GAÜECA, CAMP AND POWER
Arco Noticias nº 18, September 2000.
Gaüeca is one of the most stimulating of the new batch of artists. In spite of his relatively short artistic career (he has only been active for four years), he has achieved an interesting international projection, is a habitual exhibitor at the Gramercy International Contemporary Art Fair in New York and Chicago and the Queen Sofia National Centre and Art Museum in Spain has already acquired some of his pieces. In this, his fourth appearance at ARCO, he presented the following three pieces of work belonging to his Pink Series in the Espacio Mínimo Gallery:
"Mi mesa" ("My table"). Mixed techniques, 1999
"Brisa Rosa" ("Pink Breeze"). Cibachrome, 1998.
"Veleta" ("Weather Vane"). Mixed techniques, 1999.
When contemplating the pieces of work comprising the Pink Series, critics often emphasise that the first impression given by the artist's stunning aesthetics refer to the many different concepts of the idea of "glamour". This formal preoccupation for aesthetics, however, in his case, is a wisely chosen vehicle for proposing contents revolving around politics. In fact, this is the artist's true concern as he transforms aesthetic icons that were previously traditionally branded as being frivolous into powerful political machines of social denouncement. His approach is that of his taking a deep look at his subjects, conscious that, in art, everything represents a sign and that construction processes are also signs ("something that replaces something else for somebody", as Pierce might say), in this particular case, selected ideologies with political implications. The first thing the artist questions is the significance of the colour pink, a colour that Marjorie Garber (1991) stated has been used to represent femininity only since the times of the First World War (before then, it was precisely the opposite: pink was considered "a more aggressive colour" for boys and blue, a "more ethereal and softer" colour, was used for girls) and the more recent, gay connotations of the colour. Among many other things, the artist's Pink Series is a systematic criticism that questions intentions and how not only public, but also private social structures and spaces are organised. In order to do so, the artist takes the viewpoint of an alienated subject in confrontation with the structures of power, using a personal universe that includes a group of fictional references that finally materialises when the spectator has become his accomplice and projects him, or herself, into the shown questions. His passion and obsession for pink is calculated from a distance and he uses it to give testimony of ANOTHER story: gay culture as opposed to domineering patriarchal power, as if he were questioning the new powers born of this struggle, such as the gay lobby that is challenged by them, but which continues to generate inequality. Perhaps this second line in his approach arising from his subject viewpoint is what is more novel and incisive about his work. Gaüeca reiteratedly denounces a type of very explicit misogyny: gay misogyny, turning camp into a rebellious act that celebrates the difference between gesticulations that challenge both the patriarchy and the masculine gay community. Gaüeca's glamour comes from corrosive irony directed against social constrictions that try to veil its manipulative nature, coming from hisrebelliousness against essentialism, no matter where it comes from. The most contemporaneous currents of critical thought, feminism and the Anglo-Saxon twisted theory decidedly mark this vision. In "My table", the artist displays the most central aspects of this critical vision. The table representing the domestic, the private, maintains tension between campness and the sphere symbolising power in a disconcerting equilibrium that makes us think of the idea of crisis in the contemporaneous subject. In this particular sense, the piece of work is a sort of self-portrait. Vital experience and identity are turned into things that are suspended as if by art of magic, inviting us to ask ourselves questions along the lines of why do we sustain ourselves in order to keep on living, how do we support the pressures of a society in conflict, how our beliefs are articulated and what and how equilibrium is defined … the self-portrait of a fragile being that is strong at the same time, someone who has chosen to reveal private in public in an attempt to transform a social context that he finds a far cry from being satisfactory.
Xabier Arakistain.
