BÉSAME MUCHO:
A HYPERTEXT ABOUT LOVE
Video-opera-installation

US premiere.

26 October – 17 November 2000

During the Salzburg Music Festival 2000, Osvaldo Romberg’s production “Besame Mucho: A Hypertext About Love” received its world premiere at the DomgrabundgsMuseum.

On Thursday, 26 October, this video-opera-installation eceives its US premiere at White Box as part of its Winter/Spring 2000–2001 Media Series.

This “Theater of Transparencies” introduces an unorthodox exhibition concept: installation that extends the boundaries of installation by incorporating a blend of elements such as classical painting, black & white and digital photography, video projection, sculpture and music.

One part of this work consists of male and female life-size transparent dolls that act out passionate love scenes while overlapping depictions of significant moments in culture and history.

The other part has such figures standing in darkness around a large video projection that brings them slowly into life as they engage in blatantly operatic love rituals. Their tale is explained via collaged melodies and texts drawn from different contemporary cultures and familiar popular love songs.

Throughout the 20-minute production, a chorus provides a running commentary that exposes the real motivation behind the protestations of “eternal love”. When the disintegration of these figures occurs, the idea of love is revealed as pure and simple illusion.

Osvaldo Romberg’s work has long been distinguished worldwide for its social commentary and penetrating discourse on the history of culture.

Press:

Show: Besame Mucho
Publication: Art Nexus
Writer: Graciela Kartofel
Title: Osvaldo Romberg
Date: 5.01

Bésame mucho: un hipertexto acerca del amor (Bésame Mucho: A Hypertext on Love) is the title of the vide-opera-installation that Osvaldo Romberg opened in New York. Born in Argentina, he’s thus a citizen of the world whose works are collected in today’s most dynamic museums. The other places in which he’s settled are Israel and the US; he has studied in New York and Philadelphia, cities in which he practices academia. For this hypersensitive, irascible, and questioning artist, neither technique nor technology are a work of art’s legitimizing factors. The works from his youth were resolved in stamps; already back then he was convinced that a constant and reflexive work included the confrontation of cuts, turns, and changes whenever it was needed. The only style was, and continues to be, the “un-styling,” not repetition.
The work analyzed here could presuppose a correlation with his history, his speed, and his deceits, as well as his frugal generosity and his unkept promises. Nevertheless, Bésame mucho: un hipertexto acerca del amor goes beyond the real and the evoked, the expected and the cinematographic, with scenes of ungraspable physical presence. “Videopera-installation” is the description of the media that the artist attacks for this sophisticated creative work. It’s an opera, so he presents the elements of lyrical theater: music, characters, and vocalization of a text. The characters here play the role of “images.” The text is an “anti-script” and it doesn’t establish the traditional thematic narrative or a linear order.
This is an installation in the widest and least orthodox sense of the word, and ------ (?) statues. The quality and the speed or lack of it imprinted by Romberg on his intellectual metaphors are not marked by photography and video in themselves, but by the author’s spirit —always question. Here we agree that neither technique nor technology legitimized the work of art, but they also don’t inhibit the metaphor, and the meta-stories forward the artist’s own esthetics, always departing as a result from his work. there are no excuses, and that’s the situation
Marvin Kinsky, co-founder of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, states that from origin to destination there are several “trans-frames” throughout a thought’s path until its resolution. According to us, this, being so appropriate for artificial intelligence, in visual arts is a fundamental curve of diverse and occasionally successive trans-frames, from the origin of a work of art until its destiny (here we characterize it as “destination-achievement”). We perceive the trans-frames in the videos, the musical collage’s composition, and the images. Romberg combines the trans-frames (impulses generated while questioning) with small modules. in this fashion, the videopera-installation closely links scientific work with esthetics. A transparency’s immateriality is a resource of high esthetics; it refers to this society’s extermination as well as to the disillusionment with itself. The size of the characters resolved in synthetic polymers is related to natural size: they’re isolated or coupled, fragmented or complete, in loving , copulating, attentive, or dead-like postures. The physical is diluted everywhere. From Turner and the Impressionists we have seen that beings tend to dematerialize where there’s more light.
Having a deep knowledge or the history of Art, on this occasion Romberg handled several distinct penumbras. As a suggestion of the society in which we live ( that aspires to coexist with robots while forgetting the spiritual), his dummies dilute into light until they become transparency, pure brilliance, organic absence.
The sense of the title Bésame muhco shouldn’t be translated isolated into other languages. It could be executed in mime or recognizable sounds (phonemes). Since this is a printed article the resolution would be equivalent to the small “signs” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) or the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Bésame mucho sounds equally sappy in both English and Spanish. But in spite of that, it must have been one of the first verbalizations on earth. Romberg’s meta-story supersedes the techniques and materials used. The implication is that he has created his own esthetic situation, and it doesn’t imitate or reproduce reality. They’re twenty minutes not completely devoid of sense of humor or even sarcasm.
The quality of “being Argentine” can be felt, which in turn shouldn’t need an “Argentine being.” Un hipertexto acera del amor, the title’s second part, could be understood as a transit from the tango to Derrida. The title whispers tango and keeps its promise. there is no abuse while tackling the love and tango elements; the music and image sequence set the pace. The spectator can sit, walk around, look at the big screen or the video niches. Perception will vary according to the movements and the distance from each section. Without being a sum the parts, and the whole work outside the traditional frame, confirming that everything’s an illusion.

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