"Absence and Pain in the work of Doris Salcedo and Rosemberg Sandoval"

the work of Doris salceDo anD rosemberg sanDoval / AlzAte 5

© South Central Review 30.3 (Fall 2013): 5–20.

Absence and Pain in the work of Doris Salcedo and Rosemberg Sandoval

Gastón Alzate, California State University, Los Angeles(Translated by Marcia Olander, Princeton University)

This arTicle deals wiTh Two conTemporary Colombian artists, Doris Salcedo (1958) and Rosemberg Sandoval (1959), whose works address the situation of victims of violence, presented as ruins or remains left by contemporary history. In other words, they tackle the pain and dehu-manization of those who are excluded from participation in political and historical events and/or devastated by these experiences. Because their work is so extensive, I will focus on a few representative works by both.

In order to explore their artwork I will rely mainly on the ideas of the French-Lithuanian philosopher of Jewish origin Emmanuel Levinas because I consider Levinas’ ethical concern for the Other to be present in both artists’ approaches. For this philosopher, ethics would be the first form of thought, the first philosophy. It is not a matter so much of seeking a rational system or moral precepts or norms that humanity should follow but, on the contrary, of ethics “as the extreme exposure and sensitivity of one subjectivity to another.”1 Thus, the idea of vulnerability is linked directly with that of responsibility for the Other.

Another significant aspect of Levinas’ philosophical approach is that he emphasizes that dialogue with others is not based on comprehen-sion or on persuasion, but on the encounter between two people and the discovery of the Other in the differences. Therefore, he proposes a political philosophy of peace based on differences: to be face to face, in disagreement, and yet continue to express our thoughts without insist-ing that our ideas become guiding principals for the Other or seeking to destroy him.2 This is another aspect to be developed in connection to the artwork of Salcedo and Sandoval. In fact, Salcedo included a text by Levinas in a book on her work (see Princenthal),3 and I have also ex-plored his thought in connection with Sandoval’s art in an essay written in collaboration (see Marín).4

In order to analyze these artists’ works I also found a foothold in one of the key concepts of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. For Lacan the real is “impossible” to translate into words or symbols as we are always conditioned by a way of understanding it (see Lemaire).5 This idea, for

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me, is complemented by something George Steiner has elucidated about the insufficiency of words, after two world wars, to sustain our hope for a better future.6 Finally, this vision connects us to the horrific reality of Colombia, with its history of civil wars, where Salcedo and Sandoval developed their work.

Both artists use strategies from the visual arts and/or performance, and present their work in either institutional or public spaces. Their vi-sion also shares a challenge to widespread notions within Colombian society regarding the situation of victims of violence: the homeless who are ignored by government and public alike, as well as the peasants and urban poor displaced by the armed conflict. The latter are low-profile political refugees without support from the legal system who are either stigmatized or deemed uninteresting by the media. These individuals, seen by many as obstacles to the country’s progress, are often blamed for their situation; their suffering and even assassinations are frequently justified as deserved in the Colombian media as well as by prominent political and intellectual figures.

Thus, the works of Salcedo and Sandoval critically point to the stig-matization and oblivion to which these individuals are condemned by society at large. Their work sheds light on the personal and social traumas permeating life in their country since the 1950s (roughly the beginning of a period in Colombian history, so bloody that it came to be known as “the Violence”). However, the artists do not aim at explaining suffer-ing and its socio-political causes, but at forcing spectators to confront their common humanity with those who are obliterated. When asked in 2012 about the concept of beauty in his work, Sandoval answered by emphasizing the need to understand art from a moral perspective related to the right to “una vida digna,” or a life of dignity. He believes the con-nection between ethics and aesthetics defines contemporary art: “The concept of beauty has always appeared in art history, but it has begun to emancipate itself, depending on the historical circumstances, especially in the XX century with the avant-garde. Beauty has been tied in the last fifty years to having a place of dignity in the world [. . .] To have a place in Colombia, or in any part of the world, is beautiful” (my translation).7

