Building Silence:

Guillermo Kuitca

TEXT ! GRANT JOHNSON

"...forget, forget, make silence..!1

-Paul C6zanne, Dragons in the Clouds
There is at least one dragon winding through serene clouds in Guillermo
Kuitca's pictorial project. From the isolated microphone stands and wallfacing paintings of his "stagecraft" series, across the empty beds and
bare mattresses that serve as both subject and support, right up to the
vacant concert halls and arrested baggage carousels of recent years, it
arcs in and out of view, a half-hidden secret. The dragon is silence-not
the silence that equals death, but an activating energy that passes
through nearly all of Kuitca's peripatetic paintings, drawings, and collages, a unifying thread. Indeed, the monumental and disarming retrospective Everything - Paintingsand Works on Paper,1980-20o8 reveals
Kuitca as a master architect of silences.2 The scope of the exhibition
allows us to grasp silence as much more than the subject of his workwhich has long been a staple of its critical reception. Here, silence
becomes the vital operational mode of his art.
The artist once told Hans-Michael Herzog that in "good" painting,
"[t]here is an experience of solitude, no, not solitude, privacy. That is the
pictorial measure."3 The subtle hesitation as Kuitca's thought moves
from "solitude" to "privacy"--and which appears, by way of commas, as
a small silence-opens another possibility. I fantasize a scene in which I
take Herzog's place: GK-There is an experience of solitude, no, not solitude... GJ-Silence? GK-Yes, silence. That is the pictorial measure. In
that momentary hitch, which is in fact a silent space, I can imagine
Kuitca authorizing my exegetical thesis. Were he to have simply stated,
"There is an experience of privacy. That is the pictorial measure," any
other options would have been foreclosed. But through the portal of his
pause, I enter and rearrange the mental furniture, exchanging "silence"
for "privacy," occupying the space opened by his hesitation with a creative insurgence. This potential recurs again and again in Kuitca's pictures as they build a momentous quietude-which Jean-Louis Chr6tien
describes as a "...communicative, radiant, and cordial silence, which
invites us to live within it.'4
Of course, these fantasy lines never passed between us, but I did speak
with Kuitca this July, after seeing Everything at the Walker Art Center in
Minneapolis. Although I had not yet developed the notion fully when we
spoke, I did mention that my strongest impression from the show was
one of "shared silence." He warmed to that, saying that he looked forward to my exploration of the idea. Like a dragon in the clouds, that
exploration has been far-flung and recursive, ultimately leading me to
circle tightly over two paintings, but not without many flourishes and
glances towards other images and series.

Signals to Silence
All pictures are silent. We know this as a bare fact, even if pictorial
silence does not press forward in current critical discourse. I admit that
although I often tried to tune in the sounds of paintings and other pictures, I had given their silence little consideration before seeing
Everything. For one thing, silence is difficult to talk about-it silences.
This unavoidable symmetry is why discussions of what Chr6tien calls
"the essential silence of painting" always risk tautology-can it even be
a "picture" if it is not silent? But Kuitca shapes another class of silences
altogether. His are supplementary to "essential" pictorial silence.
Ultimately, they transform this given dimension of pictures, even as
they derive momentum from it. Whereas "essential" pictorial silence is
featureless and interchangeable, the silences I encountered in
Everything are varied and particular. They are, among many others, the
silences before and the silences after, diagrammatic silences and the
silences of music.
While no single image provides a complete glossary to the operations
of silence at play in Kuitca's oeuvre, L'enfance du Christ (The Childhood of
Christ), 1989, does deploy an intricate sequence of those operations,
which echoes throughout Everything. The painting depicts a series of
box-like rooms, packed tightly together and rendered in crimson and
sienna cooled by metallic blues. We view this isometric grid from high
above through a web-like veil of white. The entire construction floats in
a shimmering gray nebula. In place of human tenants: empty beds,
unused chairs, and a microphone on a stand, painted with a precise yet
tremulous hand that gives them all the look of dollhouse furniture.
The first secretion of silence comes before the fact, from the short circuit between image and title. With nothing in common, they refuse to
communicate openly, and therefore seem to be keeping a secret. Astute
to the partnership between silence and secrets, Kuitca often elects enigmatic titles that keep mum in this secretive way, such as El mar dulce
(SweetwaterSea) and Siyo_fuera el invierno mismo (IfI Were WinterItself).

