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| Grid for Landscape: The Polychrome
Murals of Alejandro Otero Megan Sullivan, Harvard University |
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| The following is an abstract of the paper presented at the conference.
My paper investigates the contributions of the Venezuelan painter and sculptor Alejandro Otero to Carlos Raul Villanueva’s Cuidad Universitaria project via an analysis of the interaction of the grid, that archetypically modern structure, with the local reality of an explicitly modernizing Caracas under the Pérez Jiménez regime. I argue, based upon the work of the anthropologist Fernando Coronil, that the tumultuous but necessary relationship forged between the Venezuelan populace and the natural body of the nation, the result of the centrality of oil to the collective myths of national progress but its nearly dematerialized status within Venezuela—its manifestation as pure exchange value—is at play in Otero’s monumental, grid-like mural. While this mural, whose blues were meant to correspond to the color of the Caracas sky at certain times of day, has been interpreted as an adaptation or deformation of universal structures that highlights regional specificity, I rather assert that this chromatic correspondence is an effort to implant a material marker of universal, technocratic order in which the gridded surface, emptied of the spiritual and utopian aims of its predecessors, stands in for and effaces the local landscape. Moreover, by projecting the grid in monumental proportions within the architectural space of the city, Otero graphs the self-referential and two-dimensional aspects of the modern canvas onto public space, thereby precluding the possibility of animating the public space and positioning the populace as mere spectators to a form of modernity engendered by purely material signs. I read this transformation of grid not as an adapted afterlife of the utopian projects of the historical avant-garde, but as a sign of a wholly different form of peripheral modernity based upon a specific relation to the materiality of both primary resources and industrially produced artifacts. |
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