Published in Artnexus, # 59, Volume 2, Year 2003, pages 52 - 56. http://www.artnexus.com

Like the statue in Borges’s bestiary, the meanings of Valeska Soares’s sculptures multiply from their very constitution, being open to the viewer’s own interpretation. This is a kind of sculpture that at times seems not only to breathe, but to feel.
Rodrigo Moura

In her recent exhibition at Museo Tamayo, Valeska Soares (Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 1957; Soares currently lives and works in New York) returned to two of the most significant themes in her recent production: gardens and mirrors. Soares was invited to inaugurate the intersticios program of site-specific works in the forest that surrounds the museum, and attentive to the demands of space and situation, she chose an area that, as she put it, “wanted this piece.”1 The artist used reflective acrylic sheets to build a “lake” nearly forty meters in diameter. Her site was a clearing in the woods from which a path ran to one of the museum’s glass doors —which in turn reflected the architectural space of the building’s façade, and formed the entrance to the work. During the rainy season, a giant puddle forms in this clearing, and this became  Soares’s guiding concept. The lake’s amoeba-like shape was dictated by the outline defined by the trees themselves. It creates a new element in the landscape which to a large degree adds a touch of artificiality to the found situation, and as part of it creates this new and temporary piece.

A more dramatic element based on different specificity—in this case, Mexican culture—is added to the “ambient” character of this project. A small glass arbor was built in one of the lake’s extremes, and inside this arbor a large cake was hidden; the cake had the measurements and characteristics of a bed. The gigantic dessert was specially-ordered by the artist from one of Mexico City’s most traditional pastry shops, Pastelería Ideal; its entire preparation and baking was supervised by Soares, who also intends to publish a series of works using her record of the process. The use of such iconography refers to cultural celebrations and to Mexican women’s initiation rituals, such as the Quinceañera or the traditional wedding. The bed was hyper-realistically rendered, with sugar capitonées, pillows, and borders. Its presence within the glass bubble contributed a disturbing element to the piece introducing a bed on which no one can lie, and a bed-cake that no one can eat—and would only be seen through the glass. The work’s ephemeral profile denotes, in that fleeting consciousness, a hybrid form that borrows material and spiritual elements from both objects in order to fuse them into a third one, without a clearly defined material status. Perhaps its fate is to become food for the garden’s ants, in the manner of Sin título ‘’Preserva,” a 1991 sculpture by Soares, made with  red roses wrapped in cotton that with time rotted away and were eaten by insects. We see it not only as a human construction invented for the purpose of containing nature and representing the landscape, but also as an autonomous microcosm, its relationships of scale altered to accommodate insects. This disarticulation brings us to the concept of antropofugismo.2

Titled Pure Theatre, in reference to a song by the popular Cuban singer La Lupe, Soares’s installation assumes its dramatic character as a psychological experience for the viewer. Its element of fiction, its dream-like, clearly fantastic quality, nevertheless possesses undeniably realistic connotations. The viewer, transported initially towards the dream-like structure evoked by the repertoire of images, engages in a real experience with the apparatus installed around the museum. The reflecting surface becomes a large field of narcissistic possibilities for the viewer, who is able to walk barefoot on the piece and can find novel ways to interact with it. Its nature as museum object brings also to mind the historical use of those spaces in art. As the critic Cuahutémoc Medina has noted in his review of this show, “Is it impossible to teach the public that spaces are not doomed to serve as a platform for hypocritical civics lectures or for the pseudo-modernist phallocentrism of the sculptors’ guild?”3