But this particular title-L'enfance du Christ-compounds silence at least

twice more. First, by its most available reference: the chroniclers of
Christ's life are quiet on the subject of his childhood, outlining only a few
brief scenes. In this sense, the words L'enfance du Christ always mark the
silence of an untold story.
Silence erupts on another register with the discovery that L'enfance du
Christ is the title of a choral trilogy by Berlioz. To give a painting the
name of a musical piece-a recurring gesture for Kuitca-is to point out,

INSIDE FRONT COVER: Guillermo Kuitca, Untitled, 2008, oil on canvas, 95 x 83 cm (private collection) / OPPOSITE, TOP TO BOTTOM: Lenfance du Christ (The Childhoodof Christ), 1989,
mixed media on canvas, 60.5 x 80.5 x 2 inches (courtesy of Ramis Barquet, New York); El mar dulce [The Sweet Sea], 1986, acrylic on canvas, 78.75 x 118 inches (collection of
Ambassador Paul and Trudy Cejas,, Cejas Art Ltd.) (all images courtesy of the artist and Sperone Westwater, New York)

32 ART PAPERS

by contrast, that the painting cannot sing. It is also, especially in the quiet
of the museum, to call forth the silent memory of that music, or, if one
has never heard the piece in question, the silent imagining of music
unknown. Thus, titles such as L'enfance du Christ and Siete 6ltimas canciones (Seven Last Songs), as well as Kuitca's eponymous revisions of CD
covers from recordings of Wagner's Ring Trilogy,"replay" musical compositions within the silent context of the museum, and against the silent
backdrop of the artist's pictorial project. Miraculously, we are made to
"hear" music-familiar or unknown-in a new space where its sounds
are inaudible yet present. (Imagine Beethoven's Ode to Joy without humming it and you will "hear" something like what I am talking about.)
When a work cues a viewer to imagine choral music that she has never
heard, it opens up an expansive field of creative possibilities. And yet, this
realm of potentiality nevertheless derives its direction and complexion
from initiatives of the artist. And since silence is the only space where
such possibilities exist, Kuitca gives L'enfance du Christ a silent soundtrack, distinct from the silences of Wagner or the tango, which also have
their place in his oeuvre. These are intense experiential revelations built
on the fundamental lesson of John Cage's 4'33", 1952-that silence opens
a space in which every noise and movement, no matter how small, is
transfigured. Silence is the space of limitless creative potential.

