Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre (b. 1969 Montevideo, Uruguay) is a conceptual and live artist whose work centers around participation, informal networks and the uses of public space as a platform for self-expression, diversity, and the co-existence of conflicting views.
Using the ephemeral, the overlooked and the underrated as the starting point, her work creates visible and unexpected connections between things, people and places. The rhetoric of conversation, participation and celebration are often deployed as a strategy for engagement, in which the public is invited to become an active contributor and collaborator to the work.
Her work is usually a direct response to the temporal and spatial context in which it is created and presented, and over the years it has evolved to take place largely beyond traditional art spaces.
out of the corner of my eye
some thoughts towards a personal definition of performance
I fell off the bike and injured my knee, I had to walk on crutches for a week. During those days I kept seeing people with bandages on their legs, feet, arms, many persons that, like me, were stumbling through the city on borrowed plastic legs. Was this a wondrous coincidence, all the injured matching my step, or were they there all along, as some reasonable observer might reassure me. Can I be reassured? Where would I choose to stop thinking, digging? Who will bring the unfaltering proof, the statistics showing there is no convulsion taking place in the city, becoming visible just round the corner of my eye. An experience of recognition and awareness, a slowing down of consciousness. A vulnerability, an opening up of oneself to others. For the artist, to think about this is to think about materials for art, about what can and can’t be used in art. Could an artwork operate according to the rules of coincidence and surprise? How to make art deliver that intensity of experience, remaining intangible, on the brink of being imagined only?
In Brighton University, I speak about coincidences, a young girl asks me if I believe in destiny, I don’t think I do, I think more about the eye, what does it see and how, about ways of looking at the world, about the job of the artist, about a roundness of vision, like that of a bird. A friend writes about coincidences: “cycling through the sun today getting dust in my eye, thinking, could a person grow a pearl in their eye, and today someone used the analogy of an oyster producing a pearl…” An artwork in the shape of an onion or a pearl, with many layers wrapping together signs and wonders, a thing of beauty growing out of nothing, out of dust, out of dirt, a disturbance for the eye that might make you cry. Thinking about the work of the artist, I ask myself how do you feed what you are puzzled about, what you don’t know about into the artwork, how do you turn a crazy thought into art. Can a state of grace be communicated, an underrated thought? What does it take for the inconsequential, the unimportant to be made into a force of life, an experience of being alive? At the door of the University a woman asks me if I have read The Celestine Prophecy, if I know about synchronicity. I remember a line from a song: “I know you hate that mystic shit” . Another girl comes with an unbelievable revelation, I hesitate to believe what she tells me, she saw last night a film about coincidences, about people’s life paths crossing.
The arrival in Brighton a couple of months earlier, setting off in my search for things that have gone missing, for things no longer are. Searching for that state in which coincidences could happen, trying to find the place for poetry to happen, sitting on the beach with a poet, smoking cigarettes and laughing, circling around the definition of such place, such state. Walking the streets of the city, pulling a trolley, carrying some pebbles from a foreign beach in a biscuit tin, the stones rattling as I walk, noticing people noticing me. Is this enough to call it a performance? Should we discuss the need to document it? Plastic bottles, pebbles, the sea, sand, the desert and the beach, the soul of art. Drifting around, going about my daily business, walking into shops, helping a friend choose a pair of sunglasses, buying a bagel, talking as I walk with a friend, a lover, stopping to ask directions to a stranger. Feeling the distrust of people, knowing my presence is a threat, waiting for them to see what’s in my trolley, feeling the change in the air, the shift in power, feeling vulnerable now is my turn. The artist as a clown, scary and pathetic, someone to feel suspicious about, someone to feel sorry for.