II

Mirrors, optical apparatuses that are also symbols of human vanity, enter Valeska Soares’s art as part of different strategies and they represent a variety of roles, always while working as allies (be it material or conceptual) in the creation of fictions that correspond to the work’s concept. These are fragmentary, nonlinear fictional narratives. As in the Mexican lake, the interplay of reality and fiction (between what the viewer sees and experiences and what supports these two actions, be it fiction, desire, or thought) is central to the functioning of any Soares piece. Last year, for her show at the Fortes Villaça gallery in São Paulo, Soares created an installation based on a story by Italo Calvino, “Cities and Desires 5,” from Invisible Cities.4 Zobeide, the city described in the story, is the materialization of a dream shared by many men: a woman runs through the city, they pursue her, she escapes. Incapable of catching up with her in the dream, the men build a city identical to the one in the dream, but with walls to enclose her. However, “none of them, either asleep or awake, saw the woman again.”5

Soares’s 2002 installation Détour may be considered a translation of the same original short story into another language, as for example, the notion of inter-semiotic translation used in literary criticism. The artist turned the hall into a semi-circular mirror, so that the viewer’s image was repeated in the intersection of the different angles, and the viewer confronted the photographic image in a sequence of arches. The audio was created with five tapes that reproduce simultaneous versions of the same story by different storytellers, who were invited to tell the story of Zobeide from memory. The work articulated presence and absence, dream and reality, memory and fact, and created “a cycle of desire and forgetting.”6 Finally, Soares finds in Calvino’s narrative an opposition between attraction and aversion, also marks of her own narratives: “Recent arrivals couldn’t understand what attracted people to Zobeide, an ugly city, a lie.”7 Her own work Sin título (From Strangelove) was a 1996 installation created for the Lumeiar Sculpture Garden, which comprised sixteen birdbaths in glass and lead hung from the ceiling and filled with wine and poison.

The use of mirrors and the appropriation of Calvino’s narrative universe were already a part of the project Soares created for InSite 2000, Picturing Paradise (2000). The artist adapted an original project to a site on the Mexican–U.S. border where a circular area extends the border into both territories. At each side of the border she erected large sheets of reflecting stainless steel. These “mirrors” widened our view of one side, creating the impression that both countries overlap, and thus through illusion her work expanded the border. Moving closer to the mirror, the viewer found his or her own image and a quote from Calvino, which reinforced the impossible transposition of signals. Soares has said, “And of course, what you are actually seeing is the same side that you are on, reflected from another space that you cannot cross into.”8 In that project, the reference is to Valdrada, another of Calvino’s invisible cities built on a lake that both reflects it and acts as its double. Soares uses this text to comment on the relationship between San Diego and Tijuana. “Sometimes the mirror increases the value of things. Sometimes, it cancels it. . . . The two Valdradas live the one for the other, looking permanently into each other’s eyes, but without love.”9 In what almost constitutes a critical comment on the piece, the U.S. Border Patrol placed a disclaimer next to the Calvino quotation, stating that it did not reflect the views or opinions of the U.S. security force. Fiction and truth.

III

Tonight (2002), Soares’s first video installation, was commissioned by the Pampulha Museum of Art for a retrospective of the artist’s work, and similarly employed a strategy with mirrors. Working with the history of the museum building itself, originally designed in the 1940s by Oscar Niemeyer for the Pampulha Casino, Soares recorded and exhibited her video in the old boîte area, nowadays devoted to artists’ projects. The video was shot from the balcony, looking over the dance floor. There, a number of dancers, selected from Belo Horizonte’s traditional night clubs, danced alone to Burt Bacharach’s rendition of “Tonight.” Soares’s digital edition superimposed different groups, her camera always in the same position. This created fortuitous encounters between somewhat blurry images of the solitary dancers, whose ghost-like quality echoed the hall’s strong nostalgic atmosphere. A large projection surface was created in the balcony, so that the real space seemed to be doubled or reflected; the video, along with the music played in a loop. The dance troupe used in this work was formed by six men and two women, who alternated in the same role (in homage to Luis Buñuel’s 1977 film, Cet Obscur Objet du Désir). In this appropriation, a single woman is “shared” by several partners, awakening profound chimerical feelings and arousing sensations such as desire, projection, and inadequacy.10