While both artists take their experience as Latin Americans as a starting point, Salcedo in particular also aims to leave a mark on the consciousness of spectators from other cultures, especially from hege-monic countries. Most of the latter are either indifferent or think they know what is going on in other regions, due in part to the false idea of the global village. In rich nations, the majority of citizens also tend to be apathetic about the situation of vulnerable people or sectors in their


own countries: the homeless, impoverished and marginalized minorities or indigenous groups, undocumented immigrants and, in general, those who live precarious lives because of the conditions imposed by global capitalism. In a 1998 interview with Charles Merewether, Salcedo states: “I do not speak of the violence in Colombia from a nationalist perspec-tive. I focus on the individual and not on the acts of violence that define the State. I am aware that art has a precarious capacity to denounce [. . .] As a result I am interested in questioning the elements of violence that are endemic to human nature. Cruelty, indolence and hatred towards other are universal.”8

Art And Context

Salcedo and Sandoval began their art careers in the 1980s, an extremely complex socio-political period during which the internal armed conflict in Colombia intensified. Sandoval’s first exhibition was a 1981 show by a young artists’ collective at the National Museum, while Salcedo’s inaugural solo exhibition took place in 1985 at Casa de la Moneda. Both exhibition spaces are in Bogotá, the capital city. The two artists studied art around the same time (Salcedo in Bogota’s Jorge Tadeo Lozano University and Sandoval in Cali at Del Valle University), and they give credit to some of the same international artists as having influenced their work: Joseph Beuys, Bruce Nauman, and Gordon Matta-Clark. The “an-architecture” of the latter is particularly relevant because he dissected and altered existing objects impregnated with human existence, as do Salcedo and Sandoval; in the case of Matta-Clark, his interest lay in buildings about to be demolished, which was related to his desire to shed new poetic light on fragments of life discarded by economic progress.

Salcedo and Sandoval often work with daily-life materials obtained from contexts of marginality and violence such as used clothing, worn furniture, old toys, and in the case of Sandoval, even human remains. Both deal with suffering understood as a contemporary pathos linked to the ineffable character of individual pain and death, albeit through different aesthetic strategies, to be explored here.

Since the 1980’s Salcedo has employed recovered objects in her artwork—mainly sculptures and installations—including industrial and organic materials which she used as metaphors for the presence in absentia of the human body. In her 1989 Sin título (Untitled) series she entombed old clothing, shoes, and furniture in cement as if they were frozen in time. These self-contained and quasi-mystical objects evoke


human life in anonymous homes whose biographies are absent. She was increasingly in close contact with family members and friends who had experienced the loss of beloved ones. As a consequence, in Untitled she focused on the aesthetic manipulation of materials in order to signal traces of pain. These were simple daily-life objects found anywhere such as tables, chairs, and clothing. For example, she transformed jackets and children’s clothing into cement blocks, thereby suggesting a slow suffo-cation in an anonymous tomb. The quotidian objects became something of an enclosed sacred space, thus positioning the spectator as an indirect observer of the forceful disappearance of fellow citizens. A table, chair, and cupboard were also buried in cement, impairing their common usage and turning them into lifeless materials. The human body was thus made present through its absence, and these objects became intimate windows into missing lives. While the spectator of her work was contemplating objects that had no explicit narrative behind them, a history of horror was clearly evinced through aesthetic means, thus making the spectator a witness to pain.

A work by Sandoval from the same period that serves as a comparison is A manera de emergencia or, translated roughly, In the Way of Emer-gency (1985). The sculpture is composed of a number of glass sheets of different sizes set on end and mounted in a row on a piece of concrete that serves as the base of the object. The glass sheets are broken in the form of a wave at the top of the piece, and set below them on the concrete base are nails sticking out at odd angles. At first glance, the small sculpture, with its juxtaposition of such diverse materials, strikes the spectator as strange; only when he or she reads that it was built with debris collected after a terrorist attack in downtown Cali, is the meaning illuminated. In this sense the conceptual element is very important for Sandoval since the title of the piece, the ironic play with what is understood as art and as a terrorist act, determines the force of the impact. Creating a work of art with the elements produced by a violent act of the magnitude of a terrorist attack and assembling the participating elements as though they were plastic materials forces the spectator to reconsider one violent episode as a routine act that, through its repetition in the Colombian context, has lost its dramatic meaning.