The artist, on crutches, among a gathering of cripples. The artist, drunk and mingling with strangers on the pier. An apparent contradiction of terms, to do art that truly follows on the steps of the marvellous is to abandon all programmes, all scripts, all plans, all props, in other words, to surrender all demarcations of art as a discreet activity. To do the kind of art that the artist strives for, the artwork must be stripped naked, be no more than a waiting space. A theatre of blood, Artaud’s theatre, whose place is the body of a man. A very brief exchange, an exchange of nothing, the slightest of art works, coming to degree zero of representation. To define an audience for such art work: the crowd that rubs shoulders with the artist. “To appreciate a piece of art - to enjoy it - to find it as an important thing in your life - is to identify in some way with a kind of virtual group of people - community - who share your values. Engaging with the work - appreciating it - is about piecing together this tenuous network in your mind - a community of people which never exists geographically as a group but which somehow places you at home with people”. Going on a search by abandoning the search. If this is not a path for communication, a way of making community where there was none, if even more effort is required, more labour, more ideas, a more careful approach, a detailed budget, a production schedule, then the artist might as well suicide the artwork. Put an end to its misery. The job of the artist, a recorder without a tape.
The documentation team follows close up, the violence of the camera. A discussion about what documentation can be, about objectivity, about the right of the audience to be told what’s going on, the necessity for the spectacle of art to be declared spectacular. The desire for art is getting weaker, with the unspoken obligation to carry on. The duty of the artist to take the artwork to some conclusion, to follow the process of the work in progress, to stick to the rules. Do not forget, being an artist means to have agreed to certain rules. The artist feeling uneasy, hating the heavy monster art is turning into, feeling the pockets of the artwork getting full of souvenirs to bring back home, to prove it has been out by the sea. Walking down the street the rain starts falling, harder and harder, the artist is forced to stop. An inevitable fact, the forces of nature being stronger than artistic duty.
I go into a pub, they are playing the music I like, I drink three pints, smoke some cigarettes, listen to the music, there is no one here, outside there is a storm, the water pours down, there is no way I can leave this place, no way I can continue with the search, take further the art work. It strikes me there is no reason to go on, no lives at stake here, art, no need to give excuses, to find the logic behind the suicide of the art work. If the artwork is to be suicided is because the pain must be unbearable, a moment of madness, a moment without fear. If the art work is to be suicided is because the rain is falling, because the artist feels rather lazy and will rather drink another pint than at some point go through slides and go through tapes that surely will need editing, and anyway, go on and tell us how do you document coincidences. The storm outdoors and inside the artist’s head, psycho-cosmic parallelism, as the Literature teacher would have it. There is a name for everything in art. Leaving the pub some hours later I see it is called Pressure Point.
The desire to find the place in which the artist and the audience will continuously switch places, the artist as victim and abuser, doing virtually nothing yet expecting something to happen. The recurrent idea of suiciding art, but instead the development of ticks, what someone might call “a style”. Trying to turn that moment of doubt, of unproductiveness, that frozen moment into the artwork, an easy way out. The artist showing her ticks, the actor performing 24 hours a day, like the boys and girls in Big Brother, and no one even bothered to vote you out of the game. Since Marilyn Monroe it pays better to suicide blondes than artists. I follow men close up in the street, the sound of high heels, the sound of my vulnerability right behind them. Another undocumented performance, nothing to write home about.
The best poetry ever written, the best meal I ever had. Cycling late at night, fast, drunk. If the artist could leave the computer right now, get stoned, go dancing, have sex with strangers, hitch hike her way to Morocco, you wouldn’t caught her dead writing dead words. Writing about coincidences, an experience of a different way of being in the world. Suiciding the artwork as a way of getting to that moment, the pressure point, grown out of the impossibility or the silliness of trying to make art as interesting as life. The dangers of defining life as that which is not art. Laziness winning the day. The artist being careful not to leave any traces behind. The suicided artwork is the unspeakable artwork, as wide as the world, that cannot be grasped whole at any one moment. Piecing it together as if by chance, the artwork growing out of the corner of your eye. The enjoyment of thoughts, and the pleasure of living life.