Teresita Fernández

Tropical Scholarship

We assume that the art created in a particular cultural moment is an expression of that particular moment. This is never the case. Art is a bet on the future. Michael Baxandall identifies the “period eye” that pertains to the temporal construction of vision of the populace in a particular time, but the “period eye” is the opposite of “period made manifest” that does not exist. The new art of a particular time and place is more likely to be an effort to replace the “period eye” and restore those erasures and comforts that present circumstance and technology are winnowing away. As a result, it is more rewarding to think of persuasive new artworks as wild cards from nowhere that help us complete the hand that culture is dealing us unawares. Think of abstract expressionism as compensating for the posttraumatic blandness of postwar America. Think of pop and minimalist art as compensation for the elitist Marxist and Freudian critical culture that grew up around abstract expressionism. Think of postminimalism and conceptual art as compensating for the spectacular mindlessness of pop and minimalism in their plastic decadence.

From this perspective, new art may be said to have fulfilled its particular social function in the moment that it becomes culture. At this point, it enters the realm of academic typing, history, and sociology. At this point, art becomes less interesting to those of us who prefer art that retires the past for a moment until it becomes the past and a ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. New art is that wild card. It mitigates some presently invisible cultural deficit. This is why, even though I would never refer to a cosmopolitan artist like Teresita Fernández as a “Miami-based artist” or a even a “Cuban-American artist,” I do think of her as a “tropical artist” who deals with issues that, in my own critical vocabulary, are peculiar to “Tropical America”—a cultural configuration that is only now gaining and expressing a new and accumulating relevance asserted by artists like Cy Twombly, Nancy Rubins, Lynda Benglis, and Robert Rauschenberg. So the best I can do is provide a cultural validation of Fernández, to provide a cultural armature for its apparent eccentricity.

Teresita Fernández, Untitled, 2012. Polycarbonate tubing, 96 × 542 × 264 in. (243.8 × 1376.7 × 670.6 cm). Installation view, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong. Photo by Christopher Burke Studios.

Fernández’s art deploys architectural fields of stones and glass in rectangles and explodes them into biomorphic shapes without destroying the inference of their original shape so the exploding stones seem to tug back toward that configuration. She exploits the elevation map (with its stacked plates of variable configurations) as the classic signification of fractal nature’s intersection with cultural geometry. Fernández translates the landscape and flora of the tropics into cultural objects by translating them into horizontal and vertical plates that trace out the irregular planes and swoops of their configurations in fractal detail. Thus, in Fernández’s language Precipice becomes a crooked mesa of gray stairs; The Dune is a shaved, dazzled stack of concave planes—like a choir riser for tiny people. Her Waterfall is a slow free-floating curve of luminous blues that flows down from the wall to the floor, marked with horizontal lines that locate the planes of the space through which the object curves. Instances of willow, wisteria, acacia, falling water, and tidal residue present themselves in relief, in reflective precision—as intricately cut stacks of stainless steel planes through which the light falls and from which it reflects.

None of this has anything to do with northern Europe or New York. Fernández has inherited a Latin American history of art that is distinguished by its direct traverse from the baroque to the romantic to the modern untouched by the rationalist enlightenment. Her narrative jumps from the baroque to the surreal to the abstract, and it is less radical than it might seem, since any narrative bloodline works as well as any other in a democracy. Over the years, this elided history has created a modernist idiom of Latinized color and geometry that northern critics (when they refer to it at all) call “sexy modernism”—a modernism that does not come freeze-dried by enlightenment rage. These critics, of course, have not yet decided if “sexy modernism” is a good thing or a bad one, but I vote for good, mostly because it provides a persuasive alternate story for American paintings coming of age after World War II; it suggests a history that moves differently than we presume. Fernández suggests an art practice that moves directly from the Mediterranean baroque, through the actual and indigenous folk-baroque of Latin culture, through the revolutionary politics of Latin American modernism, to the Mexican muralistes, to the triumph of New York School painting. From Titian to Miró, to Siqueiros, to Pollock, to the new world of postwar art, in other words.

