This show marks yet another radical excursion into the possibilities of pushing sculpture in new directions. This series of constructed “floats” or expansive assemblages has a clear relation to a carnivalesque spirit but, at the same time, is also full of their characteristic appropriated imagery and acid social comment. 

 

Mondongo has resorted to the fairy story on other occasions as a means of presenting an allegory of Argentinean society, picking up on the moral content of the Victorian children’s story but subverting it through classic postmodern strategies: irony and appropriation. One of their earlier series dealt with an endlessly multiplied Red Riding Hood who wandered the parks and Japanese gardens of the city escaping and perhaps provoking the threats of a lecherous male world. Their work always cuts and comments, parodies and imagines.

 

On this occasion Manuel Mendanha and Juliana Lafitte have turned to a blending of two classic fairy stories: Snow White and Sleeping Beauty. Both figures are emblematic of white purity and innocence and, as such, easy victims of postmodern irony. Juliana herself serves as a model for this figure. It is not a gratuitous gesture since Juliana herself emerged, as it were, from one of these problematic barrios. The figure juts out as a three dimensional bust but she is gradually being overgrown, literally taken over, by the villas miseries that surround her, so characteristic of the immense peripheral expanse of Gran Buenos Aires. She is set centre stage – a distant and self-contained image of the comforts of the bourgeoisie – but, at the same time, she is being contaminated and sullied by the spread of poverty. However, Juliana’s enigmatic smile also suggests a certain positive recognition of the chaotic and irrepressible energies of life in these barrios. Life in the megalopolis is increasingly becoming a conflict-zone between the rich and the poor, between those who have access to culture and consumerism and those who simply manage to survive.

 

The appropriations invariably tie into the theme of the work at multiple levels.

 

The putrid body of the hare might easily be found on the streets of the barrio but it also relates at a metaphorical level to their approach to art and its potential meanings. Their intention is to make the work intelligible to a wider public. The hare can, therefore, be seen as a reference to Joseph Beuys’s famous performance How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. Beuys locked the gallery doors from the inside, leaving the gallery-goers outside, only able to observe the scene through the windows. Beuys had his head entirely coated in honey and gold leaf and began to explain the pictures to a dead hare, whispering to it in an apparent dialogue.

 

This performance was the high point of Beuys’ development of a broadened definition of art, which had already begun in his drawings of the 1950s. He ironically celebrated the ritual of “explaining art” with an action that was, for his viewers, effectively silent. The relationship between thought, speech, and form in this performance was characteristic of Beuys. Obviously Mondongo not only appropriates the image of the hare but also its broad symbolic meanings in many religions. In Greek mythology it is associated with the goddess of love, Aphrodite, to the Romans and Germanic tribes it is a symbol of fertility, and in Christianity it is connected with the Resurrection. Beuys has said of this piece: “For me the Hare is a symbol of incarnation, which the hare really enacts- something a human can only do in imagination. It burrows, building itself a home in the earth. Thus it incarnates itself in the earth: that alone is important. So it seems to me. Honey on my head of course has to do with thought. While humans do not have the ability to produce honey, they do have the ability to think, to produce ideas. Therefore the stale and morbid nature of thought is once again made living. Honey is an undoubtedly living substance – human thoughts can also become alive. On the other hand intellectualizing can be deadly to thought: one can talk one’s mind to death in politics or in academia.” This remark of Beuys offers a possible reading of regeneration from putrefaction, of a certain optimistic hope that things can improve despite all the evidence. Mondongo frequently appropriate imagery from their own immediate circle of family and friends and the image of their daughter Francesca stretched out on the ground seems like another injection of positive energy that acts as a counter force to encroaching strangle-hold of the villa miseria.

 

The fact that Juliana’s head rests against a pressed meat cushion carries reverberations both of an earlier series of portraits, such as the one of Lucien Freud’s Leigh Bowery, and of the proliferation of cheap and often expired food. And this multilayering of meanings that is so much a part of their work also allows us to read the image as referring to Argentine’s history of meat production that has so often been the bulwark of their economy. Mondongo willingly complicates the referential field and the image of the hare is equally indebted to a Brueghel image where characters are seen eating or vomiting fish. And similarly the small-scale skull reminds of a recent series where the skulls served as repositories for a fecund and garrulous imago mundi of appropriated images from infinite cultural sources. The fact that the skull is ironically capped with an image of a turd suggests either that the series is definitely over or that, contrary to Beuys, their minds are void and that momentarily they feel threatened by a loss of ideas: a sudden burst of existential angoisse. 

This is an important work that is taking Mondongo into new territory. It courts both spectacle and surprise. It remains much more ambiguous than the blending of the two fairy stories! 

By Kevin Power