Latin American Jewish Cultural Production

7. Spectacle and Spirituality: The Cacophony of Objects, Nelson Leirner (b. 1932)

119 u 7 Spectacle and Spirituality: The Cacophony of Objects, Nelson Leirner (b. 1932) Laura Felleman Fattal Talismans A silver pendent of charms that includes a Star of David dangles mid-chest against Nelson Leirner’s red T-shirt in the opening pages of Chiarelli, the most current monograph on his work.1 The photograph of the seventy-year-old artist with a cropped head and graying beard hints to the viewer of the telltale intermingling of both disguised and blatant images that has been embedded in his art for the last fifty years. The clanking jumble of charms on the silver pendent call attention to the Catholicism of sacred and profane talismans—six-pointed stars with zodiac references, a bishop’s hand, Latin crosses, hearts with childlike engravings, rings, and pointers as if the pendent were an overburdened keychain. These silver talismans, perhaps being more than curiosities, resonate with the distinct perspective of being a Jewish-Brazilian artist animated by the mapping of divergent sources of images. Borderlands Paradigms of geographic crossroads, societal descriptors, stylistic labels, and nationalistic associations have centered on the distance between centrality and 120 LAURA FELLEMAN FATTAL periphery in understanding cultural context and individual creativity in the work of Nelson Leirner. Contemporary art historical discussion has moved away from the diasporic model with its nexus and satellite dualities towards the process of interaction on the margins. Hybridity is now thought of as an apt description of the frontier, a history with no center, history marked by the dynamics of change, a space of contestation rather than a border between constructed identities (see Gilman and Shain 2–5). It is noteworthy, that many Jewish Latin American artists seemingly live in a permanent symbolic frontier (Gilman-Shain). Intermittent collisions between first and third world marketplaces , at times, between an urban center and a rural periphery, underscore the inequality of the coveted space of contestation. Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea in Inverted Utopias (2004) propose a dialectic and inventive rotation of the European and North American focus to be inclusive of the political, ethnic, religious, and racial reflections realized in the aesthetics of the Western hemispherical southern axis. A genesis of emerging and constructed identities is thereby recognized, in the previously unexamined geographic site of Latin America, as a marketplace of exchange. Leirner has created several series of works: Right You Are . . . If You Think You Are, 2003, Untitled, 2003, and Fauna, 2004, which employs the outline of the continent of South America as the playspace for brightly colored stickers on paper. Sarcastic and aggressive in the unflinching linkage of money and art, the artist has used stickers of dollar bills as a way to re-color and perhaps redefine human interaction as commodity/monetary exchange. Prolifically coating copies of global maps with numerous versions of juvenile attractive stickers on paper—the artist probes his viewers to see the images of the face and figure of Mickey Mouse, toy skeletons, miniature replications of the flag of the United States, Santa Claus’ bearded face and round belly figures, and color tinted Halloween -like skull heads as a direct critique on the commercial—destructive— reach of the United States. The Fauna series glues stickers of pelts, skins, and depictions of indigenous plants of Latin America as a slipcover for the South American continent. Recognizing the increasing vogue of the value of native botanical and animal forms of life, to maintain an ecologically healthy planet, the artist again blankets the global map with repeated stickers. With tongue-incheck references to historical maps of Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama and other European explorers of the Western Hemisphere, the import of the historical, and perhaps fragile remnant of the sacrosanct moment of discovery, is re-imagined with a tablecloth of environmental and commercial images of momentary significance. Though less obvious world maps in their layout, the series of works Figurativismo abstrato, 2004, use stickers on wood covering SPECTACLE AND SPIRITUALITY 121 the entire surface with a pointillistic pattern. Leirner has changed the color of the frames—red, black—of the Figurativismo abstrato series as a marginal variation. Losing the design of continents to a field of color erases in part the subtext of global intellectual and economic mapping. In 2003, Leirner began a series entitled Sotheby’s, altering sections of the international auction house’s catalogues’ pictorial covers into relief sections . Sotheby’s catalogues detail works of art...