IV

Like mirrors, gardens are a frequent presence in Valeska Soares’s work, and they provide the opportunity for a complex interplay of opposites based on the classic dichotomy of nature vs. culture. According to Soares, “It seems there was always an interest in dealing with not necessarily gardens, but with ideal spaces that referred back to how we construct ideas of paradise ... Most spaces we experience as “natural” have been constructed as sculptures, but on a larger scale.”11

Vanishing Point (1998), a large scupture that originated from a series of other works, is perhaps the most complex of Soares’s works in this sense. It comprises a group of stainless steel tanks made in the shape of elements from classic European gardens, and laid out like mazes. Each tank’s interior is filled with an aromatic substance (a solution of women’s perfume) and the smell permeates the entire exhibition. The initially pleasurable sensation, however, quickly turns into repugnance and nausea: pleasure and pain. The classic format of French or Italian gardens is transformed into a mere container for the aroma of the plants that could populate it: memory and forgetting. The solution in the tanks slowly evaporates, interacting with the space and impregnating it: presence and absence. After being on view for one day at the Pampulha Museum, the solution also became a cemetery for insects that were attracted by the scent and the reflection: seduction and intoxication. The physical space at Pampulha added new elements to the work and established an erotic relationship with Niemeyer’s sensual architecture. Soares’s stainless steel echoed the aluminum column located at the center of the maze, her acute angles contrasted with the building’s curves, and her surfaces reflected themselves as a large wall of mirrors.

Untitled (From Vanishing Point), presented at Christopher Grimes Gallery in Santa Monica, California, in 1998, is another complex installation that works on the theme of the garden. Here, however, Soares also explores the idea of the lost paradise. After moving to New York City, the artist had replicas of the 123 pots and plates that used to be in her personal garden, made in wax, porcelain, and aluminum. The pieces were placed on the floor, in groups, and they alluded to the loss of the garden in which the originals were located. The distinction between nature and culture as it applies to the vocabulary of art was also at work here. As Adriano Pedrosa points out, this work strongly refers to traditional sculpture by means of its technique and materials.12 However, Soares’s installation is a direct commentary on the sculpture’s pedestal—the pots and sculptures—while the plants are absent.

V

Along with the notion of fiction, literature itself plays an important role in Valeska Soares’s work, as demonstrated by the artist’s two works based on bibliographies. As in her works inspired by Calvino, the visual text is not only self-referential, but also refers to other texts, in a process that cannot be explained as mere postmodern intertextuality, but is fiction in itself. Histories (1998), the first of these works, uses a list of eighty literary works in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Italian, all of which include the word “garden.” “Each title makes reference to a garden, but they are not necessarily books that deal with gardens per se.”13 The bibliography was compiled by Adriano Pedrosa and published, with a text by Soares, in the catalog Historias.14 Initially a bibliography, the list becomes a text with poetic autonomy, a text that can be read on its own as a history of the use of gardens in literary titles; it is interesting to observe the different approaches to the idea of the garden that are discernible in each title. Soares’s work is formalized by a series of copper rings on which the titles were carved. In 1998 the artist installed these rings on trees, at eye level, as part of a Public Art Fund project in New York City. This intervention created a kind of open-air text that the public could read as they walked through the space.

A similar bibliography on the word “mirror” was created by Soares and Pedrosa using the same procedure: Pedrosa identified titles in the same languages, and Soares applied them in colorless opaque vinyl squares, one title per square, on a large wall of mirrors at the Pampulha Art Museum. It was an interesting minimal composition supported by the existing structure.

Literary forms are also evident in the way in which Soares organizes her artistic production into “fields” of works that are titled as derivations of previous works. The replicas of her garden objects derive from her stainless steel and perfume garden (From Vanishing Point), as if they were stories in one single, still-in-progress book (From Sinners, From Strangelove, From Fall, From Intimates, and so forth). In this vein, the image of the invitation to her show at the Tamayo Museum becomes an unfolding of “puro teatro”—the prophetic image, created before the show, of a child riding a bicycle over a large reflecting puddle, the whole framed by two trees that resemble a balcony’s curtains.

