[-empyre-] Grace Quintanilla

[Timothy Conway Murray]

As I mentioned in my last post, my first encounter with Grace was when she I received her submission to my 1999 exhibition, Contact Zones: The Art of CD-Rom.  Her inventive and playful CD-Rom, Vice-Versa: Presenting the Past, the Present, and the Depths of Roberto and Chelo Cobo, engaged in such a forceful repositioning of cinematic codes that I featured it in my book, Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Minnesota, 2008).  Although I don't usually recommend excerpting passages from published writing for -empyre-, I can't think of a better way to celebrate the artistic life and memory of Grace Quintanilla that by presenting her CD-Rom via selected passages over the next couple of days:

"Few, if any, multimedia projects interface with the history of cinema without assuming an ambivalent relation to the cinematic code.  Of the many CD-Roms I could choose from Contact Zones: the Art of CD-Rom tht might illustrate this ambivalence, one seems particularly appropriate to the task at hand.  A playful example is the 1999 Vice-Versa: Presenting the Past, the Present, and the Depths of Roberto and Chelo Cobo, by the Mexican artist, Grace Quintanilla.  Vice-Versa literally presents the miniaturized trace of cinema as something "like the photo of a loved one carried with us."  Aiming "to experiment with the boundaries of traditional documentary in which the narrative structure is conceived in a linear way and predetermined by the director," Quintanilla plots the life stories of the nationally known cabaret performer, Chelo Cobo and her movie star brother, Roberto Cobo (Roberto would be most familiar to readers for his role as the young protagonist El Jaibo in Bunuel's Los Olvidados).  Now in the twilight of their lives, they reflect back on their pasts through their meditation on recent photographs of their naked bodies that were taken by their niece, Grace.  Structured not around film, but around the psychic zone of the family photo album, the CD-Rom permits users to access historical photo and video files as well as digitally altered contemporary footage of the personages who subsequently perform nude for the camera as if acting out the nude photographs around which they nervously shaped their retrospective narratives."

"To the aged brother and sister born from actor parents, the professing of acting always doubled as their primal scene.  They took to acting and dancing before they could distance themselves from the mirror stage and the family code.  The narrated photo novella of the CD-Rom reveals that both child actors incorporated or naturalized the codes of cinema and caberet almost before the procedures of mimicry could be symbolized.  Crucial to the CD-Rom is the digital method of morphing that Quintanilla uses to represent the ebb an flow of time through which memory confronts the subject with fantasy's retrospective traumas and pleasures.  Notable is the morph of footage of Chelo's first film role, as an infant of six months lying in a crib, into an image of the elder, nude Chelo curled up in the fetal position.  Throughout the CD-Rom, the faces of Roberto and Chelo transform so fluidly into morphed versions of their younger and older selves that even the nude, curled-up figure of the aged Chelo looks naturalized in the cinematic crib she occupied as an infant.  Rather than simply permitting "history's elision and repression" through "the endlessly regenerative self-creation of morphing," as Scott Bukatman and others have argued about mainstream cinema's repetitive display of morphing, Quintanilla's morphing is marshalled to foreground the dynamics of aleatory time and motion through which the psyche maintains a charged relation to the complexity of history's incorporation.  Digital toggling between past photo albums and present moments thus confronts the user, not to mention the family subjects, with the specter of specialized codes that have become naturalized, perhaps too much so, in the aleatory zone of family history."

"Two aspects of this 

Timothy Murray
Director, Cornell Council for the Arts and Curator, CCA Biennial
http://cca.cornell.edu
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu <http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/>
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
 
B-1 West Sibley Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
 
 

On 4/11/19, 10:42 AM, "empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Murat Nemet-Nejat" <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of muratnn at gmail.com> wrote:

    ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------