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The dialogue established between
the work of art and the individual viewer can also generate feelings of
disorientation, indeterminacy and ambiguity, as in the case of the Mexican
artist Teresa Margolles, whose work highlights the immediate reality of
experience rather than the power of representation. ”Air/Aire”
not only has an empirical, experimental and cognitive dimension but also
refers to an experience in which the subject is also the object. The sensory
response is elicited not by an image but an absence. The artist’s
installation consists of a room that is apparently empty apart from a working
air-conditioning unit. The air is slightly humidified. The spectator perceives
nothing else. The small label simply lists the elements making up the installation,
namely the conditioning system and vaporised water. The water is from public
mortuaries in Mexico City and was used to wash the corpses of as yet unidentified
people prior to autopsy. Margolles combines her identity as an artist with
everyday experience as a medical examiner in public mortuaries. Her oeuvre
is devoted entirely to exploring the taboo of death, a ”memento mori”
that acts, however, in the complete absence of the actual object of investigation,
i.e. the representation of death. The visitor’s awareness thus becomes
an integral part of the artistic process. In this way, Margolles elevates
the visitor to the status of an active subject who completes the installation
by virtue of his or her imagination and capacity for interior visualisation,
producing an emotional response of repulsion and disgust that is not visual
and immediate in nature - it is sensory and cognitive. As a visceral motor
reaction, disgust is included together with fear and pain among the primary
emotions pinpointed by Professor Giacomo Rizzolatti of Parma University
as underlying the so-called ”mirror mechanism”. The active agents
of this mechanism are the ”mirror neurons” present in the human
brain, a particular class of motor neurons characterized by the extraordinary
property of firing not only when the individual performs a particular action
but also when he or she sees or simply hears someone else perform it. What
was once regarded as a culturally determined emotional reaction is now known
to depend essentially on the connections of a specific cerebral zone and
the activation of ‘neural representations’ of other people’s
actions. In short, when someone observes a work of art, this triggers a
sort of re-creation in the sense that the viewer does not remain passive
but projects his or her ‘inner state’ onto it (see David Freedberg). |
