AbouT

American, born in Uruguay

Music studies, piano and composition.  Studied painting with Guadalupe Aparicio in Buenos Aires and later with Prof. Geoffrey Olsen in Miami.

Graduated with a Master of Sciences in Mathematics from University of Buenos Aires.  Held teaching positions at UBA and at the Bariloche National Atomic Center.  Left his teaching position at the National University when the military took control of it by force.  Subsequently had an extended career in Information Technology.

His early career was focused mainly on drawing and large scale painting.  These works were shown in Buenos Aires until 1980, when in another unfortunate encounter with the military dictatorship all of his production was destroyed.  He left the country for good shortly after.  Stopped painting for about 20 years before returning to it.

Represented in Florida by The Americas Collection his works have been shown in museums and galleries in Miami and Coral Gables, Buenos Aires, Cuba and France. Video installations were shown in Music Festivals in the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires; Bourges, France; FIU, Florida and Havana Cuba.  

Throughout his career Viñoly’s dominant interest has been the consideration of the processes through which information is perceived, the functional analysis of its components, and ultimately its emotional impact on the observer.  Whether through the constructs of visual or musical languages, the symbolization of mathematics or combinations of different codes, his production focuses less on the creations of art-objects per-se, than on proposing to the viewer, through artistic means, the consideration of specific concepts or issues, and potentially finding new questionings through that process.

contact: vinolyd@me.com

AN APPROACH TO THE IMAGE

Daniel Viñoly Beceiro

“I’ve begun to consider the idea that the surface of the music might contain a complexity, a diversity and multiplicity of trajectories, all while preserving a single formal idea as its base.”  (Sam Hayden)

Gestures –that is life– leave traces.  Even in art.  It might be either the Object –the proverbial painting, the sculpture, always pretending or aspiring to embody the event itself exclusively and by its own means– or be it the record of a performance, sometimes even more perversely, just residual signs that were part of the actual happening.  These traces that are symbols, supposedly evocative, carriers of coded information, occasionally precise, frequently merely suggestive and vague.  

The dominant issues underlying my work are mostly about the perdurability of signs, the signifying, beyond their content. Their life and validity by themselves, isolated once all relationships to the original signified have been severed.  Which is to say that they are also about the process through which information –or more precisely the attempt to convey it– devours those links and becomes in the end no more than the symbol itself.

The idea is to observe the effects of the power of symbols to stand on their own, their structural capacity to operate in the absence of any reference to a related object, devoid of any subjugation to a requirement of intuition.  The base method employed to develop these pieces is, given a set of visual signs with a common generating root, to dissociate them from that root and to subject them to an intervention mostly manual of realignment or substitution.  Consequently, through a process of accumulation, layering or parallelism these raw materials are combined into a new sign, different and independent.  This invented symbol will again stand by its own power, and make possible a reversal of the process by engaging the viewer in a game of (artificial) reconstruction of a new signified.  Or in a third round, to find out (ask) about the original root employed and consider the process subjacent to the piece. 

Two requirements: the piece must engage the viewer a-priori, independently of all theoretical consideration just by its immediate visual power.  And second: the procedure generating the structure of the piece must validate itself by showing in the final resulting symbol a balance, a consistency resulting –even if not exclusively– from the fact that there is a common provenance to all of its components.  The act of vision has to take place first creating a minimum amount of interest that will allow then further consideration, making vision visible and then moving into a critical phase, deconstruction that vision, the proverbial “Explanation”.  It is possible then to reflect on the ambiguity of the act itself, the inherent disconnect between language (color, form, signs and the syntactic rules) and the information lost in the effort to communicate.  The viewer is not asked to read the signs but to affirm their validity with vision, to think the visible itself.  To see language, the coding of information as vision, and not vision as language.

