HORIZONTE ARTIFICIAL (ARTFICIAL HORIZON)
UTOPIA PARKWAY Art gallery, 12/09/2024
ADAMO DIMITRIADIS: THE FUTURE IS ALREADY HERE
By
Javier Díaz-Guardiola*
I remember perfectly this appreciation of the artist José Antonio Hernández-Díez (Venezuela, 1964), that gave me when I interviewed him on the dates of his exhibition in 2016 at the MACBA in Barcelona (1):Every society imagines the future from its own present. And that is why, that idea of the future attends to close realities and does not differ so much from the moment in which it is imagined, although appearance can make you think otherwise. And he's right.
I stop now to remember how we imagined the new century since my childhood in the eighties, and although films like "Back to the Future II" by Robert Zemeckis, placed us in societies of flying cars and skateboards, the connection by cables of the machines was still necessary and the outfits of the protagonists spread the iridescent sequins, and the shoulder pads typical of the fashion of that decade. We go back a little further back, to the 70s and the start of the "Star Wars" saga, and it is almost embarrassing to assume that someone would be able to dominate the universe with a spaceship whose dashboard was full of luminous coloured buttons and on whose screen, lower quality I mages than 20 kilobytes were reproduced, more similar to those showed to us by a mythical "video game" like that one of “ fronton”, with its wall line and its little ball moving at snail speed on a neutral background.
I go back further and mention "The Supersonics" (originally “The Jetsons"), by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, late 60s, who despite living in a world that crossed the sound barrier, could not be more rockabillies, like their compatriots "The Flintstones", although temporarily they were separated by more than 5,000 years, it”s up, it’s down...And I put you to the test: How imagine the the future, not so distant, a dystopia like "The Handmaid's Tale", both in Margaret Atwood's novel version and in Bruce Miller's television version? Well, layered in freedoms, with fascism rampant, security as a fundamental value (on the basis of which the citizen renounces conquered rights) and deprived of devices for communication, such as the internet or mobile phones. Does all this sound like anything to you? Our idea of the future is liquid, fluid even in its genres; it slips through our fingers, it is not convenient to contradict Zigmunt Bauman.
We might think that the pictorial work of Adamo Dimitriadis (Madrid, 1967) operates in the opposite direction. That he is talking about the future from the past, a not too distant past which imagined the future as utopia. And which, in reality, it is now our present. So he plays with marked cards, knowing what was to come, but inviting us by this to predict what is to come. From those muds, we have these muds. Or as we would say today: the mud slinging machine at full capacity.
The title of his new appearance in the Madrid gallery Utopia Parkway (his fourth already) leaves no room for doubt even from its title: “Horizonte Artificial" (“Artificial horizon"). The one on the horizon is that line to which we see looking for progress, what is to come. A scenario that offers us a superior well-being that we enjoy from the point from which the view rises. The problem is that adjective: "artificial". That something is by nature false, unnatural, unhealthy, does not invite too much pleasure, optimism or delight.
Let's say it now: as a narrator, Dimitriadis has always been interested in progress as a concept, with its lights and shadows. Western man has settled his idea of it on scientific thought since the period of the Enlightenment, but, for this creator, Science and Morality are two inseparable terms. “I like to look at progress through the magnifying sup that ethics brings," repeats over and over again, and has the motto of his "statement" on his own website (2). If his objective is mainly directed to last century society, it is because is just there, where the foundation of a system of perspectives , truncated in our days, were laid, where scientific advances were transformed into tools or levers of change and improvement...That could also be implemented for evil. From DNA to radio wave, air navigation or nanotechnology, all this contemplates a back side that can have catastrophic consequences.
Let's look carefully at one of the centrepieces of this exhibition, 'Perisphere', inspired by one of the icons of the 1939 Universal Exhibition, which took place in New York. Its motto was "Building the world of the future," and was developed just after the American Great Depression, thus betting on scientific progress as one of the ways out of that social and economic crisis. Inside this spherical building (which has later been repeated in other universal exhibitions: we just have to remember what the emblem of the Seville Expo 92 was) a large diorama unfolded, a huge model from which to explain the progress of that society to come, which was rotating and turning on itself and that the viewer witnessed from a certain height. Once again, the divine man who dominates everything from above. Now, the world that arrived shortly after was not at all flattering: A second world war, a holocaust, two atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the beginning of a Cold War between two opposing blocs constantly threatening each other with the nuclear weapons... It is not surprising that our protagonist chooses to set fire to his canvas, that "false American dream" in the form of a building, before it occurs. Any of us would have done it.