own shape and texture. And so, silenced by the silent face-off between
title and image, we stand ready to explore this hushed house, vacant
except for spare furniture and a microphone. Inside, in its rooms, Kuitca
seems to have painted the silence in a way analogous to that by which
C6zanne painted the light and air between himself and Mont SainteVictoire.
Empty chairs line up along certain walls of some rooms, seemingly sitting in the familiar silence of waiting. Such chairs-un-upholstered, rectilinear-are strewn throughout Kuitca's early canvases, and often lie on
their sides or backs, sustaining the silences of their percussive hit on the
floor. Prone, they are also silenced as chairs,becoming mute sculptures or
forgotten props instead. In L'enfance du Christ,they may be waiting for
the promised sound of the lonely microphone, with its voluminous
potential for all manner of song, speech, and feedback. A straightened
question mark, this microphone may stand at the closest pass between
title and image as it suggests the possibility of a present-day Young Jesus
rehearsing the Sermon on the Mount in his parents' paltry flat. Like
chairs, microphones are ubiquitous in Kuitca's "floor plan" and "stage set"
series, where they seem to assert silences louder than those of their
peers. Is it paradoxically the silence produced when an amplified voice is
used to mute the crowd? Or is it the silence of an unwanted explosion of
noise that has been shut off?
Richer still are the echoing silences of the empty beds in L'enfance du
Christ,which link back to the single empty bed in the small, almost needful painting Nadie Olvida Nada (Nobody Forgets Nothing), 1982, whose
covers turn down in anticipation but are too tightly tucked to offer a welcome. The peculiar silence of a Kuitca-painted empty bed can present the
absent sounds of lovemaking, which at some other moment might be
heard inflagrante. It may also carry the more profound silence of dreams,
whose sounds erupt in unconsciousness, only ever heard in soundless
memory. Reaching out to the viewer's bodily experience, the image of a
vacant bed can also be an invitation to the simple stillness of sleep. And
finally, attending these intangible bed-borne silences like acolytes, we
find the solidified silences of blankets, pillows, and mattresses-palpable
vehicles of quiet and absorbers of sound.
Ultimately, behind the rooms and their contents, Kuitca spreads an
enveloping atmosphere of silence made visible as a formless void. This
amorphous, ubiquitous silence spans both invocation and benediction,
between which Kuitca conducts his tour of this enigmatic dwelling,
where many of the chambers are near duplicates of one another, and
each opens into the other without any hallways. As a house and a maze,
it recalls the setting of Borges' 1949 story The Aleph, as well as the great
Argentine author's preoccupation with labyrinths, reminding us that he
is Kuitca's countryman and artistic forebear. But the structure's rightangled and equilateral geometry, seen against the amorphous background, reflects more faithfully the spaces of the gallery, and suddenly
another silence rushes in, one always given in advance-the silence, or
hush, of the museum.

The Wide Spread of Silence

Kuitca deftly shapes that space over the full sweep of his long practice.
The earliest work in the show, Del 1 a 30,000 (From 1 to 30,000), 198o,
presents the total number of Argentina's desaparecidosas a meticulously
drawn sequence without gaps. Referring directly to Pinochet's brutal
silencing of the opposition, the image redoubles that silence by rendering the individual numbers indistinguishable-by filling all space, he
makes a space of silence. Later, in the "stagecraft" series, tiny props, sets,
and pieces of furniture shiver in cavernous theaters where water pools
on the stage and staircases lead nowhere. Although specific silences
issue from details like empty beds, lonely microphones, and paintings
turned to the wall, they soon vaporize into the overwhelming hush of
massive empty architecture. In the Puro Teatro pictures, first appearing
in 1994, and based on diagrams of auditoriums, the silences are those of
empty seats and of the viewer positioned on the vacant stage. They are
also Kuitca's silencing of his source material by re-coloring the sections to
prevent them from broadcasting their assigned values.
In the paintings Terminal, 2000, and Trauerspiel (Tragedy), 2001, the
image of an empty baggage carousel-shut down for the night or for
repair-proclaims its own silent stillness. It can also recall-or even
induce-the trance-like state of a jet-lagged traveler awaiting reunion
with his personal effects. And then again there is The Ring series, 2002,
whose title invokes a silent soundtrack while its imagery acknowledges
the special silence in which we contemplate record album sleeves; a class
of picture whose silence is always set starkly against the music it
(un)covers. Indeed, nearly all of the works in Everything announcemore or less insistently-Kuitca's ambition to wield silence itself, protoplasmic and excessive, as both figure and ground in his art.
Sweeping In the Museum
It is common to decry the museum's hush as a stifling effect of the herEmpty Rooms, Absent Sounds
metic seals that led Sartre in Troubled Sleep to denounce the Museum of
Let's go back to L'enfance du Christ for a moment. We have established Modern Art as "...organized, approved, enclosed, sanitary, and sterile."5
that, beyond its essential pictorial silence and the silences that its title But Kuitca turns away from Sartre's sneer to embrace the silence of the
articulates, L'enfance du Christis a catalogue of silent rooms, each with its museum, and thereby transform it. He explicitly invites that silence into
OPPOSITE, TOP, LEFT TO RIGHT: House Plan with Tear Drops, 1989, acrylic on canvas, 79 x 63 inches (collection of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; gift of Mary and John Pappajohn,
20101; Mozart-Da Ponte /, 1995, oil, pastel and graphite on canvas, 71 x 92 inches (collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington,
D.C.; Smithsonian Collections Acquisition Program, 19951; OPPOSITE, BOTTOM: Trauerspiel[Tragedy), 2001, oil on canvas, 77 x 133.25 inches (collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and
Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund, 20031
34 ART PAPERS