In both works we find the idea of sculpture and art within an eminently political space that is impossible for spectators to assimilate, at least in the first moment, in the sense that it is presented as incomprehensibly hostile. In these installations, and in Sandoval’s performances as well, the spectator is obliged to experience something undesirable. The materials are rough, even intimidating, and their presentation isolates or alienates


them from their original context, which means that we lose the possibil-ity of contemplating them with a certain distance (and patience). They cannot be observed as one would look at a painting or attend a concert. Since both artists use objects taken from daily life that imply disappeared human bodies (used clothing, shoes and furniture and fragments of ex-ploded window panes), they propose a dramatic closeness between these implicit visual histories and the spectators. After all, the forms given to these objects evoke pain. While we cannot repeat the experiences these pieces refer to, clearly they appeal to the spectator’s corporeal condi-tion and sense. In this way they elicit the viewer’s identification, albeit involuntary, with forms of suffering that imply a political meaning in life. If politics, not necessarily in ideological terms but in terms of concern for one’s fellow human beings, has been a foreign concept, or at least unimportant, to the spectator, he is forced to confront facts that he might prefer to avoid.

Returning to the ideas of Levinas, it is clear that both Salcedo’s Untitled and Sandoval’s In the Way of Emergency seek to transform the spectator’s comprehension and experience regarding the reality of his fellow people. The majority of these viewers tend to make sense of victims as faceless numbers or, worse, as the inevitable collateral damage of the situation in Colombia or Latin America and, therefore, somehow unsubstantial.

BreAking with knowledge As dominAtion

For Levinas the forms of knowledge and knowing are strategies of appropriation and specifically of domination that are constantly present in human relations. The works we have been discussing try to break the distancing entailed in the relationship between knowing and controlling to establish transcendent communication between the artist, the spectator, and the Other. While it’s true that we can know others through words and/or by acquiring information from the media, the Other we construct in this way is but an abstraction. While it seems we have direct access to a wealth of information on the internet, newspapers, and the general mass-media, most of it is superficial, biased, and responds to political and economic interests. In short, we are immersed in a dominant system of thought that appears to connect people, but instead tends to isolate them. The needy or victims become distant facts—or mere data—robbing the Other of the power to question our humanity.

For philosophers since Heidegger, man is a being in time, a being for death; the only way to break this, according to Levinas, is to allow the Other to reveal his subjectivity, that he may interrogate us from his


absolute difference. Salcedo and Sandoval invite us to establish a differ-ent type of relationship with the Other based on material steeped in the stuff of absent fellow beings, as fragile and human as are we ourselves.

In the case of Salcedo, the pathos is related also to the contemporary phenomenon of migration and exile, experienced by sizable human groups that in Africa, Asia or America have lost their citizenship and live in limbo without even minimum social structures. The best-known example of this is Salcedo’s famous sculpture Shibboleth, elaborated for The Turbine Hall of the London’s Tate Gallery in 2007.

Shibboleth is a Hebrew word for stalk of grain. The title refers to a passage in the Old Testament which recounts how the members of one tribe identified those of another through their different pronunciation of the first syllable of the word “Shibboleth,” so that this subtle differ-ence marked the breach between life and death. This title also evokes a poem by the same name by Paul Celan, whom Salcedo recognizes as a central influence in her work. In an interview with the BBC about this poet and of Shibboleth, Salcedo says, “In Celan’s poem he refers to per-manent mourning, because there is no way, through art, to recover the lost lives” (my translation).9 As a Jewish writer who lived at the time of the Holocaust, Celan emphasizes the need to continue to be a witness of what has happened: “Set your flag at half-mast/ memory./ At half-mast/ today and for ever.”10

Salcedo’s sculpture consists of an enormous 167 meter-long crack in the ground of the Tate Gallery’s Turbine Hall. The crack is several meters deep and the substratum is made up of rocks brought from Colombia. The breach is envisioned as a giant scar between rich and poor nations, an incarnation of the irremediable distance between the two. According to the artist, it deals with racism and “the divisions between creed, color, class and culture that maintain our social order, precariously balanced as it is on the precipice of a chaotic void of hatred.”11 It is a metaphor for the exploitation and the sacking of both riches and of human lives in contemporary history, but it’s also a critique of art and of the museum institution. It is not a work to be contemplated passively, since the width and depth of the crack vary immensely. Neither does it adapt itself to the gallery space, but rather it intrudes upon and thus questions this space. Richard Dorment, who reviewed this artwork for The Telegraph wrote: “After I left the hall, Shibboleth rattled around in my head all day, and it haunts me still. When I ask myself why, I realise it is because it looks like a wound, a gash that can’t heal. It offers no hope, leaving you feeling as empty as the abyss it opens up beneath your feet.”12 The crack plays with the spectator’s curiosity getting very thin, almost imperceptible


in some places and very complex in others where it is possible to see the metallic structure (or other concrete components) visually alluding to fences and crossings along today’s borders, and to detention camps.

