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¡ How green was my valley !

by Carlos León XJiménez

Notes to (re) find the province inside of you (and me)

Inquiring within the realms of the domestic and the quotidian, Jano Cortijo presents the project Clásicos de la provincia (Classics from the province) in the III Iberoamerican Lima Biennial. This installation proposes an approach to the objects of daily use/consumption. The current project continues a career of investigation about cultural practices that belong to his hometown, Trujillo.

What to do with the quotidian?

The objects, which on first sight can be taken as ordinary, utilitarian (devoid of any aesthetic value) and even banal, can be analyzed as a testimony of a determined material culture. They show elements to find out ways through which some Peruvian identities are expressed. Personally, I understand identity as a construction in constant redefinition. From this exhaustive gaze, it explores cultural values that have to do with conventions and/or traditions of a human group. Just like archaeologists dig through dumps and discards to have better approaches about the uses and quotidian habits of civilizations and communities which no longer have an active voice, social sciences approach present human collectives, both from their ideological discourses as well as from their material culture, a culture that, needless to say is alive and in constant formation.

Guide for a collective portrait

Through this strategy, in Clásicos de la provincia (Classics from the province) Jano Cortijo seeks to generate a collective portrait, like he claims. A portrait that digs in the objects that belong to the daily life of any person. From this generalization, Cortijo profiles an attitude and a strategy that seeks to come close to defining an “aesthetic of provinces”.

The title of the installation carries an implicit paradox, by granting a condition of prestige to the aesthetics from the province (and precisely because of that, it suggests a “dignity of the periphery”), and from it one can also play to highlight a situation of marginal condition and border in face of central values that have not been raised, but have been associated by opposition.

In Cortijo, this reflection about the local environment becomes extensive towards every place where the popular is recreated heroically/erotically. And it is this same element which allows us to read what is also marginal and provincial harbored by centers and capitals: it allows us to look at our own and acknowledge that the provincial coexists and permeates the great modernized major cities.

Here the gaze is on Lima and also the public from Lima, where this project is presented. Cortijo knows that the capital is made up –in its majority- of immigrants and their descendants. It is then that, most of the cultural practices from the province are adapted, reproduced and re signified in Lima. It is meaningful how the “popular aesthetics” have gained terrain and space in the mass media during the 90’s, undoubtedly also as part of the dictatorship’s political project, but also by the progressive consolidation of emerging social groups with a capacity of leadership and power –let’s not exclude the aesthetic projects of drug lords, the commercial textile cluster of Gamarra and other cases which have not been documented by the bibliography about popular urban culture throughout the XX century.

Lima, heir of its condition of capital during the Viceroyalty, remains situated with its “back to the country” which supports it, although the political power and art play the game of blending with “what’s popular” when the social juncture merits it. It is then we understand that the provincial condition is not something far removed from anyone.

The everyday object as a manifestation of class

Later that gaze upon the “other” shows us that he or she is not so distant and that they even participate in day to day life in “us”. This is a way of approaching the subjects of center-periphery. From the fact that the shape of what’s “banal” about ordinary objects takes on a status of a significant ensemble up to the articulation of a significant ensemble, social, cultural and political.

In this willingness to present/rescue everyday objects, Jano Cortijo proposes an aesthetic in agreement to them. In the installation, the images are presented as a photograph framed inside a group of shelves: a kind of dismantled album whose pages have been set up for display. He synthesizes the furniture of a living room including, of course, the ever present tv/vhs combo table –which presides any living room worth its name.

He camouflages his message from within the use of the medium itself. But, its synthesis looks for distance: it cools the vitality of its images and gets closer to the aesthetics of a minimalist laboratory.

The projects where the crossing of the “familiar” with the “quotidian” is reconstructed, confronting from the objects the intimate and private realms in front of the public (the latter as a space invaded by the private), gives us criteria to understand gazes of disenchantment, questioning and even saturation towards tradition as a habit and routine, but not necessarily in the plane of rootlessness, but maybe –and this is undoubtedly the subject- in the possibility of a critical and lucid (re) rooting.

The inevitable as terrain of freedom

It is this gap of modernization without modernity that generates critical gazes in the artists outside from Lima, undoubtedly, caused by the lack of quality services for specialized publics (and audiences).

There exists, indeed, a willingness to be modern, but that implies necessarily an analysis of what is one’s own. To be modern is not a question of shedding skin unconsciously, on the contrary, it supposes an evaluation –and conscious enjoyment – of the reason of the shedding. Then, the province and its “peripheral” values are not something so far removed from the experience in any inhabitant of the modern big city –in the broader and even global sense, but only another dimension that complements and broadens values (and aesthetics) that are considered as predominant, and as such, a sign of “good taste”.

The “bad taste”, the calculated ingenuity and even the game of the popular have long ago legitimated their citizenship in the world of art. But the anthropological gaze of Jano Cortijo wants to return us to the street. That street that labels us not from theory, but from a user’s sensibility: that, which is also massive and anonymous, and to which you and I are not foreign, but actually accomplices.

article published in “La Industria”, Trujillo, June 2,002 for the exhibition of “Classics from the province”, during the III Iberoamerican Lima Biennial