Associação Cultural Videobrasil

About the Video Lo Sublime/Banal, by Graciela Taquini

"Being Argentine means being far away" - Julio Cortázar

With a wide-ranging, restless, and single sequence shot, Graciela Taquini is able to create a world within a Buenos Aires kitchen where two talkative ladies, one of whom is the author herself, recall their meeting with writer Julio Cortázar in Paris, 1971, as they whip creams and pick small fruit to decorate the dessert the tasting of which has brought them together as well. That sequence shot also serves to stitch it all together, containing and unifying the loud dispersion of the protagonists who are capable of going, in a single phrase, from the totemic and poetic remembrance, perhaps distorted or stylized by memory, to culinary details, domestic, evanescent, told and tasted with the same emphasis. 

From the very choice of the title for her video, Graciela Taquini makes explicit this game of opposites, counterpoints, and contradictions that permeate her work. From her self-portrait, Roles, in which she has herself called a “nun” and a “whore,” to her tribute to Hitchcock in Psycho, including scenes from the classic movie in which the shy Norman Bates cross-dressed himself as his murderous mother; in Jugetes, an institutional video for Museo de la Ciudad about old toys used by ghost children; and in her latest work, Granada, another ambivalent title that might refer to a song or an explosive (grenade), and which ends in a close-up shot of the face of an ex-convict of the military dictatorship, now submitted to the camera of the author, who dictates, in voice-over, parts of the statement to the protagonist.

All of these videos feature Taquini's thematic and aesthetic obsessions, the attractive or claustrophobic sequence shots, the invasive camera with its raw approximations, the use of space and the voice-overs giving new significance to the scenes, the invocation of episodes that happened in reality and were later sublimated by memory, art, or merely by their representation, the contradictions and contrasts that are resolved in circular or mirror-like solutions, the certainty of having lost a center and an order, maybe more mythic than real, the absence or rambling reminiscent of tango and of Cortazarian “Argentineness,” as the author of O jogo da amarelinha stated: “Being Argentine means being far away.”

The sophisticated mealtime companions of Lo Sublime/Banal, one of whom is the author herself, and the other, her friend Felicitas, managed to simultaneously transform the constant chaos of their universe of meetings and ingredients into a labyrinth with a direction or, as Borges would put it, an architecture, when they finally share, on the table, two communions: the two desserts, and the two postcards from Notre Dame in which Cortázar has left his play of speculation. To each woman he wrote something that can only be verified and reveal its meaning when confronted with what he wrote to the other woman. Taquini, as well as Cortázar, likes playing with opposites, and both know that every game needs rules, and every game needs chance. 

There also is, as in any self-respecting tango, the invocation of a past that makes itself present, the conjuring of ghosts that return, in an indecent combination of Tres Anclados en Paris* (Cortázar, Taquini, and her friend Felicitas) with the obtrusion of memory, in the likes of Naranjo en Flor** (“Si toda mi vida es el ayer que me detiene en el pasado” [If my entire life is yesterday, which holds me in the past]), as imprecise as it is mythic and sacred (frozen by photography in postcards from Paris, and made eternal by the wrist and handwriting of Cortázar, in his verses) which irrupts out or incarnates in a fleeting, ephemeral present time of domestic urgencies and instant pleasures.

As in Cortázar, the extraordinary and the fantastic take everyday life by storm; a bright, sensual cooking session turns into a séance, and the repetitions or mirrors redeem themselves in a perfect circle, thanks to which, as Borges would have put it, we live and die so that a scene can repeat itself. Symmetries, as well, are not strange to this work by Taquini, imprisoned in a circle inside a stained-glass window in Notre Dame. 

Perhaps those young language and art-history students met with Cortázar in a bar in Paris, circa 1971, so that this work could come into existence. Cortázar would also quote Mallarmé, claiming that every life should be able to become a novel, that we were predestined to be literature, and that that very literature justifies us. 

Just as dwarves from the past, from another time and space, make themselves present amidst the dishes and mixers of the inexorable here and now, the stagings in Graciela Taquini's videos are supported by a camera that cuts out, and thus imposes absences; one never sees the protagonists clearly, frontally, or completely. Something, a lot, remains scarce, so that it can be occupied by the invisible. She reminds us that seeing is not believing, as she makes what we don't see credible and, paradoxically, that which we do see becomes clouded with an unreal, hallucinatory, or absurd tone. Or else, the recording device becomes evident: if, in Granada, the protagonist speaks looking at the camera and staring at us, spectators, in Lo Sublime they show postcards to the camera, and both the audio and what they say run counter to what one sees, focusing more on the reality of image, than on the image of reality. Therefore, as in Velázquez, the screen is akin to a mirror, with its atrocious suggestion that we are, we and the world we assume as real, a mere reflection.

In this metamorphosis, intrinsic to the cutting and splicing of the audiovisual language and its space, light, color, and time values, the sublime becomes banal and vice versa, for everything that converges into the mirror, into the circularity of the tape or DVD, is subverted; what is above goes below and vice versa, depending on the spin point; banality finds its sublime reflection; darkness finds its light; the fleeting finds its eternity. 

The microworld traveled by Taquini, in this case a cozy, bourgeouis Buenos Aires kitchen, becomes rarified; after undergoing a process of estrangement, it unfolds itself, loses its certainty. As an Argentine in essence, she puts her existence as a defined unit in check and under tension. She feels and guesses that she is someone else, someone who has usurped her name and who can only be complete and recognize its own self when it accepts that it isn't indivisible. It needs distance and detachment in order to detect its true outline, or else it will use the superb and dangerous alibi of mixing with its own shadow. The postcards are as banal on their own as they are sublime when coupled. Only then do they become an indivisible phenomenon. 

Cortázar, Graciela, and Felicitas take Buenos Aires with them, like the shoes they wear, but this is better noticed in foreign territory; at home, details distract them, and the whole is not appreciated; however, as diagnosed by the author of Casa Tomada***, a gray sky pushes them into a private ceremony. And what else is sublime/banal, if not a private ceremony in which two friends ostentate frivolities and sensitiveness, daringness and prejudice, as each of them can be either fama or cronopio; together-like their postcards-, using video instead of chalk, they draw a hopscotch, this child's game in which you can go from hop to hop, from plane to plane, until you reach the sky. In the end, the Notre Dame stained-glass window shows me where does this video creation point to, and where does it hit the target. 

* Film by Argentine filmmaker Manuel Romero, 1938.
** Tango by Homero and Virgilio Expósito, 1944.
*** Tale by Julio Cortázar, 1946.