This is worth mentioning here because Teresita Fernández’s work feels comfortable in this flow, as does the work of other Tropical Americans like Jorge Pardo, Jim Isermann, and Ken Price. All these artists engage in an odd romance between chaos and design. They opt for an impersonal rejection of romanic auteurism. The work of these artists is interesting as art, but it is also interesting as a cultural proposition that seems to be on the winning side. The behaviors, phenomena, and objects that, in the North, seem to invite or demand deconstruction, are already in the process of deconstructing themselves in the tangles and mutable swamps and wetlands of the South.

In my view, the world that Teresita Fernández evokes matters more every day because Fernández’s affection for tropical culture softens the hard distinctions that pass as hard currency in the intellectual casinos of the North. In the tropics, the distinction between one thing and another, between one place and another and one identity and another, is all flux—dirt turns to water, water turns to air, and air back to water and dirt. In this world, culture is nothing more than the grid and the plane. All the rest is fluid nature. Since most of it has been imported, it qualifies as culture too, or the fantasy of it. The visual irony of Fernández’s Ink Mirror (landscape) is that both the vertical, black, rectangular slab and the dune of white sand from which it arises are as natural as they are cultural—and something beyond that, since they evoke an imported, imaginary landscape that humans have built, in which real humans dwell.

Living in this world, in the fantastic temperate cocoon of Tropical America, means that one’s mind is not fully occupied with keeping one’s body alive, so the mind and the body blur at the edges, and since your body is at home in the air around it, the self and the other blur at the edges too. The “class-language” of clothing is suppressed, as is clothing itself on numerous occasions. The echoes of one’s self move outward in arcs of physical resonance. As do the physical attributes of one’s world. The bougainvillea in your yard are yours first, an extension of your body’s centrality. They are only secondarily God’s nature. One lives in a full world in which one is occasionally punished but never inconvenienced by the climate—a society in which fine distinctions are hard to come by.

So Fernández works at the edge of entropy but never beyond it. Her works exist in the domains of the translucent, the reflective, the blur, and the slide; she embraces the scatter, the splatter, the explosion, and the splash, and only as much physical matter as it takes to achieve the curve and reveal lineaments of culture. Her objects occupy the realm of surfaces but not the realm of objects, because the easy northern distinctions between space and volume, between one’s interiority and one’s exteriority at the false threshold between appearance and reality, dissolve in the Okefenokee. Manners and morals become indistinct. The idea of “identity” has no practical meaning. The qualifying virtues of artistic chaos and abjectitude, which feel so necessary in the overorganized North, approximate the conditions of tropical life so closely as to become trivial.

So this is my question. What is the wild card in the hand that Teresita Fernández deals us? What do the tropics need from an artist? Or, what does an artist in this environment see that needs to be done? My suggestion is that the tropics are always in need of a good redesign, and are receptive to them, not a northern redesign that extends the bland encroachment of repressive geometry and not a Disneyworld reproduction that only reminds us of the unauthentic absence of thorns and insects but a tropical redesign that speaks its own language, that provides a stable armature at the intersection of nature and culture for its mutable profligacy. Morris Lapidus identified this intersection as the curve, the shape that nature and culture share, where mathematics, calculus, and physics meet the harbor, the bay, the wave, the dune, and the bend of the river—the universal algorithm.

Lapidus began his Fontainebleau Hotel on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach with the curve, because, as he told me once in an interview, curves signify leisure, because a curve is the longest, most beautiful distance between two points and we are tropical human beings who are not in a hurry. We are always shopping for views, or news, or toothpaste, like Romans in the curve of Trajan’s market. Also, curves are sexy because human beings are curved and the curvier the sexier. Curves also stand for change because curves are how we measure change and express it in the calculus. Curves signify flexibility and adaptability to nature, because nature is not rectangular. Curves also stand for self-sufficiency and independence, because, as Richard Serra so aptly demonstrates, curved walls can stand free and straight walls cannot. “A lot of good things about a curve,” Lapidus said, “and about ovals and circles and biomorphic shapes because they have no normative ‘size’ relative to any enclosure they might adorn.”