This way of marking the art-work space as a negative space, of separa-tion or exclusion, is shared in some ways by Sandoval. A performance by this artist that has a double intention of criticizing the history of art as well as contemporary society is the 1999 Mugre (Dirt), which takes place in a museum gallery. Dirt is an action in which the artist carries a homeless man slung over his shoulder from the street, where he lives, into one of the Museum of Moden Art’s galleries in the city of Cali. The spectators, who were participants in an international performance festival, were waiting in this gallery. First, the artist used the homeless man as a human paintbrush with which he slowly drew a line along the museum’s white wall, a line “of pain and dirt” as the artist writes on his web page.13

Later he put the man down on a wood platform on the museum floor, on which, using the same procedure, he drew lines rubbing the white surface with the destitute man’s back. In spite of the great differences between the two works, Salcedo’s being more abstract and Sandoval’s intentionally literal, they both manifest the need for spectators to have a direct experience of the vulnerability of the invisible Other to whose death and pain we are normally indifferent.

It should be noted that there are those who feel that Sandoval’s work exploits the poverty/misery of others, and those who have criticized Sal-cedo because the Tate Gallery receives financing from the multinational corporation Unilever. I feel that these criticism stem from ignorance regarding the context from which these artists emerged; they began their careers in the early eighties in the most precarious of ways and when the possibility of making money from this type of political art in Colombia was risible. On the other hand, to pass moral judgment on an artist for using a homeless person as a brush when society at large stigmatizes the indigent and kills them with indifference or through “social cleansing,” is not only paradoxical but clearly hypocritical. Insofar as the financing of Shibboleth, art institutions world-wide rely on commercial tactics linked to the global financial market, and it would be licit to ask why it is acceptable for other artists, like Ai Weiwei from China, to exhibit work in the prestigious Tate Modern and not Salcedo.14 In my opinion both of these Colombian artists have been true to their original propos-als, and the fact that the global art market later embraced them does not invalidate their artistic legitimacy.

Returning to Levinas, there are clear similarities between his concep-tions and the works of Salcedo and Sandoval, in the sense that those artists


understand art as a mechanism through which the Other can question us directly. As stated above Levinas proposes a radical reformulation of philosophy, based on “the absolute alterity of the other,” in order to break with the abstract knowledge that allows us to dehumanize other human beings.15 This ethic based on an experience of the senses is particularly relevant for art, since by its very nature art incarnates human experiences that are concrete, sensorial and materially unique.

The explanation that we tend to give for the existence of marginalized people is generally based on misconceptions and/or decontextualized information provided by the media, and by an education system that privileges the perspective of those in power. The actual history and experiences of underprivileged citizens and world regions are usually either lacking or distorted. Thus, they become a form of obliterating and controlling their human condition. Shibboleth embodies the abyss of the contemporary world, too deep and at the same time too obvious, between ourselves and the denied Other. In the case of Dirt it is the intense mate-rial presence of the homeless man with his odor and squalor to whom we deny eye contact and, frequently, the right to exist. These artworks open the possibility that forms of domination resulting from purely conceptual knowledge are questioned by the very body of the poor person which is situated in the middle of the stage and which the spectator cannot reject now, or by the unpredictable crack that cuts the gallery space.

The materiality of Dirt, Shibboleth, and Untitled avoids artistic mi-mesis, as well as statistics and discourse over the Other. Nevertheless, in contrast to the ready-made art of Marcel Duchamp it is not a matter of transforming a quotidian object, or the human body, into art, but of charging it with humanity. In Sandoval’s case, this materialness is not represented but rather directly presented. As for Salcedo the objects she presents are loaded with mark of what’s human, through the presences which they evoke, but they do not replace the absent bodies.

The direct experience of the materiality of the human body, be it through a physical presence or through the prints or traces it leaves, brings us closer to Levinas who believed this experience is a way to give meaning and to affirm our common humanity. According to Levi-nas, “the face of the other is the primordial signification, from which all other signs take their meaning; the perception of the other is the true one, from which all other bodily perception ultimately derives.”16 However, for Levinas ‘face’ does not mean only the countenance of the human but also the extreme precariousness of the Other, which may manifest itself in the proximity of the other’s body.17 This precariousness may be found in Salcedo’s entombed objects, as well as in Sandoval’s use of a


human body as expressive means to leave a trace of dirt in the white walls of an art gallery.