In his story Two Metaphysical Animals, included in The Book of Imaginary Beings, Jorge Luis Borges describes the Statue that Feels. It is an imaginary animal introduced by Etienne Bonmot Condillac as a refutation of Decartes’s theory of innate ideas. This hypothetical statue is given only one sense initially, the sense of smell, and on the basis of this it will develop, in sequence, the faculties of understanding—attention, memory, comparison, judgment, reflection, and imagination—and from that point, the faculties of will—attraction and aversion.15 Like the statue in Borges’s bestiary, the meanings of Valeska Soares’s sculptures multiply from their very constitution, being open to the viewer’s own interpretation. This is a kind of sculpture that at times seems not only to breathe, but to feel.

Notes

1. Valeska Soares in a personal communication with the author, April 2003.

2. For the concept of antropofugusmo (man’s escape) and a geography of gardens based on it, see also, Julio Cortázar, “Geografías,” in Historias de Cronópios y de Famas, trans. Gloria Rodríguez (Río de Janeiro: Civilización Brasilera, 1972), pp. 78–79. In this story, the narrator transcribes a manuscript that includes a vast and intricate geography, which, “hypothesis or fantasy, would correspond topographically to a small garden on 628 Laprida Street, Buenos Aires.” It is an inventory of the landscape from the point of view of its insects, “demonstrating that ants are the true queens of creation.”

3. Cuauhtémoc Medina, “El Ojo Breve—Géneros de espejismo,” in Reforma, 5 March 2003.

4. Italo Calvino, “Las Ciudades y los Deseos 5” As Cidades Invisíveis, trans. Diego Mainardi (São Paulo: Compañía de las Letras, 1998), pp. 45–46.

5. Ibid., p. 45.

6. Soares, personal communication, April 2003.

7. Calvino, “Las Ciudades y los Deseos 5,” p. 46.

8. Valeska Soares, interview by Vik Muniz, Bomb Magazine 74, Winter 2001, p. 50.

9. Calvino, “Las Ciudades y los Ojos 1,” As Cidades Invisíveis, pp. 53–54.

10. For the Freudian concept of deep strangeness as applied to Soares’s work, see Adriano Pedrosa, Valeska Soares, exhibition folder, (Belo Horizonte: Pampulha Museum of Art). “If often her works assume beautiful and seductive forms, with intimations of the erotic, an attentive gaze will reveal disturbing elements in them.”

11. Soares, Muniz interview, p. 51.

12. Adriano Pedrosa, “Valeska Soares,” Poliester vol. 7, no. 24, Winter 1998–99, pp. 46–47.

13. Soares, Muniz interview, p. 51.

14. Valeska Soares, Historias, exhibition catalogue, text by Adriano Pedrosa (São Paulo: Galería Fortes Vilaça, November 1996), pp. 40–41. With respect to the title of the show, Pedrosa says: “unlike the more limited English word ‘histories,’ the Portuguese word ‘histórias,’ much like the French ‘histoires’ and the Spanish ‘historias,’ may be used to identify both fictional and non-fictional texts, thus designating the historical, the anecdotal, and the literary at once.”

15. Jorge Luis Borges, “De los Animales Metafísicos,” El Libro de los Seres Imaginarios, trans. Carmen Vera Cirne Lima, (São Paulo: Editora Globo, 1989), pp. 11–12.

*This image is a courtesy of Christopher Grimes Gallery. The others are a courtesy of Galeria Fortes Vilaça.

Assistant curator at the Pampulha Art Museum, Belo Horizonte.