For these and other reasons, Teresita Fernández organizes her work around the curve. She balances her work on its precipitous fulcrum. The formal function of Fernández’s planar objects, it should be noted, reverses the function of this practice in architecture. In architecture, the stacked irregular planes of the articulated elevation maps are intended to extend the contour of the landscape. In Fernández’s sculpture, the vertical and horizontal plates accommodate her fractal objects with the rectangular enclosures in which they are exhibited—a minimalist device in baroque circumstances. All of these works may be taken as confirmations of Bernini’s contention that there is nothing so ephemeral or protean that a master sculptor cannot freeze it forever. Fernández’s translucent yarn cubes, her pillars of fire and atmosphere, also speak to this aspiration and suggest a group show of works that share this ephemeral aspiration by Peter Alexander, Robert Irwin, and Jesús Rafael Soto.

The interesting point for me is that Teresita Fernández and her all colleagues in this delicate endeavor (Pardo, Isermann, Alexander, Price, Irwin, Nancy Rubins, etc.) are children of Tropical America. They have a touchstone in those southern corners of the continent that are not properly America at all, but are not properly anywhere else. In the years of their innocence these corners of the continent were literally nothing. They were nowhere at all—just big sky, big clouds, saltwater, sand, dirt, and that full, luminous haze, the green lightning bouncing off the water that makes the atmosphere a palpable realm of blur and dazzle. Nothing is quite itself. The sky, the sea, and the landscape blur together at their intersections. There were also weeds, brush, palms, marshes, deserts, serpents, rodents, and a scattering of scantily clad human beings. Nothing too organized, and, even today, in its penultimate cultural maturity, after human beings have added plants, streets, flowers, and architecture, Tropical America has not changed that much: Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, and Houston are still less proper American cities than swathes of equatorial wasteland divided into tribal neighborhoods.

In the years of its social flowering, theorists referred to the realms of Tropical America as Hyper-places, or Surrealities. Today they just shrug and say so what. They acknowledge that these places may not constitute nature or culture by American standards but they are no less real and the tropics are winning. People admit that our comfort with the putative inauthenticity of tropical, cosmopolitan America speaks to the death of Culture as weathered clapboard in Connecticut. For myself, I consider the waning of romantic Nature as an energizing concept for the tropics and not a signifier of its decadence—especially when one considers the fact that, when approached from the south, from Latin America or the Caribbean, Tropical America seems to be a perfectly ordinary and comfortable place in its rapacious fecundity. What has changed is that Tropical America, once regarded as a final refuge from Protestant America, has finally become a real place, the last refuge from entropic Latin America and Puritan America as well. It has become a place from which one might seek succor, more and more a viable alternative to the dominant culture.

One principle supports this option. The joys of Tropical America with all faults can be made more livable with less effort than the conformity of Middle America can be made more joyful. Any urban designer will tell you that the messy, chaotic infestation of human beings in the tropics may be tidied up more easily than the rigid culture of the heartland may be relaxed into a more global generosity. This assumption lies at the heart of Eames, Shindler, Neutra, Lapidus, Gehry, and many others; it informs the architecture of California modern and Miami deco. Artists like Fernández, Pardo, Price, Irwin, and Isermann speak volumes.

They create handless and virtually impersonal objects that are routinely overwhelmed by the ego and theater of their designing and architecting colleagues. This because these artists, so often degraded by their association with design, do, in fact, transcend design more profoundly than those who visibly reject it, because these artists are designing functions to some philosophical purpose. They are creating for the first time some occidental approximation of scholar’s rocks, Zen gardens, quiet sites, and objects of contemplation, molding them into a collectively imagined society. Each is a parable of a sort, so if the work of Teresita Fernández seems too quiet for you, shut up and listen. She is whispering the future. I always think of a meticulous nineteenth-century painting of a hummingbird by Martin Johnson Heade as marking its beginning.