Modern Entanglements: Three Definitions
To “entangle” means to catch something in a tangled mass, impeding easy movement. Speaking figuratively, it can refer to rendering something complicated and intricate, fixed within a larger web of stories, facts and contradictions. Once entangled, extrication won’t come easily. Superimpositions will inevitably yield new storylines.
Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck has been producing his “modern entanglements” for nearly two decades. His projects have been motivated by socio-political questions involving gaps in collective knowledge or misrepresentations in the public record, often focusing on the importance of propaganda as a political strategy. Authority is a recurring theme, especially cultural authority, or the structures that lend objects and ideas their legitimacy. Balteo Yazbeck’s works often incorporate or recreate the output of other artists or authors, presenting them in new configurations or reading them against new histories and motives. His research often “entangles” disparate disciplines and geographies, resulting in multi-layered installations that bring together what appear to be disconnected subjects.
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An “entanglement” is a delicate way of describing a compromising relationship or an unsuitable liaison. It is a potential embarrassment, complicating matters and leading to much confusion. This dalliance can prove costly for those unwittingly caught in its trap.
Each work in Balteo Yazbeck’s “Chinchorro/Hammock” series (2004-2013) is a handmade Venezuelan hammock that holds a framed print depicting oil derricks or barrels. The installation includes wall labels crediting the anonymous ethnic craftsman who produced the hammock and the Venezuelan artist Rolando Peña, who in 1979-80 produced the golden silkscreen prints for his “Oil Project.” In 2004, when Balteo Yazcbek first conceived of this work, the price of Venezuelan oil had reached its highest point in two decades—this amidst fears (and hopes) for the ouster of Hugo Chavez, whose power derived from the country’s increasing dependence on its oil industry. The “Chinchorro’s” juxtaposition of the ethnic and industrial addresses the contradictions of a government that exploits the oil industry for its own profit in the guise of supervising the national commons.
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In nautical terms, an entanglement is a weapon of war: “a cable stretched athwart the mouth of a river or harbor, with stout spars of wood lashed to it, to prevent the entrance of an enemy.”[1] A naval entanglement is a strategic deployment of the landscape as barrier and launching pad.
Balteo Yazbeck’s series “Israeli Nuclear Arsenal” was also begun in 2004, the year Mordechai Vanunu was released from prison. Vanunu had been a technician at Israel’s Dimona nuclear plant; in 1986 he leaked photographs to the British press that proved Israel’s highly advanced nuclear capabilities (he was subsequently kidnapped by Mossad, tried at a secret tribunal in Jerusalem, and sentenced to eighteen years of solitary confinement). Despite a UN Security Council resolution to place Dimona under the trusteeship of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the plant remains a tacitly ignored public secret.
The billboard that is part of this series, “Waldorf Astoria, 1961”, refers to a meeting between U.S. president John F. Kennedy and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion at the Waldorf Astoria hotel. The two leaders pondered how to best represent Israel’s nuclear program as peaceful—“on the theory that a woman should not only be virtuous but also have the appearance of virtue,” Kennedy helpfully explained.[2] An excerpt of their conversation is printed against the backdrop of an abstract painting, a reference to the CIA’s orchestration of Abstract Expressionism as Cold War propaganda through the agency’s influence at the Museum of Modern Art.
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In physics, an entanglement is “a correlation between two separate quantum systems, such that the behavior of the two together is different from the juxtaposition of the behaviors of each considered alone.” Once two particles cross paths, their behavior will never be the same—they are forever entangled in time, no matter how far their distance.
To the casual viewer, Eames-Derivative (2006-2013) is a sculpture that spells the word “derivatives.” Upon closer look, however, the sculpture’s elongated letters are made of cards imprinted with photographs of archaic computer technology. They are a contemporary remake of The Computer House of Cards, a special deck produced by designers Charles and Ray Eames for the IBM Pavilion at the 1970 Osaka World’s Fair, and one of many Eames projects intended to promote a friendly image of computers (and often, by extension, the United States). The core of Eames-Derivative is the sculpture’s accompanying timeline, which charts the rise of computerized banking technology and its place in the public imaginary, drawing connections to the reckless house of cards that is today’s global economy.
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A quantum entanglement apparently remains entangled until it is measured, or described. Then, as the scientists elegantly put it, the parts decohere, peeling away from each other to go their separate ways. Revealing an entanglement can thus affect the nature of its parts, breaking their ghostly ties and freeing them of mutual influence.
—Media Farzin
Born in 1972, Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck graduated with a degree in Fine Arts in his native city of Caracas, Venezuela, where he has exhibited his work extensively. He moved his practice to New York from 2000 to 2010, and is now based in Berlin.
His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including most recently:
“Liquid Assets: In the Aftermath of the Transformation of Money,” Steirischer Herbst, Graz, Austria (2013); “Order, Chaos, and the Space between: Contemporary Latin American Art from the Diane and Bruce Halle Collection,” Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, (2013); “When Attitudes Became Form Become Attitudes,” CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2012); “Artist on the News,” Creative Time, New York (2012); “Liberalis,” Lütze-Museum and Galerie der Stadt Sindelfingen (2011); 12th International Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul (2011); “Then & Now: Abstraction in Latin American art, 1950 to Present,” Deutsche Bank, New York (2010); “Panorama,” Museu de Arte Moderna de Sao Paulo (2009).
Media Farzin is a New York-based critic and PhD candidate in art history at the City University of New York, researching language-based U.S. art of the 1970s. She received her BFA in Painting from Tehran University and MA in Curatorial Studies from Columbia University. She is the author of numerous monographic essays on artists, contributor to various art journals, and currently a lecturer at the City College of New York. Her ongoing collaborative project with Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck was most recently exhibited at the Steirischer Herbst in Graz, Austria.
[1] “Entanglement, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary online. September 2013, Oxford University Press. (accessed September 30, 2013).
[2] “Memorandum of Conversation, New York, May 30, 1961, 4:45-6 p.m.,” Foreign Relations of the United States 1961-63, Volume XVII, page 134. http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v17/d57 (accessed September 30, 2013).