Como la estatua del bestiario de Borges, las esculturas de Valeska Soares multiplican los sentidos a partir de su constitución, siendo una obra abierta a las interpretaciones del espectador. Una escultura que, por momentos, no sólo apenas exhala, más bien parece sentir.
Rodrigo Moura

Valeska Soares
By Adriano Pedrosa
Museu de Arte da Pampulha, belo horizonte, 2003

This is Valeska Soares' first full-scale survey exhibition, organized especially for the museum and gathering works created between 1991 and 2002, including some recent ones not previoulsy exhibited. Valeska's work comprises sculptures, installations, drawings, photographs, and video (the latter exhibited here for the first time). Her work deals with a complex repertoire of themes and concepts which, despite being potent and even overpowering, take on a deliberately fleeting character. This may occur due to the works' resistance to precise naming or classification or as a result of its evocation of contrasting orders and constructions. In this sense, one of the work's key themes is fiction, which is invariably associated here with its reverse as well—true feelings and experiences. Thus, pleasure is set against pain, beauty against crudeness, expectation against disillusionment, dreams against reality, memory against forgetfulness, fulfillment against absence. If the works often assume beautiful and seductive forms, even with eroticizing traces, a careful look will reveal disturbing elements. Freud's psychoanalytic notion of the uncanny is fundamental here: all that which initially attracts us because of its identity with our lives, memories, and intimacies, but which simultaneously, and for the same reasons, disturbs and repels us upon revealing hidden, forgotten, or foreign content.

Untitled (Preserva) [Preserve] (1991), an ephemeral work that has to be remade every time it is exhibited, consists of dozens of freshly cut red roses wrapped in white cotton. While they still bloom, these odd and beautiful bouquets exhale a delicate perfume; soon the roses begin to rot and the cotton that once preserved them now mummifies them. The beautiful gradually begins to adopt morbid features. Gardens, labyrinths, and mirrors are recurring themes in Valeska's fictions, and testify to her Borgesean inclinations (Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina, 1899-1986). Vanishing Point (1998) is composed of stainless steel tanks that allude to the labyrinthine shapes in diagrams of classical European gardens, transformed into minimalist sculptures and filled with a perfumed liquid. In the museum, this work establishes a precise dialogue with the architecture: centered on one of the exhibition space's aluminum columns, its geometrized reflecting pools cast back an image of the mirrored tiles of one of the walls, whilst relating to the Pampulha lake, next to which the museum is situated. Once more, the sweet perfume, which at first is seductive, soon turns into its opposite through its intoxicating excess.

Two works appropriate bibliographies, references to other histórias [In the original Portuguese, história refers both to histories and stories. T.N .], which were compiled and published in exhibition catalogues as “texts” about the artist by the curator, and composed of titles that contain the word “mirror” ( Untitled, 2002) and “garden” ( Histórias, 1998), in Portuguese, French, Italian, Spanish, and English. The mirror histórias were applied onto the museum's mirror wall in vinyl—a work exhibited here for the first time; the garden histórias were inscribed in bas-relief on copper rings that wrap around false columns on the mezzanine, also articulated in relation to the original columns of the museum.

Three new works appropriate the actual space and history of the building in a more direct manner. Valeska created a series of photographs by appropriating and manipulating period films of the Casino from the 1940s. In one video Valeska creates a loop using a shot she appropriated from a film featuring regular visitors dancing at the Casino's nightclub, in which the camera moves in a half-circle. A video appropriates a loop from a an 180-degree shot from one of those films that features regular visitors dancing at the Casino's nightclub. Another work, Tonight (2002), the artist's first video installation, produced with the museum's support, was recorded and projected inside the nightclub. It consists of digitally superimposed images of lone dancers who meet one another fortuitously on the screen. The video plays with the codes of ballroom dancing, separating couples and disrupting the dominance of the man over the woman, evoking desire, projection, and incompleteness.

Valeska's works are an open and generous invitation to interpretation. In them the artist combines seductive and precarious, beautiful and alien, potent and fragile elements that are imbued with personal histórias and references, or that invite us to project our own. In the end, it is up to the viewer to accept the invitation to interpretation, as he/she discovers the fictions whose trajectories have only been opened by the works, but which ultimately are left to us to construct and explore. As with desire itself.

