts are substitutes for the simpler prison panopticon.[1] The abstract functioning of this mechanism, by which the fact of “seeing without being seen” guarantees not only the exercise of control and domination but also the imposition of a standardized behavior and a rational that supports it, is embodied in the practice of surreptitious control discovered in the documentary material previously referred. The panopticon here is this covert force that sees all but remains invisible, at least for the majority.
The “societies of control” described by Gilles Deleuze[2] are displacing, however, this
model. They update, unlike more primitive disciplinary societies, a modern
panopticon device backed by computer science and its sophisticated locating
mechanisms—cameras, satellites, and automated intelligence networks— that facilitates
control of the individual without using physical repression or isolation.
But, for third-world totalitarian systems as in Cuba, there is not adequate sophistication, since they aim to enforce a political field of open asymmetry resorting to populist fanaticism and parapolice surveillance as a form of control/repression[3]. Thus promoting the emergence of a paranoid society. Like the Bentham’s prison model, these systems also utilize cheap resources. This was discussed by Jeremy Bentham when proposed the panopticon as a prison model, underlined its low cost as one of its advantages in relation to other forms of criminal control. Accordingly Foucault writes: “[The Panopticon] involves very little expense ... Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorising to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself.”[4]
Useful beauty
This totalitarian apparatus is unveiled in Masó’s Aesthetic Register. By extracting the
linear patterns of the polo shirts from their real context and formalizing
them, Masó not only highlights them but also makes the register a tool for their identification. The size and vertical orientation
of his paintings intentionally reminds one of the shape and dimensions of the ready-for-distribution
packaged shirts. The Aesthetic Register operates
as a catalog for showing (enseñar in
Spanish, meaning both to show and to teach) the aesthetic patterns, thus
becoming an instrument to express Maso’s desire—to dismantle this totalitarian
control device.
Masó is interested in, and reflects upon, a new paradigm
described by Nicolás Bourriaud in his Relational
Aesthetics, where the French aesthete theorizes about the incorporation of
relationships and social phenomena in the contemporary artistic sphere. This
interest of Masó was formed much earlier although for his early education in
Cuba was at the Cátedra Arte de Conducta (Behavior Art School) which was founded
in 1998 by Tania Bruguera. As Bruguera’s pupil, he became interested in the
concept of “Useful Art,” a proposal that “aims to transform some aspects of
society through the implementation of art, transcending symbolic or metaphorical
representation and proposing with its activity some solutions for the deficits in
reality.”[5] According to Bruguera, art
must “look at the research of the concept as well as the potential of
usefulness itself as an aesthetic category,” and “to focus on the beauty of
being useful.”[6]
Accordingly, An Aesthetic
Register of Covert Forces should be understood beyond the local problematic
of the audiovisual documents that initiated it. Although Masó's preoccupations are notoriously
political as well as social, his Aesthetic
Register constitutes a tangible instrument of social change, a hoped-for transformation
of reality.
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| Francisco Masó. De la serie "Registro estético de fuerzas encubiertas", página 9, volumen II, 2017. Cortesía del artista |
Useful Art is firmly based in the critical analysis of social phenomena and operates through long-term projects that are structured according to the results of the implementation of the strategies proposed. The notion of utopia is rejected. Useful Art looks for real, possible and viable mechanisms of implementation.
Other works by Masó including United Nations, the first chapter of his Liminal States project, share these Useful Art goals. In United Nations he utilizes an
abstract-geometric language in constructions made with schematized national
flags that propose the creation of new “states” to be established on the
territorial borders of the countries which he visually links.
The proposal of a disruption of
the strategies underlying the exercise of power that articulates the Aesthetic Register is in line with what
Foucault notes regarding resistance to the panoptic structure. The French
thinker writes that “resistances to the Panopticon will have to be analysed in
tactical and strategic terms ... The analysis of power-mechanisms has no
built-in tendency to show power as being at once anonymous and always
victorious. It is a matter rather of establishing the positions occupied and
modes of actions used by each of the forces at work, the possibilities of
resistance and counter-attack on either side.”[7]
Additionally, the Aesthetic
Register comments on formalist artistic traditions. In these works, the
beauty of the colored lines and their constructive patterns is a lure that
invite the viewer to contemplate the narrative of the tensions generated by a
totalitarian structure which, by hiding the action of its agents, tries to
confuse and discourage any possibility of resistance.
SOURCES:
Bourriaud,
Nicolás. Estética relacional. Adriana
Hidalgo Editora. Col. Los Sentidos/Artes Visuales, Buenos Aires, 2006.
Bruguera, Tania.
(nd). Cátedra de Arte Conducta. Tania Bruguera. Recovered from: http://www.taniabruguera.com/cms/492-0-Ctedra+Arte+de+Conducta+Behavior+Art+School.htm
Bruguera, Tania. (04.23.2011). Introduction on Useful Art. Tania Bruguera. Recovered from: http://www.taniabruguera.com/cms/528-0-Introduction+on+Useful+Art.htm
Delgado, Aldeide. (12.26.2016). Abstracción sólida: la producción de Francisco Masó en el contexto de la Abstracción Latinoamericana. Arte al límite. Recovered from: https://www.arteallimite.com/2016/12/abstraccion-solida-la-produccion-francisco-maso-contexto-la-abstraccion-latinoamericana/
Foucault, Michel: "The Eye of Power" in FOUCAULT, Michel: Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews & Other Writings. 1972-1977. Ed. Colin Gordon, Pantheon Books, New York. 1980, pp. 146-165.
Masó, Francisco: Registro estético de fuerzas encubiertas, 2017. PDF Document.
Masó, Francisco: United Nations (from Liminal States Project), nd. PDF Document.
© Katherine Chacón
[1] The panopticon was a type of prison
architecture devised by Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th Century. This model was
studied by Michel Foucault to explain the abstract functioning of what he
called “disciplinary societies.” In broad outline, the panopticon was formed by
a tower located in the center of a circular building. The placing of the tower
allowed the guards to observe the prisoners located in the cells around the
tower without their being able to know when they were being watched. Cf. Foucault,
Michel: "The Eye of Power" in Foucault, Michel: Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews & Other Writings. 1972-1977.
Ed. Colin Gordon, Pantheon Books, New York. 1980, pp. 146-165.
[2] Cf. Deleuze, Gilles: “Postscript on the Societies of Control” in October 59, Winter 1992, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 3-7.
[3] It is the difference between the forms of
genocide of the First World, which are industrial (Nazi Germany) or
technological (Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and the Third World, with its low
intensity extermination (Rwanda, for example).
[4] FOUCAULT, Michel: “The Eye of the Power, in Op. cIt., p.155.
[5] BRUGUERA,
Tania. (nd). Cátedra de Arte Conducta. Tania
Bruguera. http://www.taniabruguera.com/cms/492-0-Ctedra+Arte+de+Conducta+Behavior+Art+School.htm
[6] BRUGUERA, Tania. (04.23.2011). Introduction on
Useful Art. Tania
Bruguera.
http://www.taniabruguera.com/cms/528-0-Introduction+on+Useful+Art.htm
[7] FOUCAULT: Op.
cit., p.163-164.
Translation: Jim Peele
* This text was originally written for the exhibition of the same name and published in the catalog «Surreptitious Stripes. Francisco Masó» curated by myself and by Jim Peele an presented in Connect Now Room. Art Connection Foundation, in Miami, from July 20 to August 19, 2017.
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