The Secret Life of Figurines:
Artist Liliana Porter
by Ross Rice
Having grown up as a child in Buenos Aires (born in 1941), she finished her college education at the Universidad Ibero Americana in Mexico City, where she had her very first show at the age of seventeen. She made her way to New York City in 1964, which was her home base until about six years ago, when she made the move to Rhinebeck. Her loft space in Tribeca had had a full view of the twin towers, and though she was in Spain during 9/11, she was strongly affected by their destruction, and later by their absence. Frequent visits upstate to her dealer Annina Nosei’s place in Chatham, and encouragement from fellow Argentine artist Marco Maggi (see Roll issue four, 10/07) resulted in her and Ana moving up to their Rhinebeck location full-time, while keeping the small apartment in Manhattan for weekend trips.
Liliana shows me upstairs to her impressive collection of curios, mostly miniature people and animals, that she’s collected from yard sales and flea markets, mostly in New York State. When picking them up, she doesn’t rationalize why, just responds to an instinctive feeling.
“After awhile, now I realize that they all look a little bit like they don’t understand; a little puzzled. A mixture of funny and sad.” She notices a strange human phenomenon most take for granted: the need to put totemic objects on shelves, often with faces, and admire them. These oddities, many of them older and with slight yellowing of age, become a multi-range menagerie from which she can cast her dialogues and video events.
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