V'enfance du Christ with a composition that could have been drawn

directly atop a gallery floor plan. We recognize in the image a model of
the galleries around us, and a picture of how we might imagine the
whole show; namely as a suite of rooms, each shaped by its own unique
silences. Indeed, once this painting reveals itself as a visual analogue of
the space in which it hangs, it becomes an enchanted mirror of the
entire exhibition-and we find ourselves on both sides, inhabiting a
series of refractions that fork and join in all directions. Maria Gainza has
said of these effects that Kuitca's oeuvre "ramifies endlessly."6 By them,
our experience of the museum is transformed. Our view of the various
series becomes analogous to Kuitca's making of them, which he
described to me as being like a physical revisiting of familiar locations,
or like strolling from room to room in a well-known house. In a moment,
we are transported, no longer in the museum but walking with the artist
from chamber to chamber in the mansion of his creative endeavor.
Moreover, the surplus energy of these effects arcs, jumping to other
images of floor plans and institutions, such as House Plan with
Teardrops, 1989, and The Tablada Suite, 1992. They, too, become reflections of the museum-simultaneously fractional and endlessly fractal.
This is one of the primary channels by which Kuitca, in the words of Leah
Ollman, "manages ...to abbreviate the distance between private and public space, the intimate and the institutional."7 It is also an example of
what curator Olga Viso means when she says that "...Kuitca has focused
in particular on the spaces where individual and communal experience
and personal and collective memory are exchanged."8 Both of these
observations can be read as referring to the museum-as a public institution and space in which collective memories are exchanged. I do not
mean such a reading to exclude others-Kuitca is clearly concerned with
other institutions and modes of exchange-but I do suggest that it is the
museum's space and silence that he addresses most insistently. This
seems more than plausible for an artist who came of age already making pictures for the museum, and who must know its silences as well as
he knows those of his own studio.
The Opposite of Cinema
Now on to the lush silences of Odessa, 1988, in which the artist layers a
grayscale rendering of a frame from Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship
Potemkin-the famous runaway-pram-on-the-steps sequence-with a
partial road map of Russia that includes the titular city. By arresting this
cinematic image, which we already know to be "silent," Kuitca superimposes a second silence: stillness. In that stillness, we can discern the
image's graphic logic of sounds and silences. The alternating light-anddark progression of the steps fills the top third of the canvas with a
metronomic rhythm that outlines dark silence with spare beats of
lighter sound. The brightness of the baby carriage cries out against this
backdrop as it follows in its downward plunge the path cleared by its
own preceding shadow-the silent space into which it, like all "sounds,"
must eventually fall. Although quieted by the absence of color, this picture demonstrates with rare elegance the simple truth that all sounds
take shape against silence. But it is also the synecdoche of a scene
notable for its sonic richness, which Kuitca has hushed. We are acutely
aware that we do not hear what we can clearly see; the bumping of the
carriage on the steps, the squeak of its springs, the cries of the baby, the
massacre's cacophony. As with the silent soundtrack of L'enfance du
Christ,we cannot help but recreate these absent sounds silently for our-

