Reactions in a Shop Window

All reactions can, in a nutshell, be considered to be an action and all actions a reaction. Generally speaking, a reaction is a response to an external stimulus: to another person’s action, to an event or to a situation. Without going into the finer points of reactional theory, it suffices to remember that human actions are, in essence, reactions that trigger off new actions as part of an almost endless chain. The history of humanity is the best testimonial to this perpetual process, which not only makes a physical impact but also, more particularly, a cognitive one. This succession of actions and reactions is not alien to artistic discourse. In fact, we just need to review some of the most important pages in the history of art to see the vibrant dialogue between today’s works of art and those of the past. Any work of art, wherever it may be and whenever it may have been produced, can spark off very diverse reactions anywhere on the spectrum between two absolute extremes: total appreciation when a work of art is the object of admiration or imitation or, at the opposite end, total rejection when it is out of sync with a certain cultural scene. Between both extremes, reactions can take endless different forms, with one aspect of the work being favoured to the detriment of another, for example the figurative content instead of its expressive capacity.

RE-ACTION. Genealogy and Countercanon, a project by Alonso and Marful, is a perfect example of the perpetual dynamism of actions and their reactions. RE-ACTION is a process of recreation, based on six particularly well-known photographs: one by Eugène Atget, one by Maurice Guibert, two by August Sander and another two by Duchenne de Boulogne. A new version of each of these six historical photographs -which span a period from the mid 19th century to the 1920s- was made by the two Spanish artists Alonso and Marful. This initial reaction then acted as a catalyst for a second artist, who was invited to create a new version in yet another reaction. In turn, this new artist sparked off a reaction by a third person and so on in an almost interminable work in progress .

It is worth concentrating for a moment on the first of these photographs/symbols, taken by Eugène Atget in 1925 and entitled Magasin, Avenue des Gobelins. The four chain reactions that it triggered are particularly fascinating because they are based on a subtle game of reflections of differing degrees in the shop window immortalized by the French photographer. In Atget’s photograph, in addition to the shop window with its display of men’s clothes, reflected in it is the image of the historic Gobelins Tapestry Factory, located in the street of the same name in Paris’ 13th arrondissement. The shop window and the reflection both seem to merge, striking some kind of intimate chord: the French fashions of the day enter into dialogue with the ancient craft of tapestry-making in a process of mutual homage. Through this very act, the shop window’s reflective surface both unites and separates past and present.

In the photograph, the (headless) tailor’s dummies and man (with a head) - all rigorously dressed in male attire- bear price tags. They all appear to be facing left, arranged in succession, with the exception of one seemingly angled to the right, looking in the same direction out of the corner of his eye toward the place from which the photo was taken. This is the only spot, it must be noted, from which the photographer could avoid his own reflection in the window. The expression of this tailor’s dummy seems to be frozen, just like the hands of all the dummies on display in the shop window, all meticulously gloved and apparently caught in the midst of an action.

In Alonso and Marful’s reaction, Women’s Clothes Shop (after August Sander) dated 2010, the hands are enlarged, taken out of the original context of the shop window and arranged in a horizontal sequence -with the hand of the dummy in the forefront repeated up to five times-, thus reinforcing the bottom edge of the photograph. One of these hands even seems to have been given a specific function: it holds a baton, painted directly onto the surface of the photograph in a red brushstroke (contrasting with the beautiful calligraphy of a red “a” in small letters on the suit pocket of the dummy to the right). The baton is pointing at the dummy that stands taller than all the rest: the one looking toward the photographer who, in Alonso and Marful’s photo, has been lent greater emphasis. Even though their version of Atget’s photograph conserves the same vertical format, it has been zoomed in slightly, bringing the shop window closer to the spectator/shopper. In other words, although the spatial layout of Atget’s photograph has been maintained, Alonso and Marful have reduced the field of vision, altering the spectator’s involvement in it. By replacing the price of the garments with the words “Not for sale”, they encourage an interpretation associated with a change in gender since Atget’s male dummies have been transformed into female ones.

