Big Stage 111
Rodrigo Valenzuela has been producing incredible work for the past couple of years. I was lucky enough to get a copy of his last book, Journeyman, published by Mousse Publishing. It was my introduction to the Chilean-American’s work, and from that point, we managed to have an extensive conversation about his work for Nearest Truth. He has had quite a life, and his travels to America are worth listening to in their own right. As for Valenzuela’s work, what draws me to it is the brilliant mix of politics and what appears to be a science-fiction aesthetic.
Valenzuela specifically focuses on post-human labor and its effect on our future, which I find intriguing. He uses tableaux to discuss the violent horror of eliminating human work. The machines he crafts look like they were birthed in a David Cronenberg film, such as Existenz or Dead Ringers. I mention Dead Ringers as the surgical instruments that Jeremy Irons’s character uses for their gynecological clinic, which are of an implied alien fashion. They exceed in a baroque grotesquerie, much like Valenzuela’s monstrous anti-labor implements. I can also hear Charleston Heston screaming that Soylent Green is indeed the people I view them.
In cinematic terms, I also think of Stephen King’s ultimately silly yet underrated film Maximum Overdrive, in which cosmic dust settles over the planet, promoting the machines to come alive and attack the human race. Only Emilio Estevez can battle it out with the head automated semi-truck to regain order. Of course, within the realms of the machines taking over, there is a plethora of material to choose from. To not mention Phillip K. Dick, I Robot, Asimov, Ursula K Le Guin, etc., is simply a shorthand, not a complete omission.
With the still life images, I am also reminded of an obtuse relationship to painting, invoking Bosch, Picasso, and Miro, perhaps even more than the sculpture of Calder. They feel less like objects and more like oddly relic-oriented iconography with a profound twist of absurd surrealism. They seethe, almost move, and are read like photo-realistic images more than they do photographs themselves for me. That may be a condition of the age in which we live. I have become accustomed to viewing many photographic images, particularly fantastical images like these, as if they were manufactured by AI, which, in the case of Valenzuela, they are EMPHATICALLY NOT. That would undervalue the point he is interested in making. He is interested in how bodies, labor, architecture, and material objects collide, collude, and conspire within the more extensive discussion regarding socio-economics in the broader territories of the West.
Several employs tease out the conceptual load of labor and bodies within the book. First, the presence of the fantastical and violent machines invade the frame. At first, they appear benign, but in their strange animate form, they become fecund with a deathly potential like Boston Dynamics dogs and other robotics. Wires become garrotes, Gears, and tools for rending flesh. Also of interest are the devils that enter the frame. They are performative pieces placed on a chessboard closet room, where they jump and make plans. They are avatars for the corporations that use human life as gristle for the never-ending-progress-through-capitalism fantasies. They even look slightly like they were culled from video games, linking technology further to the body politic. They are fascinating co-conspirers to the machine.
Further to the book’s heart are the archival photos of South American workers. They are the fundamental human counterpart to the machines and the devil dancers in the chessboard room. They root and anchor the human presence. They are outlined in a dot matrix, almost suggesting they will be read about in books by future generations of humans, machines, or a combination. This is complemented by a diagrammatic overleaf that suggests more mechanical discussions of how the human essence will be assessed within the context of the debate. The book is perfectly dystopian and dark. It suggests critical discussions for our very near future. Highest Recommendation!
Rodrigo Valenzuela
New Works For a Post-Workers World
VEII