I have seen the future, and it’s much like the present, only longer.
Dan Quisenberry
The verb tense we call the “present perfect” involves a curious temporality in that it describes an action that belongs to both the present and the past; or put another way, it refers to the past in the present, equal partners and contemporaries, dual yet non-oscillatory, the past retaining its past-ness within an ongoing present-ness. In this, it is faithful to one of the deepest and most nuanced aspects of our lived experience; it captures the ever-presence of the past in an ever-passing present.
Walter Benjamin ha muerto (Walter Benjamin Is Dead), Dora García’s current exhibition at the Galería Elba Benítez, might be thought of as embodying this particular and peculiar verb tense. The exhibition takes as its starting point García’s “reading” of the lives and words of a small group of radical 20th-century intellectual and cultural figures: Asja Lācis, the Latvian theater director and pedagogue; Carla Lonzi, the Italian art critic and feminist; Alejandra Pizarnik, the Argentinian poet; and (somewhat more obliquely and yet still centrally) the German theorist and critic Walter Benjamin. From these figures of the past, and in keeping with her own distinctive artistic practice, García has created a series of interrelated works in various text- and drawing-based formats, including wall and floor drawings, drawings on paper, and mixed-media objects. But while grounded in intellectual history, García’s own practice is not one of intellectual biography; instead, in creating the art works on view in Walter Benjamin ha muerto, García’s own “reading” (and writing) of the readings and writings of these historical figures has become part of the story of history, a history that extends (and cannot not extend) to include García herself and the present she (along with us) inhabits. As always, a portrait reveals as much about the portrayer as the portrayed.
This drive to pursue, possess and renew the presence of the past in the present both entails and yet enables a great deal of temporal freedom throughout García’s practice, a freedom explicitly expressed here in Hopscotchs, a set of drawings that present the basic biographical facts of the exhibition’s protagonists (Lācis, Lonzi and Pizarnik) as floor diagrams modeled after the children’s game of hopscotch, i.e. in which sequence is determined not by chronology but by chance and choice. In these works, the reference to Julio Cortázar’s structurally experimental novel Rayuela (Hopscotch) is explicit; more implicit is the challenge to the notion of history as driven by the ineluctable forward-moving progress of dialectical materialism, a notion inseparable from much of the 20th-century political thought that informed these same thinkers.
But again, García’s practice is not ludic or theoretical but rather powerfully and persistently empathetic, and something far less playful or abstruse permeates Walter Benjamin ha muerto: namely, a spirit of disappointment, of disillusion, of disenchantment, possibly of despair. This becomes explicit in the set of works collectively titled Cartas del desencanto (Letters of Disappointment), in which García draws (literally and metaphorically) on private expressions of disappointment in the diaries and private correspondence of the exhibition’s three female protagonists, radically committed and politically engaged women who embraced with hopes and dreams the Angel of History and were left, individually and collectively, shattered in its inevitable flight. Walter Benjamin has (past perfect) died, and therefore Walter Benjamin is (present), and will remain (future), dead. As for Walter Benjamin, so for hopes and dreams. The present is anything but perfect. And yet it too belongs to the future.
George Stolz
