Expanding Internationalism - A Conference on ... - Mary Jane Jacob

other works too, in other assemblies.
The journey of the painting is
echoed in the journey of the body and in the journey of images from a
state of being lost and forgotten to being found and recombined.
And on
this surface, each crystalized presence floats in an unmarked space or
void.
Dittborn' s strategy is a coherent one.
At one level the Airmail
painting is a rejoinder, a riposte, to the prevailing art system, and one
devised specifically by an artist working at its periphery, in the
so-called Third World.
Made of cheap materials, easily transported, not
dependent on a developed infrastructure, they arrive to unfold and occupy
a substantial amount of the hotly-contested space of the cultural
metropolis. At the same time they refuse to be seen as floating, neutral,
international cultural corrmodities.
It's clear from where they speak.
But they also reflect on, or embody, traveling, exchange, the unresolvable
paradox of closeness and distance. Their political clarity meets their
personal openness and vulnerability. It becomes a way of making,
circulating, and displaying work which guards its immediacy and efficacy
for the viewer.
I would like to say more about the work of the nine Latin American
artists in "Transcontinental" as exemplifying the tension between, and
mixing of, many kinds of duality: not simply the geographical, cultural,
and political realities of the "there" and the "here", but also how these
connect with the abstract/figurative, male/female, sculpture/painting,
light/ dark, transparent/ opaque, present/ absent divides. Perhaps the
concrete particularities of such experiments are a subject we can return
to in later sessions.
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