The Metabolic Age, Or How Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos Predicted the Internet With an Egg

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5/18/2016 T he M etabol ic Age, or H ow F eder ico M anuel Per al ta R am os Pr edi cted the Inter net w ith an Egg | Tohu

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The Metabolic Age, or How Federico Manuel PeraltaRamos Predicted the Internet with an Egg

Could an egg-shaped artwork have predicted the internet? Alma Mikulinsky on “The

Metabolic Age,” curated by Chus Martínez at Museo del Arte Latinoamericano de

Buenos Aires

critique by Alma Mikulinsky

November 24, 2015

Internet, Chus Martinez, Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos, Jon Rafman, Petra Cortright, Latin-American Art, Wilfredo

Prieto, Scale, Sculpture

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One-off T-Shirts by artist Roni Hajaj on our support page.

First came the egg. At the entrance to "The Metabolic Age," a show curated by

Chus Martínez at MALBA (Museo del Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires),

stands a re-created version of the 1965 sculpture We, The Outside, a celebrated

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piece by the Argentinian artist Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos (1939-1992).

Mythical is perhaps a better word, as this gigantic egg-shaped artwork was

Peralta Ramos’s last, before he renounced artmaking. The original sculpture

was exhibited only once at a juried show in Buenos Aires, where it won the

first prize. But its success was short-lived, as the plaster object began to

disintegrate even before the show ended. Other accounts claimed that the

piece met its end when the artist himself destroyed it. For Martínez, the

curator, it holds a greater significance, beyond the autobiography of the artist;

she argues that We, The Outside, which she simply calls “the egg,” has predicted

the internet, specifically the non-linear, non-hierarchical way in which

everything is connected to everything online – from commercials to ideas,

philosophical texts to memes. She writes:

“Like the hyperlink, the egg is a symbolic monument to the end of all straight

lines, an elliptical form that contains all sorts of curved energies in constant

motion and generates an array of connectivities between organic, symbolic,

aesthetic, and semantic matter: the origin of life, a new life with a new logic.

The egg and the hyperlink belong to the same family. Both announce adifferent way of surfing the meaning of things."

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Federico Manuel Peralta Ramos next to his work We, The Outside (Nosotros Afuera)

1965. Courtesy of Museo del Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires

In "The Metabolic Age," then, the re-created We, The Outside is a symbol and a

metaphor, a theoretical tool and a conceptual opportunity, as well as just a

thing in itself - a really big egg, awkwardly positioned as an obstacle at the

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entrance of the show. Martínez calls it a spaceship, which Peralta Ramos had

simultaneously inhabited and traveled to uncharted territories; his future - our

present.

The show is as ambitious as it is small, consisting of works by eight artists

active from the 60s to the present. Some works are deeply entrenched in

contemporary visual culture, such as Petra Cortright’s sexy cowgirls and

strippers, who dance against a backdrop of computer-generated images

depicting deeply artificial pastoral landscapes. Some, like Jon Rafman’s video

Popova-Lissitzky Office Complex , travel back in time in order to test the utopian

desires embedded in early 20th-century art in corporate spaces.


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where a mango is attached to a BlackBerry device with an elastic band. I am

still debating whether it’s a waste of a tasty-looking mango or a melancholic

statement on the changing categories of humanity – where scale is no longer

defined through bodily references but through the technology we use.

Martínez tells us that after Peralta Ramos had stopped making art, he used his

Guggenheim Fellowship funds to throw a lavish dinner party, and had spent

his days scribbling maxims on pieces of paper that he left behind for friends -

sentences like “believe in an invisible world, beyond the fars and the nears,”

which rings both empty and full of pathos. This principle, of profound silliness

and stupid profoundness, which had been perfected by Peralta Ramon, is now

everywhere; we are always one click away from the existential misery of

Grumpy Cat’s Instagram account.

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Wilfredo Prieto, Look at the Size of this Mango


In the weeks following my visit to the show I returned again and again to the

Metabolic Age website, an integral part of the exhibition and, in my view, its

strongest aspect. I left the show energized, excited by the excellent pieces on

display and by Martinez’s inspired use of the hyperlink as curatorial method ,

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but in hindsight her selections felt more vague than precise. All the artworks

included in the show – even the best of them – could have easily been

replaced by other pieces illustrating the same principle. Even the egg, so

essential to the curator’s thinking, was used as the centerpiece and the

theoretical starting point of Martínez’s previous show, "We, The Outsiders," at

e-flux space in New York City . I would say that this is the point - an attempt to

highlight a trait of our culture where everything is interchangeable and

everyone is replaceable, as well as a testimony to the force of Martinez’

proposal – if it weren’t for the Website. The show’s virtual life brings a level of

specificity, both in content and in form, which has been lacking in the

exhibition. Now I think that the best way to experience the show is not at

MALBA but online. Take its structure, for example. All the information –

theories, artists’ biographies and works, main concepts - is presented by way

of a complex diagram whose focal point is the image of the egg. Every route

you choose to take, every line or arrow or direction you decide to follow,

whether in English or in Spanish, brings you back to the concrete-metaphorical

principle of the show, to the elliptical shape of the egg and the motion of the

hyperlink. You surf the meaning of things as opposed to delving deeply,

moving from one link to the next in a circular motion, an experience that

doesn’t occur in the actual space of the show.

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http://www.malba.org.ar/laerametabolica/


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Jon Rafman. Popova-Lissitzky Office Complex


In her excellent curatorial text Martínez positions the decentralized nervous

system of the octopus – apparently three quarters of its brain are located in its

eight arms - as a new model for thinking beyond “the era of judgment.” The

greatest challenge and adventure the show offers is to see art as if you were

an octopus – to judge without falling back on the old mechanisms of judgment,

to think without a centralized nervous system, to be in constant motion

http://tohumagazine.com/sites/default/files/Jon-Rafman_0.png


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without necessarily being superficial. I don’t know if that is possible, but I

would never again eat fried calamari.

The Metabolic Age is on view at MALBA (Museo del Arte Latinoamericano de

Buenos Aires), Argentina, between 11.09.2015 and 15.02.2016

http://www.malba.org.ar/laerametabolica/teoria/?lang=en

http://www.malba.org.ar/en/evento/la-era-metabolica/

>http://www.e-flux.com/program/we-the-outsiders

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