黑料不打烊

Alexandra Kuhn (Caracas, Venezuela, 1966) is a Venezuelan born visual artist and designer currently living in Madrid, Spain. Formed as a graphic designer at the former Instituto de Diseño Neumann in Caracas, Kuhn has maintained a close relationship with organic elements since the start of her career, especially those of botanical origin. She approached them initially as subjects of representation in drawings, designs and abstractions, until arriving at physically working with them in later years.

In 2003 Kuhn presented her piece  in the context of the 2003 Michelena Salon in Valencia, Venezuela, and was awarded the Henrique Avril Prize that very same year. The piece consists of a series of long curved elements arranged vertically on a red painted background and attached to small fan motors on both ends. When these are activated, the structures turn on their own axis, forming a double helix, the base form of DNA. In reference to this piece, Kuhn confessed it was based on her studies on genome ­– linked to the discovery of the genetic code of rice in 2002 ­– and on her personal experiences during pregnancy. The work, thus, refers to genetics and biology, but without employing laboratory tools or any genetic material.

Alexandra Kuhn, Almendrón y Tiempo, 2012

In a similar taste, in 2012 Kuhn explored the passage of time in her piece , a big installation made for Cacri (Feria periférica de Arte Contemporáneo en Caracas), held at the Hacienda La Trinidad Parque Cultural in Caracas. The piece consisted of a series of leaves of country almond (Terminalia catappa, native to Asia, Australia, the Pacific, Madagascar and Seychelles it is also referred to as “Indian almond”, “Malabar almond”, “sea almond”, “tropical almond”, “beach almond” and “false kamani”), a large tropical tree that grows in the premises of the cultural center, displayed along with photographs of them taken by Kuhn. The leaves start to dry and rot with the passage of time, but their photographic images remain the same, showcasing their appearance at the time when Kuhn made the piece.

Kuhn took these experiences with time, death and the preservation of the body a step further in 2013, when she undertook a summer artistic residence specializing in bio art at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. For a group exhibition that arose from this experience, she presented a work in which greenery appeared as a living fact and, therefore, condemned to perish; it was an ode to life and a reproach to death. Kuhn’s work was titled LIVING, and it served as the seed for her solo show at Carmen Araujo Arte in Caracas, held that very same year.

Rosa in time, one of the pieces presented at the exhibition, is a photographic diptych in which Kuhn approaches the rose as a symbol of perishable beauty and the ephemerality of life.

Alexandra Kuhn, Rosa in time, 2013

Like in Almendrón y Tiempo, she contrasts both images and suggests a reading of the passage of time: like the paintings of the Baroque vanitas, all that is beautiful perishes, the pure and the young are corrupted, and this is an inescapable reality. The piece is read from left to right, dividing it between life and death.

The focal point of Kuhn’s exhibition was an installation entitled Una verdad y tres mentiras / To be informed is she, which consisted of a living rose plant in a bag of earth, two roses in advanced state of decomposition in plastic bags, a Moleskine notebook intervened with photography and graphite, and a fabric rose inside a glass cup.

Two different views of Kuhn’s Una verdad y tres mentiras / To be informed is she, 2013

Similar to Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs, 1965, by arranging the three roses in the table Kuhn presented the spectator with a question: Which one is the true rose? For Kuhn, it is clear. The truth lies in the living rose, in the natural being, not in the putrid rose, encapsulated in an eagerness to preserve its beauty, nor in the photograph of the rose stuck in the notebook, and much less in the artificial flower inside the truncated cup. The text quoted by her in the Moleskine notebook makes it clear; taken from Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, it reads: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born.”

When read from the living rose to the false rose, this piece seems to deconstruct the image of the flower and transform the natural and true into pure symbol and image. Kuhn thus joins an artistic tradition that seeks to deconstruct the symbol of the rose as an image of perfection and pure beauty, a tradition that seems to be preceded by Gertrude Stein with her poem Sacred Emily, 1913, in which the name of a woman is transformed into a flower, which becomes word, which becomes form: “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.”

Back to Kuhn’s installation as an expository event, it raises a problem addressed by Amalia Kallergi in her article Bioart on Display – challenges and opportunities of exhibiting bio art: How is a piece whose main characteristic is to be composed of a living being exhibited in a space not suitable for the subsistence of delicate beings, such as art galleries? These institutions, or rather the buildings containing them, are created for the purpose not only of exhibiting works of art, but also for protecting them from a series of factors like the sun, humidity, and even living organisms. This became evident during the exhibition in Carmen Araujo Arte: though the gallery staff watered and frequently exposed the rose plant to the sun to prolong its life, it eventually died and had to be replaced. This was repeated at least three times throughout the span of the exhibition.

Thus, the piece was modified over time: not only the physical deterioration of the rose became evident in the eyes of the spectator, but the same plant was changed on several occasions and, with it, the color of its flowers. Kuhn’s oeuvre, as a commodity and object of collection, remains in a threshold space: whoever acquires it will be both an art collector and a plant connoisseur – both are similarly regarded by author Georges Gessert in his book Green Light. Toward an Art of Evolution, 2010, when he argues that both are moved by an interest in the particular and require a considerable fortune – since the piece requires not only a space to be exhibited as a work of art but also care and a series of conditions to live.

LIVING (experiencia ccs) marks a turning point in Kuhn’s career: after years of developing work that insisted on the preservation of natural beauty, she now left it to rot, portraying it both at its most splendid and in an advanced state of decomposition. Memento mori, all living things perish.

Una verdad y tres mentiras/To be informed is she seems to bridge the two bioart techniques proposed by Robert Mitchell in his book Bioart and the Vitality of Media, 2010: it is an installation that does not employ genetic material or biotechnology, but it presents both a living being and decomposing biological material in situ. The pathos between spectator and work is born from the use of a living being and the presence of decaying organic bodies, but text, paper, and other objects are also being used at the same time. Kuhn’s work seems to enter the realm of bioart at times, only to exit it again; these incursions into the tendency happen at ambiguous points and in the meetings of discursive resources.

The only thing that unifies Kuhn’s approaches and immersions into bioart seems to be the phrase written next to a broken mahogany seed in one of the Moleskine notebooks she presented in the collective show Punto de encuentro (Carmen Araujo Arte, 2014): “If conditions are favorable, this seed will be a mahogany tree. / Nature is interpretable.”

This text takes some ideas presented by the author in an early publication at .

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