Liliana Porter

Untitled with Lamp, 2000, is my first encounter with the work of Liliana Porter, upon further investigation I found myself being engaged with her material choice and was instantly reminded of Nicolas Bouriaud’s The Radicant. Immediately there was a connection of her choice in materials stemming from what Bouriaud would call the “flea market-aesthetic.” He states that the lifespan of objects is becoming shorter and shorter, their turnover in the marketplace ceaselessly accelerated, their obsolescence carefully planned. It is this obsolescence that Porter thrives own, she takes home these objects and employs them. She comments saying they “already exist…already come with a history,” and by isolating them or situation them with unusual companions she gives them entirely new realities and interpretations. The power lies not in the individual toys, but in the relationship and the space she creates between them. Currently wanting to appropriate objects from the “flea marke aesthetic” myself and appropriate them for pieces of my own, looking at works like that of Liliana Porter is helpful in thinking about how things like placement will set up a certain relationship between objects. I can see a lot of opportunity to make works in this manner. Having obtained objects that both hold a personal history and a history of their own ex. Teddy Ruxpin or R2D2 for example symbols of my childhood, I can give them new meaning by placing them in certain situations/environments.

I think a large difference between Liliana Porter and most artists is her ability to alter her work. She in fact creates with this in mind. In an interview with Pablo Baler she says: “I place my work in a neutral space, I do stage it in such a way as to not even allow the possibility of seeing it without re-creating it, without transforming it…I’m mostly interested in realizing and showing that almost everything lies inside that region where you are the one who endows things with a particular meaning.” I also find Porters arrival of her material as interesting as her portrayal. She says that she “got here not form the Pop side; it was more from the fact that toys are things of the past, and at the same time, they are metaphors, receptacles of meaning It is exactly the same with art.

In thinking of the appropriation of certain toys that I have collected and held on to with then intentions of using them as my art I feel that now that I have some insight from Liliana Porter’s point of view as the “toy” as a material, that I must investigate what the material is trying to say to me in terms of objects from the past that can be seen as metaphors.

Baker, Kenneth. "Waltz of the Figurines, Now on a Screen near You." San Francisco Chronicle. 26 Apr. 2008. Web.

Bourriaud, Nicolas. The Radicant. New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2009. Print.

Harper, Glenn, and Twylene Moyer. Conversations on Sculpture. Hamilton, N. J.: Isc, 2007. Print.

Tintori, Valentina. "Liliana Porter/Interview." Latina Art Journal (2011): 1. Latina Art Journal. 27 Mar. 2011. Web.