The Great Glass

How to throw the rock and hide ones hand

Mixed Media Art Exhibition,

July 02^th, 2010

Sector Reforma Contemporary Art Gallery, Guadalajara, Mèxico

Curator: Alejandro Pérez-Tamayo

„El Gran Vidrio / de cómo tirar la piedra y esconder la mano”, mural, recycled bottles, cement, plaster board and metallic structure, part one 86.6 x 86.6 in., part two 86.6 x 118 in., 2010.

This project is part of multi-interpretative spectrum, in which, the deepest reading (linked to title of the pice) makes references to „The Large Glass” and „The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even” (1915-1923) Marcel Duchamp (France 1887-1968).

If Duchamp's work is a parody of the mechanical love in the modern world, in the piece of the Polish artist Magdalena Firląg (Poland 1984) a sarcastic view is addressed and, by analogy to this work, the actual situation of relationships between desire and satisfaction in the context of hypermodern world sublimated into a monumental reproduction of a one-hundred dollar note, symbol and conceptual recipient of connections and goals in a global system exceeded by the same mechanism of action called capitalism.

Through a critical but filled with black humor view, Firląg uses glass from recyclable materials (glass bottles) to make reference not only to natural functioning of the capital, which is constant re-use, being that the circulation of itself is what gives a full meaning to their existence as a symbolic value of material goods in modern societies. Going further, the artist also describes a sub-system inherent in this apparatus: the corruption.

Analogously to the recycling process, collection, separation, cleaning (i.e. washing) and managing

the re-use, the artist metaphorically manifests that, the process of corruption linked to the capital, in which, by similar steps, the goods provided by the latter are sprayed into a well-defined social strata and totally elitist, dedicated entirely to generate power system through is hegemony over the acquisition and accumulation of satisfaction goods, not only of symbolic value but primarily materialist.

This reading represents the harshness of inequality and violence caused by social exclusion that arises as a result of the monopolization of capital goods, common in theory.

Alejandro Pèrez-Tamayo

http://sectorreforma.net/english/projects/el-gran-vidrio-de-como-tirar-la-piedra-y-esconder-la-mano-2010/