Artist of the day: Artists of the Day, March 9, 2022: Allora & Calzadilla, a Puerto Rican visual artists (#1516)

Wednesday, March 9, 2022

Artists of the Day, March 9, 2022: Allora & Calzadilla, a Puerto Rican visual artists (#1516)

Jennifer Allora (1974) and Guillermo Calzadilla (1971) are a collaborative duo of visual artists who live and work in San Juan, Puerto Rico. They were the United States Representatives for the 2011 Venice Biennale, the 54th International Art Exhibition, in 2011.

Jennifer Allora was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1996 she received a BA from the University of Richmond in Virginia. Between 1998-99 she was a fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. In 2003 she attained a Master of Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Guillermo Calzadilla was born in 1971 in Havana, Cuba. In 1996 he received a BFA from Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño de Puerto Rico in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In 1998 he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and he attained an MFA from Bard College in 2001.

They began working together after meeting while studying abroad in Florence, Italy in 1995.

Since the beginning of their collaborative career in 1995, Allora & Calzadilla have worked in a variety of media to produce a body of work spanning sculpture, photography, performance art, sound and video.

Starting in 1999, Land Mark is a series of projects that encompasses film, video, photography and performance pieces related to the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, which, for 60 years, was used by the United States for military operations, leading to a civil disobedience campaign waged by local residents. The works include Land Mark, Land Mark (Footprints), Returning a Sound, Under Discussion and Half Mast\Full Mast . Allora & Calzadilla interrogate the economic, cultural, and political markers that differentiate one area of land from another, and the processes of colonization and gentrification that come to define its changing status. As a whole, these works connected performances typical of political activism to artistic traditions like engraving.

Allora & Calzadilla's body of work has long explored the dynamic between music and power. Some of the pieces that trace this "age-old sonic militarism against the contours of its relationship to contemporary culture and political ideology" are Clamor (2006), Sediments, Sentiments (Figures of Speech), Wake Up and Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for a Prepared Piano. The first three feature "massive sculptural installation, live performance, collaboration, and, of course, extensive sound tracks." Stop, Repair, Prepare is a complex hybrid of sculpture, performance and experimental musical practice. It consists of an early 20th century Bechstein piano that has been put up on wheels and ‘prepared’ by cutting a round hole in the center of the body and reversing the pedals, which allows a series of performers to play variations on the Ode to Joy (as transcribed for piano by Franz Liszt) from inside of the instrument. During the performance, the pianist, girdled by the absurd skirt of the instrument, periodically trudges with it through the performance space, dragging its weight as he or she plays.

Since their participation in dOCUMENTA with the video Raptor's Rapture, Allora & Calzadilla, have created works that move beyond the purely human. According to critic Emily Eliza Scott, their work is "focused to engage what we might call the worldly. These artworks illuminate entanglements between the human and the nonhuman as they unfold in time, signaling a dual (re-) thinking of humans as natural---one among other species and surroundings---and nature as historical." Following the same thematic interest in cultural artifacts and deep time, the artists presented the two part exhibition "Intervals" at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Fabric Workshop and Museum. There, they employed objects, films, live performances, and sound to invoke the span of geologic time and our own place within it. The artists presented a trilogy of video works that present modern musicians and vocalists engaging with ancient artifacts through sound. Apotome (2013) stars singer Tim Storms, who holds the world record for producing the lowest note every recorded—only audible to the human ear with amplification. As he wanders among taxidermied animals in subterranean storerooms of Paris’s National History Museum he produces, according to critic Emily Nathan, "a deep, satanic rumble" which "seems to usher from his very core." These sounds are a subsonic version of a musical score played in 1798 for two elephants brought to Paris as spoils from the Napoleonic Wars, in the first recorded instance of attempted inter-species communication through music.

For the 56th Biennale di Venezia, Allora & Calzadilla presented In the Midst of Things, a choral work with music by composer Gene Coleman based on Haydn’s oratorio The Creation (1796–98), whose original libretto drew on descriptions of the origins of the world and humankind from the Book of Psalms, the Book of Genesis and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Allora & Calzadilla follow Milton's in medias res tradition for a series of interruptions on Haydn’s score. In taking liberties, Allora & Calzadilla are also playing on the translation history of the libretto: originally written in rather awkward English, it’s said to have been improved by the subsequent German translation.

Allora & Calzadilla's work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions internationally. Notable exhibitions include All the World's Futures, curated by Okwui Enwezor, at the Venice Biennale (2015), Intervals, curated by Carlos Basualdo and Erica F. Battle, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Fabric Workshop and Museum (2014), the group show Costume Bureau (2014) at Framer Framed in Amsterdam, dOCUMENTA (2012). Their work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in venues such as the Museum of Modern Art (2009), National Museum of Art, Oslo (2009) Haus der Kunst, Munich (2008), Serpentine Gallery and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2007), Les Rencontres d'Arles festival, France (2008), Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (2008), Kunsthalle Zurich (2007), and the Renaissance Society, Chicago (2007). Allora & Calzadilla also participated in the 5th and 7th Gwangju Biennale (2004 and 2008).

On September 8, 2010, the United States Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) announced the selection of Allora & Calzadilla as the American representative at the 2011 Venice Biennale, a first for artists living in Puerto Rico. The proposal for the exhibition was developed between the artists and curator Lisa D. Freiman (Chair, Department of Contemporary Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art, and Director, 100 Acres: The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park), during the fall and winter of 2009. The exhibition consisted of six new commissions including: Armed Freedom Lying on a Sunbed (2011), Track and Field (2011), Body in Flight (Delta) (2011), Body in Flight (American) (2011), choreographed by Rebecca Davis,[24] Algorithm (2011) and Half Mast\Full Mast (2010). In most of the pieces, the artists did away with subtlety in favor of a direct invocation of the imposing specter of American militarism, treating nationalism first and foremost as an aesthetic language that expresses itself through the military machine, ritualized bodies, and official architecture. The installations and performances inside the pavilion further the artists’ investigations of “bio-power” and technology, deforming and repurposing bodies and materials in conjunctions that are at once ominous and comical.

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