Doris Salcedo

4 Doris Salcedo Edited by Julie Rodrigues Widholm, with an introduction by Madeleine Grynsztejn and contributions by Elizabeth Adan, Katherine Brinson, Helen Molesworth, and Franklin Sirmans Doris Salcedo is a comprehensive survey of one of today’s most important international artists. Salcedo, who lives and works in Bogotá, produces meticulously handcrafted sculptures and installations that address the question of what happens to people impacted by systemic violence. Her work is grounded in rigorous fieldwork, including testimonies of victims who have suffered loss and trauma due to war. With an elegant sensibility that Doris Salcedo balances the gravitas of her subjects, her works— often made of everyday materials such as furniture, clothing, and other vernacular objects—bear witness to conflict and suggest avenues for a collective mourning which, in the artist’s words, “attempts to give back the sense, meaning, and form that violence Doris Salcedo took away from its victims.” The volume’s essays provide new scholarship on Salcedo’s aesthetic strategies and influences, her philosophic approach to representation and metaphor, her reinterpretation of the Duchampian readymade, as well as her poetic constructions and evocations of religious themes. The book includes more than one hundred color illustrations highlighting sculptures and installations from Salcedo’s thirty-year career, including many site-specific, large-scale public works from the last fifteen years. JULIE RODRIGUES WIDHOLM is curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. MADELEINE GRYNSZTEJN is the Pritzker Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. MCA Chicago ISBN: 978-0-226-24458-7 | Chicago PRINTED IN CHINA DORIS SALCEDO Edited by Julie Rodrigues Widholm and Madeleine Grynsztejn With contributions by Elizabeth Adan, Katherine Brinson, Helen Molesworth, and Doris Salcedo A mountain of chairs piled between build- Published to accompany Salcedo’s rst retro- ings. Shoes sewn behind animal membranes spective exhibition and the American de- into a wall. A massive crack running through but of her major work Plegaria muda, Doris the oor of Tate Modern. Powerful works Salcedo is the most comprehensive survey of like these by sculptor Doris Salcedo evoke her sculptures and installations to date. In the signicance of bearing witness and pro- addition to featuring new contributions by cesses of collective healing. Salcedo, who respected scholars and curators, the book lives and works in Bogotá, roots her art includes over one hundred color illustra- in Colombia’s social and political land- tions highlighting many pieces from Salce- scape—including its long history of civil do’s twenty-ve-year career. Oering fresh wars—with an elegance and poetic sensi- perspectives on a vital body of work, Do- bility that balances the gravitas of her sub- ris Salcedo is a testament to the power of jects. Her work is undergirded by intense one of today’s most important international eldwork, including interviews with people artists. who have suered loss and endured trauma from political violence. In recent years, Sal- cedo has become increasingly interested in Julie Rodrigues Widholm is curator at the Mu- the universality of these experiences and seum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Madeleine has expanded her research to Turkey, It- Grynsztejn is the Pritzker Director of the Museum aly, Great Britain, and the United States. of Contemporary Art Chicago. 87/8 x 11, 240 pages, For a review copy or other publicity inquiries, To place orders in the United States or 105 color plates please contact: Rose Rittenhouse, Promotions Canada, please contact your local University Manager, University of Chicago Press, 1427 of Chicago Press sales representative or ISBN 13: 978-0-226-24458-7 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. contact the University of Chicago Press by Publication Date: March 2015 Email: [email protected]; phone at 1-800-621-2736 or by fax at Cloth $50.00 / £35.00 Phone: (773) 702-0376; Fax (773) 702-9756. 1-800-621-8476. 3682 01 Doris Salcedo FM [mwd 12-1].indd 28 12/12/14 1:24 PM 29 Seeing Things that is likely to become increasingly at issue in contemporary art history and that is central to the work of Doris Salcedo. In examining practices such as Elizabeth Adan Salcedo’s, which emerged at the moment, in the late 1980s and 1990s, often aligned with a historical shift to contemporaneity,5 and which have since contin- Over the course of its relatively short existence, ued to play a role in contemporary art, how does one contemporary art history has grown exponentially actually locate the contemporaneity of such prac- as a field. At the same time, it has become an object tices? To put it another way, how does one contend of study, with considerable