{"id":13475,"date":"2020-05-07T10:30:23","date_gmt":"2020-05-07T10:30:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=13475"},"modified":"2020-07-21T13:52:57","modified_gmt":"2020-07-21T13:52:57","slug":"rosa-enferma-together-apart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=13475","title":{"rendered":"Rosa enferma<\/em>, Together Apart"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Collage<\/a>
Roberto Obreg\u00f3n, Rosa enferma \/ Disecci\u00f3n real<\/em> (Sick rose \/ Real dissection), 1981\u201382, collage of dry rose petals adhered to paper, 13 3\/8 x 9 1\/8 in. (33.3 x 22.9 cm) (artwork \u00a9 Archivo Roberto Obreg\u00f3n, Colecci\u00f3n C&FE, Caracas; photograph by Carlos Uzc\u00e1tegui, provided by Carolina and Fernando Eseverri Collection)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Roberto Obreg\u00f3n was born in the coastal town of Barranquilla, Colombia, in 1946. He came to artistic maturity in Venezuela, where he moved with his family in 1954. He lived in Caracas, the capital, from 1966 to 1982, when he relocated to the small town of Tarma. He was of Afro-Caribbean heritage, of working-class origins, and of a queer sensibility (likely gay, though he never openly said so). While these biographical details may have informed Obreg\u00f3n\u2019s artistic practice, such identifications are not illustrated in his work. Instead, as an artist he engaged in deliberate disidentifications with, and a tenacious resistance to, any stereotype or schema that might attempt to control the meaning of his life and art. Obreg\u00f3n harnessed his chosen primary material\u2014rose petals\u2014toward a careful meditation on time and nature while at once imbuing their collection and display with subtle ironies whose coded meanings often hinge on the difference between gestures of cultural alliance and acts of cultural appropriation and the power differentials each entails.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I first encountered Obreg\u00f3n\u2019s work in 2012 (well before I partnered with curator Jes\u00fas Fuenmayor on the recent exhibition Accumulate, Classify, Preserve, Display: Roberto Obreg\u00f3n Archive from the Carolina and Fernando Eseverri Collection<\/em>1<\/a><\/sup>). At that time, in a review for Artforum<\/em>, I noted how \u201chis assembly of real and watercolor rose petals recalls the seriality of some of the [S\u00e3o Paulo] biennial\u2019s photographic work but is instead motivated by desire for a universal symbolism that could convey the precarity of life and communication itself. That part of the work is pink might trouble some critics, so closely does Obreg\u00f3n\u2019s hue court (if ultimately abstaining from) kitschy effects.\u201d2<\/a><\/sup> Obreg\u00f3n\u2019s flirtation with kitsch is shared with another artist I love, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who elegantly indulged in creating displays of beaded curtains and used everyday materials with shiny surfaces, such as silver-wrapped candy. What is more, both artists were affected by the AIDS pandemic, confronted personal loss, and addressed how infection with HIV intensified stigma, discrimination, and denial.3<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the face of our current coronavirus pandemic, I would like to pause and think about Obreg\u00f3n\u2019s Rosa enferma<\/em> (Sick rose), which served as the promotional image for Accumulate, Classify, Preserve, Display<\/em>, a series of documents and works to which I keep returning. On the paper on which the original forty petals of Rosa enferma \/ Disecci\u00f3n real<\/em> (Sick rose \/ Real dissection, 1981\u201382) are displayed, Obreg\u00f3n notes that the rose was a gift from L. S. (his friend Luis Salmer\u00f3n). He also identifies the approximate date of the gift, among other details, including d\u00eda de lluvia<\/em> (rainy day), which is written diagonally in the upper margin above the composition, and how the petals were ultimately damaged by an unknown insect.4<\/a><\/sup> The delicate closeness of the petals\u2019 arrangement on the paper contrasts with the artist\u2019s subsequent use of the grid, calling attention to how the latter identifies, isolates, archives. With Rosa enferma \/ Disecci\u00f3n real<\/em> the petals\u2019 proximity and physical contiguity instead display a scene of what one might provocatively