FREDRIC SNITZER GALLERY

4 SMOKE and CLARITY

by JOSE ANTONIO EVORA

COOPER

25/9/2005 edition, EL HERALD

"I took out pairs of gloves." Signed Pete Company. One assumes that this note is not authentic. It is written in a hardly visible slip of paper in the thickness of an artistic installation, and although the artistic facilities hold of everything, nobody puts `` company '' (sign) to leave a note. What happens is that now in the presence of we are the same turned another thing. Trailer left in the property that from not long ago occupies Fredric Snitzer Gallery, in the Wynwood Art District, it served the Cooper artist to him to mount the installation Black Lungs, To Blow Smoke In Your Phase (black Lungs for echarte smoke in the face), with which it was left the space of special projects of that gallery open. The photo of the invitation to the opening ceremony showed the interior of trailer so and as it was before Cooper worked in him. Shelves in the wood walls are seen, deteriorated to existing metalists and much sweepings in the ground. To the bottom, to the right, the same door through watching which it must happen now. Then, first that notices it is that the enclosure has been divided in two sections: first, everything painted of target, with directional centers in the ceiling and curtains to the entrance and when coming out, remembers a conventional gallery. Second it is of there inwards. In the doors of the shelves inscriptions like Labels of boiler are ***reflxed mng, Fat, Wires 12 volts and Discs. By a groove that is opened way on the false stonewares of the ground runs, from the bottom to the door, the water that falls of two bored metallic containers, which as well receive it from the ceiling. A noise like that of an airplane that flies over the site completes the atmosphere.

It is necessary to transfer the threshold of the zone of comfort commonly frequented by the public to arrive at the part on which Cooper wants to call the attention: trailer like was before. Nothing of adjustments. In any case, the added elements come to emphasize the subject with certain doses of elaboration. To the bottom, a center of red light illuminates the cardboard glasses, the percheros, the semienrrolladas steel laminae and other wastes that must there have remained nobody know how long before trailer, that already was lost its practical utility and was condemned to disappear, it acquired artistic quality. Made is not ready, because the lazy part more or less just as as it were only has sense in relation to the gallery of the entrance, in whose reduced space, by the way, there is a single hung picture nor no a single exposed piece. The forms are countless in which the art has tried to reorient the center of attention of the spectator towards new contents, that in the end we have finished also accepting like artistic. Of Duchamp to Rauschenberg and this one to Basquiat they are except the jumps that the resignations of the critic and the public, and the perseverancia of the artists.

In order to remove the poetry from the tight margins of the beauty, the intervention of authors like the Spanish Juan Ramon Jiménez and the French Roland Barthes was necessary, whom that said poetry is `` the inalienable sense of the things ' '. Today, in the heat of century XXI, costs work to appear with something new, and perhaps the less important question is that one. The truely significant thing is to arm a coherent and substantial work on the bases of which not yet few consider pure eccentricities. With hers, Cooper consecrates the insolent gesture to throw the smoke to him of the cigarette in the face to another person like an intellectual shock.

Although it would be enough to leave the meaning of Black Lungs, To Blow Smoke In Your Phase in the strictly panfletario plane to make him deserving of a praise, the subject goes further on. The dilemma of if the public accepts to limit his curiosity the artistic surroundings `` '' raises more of a cuestionamiento, and with the resurrection of an object that had finished in the waste basket it is left the question open of to what extent the new thing is truely able to dominate itself the old thing (it replaces it or it moves it and, therefore, it accumulates it). It can that many things are happening to our backs only because we do not give the average return with the spirit to pay attention. Of that way of indolencia, the filters of the conditioned air will be in favor more and more near the waste basket.

jevora@herald.com

` Black Lungs, To Blow Smoke In Your Facé.

Installation of Cooper, with which it is left the space of special projects of Fredric Snitzer Gallery open.

2247 NW 1st Place, Wyndwood Art District. Of Tuesday to Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Until the 4 of October.

(305) 448-8976 and www.snitzer.com