Art And PolitiCs

Portada: objeto de ofensiva (Cover: Offensive Object) [1984–1985], is a drawing on paper done to scale of an automatic Molotov cocktail. According to Sandoval it is a Russian-Spanish bomb redesigned in Co-lombia by the insurgent movements. In the subtitle that accompanies it he says that this has been “done with the destroyed hair of the cadaver of a martyr for national liberation.” It is important to clarify that, in contrast to later developments, in the mid-1980s the Colombian guerrilla had not become involved in the production of cocaine and used kidnapping for political rather than monetary ends. Another important aspect is that San-doval spent much time as a child in a hospital and in the morgue where his older brothers worked, therefore he takes his relation with death and human remains naturally.

As Sandoval notes on his webpage, the drawing was sent through the mail to gallery owners, art collectors, art critics, and artists.18 The author affirms that in the 1980s when he began his studies and took into account his precarious economic situation, his life had just three options: to become an insurgent, a lucid criminal, or a transgressive artist.19

Today, Sandoval doesn’t see the guerrilla in the same way that he did in that moment, but beyond the political position of the artist, Cover: Offensive Object remains significant because of its relationship with the reality of Colombia and because of the question which it posits regarding the place of art with respect to that reality. The guerrilla movements, and the “disappeared” (any individual who is an obstacle to the interests of the political and economic elites, including those who disagree pacifi-cally), have been constants in modern Colombian history. If art’s value is to make us see the world in a different way through new uses of art materials, to question that which we take as a given and, in the case of artists like Salcedo and Sandoval, to humanize others who have been dehumanized, then Cover: Offensive Object occupies a legitimate position in the history of Latin American art and its aesthetic tradition.

In our article on Sandoval, Marín and I state that in Colombia the true scandal does not result from the actions of an artist such as Sandoval but from the level of degradation of society as a whole.20 As Sandoval said once, “the country’s problem is not poverty but morals” (my translation).21

Here I will turn again to Levinas’ ethics to further elaborate its connection with Sandoval’s work. Levinas considers that man is the measure of all


things but only if recognizing this implies the wellbeing of the Other, his fellow-man. As mentioned above, Levinas does not define the Other on a conceptual level but, concretely, as he who is standing before us or beside us and toward whom our responsibility is infinite. As stated in the introduction to this article, he proposes a political philosophy of peace based on differences: to be face to face, in discrepancy, and yet continue to express our views without insisting that they become guiding principles for the Other or seeking to annihilate him. By using human hair while describing it as belonging to a “martyr,” Sandoval forces the spectator of Cover: Offensive Object to find his common humanity with someone as different from us as a guerrilla fighter. This is the exact op-posite of what the media, the middle classes, and the political elite have usually done by dehumanizing, destroying and justifying the annihilation of those who think differently.

Without a doubt Sandoval’s work explores a contradictory place for art, the place of interrogation, the place in which human beings show an unrecognizable and evasive face. When reality has turned into a dis-course that dominates the interpretation of the Other, for example the guerrillas, who are described by the media as infrahuman figures, or as people alienated because of their ideology, Sandoval’s work explores the dark materiality of that Other, by diverging from what mainstream culture assumes as reality.

In the introduction to this article I made reference to Jacques Lacan’s conception about the impossibility of capturing reality through language. Considering that Lacanian psychoanalysis appears in the 1960s, his perspective coincides with George Steiner’s ideas about discourse after the two World Wars. According to Steiner, words which had maintained temporal articulations and the meaning of fundamental values such as progress lost their substance because of the false promises and lies they had proclaimed.22 The continued relevance of Steiner’s pessimism has been demonstrated by the devaluation of language in Latin American dictatorships and pseudo-democracies, alleged bastions of stability and economic “progress,” and later by the serious consequences of neolib-eralism on our countries and by the wars following the terrorist attacks of September 11. In the case of Colombia, the persistence of civil war has been justified with simplistic arguments that disguise the authoritar-ian nature of the government’s “defence of democracy,” including the unjustified assassination of innocent civilians. Salcedo’s and Sandoval’s works explore horror and pain as aspects of reality that either cannot be put into words and/or are distorted by those in power, including the politicians, financial elites, and the mass-media.


