The current exhibit at the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art is the first large-scale museum survey of the multi-media, Venezuela born artist José Antonio Hernández-Diez. Curated by the New Museum of Contemporary Art’s senior curator, Dan Cameron, and adjunct curator, Gerardo Mosquera, Hernández-Diez’s landmark pieces sparsely populate the modest gallery. Vestiges of vernacular culture mix with the scientific, religious, domestic, and leisure worlds. Sneakers, a taxidermied dog, skateboards made of pork fat, a pool table, and oversized acrylic fingernails all play a part in Hernández-Diez’s pop cultural palette.

There are a number of colorful vinyl banners scattered throughout the gallery that greet the viewer. Each banner displays a stack of shoes. Each shoe bears the letter of its brand. A New Balance shoe has an N on it; Guess, a G; Etnes, an E; and so forth. When read from top to bottom a stack spells out the name of a famous philosopher or literary figure. There is a Kant stack, a Hegel stack, a Hume, a Marx, and a Kafka.

Kant, 2000
C-print, ed. 5
190 x 140 cm
© 2001, José Antonio Hernández-Diez

With bright colors, studio lighting, and shiny, plastic backdrops, the images on the vinyl banners could easily be an ad for a shoe store if a small logo were placed in the corner. Upon closer inspection the shoes are not all new. Some are slightly used, but not broken in. Some dirt on the soles belies mild usage. Many of the shoes are skateboard shoes or street-style shoes designed after skate fashion. This skate fashion motif is often used by Hernández-Diez as a means of pointing to a street-savvy culture. The philosopher footwear banners suggest that the underpinnings of much street culture philosophy is rooted in bits of each of Kant’s, Hegel’s, and Marx’s theories. However, there is an edge of sarcasm in that Marx would be violently ill at his name’s commercialization in fashion footwear.

In “Vas pal Cielo y Vas Llorando,” [You’ll Go to Heaven, and You’ll Go Crying] (1992) ghostly video projections of Andean street children laying horizontally and rise from a large pile of dirt on the gallery floor and float toward the ceiling. As the youth reach the top of the projection frame, the screen flashes white, the first child disappears and another child rises from the earth. Reverberating, sparse percussion plays over the projections, as if the scene were playing out near the steel mills of the dead.

The idea that the forlorn looking street children are heading towards heaven does not change the fact that they look tattered and somber. Hernández-Diez’s commenting on the economic plight of some of the people of Venezuela suggest their children regularly die, and religion is the only thing that gives hope. But rest is not had until heaven is reached, and the children will continue to cry until they arrive. This street cynicism pervades Hernández-Diez’s work and at times wears a bit thin and becomes predictable.

The central piece, “La Hermandad” [The Brotherhood], a 1994 installation created for the exhibition “Cocido y Crudo” (also curated by Dan Cameron), light up like a Broadway theater set; the installation occupies a central nook of the gallery. Three tables stand in line each bearing a television set and a pork fat skateboard in various states of decay. The skateboards are made by taking slabs of fried pork, known as chicharron, and bolting two sets of skateboard wheels to the glistening, translucent, and sometimes hairy hide. Behind the tables a long metal trough sits to catch the melting fat from the overhead pork skateboards. These skateboards dangle from a galvanized steel fencing pole like animal carcasses fresh from the hunt or cuts of meat displayed in the butcher’s window. The television sets display the lifespan of the protagonist - the pork fat skateboard - from its birth in a sizzling frying pan, to playfully rolling along city streets, to being eaten and torn apart by wild city dogs.

La Hermandad, 1994
video still
dim. variable
© 1994, José Antonio Hernández-Diez

The character of the skateboard is an interesting substitute for the street children viewed in “Vas pal Cielo y Vas Llorando.” The once living creature is resurrected as an urbanized hybrid that spends its days wandering the streets until devoured by wild dogs. This seems to resonate with the feeling sought for in “Vas pal Cielo y Vas Llorando,” as if the ascending street children are the souls of the destroyed skateboards.

Although “La Hermanidad” is a sculptural installation, the piece has a painterly feel in that there is one main vantage point from which to view it. It does not invite the viewer to walk through the space or interact with the pieces. This is true of most of the pieces in the exhibition. When a video is involved, the projection or television situates the viewer at a certain distance and at a certain vantage point where the piece is to be experienced. When a video is absent, the rectilinear forms of the pieces - a transparent acrylic box, tables, oversized remote control battery lids - all hint that the viewer is to align him/herself with the edge of the rectangle. The curator tried to break up the monotony of the rectangle by placing two works askew from the ninety-degree walls, but it is a very transparent attempt.

When the work is looked at, aside from context and environment, it can be very captivating and fun - an aspect which is often lost in the dour face of art or sacrificed to sarcasm. When Hernández-Diez leaves his tired cynicism aside, his work flourishes and stays free of postmodern cliché.

However, I take issue with many of the curatorial choices in display and selection. When referring to this exhibit it is impossible to do so without mention of the curators. The show is meant to be an overview of the previous decade of Hernández-Diez’s work. This curatorial abridgement touches lightly on the major themes of the work giving the gallery a very schizophrenic feel. No two works use the same materials in the same way. There is a thematic thread of commonality between the remote control battery lids, the video work, the philosopher shoe banners, and the other works, but materially the pieces are singular. No two works look alike. The curators wanted to point more towards the artist than the work or ideas. The show is not so much about an idea, nor a medium, but a showcase for José Antonio Hernández-Diez, the artist. In a way, it makes the artist as much of a commodity and advertising feature as the stacked sneakers. However, it would be a little difficult to stack enough shoes to spell out Hernández-Diez.

Originally published in the Miami Art Exchange.