call \u201cbotanical intimacy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When opening the two drawers of the display cabinet dedicated to Rosa enferma<\/em> in the exhibition, one noted how the original specimen as well as the petals\u2019 subsequent reproductions at Obreg\u00f3n\u2019s hands display irregular holes, uneven edges, fragments: bounded forms show perforations; contours have been penetrated. The archival documents bespeak a tension between the real (or imagined) regularity of the grid and the concerted asymmetries of Rosa enferma<\/em>\u2019s tattered and mournful forms\u2014as if the grid could not contain or protect the rose from the sickness that befell it, dramatizing the petals\u2019 demise. Accordingly, Rosa enferma<\/em> presents less a pristine botanical specimen than a lesson in how the objectification of knowledge through classification can be infiltrated by what remains beyond the discursive and material frames (i.e., disease) associated with that objectification. As to the series title, it derives from an eponymous poem by William Blake, a poet of the romantic age who developed a poetry of complex symbolism and private myth. Given the external cause (i.e., foreign agent) that, in his own work, accelerated the petals\u2019 decomposition, Obreg\u00f3n suggests that \u201cBlake does not refer to the sick rose but [to] love as a sickness.\u201d5<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"View<\/a>
Accumulate, Classify, Preserve, Display: Roberto Obreg\u00f3n Archive from the Carolina and Fernando Eseverri Collection<\/em>, installation view, University Gallery, University of Florida, Gainesville, November 12, 2019\u2013February 14, 2020 (photograph by Randy Batista, provided by University Gallery, University of Florida)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Obreg\u00f3n developed the scene of the dried petals\u2019 vulnerability\u2014or how roses, too, can become ill\u2014across a range of techniques: drawing, photocopy, print, photography (all on display in the exhibition), and ultimately in a large-scale installation from 1993, for which the enlarged petal reproductions appeared as white silhouettes on a black background (see below). Between the gifting of the original rose and the final installation it inspired, Rosa enferma<\/em> accrued additional meanings. Ten years after Salmer\u00f3n presented Obreg\u00f3n with the dark red, fragrant rose from his mother\u2019s garden, Salmer\u00f3n died of AIDS. Though seeming to evoke the loss of his friend in both title and composition, as a work Rosa enferma<\/em>\u2019s final form was in fact the result of an oversight: Obreg\u00f3n forgot to use alcohol when dissecting the rose and preserving its petals on March 27, 1981.6<\/a><\/sup> For Obreg\u00f3n to call the work an homage would have been too literal and especially anachronistic, even though the petals\u2019 initial contiguous arrangement\u2014evident especially in how he emphasized their delicate membrane-like translucency\u2014may evoke memories and intimacies of a different order. As an homage the work would have been a bit too saccharine and contrived, given the sentimentality that the image of the rose has accumulated over time, a sentimentality that responds more to societal conventions over loss than to the singularity of an individual\u2019s grief. Reflecting on his friend\u2019s passing, Obreg\u00f3n observed, \u201cThat day the rose he had given me took on another connotation, it became a true allegory.\u201d7<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Scale<\/a>
Left<\/em>, Roberto Obreg\u00f3n, Untitled<\/em> (Rosa enferma<\/em> [Sick rose]), 1981\u201393, scale study, manipulated photocopy with dry ink, chemical fixer, and graphite, 11 x 8 1\/2 in. (27.9 x 21.6 cm); right,<\/em> Roberto Obreg\u00f3n, Untitled<\/em> (Rosa enferma<\/em> [Sick rose]), 1981\u201393, manipulated photographic negative and correction fluid, 8 1\/2 x 7 in. (21.6 x 17.8 cm) (artworks \u00a9 Archivo Roberto Obreg\u00f3n, Colecci\u00f3n C&FE, Caracas; photographs by Carlos Uzc\u00e1tegui, provided by Carolina and Fernando Eseverri Collection) <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Rosa enferma<\/em> is not a transcendent work of art, but its meaning transcends the archival and curatorial functions of accumulation and preservation. In Obreg\u00f3n\u2019s real