Sandoval expresses sentiments similar to Steiner’s in terms of art as an institution: “The history of art has watched over social history. There is an enormous abyss between reality which is the infinite and the history of art which is invented and sweet. Art is a mafia” (my translation).23

Nevertheless, he also explains that “If [something] truly is art, it doesn’t matter what you make it with, it doesn’t matter if somebody makes a little bird or presents the arm of a cadaver. What artists seek is to produce a sensation through images and supports. The craft is to produce them in a heroic or ephemeral way to be able to reveal the soul. Art is the purging of the inhuman” (my translation).24

To break the isolation in which reality has been captured by language is, in some measure, Sandoval’s objective. That which cannot be sym-bolized, that which is impossible to understand takes on an aesthetic and symbolic form in his work. The naive look the spectator might cast upon reality makes a complete turn so that it now faces an unusual view in which language no longer manages to interpret and encapsulate the totality of the Other. Cover: Offensive Object tries to settle in the realm of darkness as an ontological event; in other words, as the proper space to reveal an object independent of reality. The artist in this case does not begin with a particularly different context than the one the spectator has lived. He inhabits the same culture and language, but he has decided to choose a part of it that is hidden. Now, when the spectator learns that the drawing is made of human hair, he is forced to look, led by a negative force that one might go so far as to call nausea. Even if the spectator is against this type of art, he loses his naïveté in the way he relates to the theme, in this case the death of an anonymous Other who might well be on the opposite side of the political spectrum. The spectator can continue to hold his political position (be it opposition to or support for the guer-rilla, leftist or rightist) but he cannot ignore what he has experienced. The Other here consists of the hair of an inert body and has a face he cannot subject to his dominion. In Cover: Offensive Object, the art does not belong to the realm of revelation or creation; it is rather, in the words of Levinas, an “event itself of obscuring, a night fall, an invasion of shadow”: a shadow from which the spectator is in full flight.25

While very different in terms of its formal composition, Salcedo’s work Plegaria muda (Mute Prayer) [2011–12] also explores a part of reality that remains shrouded in darkness because in Colombia there has never been a full and public accounting of the State’s crimes towards those to whom this work refers. Mute Prayer is an installation commissioned by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon and the Moderna Museum in Malmö, Sweden. In its largest display, the work consists of


166 units, each one made up of two tables, one set upside-down upon the other; sandwiched between the two tables is a layer of dirt about ten centimeters thick which allows grass to grow. The tables are grey and measure approximately 50 centimeters by 2 meters (the width and length of a standard coffin). The spectator’s first impression is that of being in front of a labyrinth of coffins from which life sprouts precariously, sym-bolized by the blades of grass that emerge from the cracks in the tables.

Salcedo’s piece showcases events which occurred in Colombia be-tween 2006 and 2009. Hundreds of young men from marginal provinces were lured to another region with the promise of jobs and were then assas-sinated there by members of the Colombian army. The army participants made it appear as if they had been guerrilla fighters who were killed in combat. These soldiers were then able to obtain benefits and perquisites from the government.

Mute Prayer is a testimonial work which, by its very dimension, makes omnipresent the experience of the death and the disappearance of the Other from which the spectator cannot flee. Both in the works of Salcedo and of Sandoval, the relation with the Other cannot be lived anonymously or mediated by a third party (the media, ideology, moral justification). These works destroy the symbolic mediations of reality and implicate the spectator directly through their materiality. Salcedo’s Mute Prayer, like Sandoval’s Cover: Offensive Object, albeit on a more symbolic level, liberates a traumatic essence of reality, a phantasmal essence—insofar as it is not recognized officially—that differs radically from the information revealed by the data on youth who disappeared at the hands of the Colombian armed forces during the second presidency of President Alvaro Uribe-Vélez (2006–2010). When this scandal, labeled ‘false positives,’ of the killings by the military of approximately 2,000 young men was denounced in the press, it was common to find readers’ comments stating that the assassinated people were probably criminals, or that the killings were orchestrated by the guerrillas, and/or leftist sectors to damage the army’s image.26 Thus, not only the government or the illegal armed groups but a large number of citizens of so-called civil society, including public figures and intellectuals, either openly or tacitly justify or minimise in daily discourse the elimination of those fellow citizens who do not agree with their views, or who are considered obstacles in the path towards the country’s progress.

