Esvin Alarcón Lam and the journeys of the Blue Bird
Gabriela Rangel

 I.
Material culture often reveals a predisposition towards a habitus[1]. Furthermore, it exposes a set of dispositions intertwined with the core of a built-in sociopolitical condition. Significantly, material culture discloses an economy of the making shaped by the imperceptible forces of history as they are fused into everyday life. In Guatemala, for instance, material culture seems to be predominantly shaped by craftsmanship, which as in the ancient book of the Popol Vuh, is constituted by a vast corpus of knowledge embedded in the foundations of local histories and myths, shared by generations of Mayan people who have been struggling against the clockwork apparatuses of colonization since the fifteenth century. As Esther Paszthory aptly observed, “although there are many long lists itemizing the objects that were brought from the New World, there is no single illustration from the sixteenth century. This is astonishing in itself (…) Of the hundred of Mesoamerican textiles that were sent to Europe and listed in the accounts, not a single one has survived.”[2]

Within a non-teleological line of thinking, hybridization and bricolage make difficult any attempt to construct a linear narrative of the late phases of modernization in Guatemala, in which contemporary art practices seemingly emerged from a void as a result of globalization, in that they are lacking a context and located at the very margins of precarious institutions that are barely able to serve a public function. Following the forceful deposition of President Jacobo Arbenz by a coup d’état in 1954, Guatemalan history during the second half of the twentieth century became radically central to the development of Cold War policies in Latin America. The predominately rural country is slowly recovering from its internal fractures, long after a period of military juntas, systematic segregation of indigenous populations, and pervasive state violence brutally exerted against any expressions of opposition or dissent.[3] Rosina Cazali reminds us that after years of cultural ostracism, contemporary art manifestations flourished in Guatemala within the framework of peace arrangements that began to take place by the end of the 1990s. And yet, in the twenty-first century, art practices in Guatemala still play a pivotal role in engaging different groups and communities on civil responsibilities, social justice and democratic culture. It is not accidental that performance art, photography and conceptual bricolage have been the dominant expressions over traditional forms of painting and sculpture in the last decades. Notably, the cultural production that followed the period of the Cold War often partnered with alternative paths of citizenship and public participation through the agency of ethnic, sexual, social and political minorities, as well as new discursive lines of action.[4] Among these, I will highlight a strategy of the Tlamantinime, which vindicates the Mesoamerican constructive imaginary through the myth of the wise man who applied his knowledge of abstraction to everyday life situations. For Luisa Fuentes Guaza, recovering geometry has been vital to the understanding of new lines of action undertaken by artists in Central America after decades of regional violence. Significantly, it is not a phenomenon correlated to the rediscovery of abstract, concrete, op or kinetic art tendencies in Latin America by mainstream institutions, collectors or the international art market.[5]

II.
Today, Guatemala City is crowded with Blue Birds, the emblematic type of U.S school buses that are sold at vehicle auctions and driven to the Central American country from remote North American spots at a mature stage of their productive lives. Refurbished by local micro entrepreneurs, Blue Birds have a second life in Guatemala, serving the needs for public transportation that the State does not provide. Painted over by their new native owners, the idiosyncratic U.S yellow buses adopt in the Guatemalan capital a vibrant palette of colors. Suggestively, the metal carcasses of Blue Bird buses are essential to the practice of Guatemalan artist Esvín Alarcón Lam as well as other significant pieces of scraps that he buys either at junkyards or flea markets.

Since his debut as a promising young figure of contemporary Guatemalan art, Alarcón Lam has diligently delved into the intricate conditions of the material culture of his context through a systematic exploration of the notion of materiality and its literal properties. The artist has been recycling rusty metal sheets that he cuts into rectangular or triangular shapes, which he selects from the buses’ remains according to their preexisting color patterns in order to construct his corner reliefs or wall installations.  But the creative act of transforming those ready-made versions of “primary structures” into a body of abstract three-dimensional works “is largely ideological.” Or, at least, his exploration began as an expression of a general and pervasive positioning of contemporary artists towards Minimalism, regardless of whether they come from the periphery or the Global North.[6] Even if we agreed with Michael Fried’s canonical examination of Minimalism based on its ambivalent attitude towards sculpture in which “the shape is the object: at any rate, what secures the wholeness of the object is the singleness of the shape,” here the perception of the shape, hollow and flat, is nuanced and complicated through the use of an everyday life object.[7] Therefore the “emphasis on the shape” projects, in the case of Alarcón Lam, a sense of objecthood that, in fact, reverts the meaning of the object as such.  The so-called presence of the rectangular or triangular shapes extracted from the remains of Blue Bird buses not only confronts the beholder through its hidden naturalism but it also demands a double complicity in a socially convoluted situation.  More importantly, the materiality of the object reflects a disposition for recycling in that it is automatically reflected into symbolic and cultural capital.

Being a consistent bricoleur, Alarcón Lam also recovers and transforms metal structures of old cots and installs them onto the walls of the white cube, a space that he equates to textual lines sketched upon a white page.  According to the artist, in these elegant pieces, “the negative space, the fragmentation of the objects and the perception of the audience inform each other in order to provide different meanings of the piece.” In contrast to the colorful and haptic Blue Bird structures, which source material grounded on a strong social foundation, these cot installations are more abstract ruminations that invite the viewer to interpret the work from an open-ended approach. Such work advocates for an encounter with the object that “is not only negative but qualitative.” Through an ordinary iconographic element Alarcón Lam displays a diagram within the exhibition space through which he enhances the relationship between seriality and industrial production. As we know, diagrams can be many things and function as time conduits.  A diagram can convey “an instruction or a working drawing; it can be scientific, mechanical or mathematical.”[8]

[1] Habitus is a term central to Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of power.  It is defined by schemes of perception and appreciation that reproduce their own logic, and in doing so they confer positions to people’s dispositions. See: P. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production. Essays on Art and Literature, Columbia University Press, New York, 1993. p.64
[2] Esther Pasztory, Thinking with Things. Toward a New Vision of Art. University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas. p. 121
[3] See: Héctor Pérez Brignoli, Breve Historia de Centroamérica. Alianza Editorial, Madrid. 2010.
[4] Spanish critic and independent curator Luisa Fuentes Guaza identified a number of new discursive lines on her critical approach about Central American contemporary art after the war and the commissions of truth. See: Luisa Fuentes Guaza, Contemporary Languages from Central America, Turner: Mexico and Madrid, 2013. p. 10-16
[5] Fuentes Guaza, Op Cit. p. 14
[6] Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology. Ed. Gregory Battcock. University of California Press, Los Angeles, London, 1995. p. 116-177
[7] Michael Fried Op. Cit. p. 119.
[8] Briony Fer, The Infinite Line. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2004. p.65