dissection the petals were exposed to something that came from the outside and changed the nature of their subsequent display, classification, and reproduction. The flower’s veins, which create an expansive cellular network of lines, remain visible in the dried petal tissue, as do the paths bored by the unidentified insect to which the petals were not immune. On account of the contingencies that prevented their unspoiled preservation, what survives in these forty petals are the traces of a common corporeality; that is, a shared vulnerability that cuts across the plant and animal kingdoms.8<\/a><\/sup> Organic bodies experience birth, growth, development, and death. At each stage they are permeable to external factors, to infection and communicable disease.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I write this short text while sheltering at home and social distancing, Obreg\u00f3n\u2019s Rosa enferma<\/em> repeatedly reminds me of this common corporeality and how we daily negotiate our bodily vulnerability. To recognize this shared vulnerability is to cut across distinctions such as self\/other, inside\/outside, and is at once to acknowledge how the imagined boundaries of the body and self are porous. Accordingly, we are tasked with rethinking modes of relationality: how caring for oneself is, somewhat paradoxically, to care beyond oneself, for community.9<\/a><\/sup> But our daily choices in the interest of remaining healthy\u2014keeping our vulnerability at bay\u2014in the face of the pandemic (e.g., to wash one\u2019s hands for twenty seconds; to use hand sanitizer; to wear or not to wear a mask; to go grocery shopping or to ask for food delivery) fail to deflect the coronavirus\u2019s differential impact on specific demographics, largely defined by age, class, and race.10<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rosa enferma<\/em> speaks to our shared vulnerability and how it enables care and love. We reach out to family and community, even former friends and ex-lovers, in a way that is possibly sentimental and in tension with Obreg\u00f3n\u2019s allegorical understanding of his work, even as Rosa enferma<\/em> stems from a personal history.11<\/a><\/sup> Consequently, I continue to think about intimacy\u2014to reimagine both the ties that bind and the ties that used to bind us to others\u2014and about how to live, like the petals of Obreg\u00f3n\u2019s roses, together apart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014April 1, 2020<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Kaira M. Caba\u00f1as<\/a><\/strong> is professor of global modern and contemporary art history at the University of Florida, Gainesville. She is the author of The Myth of Nouveau R\u00e9alisme: Art and the Performative in Postwar France<\/em> (Yale University Press, 2013), Off-Screen Cinema: Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Avant-Garde <\/em>(University of Chicago Press, 2015), and Learning from Madness: Brazilian Modernism and Global Contemporary Art<\/a><\/em> (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Her next book, Immanent Vitalities: Meaning and Materiality in Modern and Contemporary Art,<\/em> is forthcoming from University of California Press. She regularly contributes to Artforum<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n\n
<\/div>
  1. Fuenmayor and I cocurated the exhibition, which took place at University Gallery, University of Florida (UF), Gainesville, November 12, 2019\u2013February 14, 2020, and included a satellite presentation of Obreg\u00f3n\u2019s works from the collection at UF\u2019s Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art. The exhibition\u2019s installment at the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum of Florida International University in Miami has been postponed until January 2021. Full disclosure: Fuenmayor is also my life partner. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  2. Kaira M. Caba\u00f1as, \u201c30th Sa\u0303o Paulo Biennial,\u201d Artforum<\/em>, December 2012, 266. Luis Per\u00e9z-Oramas was the curator of the 30th Sa\u0303o Paulo Biennial and also gave a Harn Eminent Scholar Chair in Art History (HESCAH) lecture in connection with the Obreg\u00f3n exhibition at the University Gallery\/University of Florida Harn Museum: Luis Per\u00e9z-Oramas, \u201cAchroma vanitas<\/em>, Animal Image: Roberto Obreg\u00f3n and the Return of Nature in Venezuelan Art,\u201d Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, Gainesville, November 14, 2019. