Text by José Antonio Navarrete Researcher in visual arts. Mach 2008

An Offering of Entanglements by Balteo Yazbeck

I
Ever since the mid-nineties, Balteo Yazbeck has been developing proposals using as an artistic strategy the conceptual premises and methodological procedures of the curatorial practice. Nonetheless, he has accomplished this without tying himself down to any particular professional constraint; namely, by consciously making errors.
Making use of his institutional status as an artist and with the complicity of still active authors, Balteo Yazbeck appropriates the work of others to new uses –for instance, the photographs of Paolo Gasparini and the designs of Gerd Leufert, Nedo and Álvaro Sotillo– and relates them to his own images creating completely new associations and juxtapositions. What unfolds thus is an «exhibition» sui generis that while being a space for the elaboration of meaning also couples his approach with that of the curator, who traditionally values and exhibits the work of others. Definitely a curator modelled according to the notion of auteur: holding a position as coveted in the curatorial practice from the end of the eighties to the present day. 1
This «exhibition» of Balteo Yazbeck resembles and can be read as an installation (an art practice that emerged in the sixties), because it displays the basic features and configuration of this type of work. At the risk of defining an installation simplistically, it can be summed up as the artistic occupation of space according to logical operations and the use of any (or even several) medium, conducive to the aims of «organising» the artwork.
Despite the fact that the works of other artists appear in the configuration suitably identified, La tiendita del Museo de Arquitectura (The Museum of Architecture’s little Store) will in any case –owing to the analytical perspective chosen to examine this point– still be considered an installation «exclusive» to Balteo Yazbeck, within which the original photographs and designs of other authors function, literally, like pieces or parts of the whole that it entails.
One cannot elude the fact that both the exhibition (as curatorial practice) and the installation (artwork) are conceived according to the principle of gathering things together, which is accomplished by the modest operations of adding to and taking away. Balteo Yazbeck explores this principle by fashioning his individual offering as a group exhibition –achieved through an interdisciplinary transfer, taking place permanently between the figures and operations of the artist and the curator-auteur, as previously mentioned- and taking to its extremes the irresolution of its own physical limits, which is susceptible to the increase or the decrease in the number of its elements, without necessarily losing touch with its possible interpretation. These indeterminable limits are also characteristic of any commercial establishment, including the museum store and the private art gallery.
The English word «entanglement» which can be applied to those circumstances of life in which one is involved and finds it difficult to escape from, is a term invoked by Balteo Yazbeck to describe the concept central to his practice. By combining ideas and objects referring to facts, situations, intuitions and memories that shift between the institutional narrative and marginal stories he displays, the «entanglement» in each of his proposals comprise multiple stories, the interactions of which seek to reveal the political, social and cultural complexity of the phenomena under inquiry.

II
Shortly after its invention, photography became the principal medium for spreading urban and architectural accomplishments throughout society –the perfect resource for their illustration. Nevertheless, even more than that, photography also became established –from then onwards– as the basic public medium for debate on The City, anchored in visual representations.
It is therefore, no mere coincidence that museums of architecture, given the impossibility of their being actual recipients of the repertoire of public works they become involved with, have photography alongside scale models and sketches (manual or computerised), as their chief objects of collection and elements of visual representation. It is for this reason that there exists no radical difference in museums of architecture –as far as the nature of the objects they contain– between their exhibition rooms and their shops, inasmuch that both the one and the other profit from their technical reproductions. What differs between them is the main aims –institutionally assigned– that they are obliged to satisfy. These aims are inter-related with the function these reproductions are required to carry out in strict accordance with their placement. In their exhibition rooms, these reproductions assume their own discur­sive functions, while in the shops they take on commercial ones, in whatever form, such as books, posters, post cards and so on.
Furthermore, the modes and devices by which these technical reproductions are displayed in the museums of architecture also vary, consistent with the purpose of the spaces in which they are placed. It is worth adding, moreover, that in a private (commercial) art gallery where the sale of art works is the main object –preferably legitimized by museums and validated by authorship– these reproductions will achieve at the same time the two functions; discursive and commercial.
Being an exhibition that is also an installation, La tiendita del Museo de Arquitectura (MUSARQ) highlights the paradox underlying the model of a museum of architecture as a cultural establishment that does not admit the ‘ownership’ of the actual samples that define its objective, as opposed to the traditional museum standard spread by Western culture. It is on this note that La tiendita… attempts to destabilize the discursive and commercial functions that normally take place in a museum, while at the same time endeavouring to carry them out. Balteo Yazbeck stimulates the connotation of the images emerging from the references they contain -many of which are photos of architecture in its urban context or more often, in an urban context with an emphasis on buildings. Several images show the deterioration of the vintage negatives left purposely uncorrected, while in others he stretches digital reproduction to its limits showing errors obviously made during the execution. On one hand, this demonstrates the weakness of visual technologies as certifiers of the real; on the other hand, the images «devaluate» according to the two institutional criteria they relate to in this exhibit: that of the museum and that of the market. They must resolve, in the same place at the same time, as mentioned before, the functions they would develop with spatial and temporal independence in a museum of architecture.
Lastly, Balteo Yazbeck introduces into the series a sort of architectural fantasy, which ends up giving rise to the suspicion that the ‘Little Old Store’ is perhaps an allegory: a rocket, a symbol of progress, once found located on a high-rise bank building in Caracas, is transferred to the roof of a building, which in 1938 housed the capital’s Museum of Fine Art and has been an institutional paradigm of the brief history of Venezuelan museums. Therefore, to buy a photograph in this little store would be like buying a fragment of the message it is trying to convey.

III
What is heaven? I presume that the answers to this question could indeed be manifold. What I’m interested in highlighting in this regard is, that if indeed the catholic religion relates heaven with eternal happiness, a spiritual enclave free from suffering, conjuring a long standing Western metaphor of a physical place, recognisable and identifiable by name. This is a place in which privileges remain unreduced in its relation to nature –even if we sometimes seek a better simile in it– because it is nothing less than paradise on earth.
Heaven has been a topical metaphor of Caracas for a very long time –or at least it was– before becoming assimilated into the present day visions of the city, as a place lost to the point of being almost irretrievable, barely touched by nostalgia. Balteo Yazbeck however, appears to have done something productive with this metaphor, consistently converting it into the symbolic space for situating the tales that allow us to explore the desperate euphoria, of a former Caracas, known as «the branch of heaven» –a city whose modernisation grew in parallel with its decadence; its opulence with its poverty.

José Antonio Navarrete / Researcher in visual arts
Mach 2008 / For the Show: The Museum of Architecture’s little Store.

1 Natalie Heinich & Michael Pollak. «From Museum Curator to Exhibition Auteur. Inventing a singular position». En: Thinking about Exhibitions (edited by Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson y Sandy Nairne). Routledge, London and New York, 1996, pp. 231-250.