98 MARCH 2016 NOMADIC GAMES
(lixiviados) involves a sudden turn to sheer poetry. At the
end of the video, in which no people have been seen, women
in black dresses suddenly appear, sweeping the ground under
the transparent cube with reed brooms in what looks like
a hopeless ight against dust and trash. Suddenly, one last
shanty falls from the sky, this time directly over the camera.
he screen goes nearly dark, but then, for a second or two,
shafts of sunlight blaze through tiny rents in the shanty’s
roof, like stars in the night sky.
he end of Landlocked, the video that gave the show its
title, is equally startling. hroughout the 5-minute piece we
watch as four dogs furiously dig separate tunnels into a clif,
on the track of we know not what. When, after some dramatic
intercutting and claustrophobic shots that look more like
endoscopy sequences than views of tunnels dug by canines,
the dogs inally break through to the other side, Ríos with-
holds any image of their goal (the Paciic Ocean), letting
us imagine it via the sound of waves and the barking of the
exultant dogs. An allegorical meditation on the psychogeog-
raphy of landlocked nations such as Bolivia, which lost its
coastal region to Chile in a bitter 19th-century border dispute,
the video follows an artistic logic that, like nearly all of Ríos’s
videos, begins in the everyday, in some aspect of vernacular
culture, but leads into the visionary.
Another characteristic of Ríos is his ceaseless innova-
tion; he is as restless artistically as he is geographically,
always pushing himself to work with new materials, new
subjects. his was clearly the case with the most recent
video in the exhibition, Endless (2015); accompanied by
a recording of Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” the camera lingers
for six-and-a-half minutes over a group of immense wall-
like structures made from densely woven-together thorny
branches. To create these massive objects, which are made
from the huisache or sweet acacia plant, a large indigenous
Mexican shrub, Ríos and a crew of 10 worked for four
months, cutting the plants with machetes and then press-
ing them into wooden boxes to create the thousands of
modular units required to build the huge walls. Possibly the
most abstract of Ríos’s videos, Endless is certainly the most
meditative. In contrast to the strenuous and often violent
activity at the center of his previous videos, the pace is slow
and stately. he thick, freestanding walls remain stationary
until almost the very end, with nearly all movement coming
from the gliding camera. While a few shots recall Stanley
Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Endless is chiely in dialogue
with abstract painting, especially that of Barnett Newman
and, when a zoom ills the entire screen with the wall of
entangled thorns, Jackson Pollock. here are also hints of
religious mysticism, perhaps triggered by the thorn imagery
and the widespread appropriation of Schubert’s melody for
the Catholic Ave Maria prayer. As the aching Romanticism
of Schubert’s lieder illed the room and the thorny barrier
appeared to open up as the camera zoomed in, the exhibition
concluded as it began, with the artist once again inviting
his viewers to wander freely around new territory where the
tactile and the metaphorical constantly enfold each other.world fall out of the sky in slow motion, creating an instant
settlement that happens to be adjacent to an immense garbage
dump. Suspended by invisible wires, a large, slowly revolving
see-through cube loats among these squalid shelters like a
king or a god. Never touching the earth, impervious to the
thick locks of vultures attracted by the decaying garbage, the
pristine cube symbolizes every kind of blinkered idealism,
every philosopher or politician or theologian who has tried to
impose a supposedly perfect system on the starving masses,
or simply blissfully ignored them. Ríos also wants viewers to
be reminded of the Minimalist boxes of Donald Judd, Larry
Bell and Dan Graham. While deeply inluenced by Minimal-
ism, Ríos has always engaged the kind of messy content that
was excluded from so much reductivist art of the 1960s.
In the two Ghost of Modernity videos, which could well be
subtitled Minimalism and its Discontents, he has staged an
almost surrealist confrontation of opposing realities. And,
as so often happens in Ríos’s videos, The Ghost of ModernityTwo stills from
Endless, 2015,
video, approx. 6½
minutes.
Opposite, two
stills from
Landlocked, 2014,
video, approx.
5 minutes.