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  3. In 1990 Obreg\u00f3n proposed to curators Jes\u00fas Fuenmayor and Miguel Miguel an installation that would contribute to destigmatizing AIDS in Venezuela. See Ariel Jim\u00e9nez, Roberto Obreg\u00f3n<\/em> en tres tiempos <\/em>(Caracas: Exlibris and Colecci\u00f3n Carolina y Fernando Eseverri, 2013), 188n73. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  4. See the written inscriptions on Roberto Obreg\u00f3n, Rosa enferma \/ Disecci\u00f3n real<\/em>, 1981\u201382, dried petals adhered to paper and graphite on paper, 13 3\/8 x 9 1\/8 in. (33.3 x 22.9 cm), Colecci\u00f3n Carolina y Fernando Eseverri, Caracas. Here Obreg\u00f3n notes how, in April 1982, when curator Susana Benko visited his studio, they discovered that the petals, which had been stored in an envelope, had been transformed by unidentified insects. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  5. The original Spanish reads, \u201cBlake no se refiere a la rosa enferma, sino a la enfermedad del amor.\u201d Ariel Jim\u00e9nez, interview with Roberto Obreg\u00f3n, November 2, 2002, reproduced in Jim\u00e9nez, Roberto Obreg\u00f3n<\/em>, 119. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  6. Of the original document\/work (Roberto Obreg\u00f3n, Rosa enferma \/ Disecci\u00f3n real<\/em>, 1981\u201382), Obreg\u00f3n writes that Salmer\u00f3n gave him the rose in August 1981. I have opted for the precise date recorded in the chronology reproduced in Jim\u00e9nez, Roberto Obreg\u00f3n<\/em>, 188n73. There Obreg\u00f3n notes that Salmer\u00f3n gave him the rose on March 26, 1981, and that the dissection was performed the following day. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  7. The original Spanish reads, \u201cEse d\u00eda la rosa que me hab\u00eda dado tom\u00f3 para m\u00ed otra connotaci\u00f3n, se convirti\u00f3 en una verdadera alegor\u00eda.\u201d Jim\u00e9nez, Roberto Obreg\u00f3n<\/em>, 180. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  8. My discussion of a common corporeality is inspired by Judith Butler\u2019s work. See her discussion in Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence<\/em> (London: Verso, 2004), 42\u201343. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  9. To thus insist on a common corporeality is not to ignore how the pandemic also leads to new forms of control over populations and bodies. The dynamic between, on the one hand, experiencing an intensification of desire for love and care and, on the other hand, the pandemic\u2019s implications in relation to power is captured by two of philosopher and activist Paul B. Preciado\u2019s recent texts. The first deals in part with love and the second with biopower. See Paul B. Preciado, \u201cThe Losers Conspiracy<\/a>,\u201d Artforum<\/em>, March 26, 2020; and Paul B. Preciado, \u201cAprendiendo del virus<\/a>,\u201d El Pa\u00eds<\/em>, March 28, 2020. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  10. Since I completed this text on April 1 and submitted it for review to Art Journal Open<\/em> on April 6, multiple news reports have identified the virus\u2019s disproportionate impact on black communities in the United States. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  11. See Preciado, \u201cThe Losers Conspiracy.\u201d ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Kaira M. Caba\u00f1as considers our vulnerable yet resilient social relations in a time of pandemic, through the lens of a work by Venezuelan artist Roberto Obreg\u00f3n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":13483,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"kia_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[401,405,407,403,377,410,402,408,409,406,404],"class_list":["post-13475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-texts","tag-art-and-pandemics","tag-art-and-the-novel-coronavirus","tag-artist-archives","tag-common-corporeality","tag-covid","tag-distance-learning","tag-global-conceptualism","tag-jesus-fuenmayor","tag-roberto-obregon","tag-rosa-enferma","tag-shared-vulnerability",""],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13475\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}