Ice Stories
by Justo Pastor Mellado
November 1991

As for the plastic space, the participation of Chile in the Fair of Seville has given course to a polemic that seems to me of vital importance to recover, and that for the effects of this text I will name " the incident of the Iceberg ". It is curious how, from the mention of the object, the worrying character of your extension appears immediately: the notion "iceberg" supposes the material existence of an invisibility that is to the scope .Y for this reason in a material that has fascinated artists and ... browsers. For the time being, is enough to point out the new type of relation that has been established between cultural industrial production and produción of work; since the conduction of the project has put in check the author's notion itself. I speak about " incident ", exactly that's why: one treats pieces of ice as a turn of mass .Los they get rid of a major block and to the deshielarse progressively they suffer a change of form, redistributing your mass and realizing violent drafts on your axis. In synthesis: the ice "works", physics{physicist} and conceptualmente. As for the above mentioned, " one makes to work ", be already like an explanatory model of the proper modifications of the work of art, or, as{like} matter. It is here where the question arises autoral. The Project Seville is a cultural industrial production, in which the notion of responsibility is diluted in the institucionalidad of the company of communications that proposes it, inscribed{registered} in a certain politics of the State{Condition}. In this measurement, it exists an interpretive hegemony that fixes the limits of your immediate recognition, by virtue of the ratification of reposition of the Chilean economy in the world context .Respecto of this point, which seems to me legitimate from the productive industrial rationality, is necessary that the productive rationality of the system of the art makes feel your weight in the debate. The author's politics, in the art, tries to doubt the foundation of the interpretive hegemony of the industrial producers .Y it happens{passes}, clearly, for exhibiting the precedents of the relation that the Chilean artists have supported with the ices. To doubt this question this question, it already shows from the desire to share a process of accumulation of precedents, which allows to indicate the diverse affiliations that plan the manipulation of regarding saying{above mentioned}. There is a Chilean artist, Gonzalo Mezza that there has been, for several decades, facinado for the ices .Ha early, somehow, a rhetoric of freezing, which refuses to take satisfaction in the simple reduction fisiognómica of the coldness as{like} national character; that for the rest, present myth sends to an old man in the political literatures before to the birth of the Social Sciences, and that it consists of subordinating the character of the peoples{villages} to the planetary distribution of the climates. On this matter, the novels of Edgar Alan Poe and Julio Verne have established a symbolic frame deonde the central question is the anxiety before the improvement of the finitud, across{through} an epic of conquest of the ices that carries to extremes the desire to reach the inalcansable .Tesis supported by the French project " brise-Glace ", directed by Pascal-Emmanuel Galet, at the head of the Office of Multimedia Operations of the Department Frances de Asuntos Extranjeros. And this occasion, the French marina I realize studies of factivilidad in order to an iceberg transports from the polar skullcap flagstaff the Seine, in Paris. Meteorological adverse conditions prevented this operation from being realized in the epoch of opening of the program. Be worth while pointing out that in the above mentioned project, there took part the Chilean film maker Raul Ruiz, who produced the movie " Histories of Ice ", of whose{which} version to Spanish I himself took charge. It is not a coincidence that the literary projects of Poe and Verne took place in the frame of the nineteenth-century colonialism finesecular, which to these heights has already cornered the totality of the territory of the planet. It is not also a coincidence, in the same line{figure}, that the artists take the ices, you play in tune of the XXth century, as{like} fabulación of the experience limit of the preservation. That one to been the character of the tabajo of Gonzalo Mezza, from 1972 Installation was proposing to the Museum of Fine arts your project video of sculpture of ice. This work consitia in making three "editions" of Milo's Venus of sculptures of ice colored and realized with waters cordilleranas. [" whose{which} slow thaw would be registered for legendary video covers "] .Trabajo that could be mounted only in 1980, in the second Meeting of art. Misery of the Chilean art: the installation should have been content to recount the sculptures, exibiendo blocks of industrial ice in whose{which} interior introduced photocopies of the above-mentioned work. The critics Gaspar Galaz and Milan Ivelic, in your work " Chile, current art " (1988) write: " In Thaw Venus " the camera recorded the transfer of bars of ice to a space of art (the cultural intituto of the counts); inside said barrras the artist introduced photos of Milo's Venus, which they liberated from your sit-in{enclosure} after the ice was melted"

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Since I have said on having begun, the ices and the freezing have fascinated Gonzalo Mezza, from the epoch of your first contacts with conceptual Catalan artists. A brief rrecorrido for your graphic coarse work to indicate a criterion of sufficient responsibility in insisting on the utoria of the current one " projecto of the ice " .....

I try, since{so} perquizar some immediate precedents that allow to place the above mentioned spirit, I will begin for the electronic extenciones. Frozen: word that indicates a change of the state{condition} .Es what happens when one stops the Image Video, supporting and the " break. " Really, there is no break; the movement does not stop, only it changes the state{condition} like the water that goes on from the liquid state{condition} to the solid state{condition}. We know already from Marx: all occurred rarely it disappears in the air. It is a phrase that Marsahall Bernam invests as{like} title .. of your inportante I test on to modernity .Y in this essay, of one of the things that he{she} speaks as{like} symptom of the modernist illusion, it is of "Palais de Glaces" glass palaces. palaces of mirrors, palaces of ice. Returning to our word: what we have before the eyes is not an absence of movement; it is a movement " in blouche " .Que the image moves or not, he{she} lacks of inportancia: the flow of electrons that covers the points of the screen is never interrupted. Only it is canalized otherwise; it is re-located .Del the same way as the iceberg re-locates the conceptual postulation of three bars of the Venus. In the same way that the video re-locates the conceptual postulation of the work with venus, supporting " favorite " - it freezes - the image, as if it was the guarantee to make her remain in our memory .Del the same way, once again, the photocopies cogelan on having bothered{calcined}. Is not it said, perhaps, that the ice is burning hot? The previous reflection comes from a text of the critic and videista French Jean-Paul Fargier, alumnus " Cryogenie " (criogenia: skill{technology} of writing produces temperature very low) for the catalgo of the International Days of the Photo and You them Come up, realized in Montpelier in April, 1988 .Desde enonces, it is a notion that accompanies my reflections on the works of artists who work with the cold, This is, with cold technologies of the image.

gonzalo mezza (1992)
project deshielo en sevilla + polo sur
as the star of the flag, flag of chile for 500 years Spain Guadalquivir river side.

Ice-Neon, photographs, paper, acrylic boxes, impression offset, digital laser,

12 meters x 7 meters x 7 meters
photo: registre gm MAC , Comptemporaneo Art Museum, santiago, Chile

( Under Construction, It may be in the process of being upgraded )