The Secret Life of Figurines: artist Liliana Porter
by Ross Rice

I can’t help giggling.

A wind-up penguin staggers into the screen from the upper left corner, against a solid white background. It wobbles slightly, then gets off-kilter, pitching forward and elegantly somersaulting into a prone face-up position, balefully staring at the camera before the cut. It’s a funny Chaplainesque moment, where a human character has been assigned to a mechanical object, a real toy, not an animation. And I’m giggling . . . can’t help it.

Liliana Porter sits nearby smiling. She’s one of those people who smiles with her whole face, and laughs with her whole body, instantly making you feel comfortable in her presence. She’s letting me know: it’s OK to laugh, I do it all the time . . . it’s a perfectly appropriate response to the work. Thank goodness.

On a day that can’t make up its mind to shine or rain, Liliana Porter greets me at her red studio/barn just outside of Rhinebeck, a space she shares with fellow artist Ana Tiscornia: plenty of room, well-lit, with ample table surfaces and lighting for projects in progress. Liliana couldn’t be a more gracious hostess, self-deprecating and disarmingly charming. And looking around the remodeled barn, it’s easy to see why she is an internationally famous artist, with her works shown in Houston, Chicago, Boston, New York, San Francisco, Madrid, Rome, Sao Paolo and her native Buenos Aires. Her and Ana’s workspace looks like a fun place to play, neatly organized, with rolling tables and all manner of media: pencils, paint, drawing tools, and sundry objects.

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.

Liliana employs a variety of skills in her deceptively simple approach. Once she has assembled the subject matter from her cast of figures, she photographs them against predominantly white backgrounds (though blue and red are also occasionally used), with precise positioning of light to achieve the right kind of shadow. Recent works are referred to as “dialogues,” where two selected figures/objects are positioned facing each other. The serendipitous interplay between them, presented in this neutral setting, makes for an odd connection. Two faces looking at each other always begs a story—what are they thinking as they return the gaze?

The photograph seals the moment right where Liliana wants you to see it, usually with large amounts of space that give everything an Alice-in-Wonderland sense of scale, sometimes isolating the subjects, sometimes completing them.

Liliana’s more recent forays into video allows her to guide you around her world at her pace. “When you have a video, you really get to control the time that the viewer sees the image.” With a sparse and sympathetic score by Silvia Meyer (married to Marco Maggi), the nineteen-minute selection of vignettes is what has me with the giggles. You really start to see souls emerging from wind-up toys; one that can’t be stopped from rope-skipping by authoritarian kicking, the scary metallic wheezing of a demented fiddler as he flops and leers.

It’s revealing what these short glimpses offer us, and how easy it is to juxtapose a human meaning to a staggering and falling wind-up penguin.

A crocheted poodle/bottle cover performs a striptease, a candle-haired girl joyfully regards her self-immolation in a mirror, motorized mini-percussionists perform an impromptu jam session . . . these things seem to have their own minds and hearts, furnished by the viewer as much as by the artist.

On the walls are two pieces she is working on for an upcoming show in Brazil, where she has been requested to bring paintings rather than the print medium she has been working with recently. One piece has a “tsunami” of thick blue in the upper right corner, with a variety of figures and objects alternately fighting and riding the azure tide. An expanse of white space awaits the inevitable spread, suggesting distance and isolation, while the thick gluey blue paint has a heaviness to it; the sports figures mired within interchangeable with the toy soldiers.

The other painting has a Chinese-style pair or birds in the corner, looking off of the painting at two mini-figures, ignoring the vast space behind them. Chinese elements are an inside joke in Liliana’s work, signifying inscrutability and the unknowable. She admits, “In Argentina, when we don’t understand something, we say it’s ‘Chinese,’ much like the way you say ‘it’s all Greek to me.’” Once again, she is using large space to effect scale and framing, and her use of dialogue between characters brings a cognitive spark to the scene.

Before I go, Liliana shows me some of her past and present work. First, a photo triptych of fallen “martyrs”—A packaged slice of Joan of Arc Brie, A Che Guevara mousepad, and a maple-sugar candy Christ on the Cross, complete with ingredient list—martyrdom meets marketing. Another recent favorite etching entitled “Levitating Rabbit,” elicits a quick chuckle immediately: a goofy looped armless rabbit inexplicably hovering over its shadow. Why? I don’t know . . . I start thinking that well, maybe the magician forgot to undo the trick, the audience split and left the rabbit hanging, and the rabbit is taking the opportunity to catch a quick nap undisturbed. Just floating there.

This is the kind of thing you start thinking about when viewing Liliana’s work, relationships that might be possible, jokes you write your own punch line to, tiny figures you see your own face on. And just like real people, sometimes things that were never meant for each other, work out perfectly, creating their own unexpected story. As she puts it, “When you react to these real things, you also react to their presentation . . . and can be really unsettling because you realize that the reality of everything is almost the abstraction of it.”

Liliana Porter’s work is represented by the following galleries: Galeria Ruth Benzacar (Buenos Aires), Sicardi Gallery (Houston), Brito Cimino (Sao Paulo), Carrie Secrist Gallery (Chicago), Hosfelt Gallery (New York and San Francisco), Valentina Bonomo (Rome), Barbara Krakow (Boston), and Galeria Espacio Minimo (Madrid). LEVITATING RABBIT, an exhibition of her work curated by Terri C. Smith will be shown 6/21 through 8/17 at the Leo Fortuna Gallery, 422½ Warren St., Hudson, www.leofortuna.com, 518.697.7907. Gallery hours are Fr/Sa/Su 11 AM- 5 PM. Opening reception is Sa 6/21, 4-6 PM.