Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Drawings in Smoke

Abstract

Rafael Lozano-HemmerDrawings in Smoke Irina Sheynfeld (bio) "I grew up in Mexico City with parents who were nightclub owners and the artificial lights, strobes, disco balls—all of this is part of how I grew up. Most of the time, I think of art as a good party. You can play good music and bring in ambiance with lights but it's the people that make the party. You create a setting but it is only in the arrival of the people that the participation of the piece comes alive. "1 —Rafael Lozano-Hemmer Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (b.1967) is a Mexican-Canadian artist known for his monumental participatory projects that involve proprietary technology and often deal with political themes of globalization, surveillance, and government control. While the artist's work is often politically and socially attuned, Lozano's solo exhibition Common Measures (on view at Pace in New York City in the fall of 2022) was more than a didactic lecture on the postindustrial human condition. Three works in the exhibition—Pulse Topology (2021), Call on Water (2016), and Hormonium (2022)—were mesmerizing, thought provoking, deeply spiritual, and personal. In his latest work, Lozano-Hemmer surpasses the practice of social commentary and crosses over into the phantasmagoric and magical realm of art that deals with themes of mortality, vanishing poetry, and disappearing archives. (See figure 1.) Lozano-Hemmer started to create installations of Pulse in 2006, and the first Pulse work made its debut at Plataforma, Fábrica La Constancia in Puebla, Mexico. The centerpiece of Common Measures is an immersive, biometric artwork, Pulse Topology. It consists of three thousand light bulbs suspended from the ceiling to create an inverse topographical model. The network of lightbulbs forms hills and valleys of light above visitors' heads. The darkness of the gallery is illuminated by the pulsating world above and the artwork shimmers like a city viewed from an airplane, except that the relationship to the viewer is inverted. The flickering pattern of civilization is above our heads and we move below, [End Page 95] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer Pulse Topology, 2021 3000 LED filament lightbulbs, DMX controllers, custom-madephotoplethysmography sensors, computers covers any area between 1,000 and 5,000 square feet. under its luminous and delicate mantle. The viewer feels small, alone, and disconnected in Lozano's upside down forest of electric fireflies. The latest Pulse installation is a large-scale and immersive work in the tradition of Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco. Similar to his predecessors, many of Lozano-Hemmer's pieces, such as Voz Alta (2008), deal with violent chapters of recent Mexican history. Voz Alta is a commentary on a bloody massacre that occurred on October 2, 1968, when Mexican Armed Forces opened fire on a peaceful rally, killing several hundred people. Yet, Pulse is different from other works in the artist's practice. It remains politically neutral and deals with timeless questions of life, death, and time. Also, unlike Rivera's and Orozco's murals, which were meant to appeal to the masses, in Pulse, Lozano-Hemmer's work becomes personal, intimate, and poetic, even though many people can view it at the same time. The lights in Pulse Topology react to sensors that record new visitors' heartbeats. Each newcomer is assigned a light bulb. The digital traces of visitors' presence linger for a while, creating a temporary visual archive of gallery goers coming and going as well as commenting on their short life spans. In their chapter from Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Unstable [End Page 96] Presence, "Pulse on Pulse: Modulation and Signification," Merete Carlson and Ulrik Schmidt write, The visitor's relation to the work … begins as an encounter with the sculpture as physical structure (object), but evolves into a complex subject-interface situation, in which the visitor animates the light bulb and faces a visual representation of their pulse. This representation is heavily loaded with symbolic meaning: what you see in front of you is a copy of your own pulsating heart.2 The light bulb becomes you for a while until you are replaced with a representation...