Silla no estas

In Silla no esta we can see at first glance a Ready Made starring a chair, which disappears when interacting with any of the mouse clicks, showing us a city made from the influence of cubist art, pointing out a contrast between two types of art belonging to this last mentioned avant-garde and its evolution.

Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development

The work developed on the p5js platform is formed from primitive figures with colors belonging to the gray scale. An If conditional was used to provide the scene change from the chair to the city, while the movement is generated by the translate, also combined on one occasion with trigonometric calculations to realize the constant movement of the bird moving up and down.

The first figure of the work (the chair) is inspired by the Ready Made sculpture “Bicycle Wheel” (1913) made by Marcel Duchamp, one of the pioneers of this type of art and collage classification. While the city is developed from the influence of the cubist avant-garde, the basis for the development of this work.

The conceptual instance of the work is divided into 2 proposals: The first is related to both the text by Toni Simó Mulet and the text by Simón Marchán Fiz. Simó Mulet tells us how this genre of primitive figures had developed into a reductionist analytical cubism that fragmented and decomposed the image. As a criticism of this genre developed by themselves, both Picasso and Braque take the opposite path, and maintaining the fundamental aspect of the three-dimensionality of cubism, they create a technique where they seek to represent things with the “real”, hence collage is born. Collage is evolving in this area of ​​representing in art with the physical and leaving that “falsehood” that the art of the time implied, creating derivatives of this genre.

In this case, in Silla no este we can first see the Ready Made technique, which Mulet talks about when he mentions Duchamp’s presentation of “Bicycle Wheel” in an exhibition and how this influenced the perception of art. By interacting with this Ready Made object that is the chair, it shows us a city developed from traditional cubist art, the one from which all these genres are born. My idea with the work was to contrast what for me are two opposite points of cubism and its development, one where there is a conception of the simplest image, an image that, as we will see later, loses importance before the concept; and another where a more structural conception of the image is seen, placing its importance on the forms.

On the other hand, the other proposal is based on the Nathalie Heinich text. In this the author talks about how in modernity and in various techniques such as Ready Made, the importance of the object declines and everything focuses on the concept behind the image. Therefore, in the work, this idea is presented when the chair disappears and shows what it hides, the city, which is presented in discourse mode. The discursive is represented through animations, the movement shows a question of temporality, a fundamental characteristic in this term. Finally, it is important for me to show how the chair does not disappear completely, but rather leaves its trace formed by the presence of the buildings; This was included to show that despite the utmost importance of the concept, the object never disappears, but continues to have its level of hierarchy.