--Adriano Pedrosa, curator

Translated from the Portuguese by Veronica Cordeiro

Valeska Soares was born in Belo Horizonte in 1957. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Valeska Soares at Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica
By Adriano Pedrosa

Published in Poliester, 1999

In the past few years, Valeska Soares' work has explored the image and concept of the garden. This seems only a natural choice for the artist given some of the themes she has been dealing with: the labyrinth, memory and loss, intoxication and decay. Underlying the treatment of these themes through metaphorical, poetic, and conceptual plays lay also relations between nature and culture, landscape and representation, sculpture and installation. In this context, perhaps the most challenging conceptual component in (the reading and reception of some of) Valeska's works, is how they establish a relation or find their stand point vis-a-vis what is perhaps among the trickiest and stickiest of contemporary art issues: beauty.

Untitled (from Vanishing Point) , Valeska Soares' recent installation at Christopher Grimes Gallery, is undeniably beautiful. The exhibition occupied the gallery's two spaces. In the larger one, the artist displayed a series of 123 empty pots, vases, and saucers cast in beeswax, porcelain and aluminum. The sculptures were made after originals found in her garden in Brooklyn, and were presented in a similar way--her Brooklyn garden and her Santa Monica gallery shared roughly similar proportions and size, and thus only small diagrammatic adaptations regarding arrangement and display had to be made. In transferring these containers from the private garden to public exhibition space, from the space of domesticated nature to that of art, the pieces become sculptures , and in this process pots, vases, and saucers were emptied and cast in different materials, all of which were traditionally sculptural. According to a table of equivalents defined by the artist, terracotta was cast into a yellowish beeswax, black plastic into aluminum, white plastic into white porcelain, and terracotta-colored plastic into white beeswax. In order to map and chart the wide range of receptacles and to transfer them to the gallery space, Valeska created a detailed inventory of the pieces, categorizing and drawing charts of them which were exhibited at the second and smaller gallery space. More conceptual in nature, and perhaps less obviously beautiful , these drawings-plans with their indexical and cataloguing features were crucial to the understanding of the work

The garden which is here metonymically mapped by the artist had recently been left behind, as Valeska had just moved to another Brooklyn site. On one level, the artist's effort could be seen nostalgic, a personal celebration or casting of a memento--her lost garden. It seems as though in becoming art, the garden had to get rid of those ugly living things their containers previously bore: flowers have vanished. Gardening and artistic activities are here carefully played off; the craft and the concept, labour and work, beauty and concept, are all counter-acted and intercrossed. On a different level, the empty containers are much like pedestals without sculptures, or (more fittingly) plinths without statues. In this new site, dislocated from the private outdoors to the public indoors, the arrangement of the sculptures related the represented garden to installation, but also to landscape--hence the vanishing point reference in the title and the diagrammatic representation of domesticated nature through drawings sculpture, and installation. Although once carefully cultivated with leisurely dedication by the artist, the garden was now cast as art, and perhaps for that matter only the cultural artifacts have been appropriately portrayed--again the pdestal and the plinth, those culturally loaded framing devices. The pieces were preciously cast and crafted (one particular pot, small, half-broken and cast in aluminum, was particularly stunning), yet it is their conceptual play with process, form, installation, and dislocation which make them so subtly beautiful.

Adriano Pedrosa is an artist, writer and curator living in São Paulo and Los Angeles.

VANISHING POINTS
By Vik Muniz

Published in "The Dream of Wisdom." Valeska Soares: Ponto de fuga/desaparecimento [Vanishing point].
São Paulo: Galeria Fortes Vilaça, 1999.

“Je suis l'espace où je suis”

Noel Arnaud, L'état d' ébauche.

Et voici que je suis dvenu un dessin d'ornament
Volutes sentimentales
Enroulement de spirales
Surface organisée en noir et blanc
Et pourtant je viens de m'entendre respirer
Est-ce bien dessin
Est-ce bien moi.