Dimitriadis only returns to the Gordian knot, to where the shoe pinches, to that moment when everything began to twist. Hence his interest in those decades of the twentieth century in which, while the worst of evils loomed over contemporary man, cinema, photography and advertising were in charge of making them up and encouraged consumerism and party airs like patches and puffs of well-being so as not to look the other way. Elvis is moving his hip, nothing bad can happen. The pin-ups are also contone. Man reaches the Moon. We are the masters of the universe... In reality, were starting seven decades that would lead us to an atomic era and a nuclear threat that, far from finishing, are other contenders that have entered the game board, China, Korea, Iran, each one crazier than the previous one. With two leaders in Russia and the United States. Putin and possibly a Donald Trump in a second round, who wave the flag of populism and are not characterised by their temperance or common sense. We read the riot act to Francis Fukuyama, because it seems that the story more than, does not stop make us choke
Thus, the illustration imagery of the 50s and 60s is deployed in the paintings of Dimitriadis just because this was a time, in the middle of the Cold War, that strove to show a perfect world that actually tended more to utopia or totalitarianism. Not in vain, in Spanish language grammar it is called "imperfect future" that unattainable of which we do not really know if it will fulfil its promise: "I will do it", "I will love you", "You will get it"... On the contrary, that “compound tense” that only reaches its objective when it is already past in what is to come: "You will have achieved it when we become extinct as a species."Once the second is achieved, the first is done. Even the language is stull. And from that imagery, Dimitriadis addresses the self-destructive spiral in which society has been immersed for decades.
And when Science is free from sin, let it cast the first stone. One of the canvases of the exhibition is a tribute to Wernher von Braun, an aerospace mechanical engineer born German but nationalized American in 1955 in order to be allowed to work for the NASA. He is considered one of the most important aircraft designers of the 20th century, being the design chief of the V2 rocket and the Saturn V that brought humans to the Moon. However, his controversy stems from the fact that, for the development of these artefacts for the conquest of space, had to offer them to his superiors as weapons, an issue that caused him many moral problems. From the micro (the atom) to the macro (the universe), technology has been a mysterious ally of the mysterious. Even in Disneyland, as illustrated by another of Dimitriadis' paintings, a company like Monsanto was in charge of sponsoring a Tomorrowland attraction: “ Hall of Chemistry”,a self-guided proposal that worked more than anything like a kind of a science museum exhibition, giving the visitor to know everything he owed to chemistry in his daily life, than as a traditional activity in a theme park for children. Oh, the kids!. Little creatures in which we place the hopes of our future! Those children who no longer want to be astronauts (aren”t you guessing what it's about? ..) but soccer players. Or even worse than that: influencers. That is why they are also protagonists of some scenes of our author, who in his use of figuration uses attractive electric colours, as food dyes do to make the intake more attractive, with a polished style as if saying that no storm is about to come. And among his personal figuration, some more abstract, more geometric backgrounds. The cause? Let's not forget that Mathematics has been considered the language of the universe. As indecipherable as the mind of J. G. Ballard, a science fiction writer to whom our painter has resorted so many times and who analysed so well the effects of technology on the human being.
The risk of escape is imminent. The happy world that Aldous Haxley predicted, a reality for decades. The planet shows signs of exhaustion but we still prefer to book "all-inclusive" vacations. "The human being is not aware of the primitive state in which he is" (3). Even, we continue to add more fuel to the fire so that the party never ends: automation of tasks, digitisation of daily life, normalize of use of masks, photographing ourselves with them! Although the reason was a global pandemic, whose beginning, the conspiracy theory, was located in a Chinese laboratory... Artificial Intelligence! Who tells you that this text has not been written by a machine, that I only have not had to dedicate myself to tracing the obsessions that Adamo Dimitriadis repeats, evolving his style, for years? So, you are warned: the future is not what is to come. The future is already here. We can ask if not to Radio Futura, those who have been proclaiming it since 1980. The future is a past that insists on not abandoning us. So seek your refuge. The (acid) rain is starting to fall.
(1) “La obsolescencia artística programada también existe” (“Programmed artistic obsolescence also exists.")Interview of José Antonio Hernández-Díez. ABC Cultural. 25th. March 2016. Number 1.127.
(2) https://adamodimitriadis.com/pages-about-me.html.
(3) Dimitriadis, Adamo. Text for the exhibition "Ecos de la era atómica" (2016) (“Echos of the atomic age”), in conversation with journalist Marta Molina.
*Javier Díaz-Guardiola is a journalist, critic and exhibition curator. He is currently coordinator of the art, architecture and design section of ABC Cultural, editor-in-chief of ABC of ARCO and author of the contemporary art blog "Siete de Un Golpe"(“Seven at once”)