The Site of Paradise

Chapter 1 maps how petroleum development revenue allowed Venezuelans to acquire and not produce the same type of modernity that had been created elsewhere in response to vastly different conditions. Instead functionalism and the varied genealogies of Constructivism, geometric abstraction and kinetic art in particular, became the architectural and aesthetic signposts of this elusive paradigm. Yet internal conditions limited the reach of these ideologically “neutral” international tendencies as well as of the overarching national modernization project of which they were a part. A close examination of extant texts and photographs by El Techo reveals how the group challenged the cultural establishment, exposed its political dissidence, and anchored its project in the harsh material reality of the human underbelly that fuelled the dreams of progress in Venezuela.

Dead Matter for an Enlivened Practice

Chapter 5 considers the exhibition Homenaje a la necrofilia (November 1962) by artist Carlos Contramaestre (1933−96) as an extreme example of how El Techo subverted nationalized aesthetic values associated with petroleum-driven capitalism to create art that reflected the grit of contemporaneity. Through a series of twelve ephemeral assemblages created from disintegrating cattle carcasses, viscera, and blood, Contramaestre confronted death and decomposition with forceful vivid assertions of physical love. The conflation of the Freudian sexual and death drives was a direct affront against the technological utopia projected by hegemonic tendencies such as geometric-abstraction or the restrictive unanimity of (far less popular) strains of folkloric landscapes and genre scenes that circulated in Venezuela at this time.But the strategy also allowed the artist and the collective to challenge an atmosphere of political repression, torture, disappearances, and a corrosive culture of cyclical violence that accompanied a fast-tracked national project of socioeconomic modernization in the country.

The Authority of Kitsch

Chapter 4 reads Homenaje a la cursilería’s format as a potent gesture against bourgeois notions of etiquette, taste, and social practices. In a manifesto accompanying the exhibit, El Techo emphasized lo cursi (not just melodramatic flare and excessive garishness [tackiness, or kitsch when applied to an object], but also excessive sentimentality bordering on the ridiculous [schmaltz])and lo pavoso(the distasteful conduits of bad luck). The balleneros believed that these Venezuelan traits were often repressed in official discourse, particularly those intended for international circulation. Yet here the group reclaimed them as the defining parameters for its selection of materials. Indeed, Homenaje a la cursilería represented an oppositional posture against the banalities and superficiality of the country’s outwardly projected state of affairs. The recuperation and redirection of the kitsch aspects of Venezuelan culture became the basis for a critique on the partial nature of national “modernity.” At the same time, El Techo’s use of these popular behavioral traits also required it to confront and destabilize the Situationist notion of the spectacle, that numbing corpus of commodities and experiences that alienated the capitalist body from the pain of real life.

The Fluidity of Venezuelan Informalism

Chapter 2 examines how, in the context of this imperfect panorama, Informalism represented the visual manifestation of a growing discontent with the economic conditions that spurned the “make-believe” at the core of the diatribes of the Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Coronil and the telenovela pioneer turned political commentator José Ignacio Cabrujas. In the late eighties, they had observed that with the professionalization of the oil industry in earlier decades the wealth that it generated attained chimerical qualities in Venezuela. Such rapid development that obscured the realities of a largely agrarian nation whose modernization was artificially fed by petrodollars. Here, I borrow from GeorgesBataille’s treatises on ritualistic expenditure and his argument that economic wealth and growth governed the physical force field of all organic phenomena. I propose that by the early sixties Venezuela’s unspent energetic surplus had begun to unleash a destructive process from popular segments of the population that, it may be argued, is climaxing in present-day Chavismo. Bataille’s thinking revealed the paradox of utility, or life “beyond [the realm] of utility” as he described it: its ultimate end could only be uselessness as sovereignty was achieved only by those who consumed but did not labor.

Coda

The Coda retraces the late activities of El Techo de la Ballena membersJorge Camacho, Dámaso Ogaz, Carlos Contramaestre, Daniel Gonzálezand the group’sdisintegration beginning in the second half of the sixties. The group is conceptualized as a metaphorical “roof of the whale” that succumbed to a sea of troubles brought about by the decomposition of fads. The section ends by questioning the group’s legacy in light of the crumbling instability of the late sixties, when it conducted its last gestures.

The Contingency of the Whale

Chapter 3 recapitulates on the most obvious strategies through which El Techo remained rooted in the past in order to define its contemporary visual identity: the perpetuation of medieval symbolism; the adscription to old European literary models such as the kennings of ancient Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, and Old German literatures; and the repeated use of sources from Latin American colonial print culture. I also explore the rationale behind the name itself, el techo de la ballena (the roof of the whale). Drawing from the group’s extant documentary record, I argue that both of the elements in the double construct of “the roof” and “the whale” functioned as allegories for an accumulative practice characterized by the juxtaposition of disarticulated elements. While reminiscent of the Surrealist assemblage, El Techo carried this fundamental strategy—which Dámaso Ogaz aptly summarized as lo majamámico—to its unparalleled edge.

Introduction

Here the author introduces the key constituents and concepts of El Techo de la Ballena, sets the tone, and describes the structure of the rest of the book. As she argues, El Techo used the visual arts to expose the depths of the profound inequality hidden within the façade of Venezuela’s modernization. For the group, the concern became to create art that reflected not a technological utopia associated with capitalism but, rather, the grit of contemporaneity. As Gaztambide argues, the group’s all-encompassing dimension, anti-art posture, and deliberate retro-modern outlook served as the hallmarks for a visual arts project that counteracted the swiftness by which Venezuelan culture entered modernity. Moreover, the key concepts of contemporaneity, contingency, and fluidity suggest a productive, if malleable, ideological positioning for such an indeterminate group as El Techo.