WINDOWS, INSTALLATIONS, HOMES, ASOMBROS

The Barber Shop is an art installation by Pepón Osorio recreating a Puerto Rican's male hair salon at the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico. While the pieces are very well constructed, the characters and scenes in the shop are accurate realistic representations of the men at a barber shop, for reasons that language is not capable of expressing or, perhaps, lack of “interpretation insight and skils”, I left the gallery with no particular powerful emotion. Nothing in the piece moved me, to laugh or cry or in a state of wonder, (I prefer the word in Spanish, “asombro”). Some store windows had elicited stronger emotional and intellectual reactions, “asombros”, than what I experienced with The Barber Shop. 

My deceased friend Ariel’s apartment led many visitors to say that they felt like they were inside an art piece. It was certainly not a House and Garden’s decoration nor a trendy copy of whatever was fashionable at the moment. Unfortunately -perhaps, it was its destiny-, it burned down a few years before he died. I recently threw away all my photos of what was a magical place. Esthetic experiences can only be lived once. The visitor can go back and feel not moved at all or moved in different forms at different times, but it is never the same, unless it repeats itself. In Ariel’s apartment a different sensation was always felt. Maybe caused by one of its many plastic insects covering the walls near the kitchen, coming out from underneath a table, a corner of the living room, or the case full of false teeth hanging in the bathroom, next to the sink, the toothbrush and paste.

In opposition to those Flemish artists who paint interior domestic scenes where people are looking out into a window, a young Cuban artist, Gustavo Ojeda, who died at a very young age of Aids, used to paint views of peoples houses, apartments as seen from the outside, thru their windows. The viewer was uncomfortable, disturbed by the intrusion, yet wanting to go in and experience the furniture, the story happening inside the room. 

Living inside an empty apartment for more than a month can lead someone to feel empty also, without any reason to be. It is not an art piece. It feels like one, except it does not move the participant, the visitor to desire experiencing it again; not because it does not elicit powerful sensations, but because few people can be in a permanent state of “asombro”.