For months, the artist accompanied a group of mothers who had fought to keep their assassinated sons from being posthumously labeled delinquents or guerrillas, and who tried to identify them in the graves the military killers had revealed. Sharing the trauma and seeking reparation is a foundation for an art that seeks the meaning of pain; in Salcedo’s


words, she “joined this arduous process of elaborating morning and [. . .] committed to the vain attempt to fight to get justice in spite of the barbarism committed by the State” (my translation).27 These artistic ob-jects are not only sepulchers but prayers, offerings against the loneliness and darkness of the events, to bring to a collective memory the pain that should be shared because, returning to Levinas, life has meaning only if we understand ourselves as human beings facing other human beings. We could say that, much like Sandoval, Salcedo has delved into the realm of reality in order to uncover the “real”: the pain of poor mothers to whom nobody listens. That irreparable wound resides in the origin of her artistic language, since she understands art essentially as testimony. Thus, art is basically a way to build community with those who are im-mersed in the most precarious and painful situations of trauma and social abandonment, and those who correspond to the definition of Levinas’ Other. According to Salcedo: “the notion of community is born when the individual opens him or herself to others. To accompany someone to his or her death, step by step, opens us to the Other, and leads us to forget our own existence, it unites us to that other, who will then remain inscribed inside us. The exhaustive investigation I carry out on the deaths of the victims of violence [. . .] leads me to accompany them, step by step, to that death, and in that sense I feel as though they are inscribed in me.”28

While Mute Prayer would seem to give a spark of hope in the form of the blades of grass that grow on the tables, the vegetation is so incredibly fragile that the greyness and the form of the tables end up accentuating its vulnerability. If the spectator does not linger to actually contemplate the piece in its entirety (and this happens with Salcedo’s works which force one to focus on the details), the living material is made invisible by the dark colors of the tables and the earth, just as the Colombian political reality is obscured by daily events.

Both Salcedo and Sandoval believe that their art can be an “epiphany,” a term Levinas uses to refer to the revelation of the Other. From a phe-nomenological point of view, this philosopher understands the Other as gifted with “holiness,” which is to say in a state of absolute separation.29

This separation between real and reality is what lends to the works and installations of both artists an ambience of sacrality. Certainly this is not a matter of glorious festivity that reveals unto us a shining being. Nevertheless in this despair, in this pathos, their beauty resides. A beauty whose pain does not allow the spectator to dissolve into a spiritual or ideological unity with that which explains or justifies suffering, on the contrary, it sows in the spectator a huge question: that of his ambiguous position before the visceral face, dark and strange, that the art work has revealed.


ConClusion

As stated above, art for Salcedo and Sandoval does not have the power to redeem. In her artist’s notes Salcedo wrote, “The time of the massacre is: unrecoverable, immemorial, unrepresentable.”30 In a 2007 interview, she stated the same idea with a crucial caveat, “Art does not have the capacity to redeem. Art is impotent in the face of death. Nevertheless, it has an ability and it is to bring to the realm of humanity the life that has been desacralized and give it a sort of continuity in the life of the spectator” (my translation).31 Sandoval, in turn, notes that he creates art because it allows him to invest “other, superior spaces and magnetize them [. . .] turning our barbarism into an intelligence regime, since art is the only thing that allows us to live with death” (my translation).32

The meaning of art for both artists consists of emphasizing human vulnerability and in building a parallel language that allows for transcen-dence over a wound which cannot be cured, only shared. The work of art is understood as a limit of humanity because it allows the spectator to experience alterity as extreme closeness to the reality of the Other. These artists remind us that our human condition is the same as those whom we look down upon or see as enemies, the same as the indigent, the poor, the guerrillas, the disappeared, the relatives of the victims. And even if we want to look away, there is art to remind us that the pres-ence and anguish of those other lives are an essential part of each and everyone’s existence.

NOTES

1. Richard A. Cohen, Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 29.

2. Emmanuel Levinas, “Peace and Proximity,” in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Phi-losophical Writings, eds. Adriaan T. Peperzak et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 161–169.

3. Nancy Princenthal, Carlos Basualdo, and Andreas Husseyn, Doris Salcedo (New York: Phaidon Press, 2000).

4. Paola Marín and Gastón Alzate, “On Rosemberg Sandoval’s Performance Ac-tions: Questioning the North/South Paradigm,” Contemporary Theater Review 22.4 (2012): 512–525.

