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Frank Hyder: The
Memory of a Gaze
To catalogue Frank Hyder as an artist who
simply focuses on the ecological is to shed little light on
the obsessions and concerns that make a body of work that is
so effectively contemporary. Fernando Savater's enlightened
reading sees ecologists as fundamentalists because of their
constant fight to leave behind modern utopia, thus hoping to
move towards a future - or return to a past - that is closer
to nature and its inexorable laws, laws that despite modernity
still bind us. Although it is true that his wood carvings -
gesturally intervened and reproducing altars, sheds or boxes,
objects with a clear ritualistic content - clearly manifest
his concern for the highly precarious relation between man and
nature, his approach to the ancestral does not occur as an insurgence
vis a vis technology or globality, but rather ventures a dialogue
with the multicultural.
There is a lot of common sense in his concerns,
if we remember that Jefferson criticized cities on behalf of
democracy and of a certain political empiricism; that Emerson
did likewise, on behalf of a metaphysics of nature and Thoreau
in Walden or life in the wood (1854) proposed the return to
a sort of rural condition that we assume may be compatible with
the economic development of and industrial society and that
itself allows freedom, the blooming of personality and even
true sociability; ideas that almost a century later the hippie
movement would make their own and use as basis for developing
their communal experiments.
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Smithson, a North American land artist,
wrote in 1966 an article titled the Entropy and the New Monuments,
where he presented, under an entropy vision of the future of
the universe, the Earth as a closed system that only has a finite
number of resources. Aware of this geological entropy through
which materials develop and are used up, Smithson was concerned
with another sort of entropy : cultural entropy.
Based on the thesis of Lévi-Strauss
that proposes the existence of warm cultures that generate a
great deal of entropy as a result of being structurally complex
societies and cold cultures that generates a great deal of entropy
as a result of being primitive or basic hardly generate entropy
at all; faced with the wear and tear of our culture as a result
of being highly developed, he proposed to fight cultural entropy,
leaving nostalgic or romantic solutions aside, with things such
as simplifying the structures of our culture, returning to our
primitive origins, to a time and an economy that no longer point
to the future and that instead stop in cyclic states, as all
fundamentalists basically suggest. He proposed to fight Western
entropy from within the system and through art; in that we find
a common point with Hyder, one that goes beyond generational
proximity.
In the same way that we should not consider
Hyder's interest as simply ecological, the meeting of the multicultural
neither shows a mere ethnographic emphasis: there is nothing
farther from his obsessions than the search for the Good Savage.
Centering the dialogue on the ancestral, his work devotes itself
to recovering the memory of a gaze: that which shows the relation
between man and the natural order, in a time overflown with
information and contingencies, for the more we forget. Already
in the catalogue for his exhibit at MACCSI, in 1996, we remarked
that his work remits us to the those basic principles of communion
that ancestrally exist between art an cosmos, in a sort of universal
call to preserve creation. With him, we are facing an artist
whose passion for saving the planet from potential extinction
surpasses the propagandistic and transfigures it self into a
language of profound visual quality. His work and his spirit,
close to the conceptual and physical space of Latin America,
brought him to our country in 1991, with some works in which
he highlighted the conjunction between the force of the craftsmanship
and the mastery of technique with the experimental character
of his treatment of the material . His discourse was enriched
by the dimension he gave to reflecting on the danger of the
imminent disappearance of cultural and ecological communities
in a planet forced by the excess of a badly formulated technological
and political progress. Wood and paint transmute into pure energy
and convey their own cry against the abuses that hinder a dignified
living in harmony with the environment, making his art open
to dialogue with sensitivity and with the awareness of an existence
that we ourselves question.
But if we must acknowledge him for something
more that for his work as an artist concerned with the future
of the species, this could only be for bringing his obsessions
to his calling as a teacher. For Hyder is without a doubt a
maestro, in all the meanings of the word, revealing himself
as one who is always tying to find ways of teaching what must
be learned. Quite a number of generations of artist that have
passed through his many courses and workshops have benefited
from his research, his interpretations of the crossing points
between cultural and natural environment and the way in which
he has materialized them in matrials and concepts, thus contributing
to develop an awareness and a sensitivity that is closer, but
at the same time more universal, to the world as habitat for
the human being.
This exhibit is a homage to his double condition
of artist and teacher, offering to him the multiplying capacity
of the museum. Let this be a warning in view of the reality
of our precarious human ecology and a call to look for solutions
that may revert its manifest damage.
Sofía Imber
"Recuerdos del Mundo Nuevo"
Jacobo Borges Museum
November 4, 2001-May 16, 2002
Caracas, Venezuela
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