Getting Physical_Keith Wallace

Getting Physical

By Keith Wallace

The majority of Tonel’s artwork consists of drawings, and most of them involve some form of self-portraiture; at times it is obvious, and at times not. His self-portrait functions as a kind of alter ego, and the rendering of it on paper offers Tonel a means of expression that he might not otherwise exercise in his everyday socialized life.

The drawing process gives licence to explore the recesses of the mind through traces of the body—the hand—in ways that are not contingent upon realistic transcription, it is a space where logic can lose its anchor. Tonel presents us with figures that somehow continue to function in spite of a still-bloodied amputated limb, or a useless arm that exaggeratedly extends into a shit-like pile on the ground, or a penis that enters the ground and re-emerges as a plant. Unlike a photograph, even a digitally manipulated one, his drawings are not intended to impress us with a simulacrum of reality. The body and its organic fluidity, its often messy unpredictability within the propriety of how it is expected to behave socially, find a place in Tonel’s imagination. And drawing is a venue for him to unearth anxious psycho/social states of mind that invade everyone’s inner, and often troubled, relationship with the world regardless of geography, class, or sex.

I believe everyone has thoughts they don’t readily want to admit to thinking about. Such thoughts that enter the deepest corners of our minds are not based on logic but are based on what unsettles the norms and systems that supposedly keep our lives in order, that keep us safe. Tonel explores the lack of order and logic that taunts us, and he does it, for the most part, without judgement; he makes propositions rather than proclamations.

Another element that is fundamental in almost all of Tonel’s work is language. His interest in the relationship between the image and the word has been evident from his earliest drawings influenced by both popular and political cartoons where, within this genre, a relationship between word and image is inherently a symbiotic one. Words provide a framework for a reading of the image, and, visa versa, the image illustrates the words.

Tonel’s interest in language also stems from his encounter with conceptual art and its placement of language as a central component within the workings of an artwork. The use of language in conceptual art that developed in Latin America, which was his first experience of it, was poetic and ambiguous, although often in a politicized way. Luis Camnitzer, who moved from Uruguay to New York in the 1960s, and who first exhibited in Havana in 1983, is an important link between Latin American and Euroamerican concerns. In his work, Camnitzer incorporated language in order to destabilize the meaning that exists in both the word and image. He created relationships that functioned less like the caption of a cartoon and more like two entities encountering each other within the space of an art object. Words, like images, don’t necessarily have stable meanings, but instead, can embrace ambiguity through their own necessary reasoning.

So where does Tonel’s three-dimensional work fall within the context of his drawing and its content? To begin with, it does not fit into one clear category: There are sculptures that stand independent of the drawings and portraiture; there are others that are based on the self-portraits, and then there are full-scale installations.

The relationship between his drawing, and for that matter his sketches, and sculpture follows no logic, but a relationship does exist, although the order of what would seem to come first is not always adhered to. A sketch can be made for a sculpture, a sculpture can be made without a drawing, a drawing can then be completed after the sculpture, or any order thereof. The differences/similarities between the drawings and the sculptures lie not in the norm of what should come first, but in the ways they represent. Drawings primarily involve the eye and mind; within the hierarchy of art, drawing is the workhorse, the vehicle for the evolution of ideas, and anything can happen. Drawing is a representation, sculptures are physical objects that exist in space and time, and thus bring into play the relational presence of our bodies. The installations emphasize this physicality even further in that the viewer is literally inside the artwork.

Tonel’s encounter with sculpture dates back to the early 1980s when he was affiliated with Hexágono, a collective of six artists who set up ephemeral sculptural actions in outdoor environments. But it was in the late 80s that he explored three dimensional art in a more determined way, and more within an indoor, gallery, context. At this time his sculptures related to the floor or the wall or both. As with the drawings, they included both textual and visual elements. El bloqueo (The Blockade/Embargo) from 1989, made physical ideas that were first conceptualized as sketches rather than the more finished drawings. El bloqueo became a drawing several years later. And though they are not self-portraits in a traditional sense—there is no figure and they do not possess the subjective line-making of the artist—they do incorporate materials that represent a shared, collective identity in which he participates. The dominant material in El bloqueo is cement, a material essential in Cuba, as it is in many other nations, for the construction of buildings but also one that creates, and metaphorically represents, walls. With the cement blocks arranged on the floor in the shape of the island of Cuba, this work clearly alludes to the embargo that it has endured for decades, but it is doubly unclear as to which way the blockade is directed, and Tonel is not attempting to make a dogmatic statement, but instead, subtly introduces the dimension of doubt. Much of his work, as well as that of other Cuban artists, from the late 1980s and early 1990s was directly referenced to life in Cuba, especially during the “Special Period” after the Soviet Union pulled out its material and financial support leaving the island in a state of isolation and economic distress. But his interest in Cuba is not based in nationalism, it simply happened to be where he was living, and that particular period of history impacted his daily life and his understanding of the rest of the world.

The sculptures that are based on his self-portrait are more directly related to his drawings. All are made of wood cut into the shape of a body with lines painted on it to animate the character. An early piece, El Puente (The Bridge) from 1993, is clearly a representation of the artist who has presented himself in an awkwardly splayed “crab-like” position whereby viewers are conceptually invited to walk across his naked body. Placed at the entrance to his exhibition, the artist becomes the bridge to an experience of the work, but, because of his physical vulnerability, the invitation also suggests the possibility of impending collapse. Another work, La Silla (The Chair) (1993 – 2000), shows similar characteristics to the watercolour and ink drawing El vómito es la cultura (Vomit is Culture), two versions which were done in 1990 and 1998. Here, the body doubles as a chair, and again becomes a potential site for interaction with a real body. But as a chair it is dysfunctional, blocked by a fountain of vomit emanating from the artist’s mouth. The crisis of the physical in both of these works, which characterizes much of Tonel’s work, is based in the delicate balance between the body’s strength and its corresponding fragility.

The installations are his most ambitious projects, and in the practical complexity of their construction, the most conceptually calculated. A drawing can be planned, but the nature of its process encourages improvisation and intuition to come into play. Yet more than any other of his works, the installations make the most of the sensorial—the sound of the table saw in A Self-Portrait as an Organic Intellectual (Homage to Antonio Gramsci) (1997) or the smell of sugar and urine in A Tribute to Sugar with Water (1995 - 2000)—that augments the rich visual materiality of the environment itself, and brings his observation in physicality to new levels.

In A Self-Portrait as an Organic Intellectual (Homage to Antonio Gramsci) (of which there were two versions, one in Vancouver and one in Havana), Tonel makes reference to Antonio Gramsci (1891 – 1937) and his ideas, many of them formulated while in prison, about how the intellectual can be organically integrated into society. In the Vancouver version, the simple combination of a room constructed of salvaged wood, a table saw placed within a cage, and portraits of Gramsci and Tonel that are viewed through openings cut in the walls seemed benign enough. But when the saw unexpectedly became activated, this inanimate object emerged as something aggressive and threatening. Tonel himself best describes the experience, “ The saw, as in several of my previous drawings, suggests the possibility of mutilation and trauma. It is a tool—like ideas, thoughts and ideologies—as useful as it can be dangerous, as productive as it can be aggressive.”

In order to understand an artist’s cosmos, one desires a kind of logic to emerge. In Tonel’s work, it’s there, but it’s difficult to locate because he keeps logic illusive. What he does in both his drawings and his sculpture is unsettle our assumptions about the way we think things should be.

1. Artist Statement in catalogue for Utopian Territories: New Art from Cuba (Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery/Contemporary Art Gallery: Vancouver, 1997), 122.