Crossing Borders: the Installation Art of Lourdes Cué

First of all, in the interest of full disclosure I must say that not only have I been the occasional asistonto of Lourdes Cué for almost twenty years, but her husband for most of that time as well, so I make no pretence about being objective or dispassionate in what I have to say about her work.

Cué has recently finished a large installation,"Endangered Species," in Rice Recreation Center on the east side of St. Paul, Minnesota, under the aegis of Public Art St. Paul and the St. Paul Parks Department. The piece consists of three large earthworks respectively of a polar bear, a loggerhead tortoise, and bactrian (two-humped) camel, with details made of granite and gneiss. Each beast measures about 8 m. long by 3 m. wide by 2 m. high: huge fauna from the far corners of the world that rise out of the park grounds in this working class neighborhood. One of the things that has always amazed me about Lourdes is the time and patience required to finish her work: in an era of instant imagery where everyone with a cell phone or a digital camera can be a producer or a creator, taking literally dozens or hundreds (or thousands)of images in a matter of moments (it's no coincidence that "art" and "artificial" and "artifice" are all related terms),Cué utilized some 6 months (2 in the design phase, which included workshops with area youth, and 4 in construction) to execute this one sole installation, working 8-10 hours a day 5 or 6 days a week. And in the media of the visual arts I don't know what rivals carving stone in terms of pure physical labor. The downside of the computer-driven society (well, one of the MANY downsides), whose primary driving force is speed,is that instant gratification has become such a possibility. I wonder how many artists (let's put filmmakers aside) in their twenties or thirties would work half a year to make one work of art. As Jim Morrison said a while back, more than ever the mantra of today, "We want the world and we want it now." That includes the way art is produced. To create a work that develops over a long period of time, relatively, is a whole other realm of existential, aesthetic experience. Despite working with huge grinders and sanders and hammer drills and chisels, this sculptor's work is very meditative, quiet, introspective. I think it was Sartre who said existence preceeds essence, and that is manifest in the very process of installation art. "Endangered Species" shows this clearly, and I think of other work of hers such as "Windows on the Sea," on the Scottish coast facing the North Sea, or "Water Islands" that sits on the banks of the St. Lawrence River in Montreal: mammoth stone and water works that bare the traces and scars of their creation yet settle with a kind of quietness into the landscape: modern steles and monoliths that show us the memory of the landscape.

Two of the principle visual metaphors Cué has utilized over her career are water and the boat, that great vehicle of movement and transportation/transformation. As Michel Foucault wrote in his essay "Of Other Spaces," the boat is "a floating piece of space, a place without a place that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea...In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up..." For this Mexican artist, boats bring together a variety of themes: crosssing borders, migration, globalism, the commodification and reification of human beings. The boat motif has in recent years--such as work like "Dias liquidos" ["Liquid Days"]in which a huge paper boat made of hundreds of pages of books by Latin American writers rests upon a wave of sand that takes us back to the ocean waters and that first via rupta of the foot upon the land, the sculptural object set before a screen that shows a video of the Mississippi River flowing, accompanied by sounds of the Pacific Ocean the artist recorded on a trip along the coast of the Mexican state of Oaxaca, and "Mar de historias/Historias del mar" ["Sea of Stories/Stories of the Sea"],a tryptich of nets that hang from the ceiling and walls, holding bottles filled with paper boats--this concrete symbol of movement has been readily apparent. In "Water of Stone," a tryptich of full-scale granite canoes (located in Franconia Sculpture Park, just north of the Twin Cities), the improbable contrast between material and represented object reveals the difficulty of the journey, whether real or metaphysical. Tracing her family back to Cuba and the Canary Islands and Spain, and her own life forward to the United States and back to Mexico, the boat is emblematic of her status as a migrant who continually travels between two worlds.

Up here in the mountains at Casa Tobala, Cué continues a long project, another tryptich, of three large-scale container ships entitled "La Nina, la Pinta, y la Santa Maria," each made from hundreds of cans and other metal containers that have been printed on, the elaborate lines and patterns dissolving into Coke cans or bottle caps or old olive oil containers upon closer look. Another piece she contemplates in drawings and models involves hauling wood and carrizo, a heavy cane used for building fences, into the mountains near here and building a ship that would be set in a dry river bed at the edge of what in the rainy season is a roaring cascade we gaze at across the valley. An ephemeral work: destined to be washed away during the first big rains. I'm not sure whether she wants the metaphor to be transcended or destroyed.

To see the installations and sculptors of this artist, go to www.lourdescue.com.