La Bandera Negra

“If a white flag means surrender, a black flag represents anarchy.” Raymond Pettibon

Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development

When researching Vera Molnár’s work, not only was I fascinated by her work, but also one of her works (see Fig. 1) made me think furiously about the logo of Black Flag (see Fig. 2), one of the bands that accompanied me in my personal development through music.

Through this work without sound, I sought to transmit and generate a sensation of musicality through the vibration of the rectangles and the lyrics related to the generation of movement. Or rather, as Paul Valéry mentions in The Conquest of Ubiquity (1928): “to transport and reconstruct in any place the system of sensations – or more exactly of stimulations – that any object or event provides in any place.” He also writes: “In the past, we could not enjoy music at the chosen moment, according to our mood. Our enjoyment had to be adapted to the occasion, the place, the date and the program. What coincidences were needed!”

In this work, to the sum of said coincidences of occasion, place, date and program, I also added the lack of coincidence of music – as a sound stimulus in its strict sense. However, thanks to the movement generation of a generative art program (in this case p5.js), the feeling of musicality becomes possible. At least, that’s what I tried.

In Didactics of liberation. Latin American Conceptualist Art (2008), Luis Camnitzer proposes an analysis of the concept of art in the periphery (as opposed to the center) and the mainstream. I found it interesting to link the work of Vera Molnár and the Black Flag logo, which, except for their respective appearances, do not seem to have either an origin or a burden of common sense.

What I did find interesting is that both were created in a context on the periphery of the center. Indeed, Vera Molnár, originally from Hungary – that is, on the eastern edge of the production center of Western Europe – throughout her artistic career cultivated a distance from artistic movements, staying outside the mainstream. Black Flag, for its part, was born in what we could call a cultural periphery - which represents the underground - within the most hegemonic country of the time: the United States. It is interesting to see how it became a cult band that founded the hardcore movement, when this genre itself became a cult musical trend. Nowadays, how many people can we pass on the street with a t-shirt emblazoned with the Black Flag logo or a tattoo? Many. In popular culture, Black Flag has already become mainstream, or at least the periphery of the mainstream. From here, could we conclude that Vera Molnár stayed more with the spirit of the periphery than a hardcore band?