La extracción de la piedra de la locura (instalaciones de Javier Téllez)

Abstract

In 1996 Javier Téllez exhibited his art installation titled “The Cure of Madness” in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Caracas. Its aesthetics and ideological contents comprises an analytical study of the border area and the complex mutual relation that exists between the two seemingly contradictory phenomena: sanity and madness. In the above-mentioned work of art, Téllez gives emphasis to a confusion between a psychiatric hospital space and the one of a museum, assuming that there are significant similarities between them. The installation is therefore an attempt to search for forms through which art appropriates the exhibition’s space in order to face the norm violation, however not for therapeutic reasons, but to come to terms with the space of “the other” as well as with his or her “otherness” in the complex polyphony of voices. Téllez finds a theoretical starting point in the thought of Michel Foucault and various psychiatric concepts along with their interpretations throughout history, passing successively from the materialistic world view (insanity embodied by a stone), through the purely spiritual discourses/concepts (madness as an individual inner experience) to finally transform the notion of madness into a real aesthetic awareness and a discursive phenomenon. In other words, the progressive materialization of certain poetics reveals itself in this process in its dialogic, polyphonic and carnival forms. It has however nothing to do with any therapeutic catharsis, for Téllez seems not to pursue such a goal. To enter this universe, one is inevitably obliged to respect its logic, and so is one’s artistic creation. Hence, the exhibition of Téllez finds itself among the most relevant modern art discourses in Venezuela. This masterpiece full of expressionist influences and based on various drawing forms and techniques, should primarily be studied in terms of an insightful analysis of the above-mentioned art installation as a specific subversive search within the scope of various forms of conceptual art, undertaken by the art that, Carlos Dimeo itself does not aspire to be recognized as conceptual but pursues elaboration of new theoretical models and concepts. Due to his cinematography connections, Téllez considers his proposition from a film-maker point of view and this way he is able to introduce certain camera perspective to the installation. In the following writings (essay), the film motifs appear in the preliminary part, which however turns out to be enough for the artist to carry out the deconstruction of the sculptural profoundness, thanks to which he can elaborate his work perfectly. The attitude of Téllez towards art is definitely not the contemplative one, but the participative one. In such an approach, art is believed to be a great human experience which does not need to flatter itself excessively. On the contrary, it enables us to gain a deep insight into ourselves as well as to create new goals and space for dialogue within our discourses. According to Téllez, art helps to live the good life and to understand the attitudes of people that we meet on our way.