Occidenterie

We are all familiar with chinoiserie: those artifacts, especially popular in decorative arts, on which the West poured all of their thirst for Eastern exotism, imitating and reinterpreting Chinese aesthetic traditions, assimilating them to the European sensibility, and finally marrying them to the excesses of rococo in the 18th century to great success. A local example is Puebla’s Talavera,which in its Golden Age exclusively favored the use of cobalt blue, following the trend set by the porcelain of the Ming dynasty that enraptured Europe and reached Mexico’s shores on the Manila Galleon. Simultaneously, a domestic appetite developed in China for ‘oceanic’ goods—as they called Europe- an imports—and to satiate it they did as their European counterparts, Chinese artisans and artists crafted a wealth of reinterpretations of Western material culture that, in amalgamation with Chinese artistic practices, brought to life ingenious objets d’art and decorative objects. It is this phenomenon that art historian Kristina Kleutghen refers to as occidenterie. This instance of the cultural exchange of luxury goods between Europe and China is evidence of the profound instability of art objects and its modes of production, in terms of their materiality, of course, but especially in terms of the production of their meaning. Kleutghen describes a “heterogeneous idea of Westernness”, an exoticization and essentialization of its characteristics that germinated into something completely new when a European sensibility was implanted in the fertile soil of Chinese technical and representational knowledge. Let’s consider occidenterie as praxis: we can think of the history of Western art in toto, and we can dare exoticize and essentialize it, we can then section off its most celebrated parts and cross them with the logic of finance, which today sets the course followed by contemporary art, and finally let’s graft that onto one of the many globalized, non-hegemonic territories in which its predominance has been enforced: what would our result look like? Marek Wolfryd’s works in this exhibition offer an answer in the form of stacked, aggregated objects and images that share the same space in the most possibly economical way—they are an impenetrable cramming of histories and visualities, crushing solid the progressive line of Western art. If occidenterie assimilated Europe through its specific styles, themes and materials within a Chinese frame and object-form, Wolfryd assimilates the hegemonic contemporary art object, also predominantly European or North American, through its styles, themes and materials—literally. Reinterpretation is exactly its treatment: mannerism, modernism, and manufacturism as interchangeable blocks with exchangeable materialities, jade, copper or 3D printing. Material exercises and images are fungible too: they are added, accumulated, overlapping different traditions on the same surface, agglomerated to form a new finished product, a new commodity, a gesture that manages to contain everything that came before it. Wolfryd accelerates the process of pulverizing the central pillars upholding the work of art: authenticity, uniqueness, specificity—the supposed rationality of its value, the consistency of its relevance, appear in Wolfryd’s work as naked contingency: art objects unfold in time along supposedly progressive lines, but they must also exist under the aggressively transformative terms of geographical/cultural context—what does Mao’s face mean in North America? What becomes of Twombly’s calligraphic scribbles way past gringo postmodernity? Here, their presence, their experience as art objects merges with their experience of them as commodities—propped up by speculation, by fluctuating currency prices, indicators of crude oil, gold and steel, Amazon and Alibaba stocks, shored up by the logic of assets and financial instruments. Wolfryd’s works are stacks of meaning, of techniques, mythologies and representations: they are modeled in software, outsourcing their manufacture while simulating manual labor, they embrace semantic multiplicity and ‘contextual collapse’. Their insistent repetition blurs the forms contained in them, they are as recognizable as they are elusive and absent, empty containers ready to be filled by ‘futures’. They float, prophetic, in the infinite blue sea of exchange, in which anything can happen: tariff war, nuclear war, the Chinese Century—all of the above.