Pierre Albert-Birot, Poémes à l'autre moi.

The dream of Wisdom

In the medieval epic “The dream of Poliphilus” by Francesco Colonna, the protagonist wanders about “a sensuous oneiric path” in search for his beloved muse Polia (wisdom).

Although entirely random, Poliphilus path seems to have been arranged as to offer the traveler a living metaphor for life itself. In this path he encounters confusion, order, illusion, fear, determination and finally wisdom through an intoxicating call of the senses.

Poliphilus searches for Polis by letting himself go, by feeling the successively renewed environments as if moved by a primeval force. he behaves as an undistinguished part of his own dream, much like the way most people do while walking through in our days.

It is no small wonder that Collonna's classic became the imaginary blue print to all gardens from the renascence to the end of the eighteenth Century. From Pierro Ligorio, to André Le Notre every single garden design makes direct references to “ the Dream” and its narrative architecture. Colonna ( an architect himself who later became a Dominican monk), aimed to create an interactive environment between the material world of the senses and the intellectual construction of virtue and common good. In his design, the path to wisdom is systematic plethora of sensations, where truth is constantly emanating from lessons given by excessive pleasure.

The labyrinthine structure of the gardens inspired by “The Dream” forces the visitor to experience the path itself, for only by its wholesome experience , any goal or destiny can be reached. The geometry of these structures also point out to the artificiality of goals and destinies. Man does not re-design nature, he designs “in” nature the imprints of his existential quest for meanings. Like the oily trace of a fingerprint, the environmental maze is an evidence of the scale we secretly attribute to our own lives. The garden is a gigantic inside -out toy where, we can experiment with life in the form of play.

Searching for disappearance

As I write these words, I am sitting under a cherry tree inside the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. It is a hot summer day, an asphyxiating scent of wilted roses emanate from a nearby garden. There is the sound of birds and children playing. I feel like part of the tree I am leaning against. From here I can observe the complete lack of purpose and direction in which the visitors promenade along the ways , stoping sporadically to smell a flower or to touch the rugged bark of a tree. Their perplexed faces advertise both honest and feigned display of curiosity and amusement. They all behave as if they are looking for something they've lost but that they don't want anyone to know for fear the others will find it before they do. Search is the motto of the wandering visitor, but search so ample and disinterested is almost as searching for something to search, a common ethos of our over-designed culture. The frustration of some and the pleasure of other garden visitors by simply coming to the garden: Their place in the landscape.

Amid the chaotic subtleties of the mineral and vegetal world, the garden visitor is reassures by token gestures of civilization inscribed in labels attached to the plant specimens. Paradise or the place where nothing has yet been named must appear like hell to us civilized sinners. The man in the landscape as in Poussin, Claude, Friedrich or Church is a projection into the unnameable. It functions like one of these unmanned probes spatial agencies send into distant planets to search for their own existence in a place where nothing exists. The garden was designed as a place for mediation between the physical and the mental worlds, where man can again experience its ancestral ties to the natural world without renouncing his civilization.

“It is vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brain and bowels, the primitive vigour of nature in us, that inspires that dream.”

Henry David Thoreau

In this garden where I sit, this meta -garden, of primeval somnambulism, people improve their thoughts about culture, ecology and sensorial pleasures. In this place we vanish as if the entire universe had all of a sudden become a thought. In this place we think of becoming a thought.

The Vanishing Garden

Valeska maintained her garden with fastidious zeal. Though the modest U shaped path of mossy bricks, one can promenade through rows of gigantic daisies , delight on an infinite spectrum of colorful Zinnias and sample the odor of the aromatic herbs she grows in many pots of different sizes and shape. Unstoppable vines with purple flowers cover every thing . We always invite ourselves for dinner there. after the meal we can observe fireflies hovering confused by abundance of plants to sample from. For six years she improved the look of her garden considerably but now she had to move and the garden had to be destroyed and forgotten. Valeska had been working in the garden for a long time, therefore the thought of not having one made her think about gardens more intensively. Prior to her move, she began to create a detailed inventory of all her plants and pots. She mapped their exact location and made casts of all her pots, including the broken ones so she could re-create the entire place, or a good effigy of it in a later time.