Elena del Rivero’s reaction in the 2013 work By return to A&M, directly influences our perception of the images. Although del Rivero seems to borrow Alonso and Marful’s work without altering it, in reality there is a big change which fills it with new meaning: a stitch, made of black thread, covers the horizontal slit that crosses the dummies’ eyes from one side to the other, highlighting the self-engrossment of a look that is now turned inward, thus doing away with all forms of communication with the outside world.

The third reaction by Andi Arnovitz, in the 2014 work Not for sale , starts out by radicalizing the process of recreation, transforming the vertical format into a horizontal one. Elena del Rivero’s work is swivelled 900 to the left and filled with red, incorporating new elements in a new arrangement. The change of format also entails a change in the image’s contents: nine semi-naked female figures hold a small card in their hands with the words “Not for sale”. Ten invisible puppeteers, with noticeably large hands in relation to the size of the puppets, direct the latter’s movements from above. This composition has a disturbingly odd effect on us: there are ten hands for nine puppets. Apart from this, what is also noticeable is a “shop window effect” that surpasses the semantic scope of the original shop window. Not only has the compositional structure changed, but there is a breakaway: we are confronted with a different narrative, in which the presence of the spectator/shopper has been replaced with that of a potential observer/puppet who regards the red thread that falls below the confines of the photograph, invading his or her space. It is no mere coincidence that the hand that grasps this thread, above the nine female puppets, is the tenth one.

The fourth reaction, the 2014 work Untitled by Tahmineh Monzavi, takes interplay with reflections and overlapping to an extreme and the blurred effect achieved by the preceding artists is intensified. The shop window’s transparent surface is revealed, clearly denoted by the vertical glimmer on the left-hand side of the photograph. There is just one dummy behind the glass, on whose surface the street is reflected, with the shop windows of other shops and some pedestrians visible at shoulder height. The dummy stands in the foreground, looking as if it is about to come bursting out of the image. It has been deprived of certain female attributes, only visible in the reflections of other dummies in the background. Leaning onto the glass, oblivious of everything around him, eyes down, apathetic and self-absorbed, stands a male figure. He acts as an axis, separating the describable space of the left-hand side (which makes up most of the image) from the neutral, undefined, uninhabited space on the right. In comparison with the previous photographs, there is a return to the masculine: female attributes have been done away with and male ones restored to the point of a man’s actual portrayal in flesh and blood. The change in gender coincides with a change in perspective, with eyes no longer intent on looking through the glass of the shop window. Instead, they are frozen elsewhere in a petrified wait, like the dummy’s expression.

In the final instance, each of the images analysed so far forms part of a chain of works in progress, based on Atget’s photograph. They each acquire a specific meaning when related to the semantic deposits of the works that precede them (with their respective differences). This is the common denominator to all the works in the RE-ACTION project.

Each work conserves a memory of the previous one on its surface, using it as a building brick or key initial semantic basis for successive reactions. The outcome is a series of interlinking photomontages, based on one shared photographic matrix. As for the artists’ reactions, however, each of the new images is semantically independent. Thus this is not an ex novo or ex nihilo work, but a process of selection and reformulation, re-using raw material already imbued with meaning. Each photograph is an accumulation of existing visual materials, linked up with other new ones in a perpetual semantic dialogue between what has already been done and what traces one image should leave on the next. In this way, sediments that might otherwise be condemned to stagnation are infused with new dynamism. In short, although each image-reaction might seem to respond to a mere process of accumulation, in reality it is transformed into a rich generator of meaning. Using existing content matter, each reaction gives rise to a new different creation, both figuratively and in plastic terms. Each successive work thus presupposes an ongoing stocktaking process, with the artist weighing up the plastic and semantic potential of the elements that comprise it before either enlarging or playing them down in the creation of the new version.

In conclusion, action and reaction are an integral part of each and every one of the works, coexisting in the same space and same image. This image in turn acts as a mnemonic aid for preceding works and as a surface that will enter into dialogue with future semantic reworked versions.