attention focused on the with an artist whose work has been contemporary incongruities that can seem to permeate, and poten- for, say, twenty-plus years? tially even destabilize, the field.1 Perhaps most obvi- In Salcedo’s case, the subjects that she addresses, ous is the apparent contradiction between present as well as the materials and techniques that she uses, and past implied in the very phrase “contemporary continue from her early projects in the late 1980s art history,” along with related concerns that art and and 1990s into the present day. But, again, how does cultural production of the current moment are gen- one account for the span of contemporaneity in erated at an ever more rapid pace, while the work Salcedo’s work? Does one consign the earlier work of researching and writing about these objects of to the past and historicize it, reserving the word study occurs more slowly.2 In addition, some authors “contemporary” for the chronologically more recent have questioned the feasibility of what for many work? Does one assert that the contemporaneity remains a central objective, to resist and intervene of certain developments extends well beyond the in the seemingly all-encompassing market forces moment of their emergence? Or, does one trace the associated with the global proliferation of capitalism nascent history of certain concerns that emerged and its attendant visual forms, in what Guy Debord during the period termed “contemporary” with an has termed “the society of the spectacle.”3 At least eye to the perhaps subtle, but no less consequential, one further set of potentially conflicting concerns shifts one might find within such concerns since has also shaped art and cultural production since the their initial development? postwar era: tensions around the viability of repre- It is a combination of these latter two approaches sentation, especially in the face of theories of unrep- that I take in this examination of the artist’s sculp- resentability in art and culture that have developed tures and installations. For more than twenty years, with the spread of political violence and terror in Salcedo has investigated the individual experiences, the world. social conditions, and lasting impacts of political Together, these manifold issues could suggest violence and terror, as well as the challenges that that the field of contemporary art history is riddled such matters pose for visual art and representation. with conflicts and inconsistencies. More important, She is especially known for projects that explore the though, as several authors have noted, such debates ways in which, as a result of such violence, victims point to determined efforts to comprehend, or at vanish, leaving a profound absence and sense of least indicate, the full complexity of visual practices instability in the world; above all, the artist’s works in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. have insistently attempted to counter these effects. Indeed, for a number of authors, these issues, with As has been widely noted, however, nowhere in her their apparent incongruities and potential contra- work does the artist depict, document, or otherwise dictions, in fact constitute the field of contemporary include pictorial imagery of victims or their expe- art history.4 riences of violence. Instead, at the same time that There is also another matter to consider, one Salcedo has committed to making victims and their that may initially appear to be relatively minor but experiences present and evident, she has placed 3682 01 Doris Salcedo FM [mwd 12-1].indd 29 12/12/14 1:24 PM 42 Untitled, 1986 Steel shelving, steel cot, plastic dolls, rubber, wax, and animal fiber 7 1 73½ × 94 ⁄8 × 18 ⁄8 in. (187 × 241 × 46 cm) 3682 02 Doris Salcedo Plates [mwd 12-1].indd 42 12/12/14 1:24 PM 3682 02 Doris Salcedo Plates [mwd 12-1].indd 43 12/12/14 1:24 PM 48 3682 02 Doris Salcedo Plates [mwd 12-1].indd 48 12/12/14 1:24 PM 49 Untitled (and detail, left), 1989–90 Steel bed frames, plaster, cotton shirts, and animal fiber 7 Two parts, each: 71 ⁄8 × 35¼ × 5½ in. (182.6 × 89.5 × 14 cm) 3682 02 Doris Salcedo Plates [mwd 12-1].indd 49 12/12/14 1:24 PM 110 La Casa Viuda I (and detail, right), 1992–94 Wooden door, wooden chair, clothing, and thread 13 3 22 ⁄16 × 23½ × 15 ⁄16 in. (57.8 × 59.7 × 38.7 cm) 3682 02 Doris Salcedo Plates [mwd 12-1].indd 110 12/12/14 1:26 PM 111 3682 02 Doris Salcedo Plates [mwd 12-1].indd 111 12/12/14 1:26 PM 150 Untitled, August 27, 1999 Roses Dimensions variable Ephemeral public project, Bogotá, 1999 3682 02 Doris Salcedo Plates [mwd 12-1].indd 150 12/12/14 1:27 PM 151 Untitled, August 13, 2000 Roses Dimensions variable Ephemeral public project, Bogotá, 2000 3682 02 Doris Salcedo Plates [mwd 12-1].indd 151 12/12/14 1:27 PM 152 Nov.

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