5. Anika Lemaire, Jacques Lacan (London: Routledge, 1979). 6. George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of

Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). 7. Jairo Alberto Cobo, “Entrevista con Rosemberg Sandoval,” Esfera pública, July

7, 2012, http://esferapublica.org/nfblog/?p=40116. 8. Charles Merewether, “Interview with Doris Salcedo,” in Doris Salcedo, eds.

Nancy Princenthal, Carlos Basualdo, and Andreas Husseyn (New York: Phaidon Press, 2000), 138–147, 142.


9. Manuel Toledo, “Doris Salcedo: canto contra el racismo,” BBC Mundo, October 9, 2013, http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/spanish/misc/newsid_7035000/7035694.stm.

10. Paul Celan, “Shibboleth,” in Paul Celan: Selected Poems, trans. Michael Ham-burger and Christopher Middleton, (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1972), 41.

11. Sarah Lydall, “Caution: Art Afoot,” The New York Times, December 11, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/11/arts/design/11crac.html?_r=0.

12. Richard Dorment, “Doris salcedo: A glimpse into the abyss,” The Telegraph, October 9, 2007, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3668416/Doris-Salcedo-A-glimpse-into-the-abyss.html.

13. http://www.rosembergsandoval.com/mugre.htm.14. See the book review of Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Finan-

cial Market by Noah Horowitz (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013). The following excerpt summarizes the links between the financing of art institutions and the global market: “The story, as he tells it, takes us back to the 1950s, when leading muse-ums, flushed with post-war prosperity, started growing in size and power. The powerful institutions acquired all the old art, giving a fillip to prices. Gradually, collectors were drawn to the contemporary art market, as a result of which prices rose. According to him, the art market is not much different from other international markets, when it comes to behind-the-scenes activities and investing tactics involving a network of an investment consortium of collectors, art museums around the world, dealers and auction houses, with art buyers completing the chain.” “Art of the Deal by Noah Horowitz,” The Arts Trust, 2013, http://www.theartstrust.com/Magazine_article.aspx?articleid=345.

15. Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 251.

16. Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 186.

17. Levinas, “Peace and Proximity,” 167.18. rosembergsandoval.com.19. Hans-Michael Herzog, ed., Cantos / Cuentos colombianos. Arte Colombiano

contemporáneo (Zurich: Daros–Latinamerica AG, 2005), 207.20. Marín and Alzate, “On Rosemberg Sandoval’s Performance Actions: Questioning

the North/South Paradigm,” 522.21. Diego Guerrero, “R. Sandoval: 20 años de lumpenizar el arte,” El Tiempo, April

3, 2008, http://www.eltiempo.com/archivo/documento/MAM-2884540.22. Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle, 8. 23. Jairo Alberto Cobo, “Entrevista con Rosemberg Sandoval,” Esfera pública, July

7, 2012, http://esferapublica.org/nfblog/?p=40116.24. Rosemberg Sandoval, “Prólogo,” rosembergsandoval.com, http://www.rosem-

bergsandoval.com/obras_y_exhibiciones_texto.htm.25. Levinas, “Arte y crítica,” trans. Saúl Kaminer, Fractal: Revista trimestral, n.d.,

http://www.mxfractal.org/F28levinas.html.26. For examples of the aforementioned readers’ comments you may see ‘Casi dos

años de falsos positivos en Soacha, y solo un caso avanza’, El Tiempo, May 31, 2011, http://www.eltiempo.com/justicia/ARTICULO-WEB-NEW_NOTA_INTERIOR-9506065.html. For an article in English on the scandal, see Jeremy McDermott, “Toxic Fallout of Colombia Scandal,” BBC News, May 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8038399.stm.


27. “La plegaria muda de Doris Salcedo,” Bogota.vive.in, March 14, 2012, http://bogota.vive.in/arte/bogota/articulos_arte/marzo2012/ARTICULO-WEB-NOTA_INTE-RIOR_VIVEIN-11350901.html.

28. Merewether, “Interview with Doris Salcedo,” 145.29. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 195.30. Doris Salcedo, “Artist’s Writings,” in Doris Salcedo, 148–156, 149.31. Toledo, “Doris Salcedo: canto contra el racismo.”32. Sandoval, “Prólogo,” rosembergsandoval.com, http://www.rosembergsandoval.

com/obras_y_exhibiciones_texto.htm.

"Absence and Pain in the work of Doris Salcedo and Rosemberg Sandoval"

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