The effect of such work is similar of the feeling we experience when remembering an occasion when we were thinking about the past. A mnemonic double negative, the sort of complexity that both weaves and corrodes the fabric of history.. By isolating the mental aspects of the copied garden from its original, organic counterpart, Valeska is once more negotiating between notions of internal and external dimensions.

In the 1960, artists such as Robert Morris and Bruce Nauman were creating environments that dealt with such dichotomies of space and intellect through bodily sensations. Their corridors and labyrinths owed much of their simple iconography to ancient garden designs. Valeska's work, however has extended the research of former installation artists from the sensorial perception of the body in the space to the acknowledgements of a sensual space. A space prone to individualized perceptions based on memory and personality. Valeska's installations are to make its viewers-players aware of the relations that particular environment bear with similar ones he or she might have been in the past in reality or dream.By Doing so she is advancing the practice of installation art and also working towards a better definition of it.

Valeska's “gardens” remind us of the timelessness of her Craft. Installation art could have started with gardens and labyrinths in a time that nature was perceived as the predominant environment. Her indoor garden re-constructions paradoxically epitomize a conservative and historical approach towards a novel artistic experience. As francis Bacon once put it: Novelty is but oblivion. We should all remember her garden.

Vanishing Point

The smell of wilted roses has again been blown in my direction. An image of yet another of Valeska's installations has come to mind: A transplanted garden of another kind, a bed of freshly cut red roses covering the floor of a room. Their scent growing increasingly stronger by the day as if desperately trying to make up for the decay in their color and form. Smell in most cases is a last appeal to posterity.. In this installation , Valeska has a organic labyrinth of beautiful blossoms an occasional thorns. The viewer is invited to experience the conventional beauty of the flowers presented as a form of discarded goods. the piece starts when the flowers begin to die.

In her newest work, Vanishing point, Valeska has substituted the roses by yet another tested and approved cannon of aesthetic pleasure: the form of a wedge maze. The harmoniously symmetric pattern, disposed of its original materiality, now stands a scant reminder of the gratification derived from control of nature. Although generate by much stronger power over nature, the metal maze inspires only a mild form of dread, a feeling of concealment and obstruction of movement. While the f;lower piece made allusions to the change and decay of beauty, Vanishing point deals with time as it refers to changes in the style and in the architecture of forms where desire takes place. The geometric forms that refer to nature acts as a logo for an Arcadian dream. The flower piece made reference to decay; Vanishing point to the history of decay.

In contrast to the ominous geometry of the place , there is the scent of other paths passed by, formless, invisible and intoxicating as desire itself. The scent of other paths passed by, like the thread of Perseus, defines the geometry of the maze; a place whose limits can only be defined by memory. A smell is the last form of expression and the longest lasting one. Valeska knows too well the temporality of her installations: The visitor will leave the room, the exhibition will close and will live only in the form of a memory. But the piece will continue, for the visitor will return, every time a similar scent is felt. And every time he'll return, he will be reminded, that the place his dreams, that ancient garden his protean existence, is but a memory inside a memory.

In the Dream of Poliphilus. our protagonist travels the garden of his life to finally encounter his muse. But just when he and his much desired love unite in a passionate kiss, Polia dissolves in thin air, leaving only an incense of musk and amber. At this time he finally wakes from his dream, but can still smell the scent of his beloved muse.

Roger Callois has once said that the memories of games have little to do with the geometry of the courts and fields they are played on. That the screams and sounds of heavy breathing, the smells of tense sweat and the taste of tears are all that the payer is left with besides the symbolic trophy or medal. The marked field, the puzzle, or the streets of the city are mere temporary containers for things that will always exist.

Vik Muniz
1998