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The Green Zone
  

  Solo Show
Guerra de la Paz

Issue #69 Jun - Aug 2008

Tatiana Flores


To describe the installation The Green Zone by Guerra de la Paz (recently exhibited at the Daneyal Mahmood Gallery) as multi-layered would be both a bad pun and an understatement of its extraordinary complexity. Guerra de la Paz is the combined name of Alain Guerra and Neraldo de la Paz, a duo of Cuban-American artists who are currently based in Miami. They have risen to prominence with their powerful and thought-provoking oeuvre, which includes sculptures, installations, and two-dimensional mixed-media work.
The Green Zone is an all-encompassing environment in two parts. The first is a forest made of recycled clothing: the trunks and leaves consist of shirts, pants, socks, jackets, and other garments held together by intricate knots. The trees span from floor to ceiling and are illuminated with green lights that create an atmosphere heightened by air blowing from fans and mysterious sounds that evoke both the rhythms of breath and subtle cries of pain. The installation’s second part is revealed as the visitor turns a corner. Visible beyond the trees is the representation of a crucified G.I., lit with a red spotlight. Formed by layers of army camouflage, this eerie figure with disproportionately long arms and legs provides a poetic but chilling reminder of the consequences of war.
The title of the installation refers to the U.S.-occupied territory in central Baghdad that the military forces call home. It is an oasis of American life within what may be the most dangerous city on earth. By creating the installation’s two spaces, the sheltered forest and the emptiness populated only by the martyred figure, the artists evoke the illusion of safety only to dismantle it. The forest is a desert mirage, and reality lies beyond. The crucifixion scene invokes the “truth,” but it is one with no promise of redemption.
Reading The Green Zone merely as an anti-war protest would be failing to grasp the deep complexity of the artists’ process. Guerra de la Paz takes the medium of sculpture in unprecedented directions; most astoundingly, the duo renders it pictorial through their adaptation of the ready-made. A brief foray into the history of twentieth-century art will allow for a greater appreciation of their achievements.
During the last century, the medium of painting was besieged both by artists who highlighted its lack of relevance (Aleksandr Rodchenko, Marcel Duchamp) and critics who sought to impose strict limits on it (Clement Greenberg and his many followers). Sculptural innovations (i.e., the ready-made, the kinetic object, the installation) constantly called attention to the static nature of painting and to sculpture’s own vast potential as a medium. Among sculpture’s greatest limitations, however, were color and narrative. Artists working in three-dimensions had a restricted palette and often faced difficulties in using their medium to tell stories. In The Green Zone, Guerra de la Paz resolves problems that appeared to be inherent to sculpture.
Color is the main descriptive element in this and indeed all of Guerra de la Paz’s work. The forest installation comprises so many discrete articles of clothing that it creates a chromatic complexity closer to painting than sculpture. The artists do not limit themselves to using only monochromes to represent the real; instead, checkerboards and stripes also describe the tree trunks, as do a variety of sundry textures and elements, including pom-poms and cords that add to the visual interest. The green light and the sound contribute to the mood, but they are not secondary to the sheer presence of the trees. In the crucifixion scene, however, the red light is integral to the pictorial drama, creating an ethereal halo around the figure and contrasting the uniformity of the camouflage that describes its body.
Guerra de la Paz’s innovative approach to sculpture also builds on the medium’s narrative potential. With their movements through space, viewers experience a transition from illusion to reality. Though the sounds in the forest might hint at what lies beyond, the final scene comes as a shock, jolting viewers as if out of a reverie. Furthermore, the actual clothes that make up the sculptural objects are themselves full of stories. They allude to lives past and enact absences that are only made fully clear in the second part of the installation. Here, instead of employing knots, the artists create the figure out of layers of clothing: pants layered to describe the legs, jackets for the torso, and hats for the head. Since this is so clearly a death scene, it serves as a reminder of the absent wearers of the other, abstracted clothes that form the forest. Thus, Guerra de la Paz also forces a reflection on cycles of life and death, on the civilian casualties of the Iraq war, and on the pictorial potential of the sculptural medium.

 


 

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