AS BACKGROUND (The freedom of signs after Derrida):  In his First Investigation Husserl broke open the discussion on the value of signs on their own, and of their role as mediators in the communication process, a debate that has become one of the most visible and influential of our times.  It is notable that while Husserl is the first to recognize that there is a role for signs to play, who identifies the structural capacity of signs to operate in the absence of its related object and proceeds to differentiate and assign important properties to them, he is at the same time uneasy with this independence and attempts to set strict limits on such role.  The wandering signifier must be contained, and rules of grammar are established, rules governing the forms of meaning.  Validation is measured only in terms of intuitability.

Husserl states that signs are useless by themselves because there is no need to indicate mental acts to oneself, there is no genuine, effective communication of anything to the self by the self.  Therefore in soliloquy, signs would ultimately be without purpose, the instrumentality and mediation function of indicative signs becoming useless.  In this view there can be no need to indicate mental acts to oneself, because “the acts in question are experienced by us at that very moment”.   Yet he undermines his own position with his own on inner-time consciousness.  From them derives the conclusion that the present depends on the function of representation.  Representation makes presence possible; presence is the effect of representation, not a modification of it.

With the momentous discovery of (the semiotic) reduction, Husserl isolates an operation which is at once the fundamental gesture of philosophy and the undoing of the classical role of philosophy to provide foundations and assured presence; but he loses his nerve and the reductive impulse is cut short.  Husserl carries out a reduction of phonetic signifiers, not a reduction to them. (JD Caputo)

But it is Derrida the one that unveils the real power of Husserl’s proposals.  As he writes: “The whole originality of this conception lies in the fact that its ultimate subjection to intuitionism does not oppress what might be called the freedom of language, the candor of speech, even if it is false and contradictory.  One can speak without knowing.  And against the whole philosophical tradition Husserl shows that in that case speech is still genuinely speech, provided it obeys certain rules which do not immediately figure as rules of knowledge.”

It is through Derrida that we gain access to the freedom of signs, releasing them from any requirement of intuition.  He warns against letting signs fall into subjugation by created things, contingent units of meaning.  Derrida pushes forward.  He argues that the sign stands, and holds the place for something, even when that something is not to be had even when it is present, for here too the signifier intervenes, producing the effect of presence as something constituted.  The work of signs is to produce presence in the pregnant sense, where presence is impregnated with absence, presence in the supplemented sense, supplemented by signs, sustained by protention and retention.  Presence is not fallen from the sky; it is generated by constitution, engendered by repetition.  It is a work wrought by signs which produce the effect of things themselves.

The sign implies non-plenitude, the power to function without fulfillment, and this is structurally necessary to it as a sign.  This is the essence of the sign as such.  The signs have a role to play, that of tenere, tenancy, standing in and holding the place for something, just when what is present is not to be had. They are the remedy that will provide a supplement for memory. Signs make consciousness stronger, more tenacious.  They make consciousness in the pregnant sense possible. 

While Derrida said that a phenomenal system cannot be woven together without the work of signifiers, of textere, he also points out that the thing always steals away: “…contrary to what phenomenology – which is always phenomenology of perception – has tried to make us believe, contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the thing itself always steals away.”  Thus Derrida takes Husserl’s series of reductions one step further, allowing the sign to survive as semiotic residuum, liberated from the oppressive regime of intuitionsm.  He has isolated the pure form of the signifier, the repeatable code, making a reduction of a logico-grammatical form, still heavy with the matter of metaphysics, in order to make reduction to the pure power of signs to produce to generate their products, thus allowing for the interweaving of signifiers which produce an odd, obscure effect which tantalizes us, but an effect nonetheless.

THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY:  Digital technology is employed in many works, but without being given a preferential role.  Photography, digital image processing, video and digital printing are used as regular tools on the same level of importance as more “traditional” resources. 

Digital imaging is used here as a medium, without making the resulting document the ultimate objective.  The results are taken only as a tool to propose a concept, a consideration of the same issues described above: they are just signs, artificial artifacts never related to any specific signified event or thing. They are taken out of their initial context (if any) and presented only as presumptive traces of an individual or collective “experience” that they are supposed to help the viewer reconstruct.  In this sense the image is not given any presumptive esthetic value in-themselves: the artistic event only takes place in the exercising on the part of the viewer of an evocative effort.