| Javier Téllez: Alpha 60 (The mind
- body problem) September 20, 2002 - October 26, 2002 WHITE BOX presents internationally recognized Venezuelan artist Javier Téllez with an installation consisting of 2,000 miniature cars made from soap bars and sponges with accompanying video footage made in collaboration with the patients of Nirgua psychiatric hospital in Venezuela. Téllez has recently been featured in Flash Art s September issue, was shown in the last Venice Biennale and has exhibited in New York at PS1 and Queens Museum. Curatorial statement: Alpha 60 (the mind-body problem), a multimedia installation by Javier Téllez, takes as its point of thematic departure a crucial element from Jean Luc Godard's science fiction film, Alphaville. In that film, there is a supercomputer called Alpha 60 that controls Alphaville and that monitors its populace. Although Alphaville provides an idyllic life for its citizens in a crime-free environment, it is a society where conventionality and homogeneity are condoned, mediocrity prized, and banality celebrated. Alphaville is, in other words, a totalitarian and nightmarish world; it is a city "where words such as redbreast, weeping, autumn light, and tenderness disappear from the dictionary every day; a city where no one knows the meaning of the words "why" and "conscience." While the narrative strands in Godard's film are many, an undercurrent that links Alphaville the film with Alpha 60 the installation is Alphaville's mundane life and homogeneity as well as the notion of the ideal citizen who submits to society for the benefit of the collective; yet one of the returns of this social contract are the provisions and amenities provided that signify civility and that cushion and make uniformity palatable. Alpha 60 poignantly addresses this through Sisyphean tasks that are part of the installation's formal strategy: over 2,000 miniature cars made from soap bars, boxes of psycho-pharmacological drugs and sponges seem to be pushing round, colorful objects as an end in itself. Transportation is thus seen not as progress but as regression, not as a means but for its own sake, not of dynamism but of stasis. One of these objects, which has grown to gargantuan proportions, is seen in a video projection filmed in a psychiatric hospital. The patients of the hospital, like the cars, are pushing the circular object around its grounds. -Raul Zamudio
PRESS Press Javier Tellez ÔAlpha 60 (The Mind-Body Problem) White Box 525 West 26th Street, Chelsea Through Oct. 26 Javier Tellez was born in Venezuela in 1969. His parents were psychologists, and as a child he was familiar with the environment of psychiatric hospitals. That environment is the raw material for much of his work. Some of his early installations recreated hospital settings, and he has used psychiatric patients as performers in videos. In a striking piece titled "Bedlam" at P.S.1 in 2001, visitors sat inside a large wooden birdhouse to watch an employee-training film showing restraint techniques used at the Bethlehem Royal Hospital ( once known as Bedlam) in London. The implication was that confinement is an existential condition; everybody, in or out of hospitals, is to some degree cuckoo. For "Alpha 60 ( the Mind-Body Problem)," organized by Raul Zamudio, this gallery has been filled with hundreds of toy-size trucks made from bars of soap and boxes of psychiatric medication, each dwarfed by a multicolored ball that it is apparently trying to push forward. A colossal version of the ball appears in a video, filmed by Mr. Tellez in a Venezuelan hospital, in which patients energetically push it from one ward to another and finally over the walls of the institution. Mr. Tellez has titled the piece after Jean-Luc GodardŐs film "Alphaville," which offers a dystopian vision of a trouble-free but rigidly conformist future world. The patients pushing the ball might represent a version of such conformity, but their collective effort, at once driven and exhilarated, elicits all kinds of unpredictable individual responses, from joy to despair. At the same time, the presence on film of these people with profound disabilities is disturbing, the way Diane ArbusŐs pictures of industrialized subjects are. In the 18th century, patients at Bedlam were displayed for public entertainment, and Mr. Tellez has not escaped accusations of similar exploitation. The question hangs in the air at White Box, adding ethical tensions to an already challenging work by an intriguing and idiosyncratic artist. He also has a beautiful video piece at the Queens Museum of Art as part of the fine "Queens International" exhibition (through November 3). In it a boy, again a psychiatric patient, is dressed as an angel. We watch him slowly inflate a balloon with is breath; then, as the film plays backward, absorb the air back into himself, in a gentle play on the reversibility of in and out- and, by extension, of insider and outsider- which is Mt TellezŐs constant theme. Show: Javier Tellez: Alpha 60 (The Mind-Body Problem) "The mission of folly is universal," wrote the Croatian novelist Miroslav Krleza in his 1938 work On the Edge of Reason, a bleak description of a society on the brink of World War, adding, "{Folly is} a natural force, like gravitation." In art, the portrayal of human folly as a critique of the supposed lucidity that rules society never ceases to be relevant. The work of Javier Tellez often reflects on these themes as well as on the ambiguous frontiers between normality and insanity, channelling the energetic forces that spring from their clashing. For this exhibition, Alpha 60 (the mind-body problem), Tellez approached the Nyrgua psychiatric hospital in Venezuela, a labyrinthine, nightmarish institution that separates patients in a maze-like architectural structure of patios and hallways according to their mental condition. In one "collaboration," Tellez devised an enormous colored ball that was given to the patients, and then videotaped its trajectory as the various groups moved it of their own initiative onto other patios of the hospital, as if in a pinball machine. In watching the video documentation, the viewer has to negotiate the powerful dynamics of this "ball game" that is at once mesmerizing, moving and eerily disturbing. On the floor of the gallery installation, two thousand soap bars (some actually taken from the hospital) and sponges attached to small replicas of the ball take the form of little toy cars with tiny tires. There is also video documentation of other actions. Jean-Luc GodardŐs classic film, Alphaville, a futuristic dystopia where human masses are controlled by a supercomputer, provides the title reference and conceptual springboard of the work. Certainly, the portrayal of a group of mental patients in a remote Venezuelan hospital falls into this realm. But read in a broader context, this display of tensions between the natural forces of control, play, reason and unreason, is certainly disquieting, and not for merely showing madness. Rather, it is an effective metaphor of the middle classes who acquiesce to the rules of supposedly civilized society without really understanding their purpose.
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