selves. A last sound is mangled with all this: in the quiet of an imagined
movie house, the primal silence of a collective gasp as the audience
responds in shock.
The silence of the map compounds these silences of the cinematic
image with diagrammatic silence or the diagrammatic trance. It is the
effect that all maps, charts, and diagrams have on us when they transport us into contemplation of that which cannot be expressed any other
way. I refer to the impossibility of writing or speaking the road map of
Russia that Kuitca has painted here. Even if it could be judged somehow
correct, such a text would be absurd and useless. When we read
a map-floor plan or seating chart-we fall silent not only because of
the force with which it impacts memory and imagination but also, and
more fundamentally, because we can no longer rely on language.All of
Kuitca's maps share this power, but the one in Odessa is unique in that it
does not occupy the entire picture plane, but rather disappears under
the image from the film. Better still, the two images cross-fade. Unlike in
a movie, this effect has no direction in time. Sweeping in either way, it
beautifully embodies the function of clearing out that I have ascribed to
silence in Kuitca's work. This function operates in pictures as nowhere
else. What's more, in a cultural landscape dominated by cinema, it presents a truly radical proposition. It might even be said to be the opposite
of cinema. We fall silent in movie theaters, but without the prospect of
meeting a reciprocal silence in which creative potential "ramifies endlessly." Instead, our silence simply makes room for the film's sounds and
images, which proceed with or without us. Odessa effortlessly carries the
weight of its pictorial inheritance right through the age of cinema, and
teaches us that at the core of his practice, Guillermo Kuitca walks and
paints in silence.

NOTES
1. Quoted in Jean-Louis Chr6tien, Hand to Hand: Listening to the Work of Art,
Fordham University Press, 2003,57.

2. Miami Art Museum; October 9, 2oo9-January 17,2010 / Albright-Knox Gallery,

Buffalo; February 19-May 30, 2010 / Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; June 26September 19, 2010 / Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; October 21,
2olo-January 16, 2011.

3. "Hans-Michael Herzog in Conversation with Guillermo Kuitca," in Guillermo

Kuitca:Das Lied von der Erde, Zurich: Daros-Latinamerica AG, 2006.
4. Chr6tien, Hand to Hand: Listening to the Work of Art, 19.
5. Jean-Paul Sartre quoted in Chr6tien, 19.

6. Maria Gainza, "Guillermo Kuitca," Artforum 42:2 (October 2003): 178.

7. Leah Ollman, "Guillermo Kuitca at L.A. Louver - Venice, California," Art in
America 90:1 (November 2002): 166.

8. Olga Viso, "Guillermo Kuitca: Connection and Contradiction," Distemper:

Dissonant Themes in the Art of the 199os, Neal Benezra and Olga M. Viso, eds.,
Washington, DC and New York: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Smithsonian Institution and D.A.P., 66-77.
Grant Johnson is a professor of Visual Art at Alderson-Broaddus College,
Philippi, WV, and a working artist. He began writing professionally on art
relatively recently, but his deep engagement with critical discourse is
long-standing.

OPPOSITE, TOP: The Ring, 2002, oil and colored pencil on linen, 5 panels, overall dimensions: 71.13 x 322.38 inches (collection of Daniel Tempton, Parisl; OPPOSITE, BOTTOM, LEFT
TO RIGHT: Untitled, 2008, oil on canvas, 95 x 83 cm Iprivate collection); Odessa, 1988, acrylic on canvas, 180 x 100 cm (CoLtecci6 MACBA. Fundaci6 Museu d'Art Contemporani de
Barcelona; Dip6sit Coleccion Alfonso Pons Soler)

36 ART PAPERS

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Author: Johnson, Grant

Title: Building Silence: Guillermo Kuitca
Source: Art Pap 34 no6 N/D 2010 p. 32-7
ISSN: 0278-1441
Publisher: Atlanta Art Papers, Inc.
P.O. Box 5748, Atlanta, GA 31107

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