Olu Oguibe on Pepon Osorio's New Installation

DLU DGUIBE DN PEPDN DSDRID'S NEW INSTALLATION I n an article by Holland Cotter in the New York Times in 1995, Susana Torruella Leval, director of the Museo el Barrio on New York's Fifth Avenue recalls a conversation with Pepon Osorio. "I was once watching Pepon Osorio constructing one of his glittering installations," Leval mentions. "This one included a jeweled chandelier , and I kept referring to the fake pearls. He said to me: 'They are not fake pearls. They are not fake anything. They are plastic pearls. For many people, plastic pearls are what ihey have and what they wanl."' This is a particularly important observation when considering the nature, issues, and subjects of Osorio's work, and the cultures from which his formal devices derive. All too often, as they contemplate these cultures and their manifestation in Osorio's work, what conies to the minds of many critics is the indeterminate, almost irresponsible term, Latino kitsch, with which the uniquely rich and colorful traditions of the Latino working class are thoughtlessly swept into the shadow of some supposedly authentic haute-couture of which the earlier is only a tragic mimicry. Osorio recreates the inflorescent and effervescent resplendence of the Latino home and environment in his installations, complete with that combination of the baroque and the phantasmagoric which has marked the Latin American imagination since the inhabitants of the New World severed themselves from the strictures of European rationalism and yielded to the world Antonio Pigafetta found on his voyage with Magellan, to the elaborate ritualism of the catholic aesthetic, and to the natural flamboyance of the cultures of Africa's Guinea Coast; that ajiaco of which both Fernando Ortiz and Gerardo Mosquera speak and to which the appellation of kitsch denies an inherent authenticity. In recreating this world, Osorio seeks to recapture its immaterial configurations , also: its vagaries and tragedies, its pretensions and desires, its chasms and solitude, its soul and dignity preserved. By calling upon the material environment and the resonance of images, he is able to construct transitory profiles of its human manifests. In this sense his language is figurative , dominated not by mere allusion to form, but by the obvious and enduring presence of the human spirit. Which is why he erects fictions and narratives of the real rather than the mythopocic; of incidents and events and specific personal lives that invariably carry with them the circumstances and reality of a community and a culture. In such memorable works as the Scene of the Crime, Osorio's entry for the 1993 Whitney Biennial, Crying in the Barber Shop, and La Carna, Osorio takes his viewers into the Latin American community, and occasionally into the home, pointing them to vignettes and memorials, to difficulties and celebrations, even ! the eonlessional moment. In Crying in the Borhcrshopin which the artist recreated a barber shop in the barrio and filled it with video images of crying men, the community-—within which Osorio always creates his work—was confronted with the ficrionality of its own claims to machismo, and thus presented with an opportunity to look itself in the mirror, laugh at itself, and perhaps chance upon its own rediscovery. Osorio's Project 5: Badge of Honor, opened in the Latino and African American neighborhood on Broadway, lower Newark in the summer of 1995 before it made its way to the Newark Museum and ultimately to the New York art world where it showed at Ronald Feldman a year later. A recuperative installation comprised of two adjoining rooms open to the viewer, Badge of Honor presents two figures from the community: Nelson Gonzalez, 39, and incarcerated felon doing time for drug-related burglary, and Nelson Gonzalez jr., 15; father and son. One of the rooms in the installation is a recreation of a teenager's room, complete with pinups, baseball cards, mountain bike, and Michael Jordan basketballs. The other is a recreated prison cell, abode of the serving father whose presence is made real on a black and white video monitor through which he speaks with his son, himself on another video screen in the teenager's room, the Journal of Contemporary African Art • Fall/Winter 1996 Ab o...