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| Displacements, Hybridization and Globalization by Alicia Candiani 5 / 6 |
These last works of Alicia Candiani are big digital prints adhering to the art
gallery's glass windows, They appropriate the visual language of advertising, so
easily charged with subjectivity, but re-semantize its content, inverting the message
to signal the humiliating form in which advertising arrives at a construction of tile
female gender through stereotypes, and to warn of the danger inherent in esthetic
surgery that looks to take advantage of this paradigm, To produce a graphic
intervention on the façade of an art gallery implies removing the prints from the
traditionally sacrosanct environment of artistic practices and rules, and locating them in
a new area of encounter between the artist and the public-, an encounter that
enhances the relation with the occasional, heterogeneous, unknowing viewer,
whom the artist seeks to motivate, This piece changes through the different hours
of the day, retrains "under construction" and will be complete once the passers-by
of-Old San Juan City incorporate it into their daily routine, interpreting the various
readings that it initiates, registering how time wears away the materials used in its
construction, destroying its substance, and with it, the idea of permanence; that of
stereotypes, and of art as well.
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Conclusion Finally, in this complex environment, let me borrow Massimo Canavecci's concept of "pidgin web" and applying it to graphic arts, The word pidgin means a Language which is a mixture of two or more languages, especially as used between people who do not speak each other's language, inventing a new form of communication that includes elements of the original ones. As in the pidgin languages, contemporary graphic art has grown thanks to its transformation and combination, coming to be defined by its multicultural, multimedia and multi-technical aspects. The formal boundaries between technical medium and Ianguages are diluted; the works are composed with more different resources and stay in permanent movement, to the point where the), can be defined as nomads, in constant transit, in metamorphosis. In conclusion, we could say that today's graphic arts increasingly incorporate themselves into the hybridization processes present in all the other artistic manifestations, advancing over the strategies and spaces of other disciplines. Printmaking has finally transcended the limits that were imposed upon it, to the point where we may speak of "post-printmaking" to refer to the profound modifications introduced in its language, in its techniques, and in its use of multiplicity, no longer as the reproduction of an image, but as one of its generating elements. What remains is a new graphic arts culture that emerges into a new world of inter-textuality, through the rupture of archaic paradigms, a culture with which an ever increasing number of artists are integrating, artists who use it as a strategy in their narratives, asserting, once again, that graphic arts are capable of absorbing, responding and reacting to the ruptures and changes that are being imposed upon artistic practices at the dawn of the new Millennium. |