Dario Robleto
- Kurt Mueller -
(foreground) Dario Robleto, I Would Give You The Air You Breathe, 1996; air, glass jar, lid, willow; (background) The Sun Makes Them Sing Again, 1998, 2008; cyanotypes, sunlight, ghost image, paper; 9 ¾ x 7 ¼ inches each; installation view, Inman Gallery, Houston; photo by Thomas R. DuBrock
Tonight I’m Gonna Party Likes It’s 2099, 1996–present; vinyl lettering; approximately 13 ¼ x 26 inches; edition of 4; installation view, Inman Gallery, Houston; photo by Thomas R. DuBrock
Sculpture’s alchemical wonder boy is having a golden moment. Dario Robleto is currently the subject of a ten-year survey at the Frye Art Museum and figures strongly in both the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston’s The Old, Weird America and the Menil Collection’s NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith (not to mention upcoming group exhibitions in Marfa, San Diego and Toronto). Serving as a preface to this outpouring is Oh, Those Mirrors With Memory (Actions 1996–1997) at Inman Gallery.
As the title suggests, on view is a historical exhibition of acts, ostensibly carried out by the artist while still a student in San Antonio. It is also the first American—and second-ever presentation—of this early corpus (the first iteration was installed last year at the 6th Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil). As a gallery gesture, it is both bold and charming.
The main space is empty save for the pocket-sized piece Untitled (Patsy Spool)—iconic of Robleto’s oeuvre—in which he literally spins a Patsy Cline 45 rpm record into thread on an iron pyrite spindle. Surrounding it in a ring are fourteen vinyl wall-mounted texts, each a bold, italicized title followed by a double-spaced and centered materials list and description. The cumulative material weight of the room edges on zero, and the usual black-hole condensation of Robleto’s objects exhales, expands and becomes centrifugal.
Each wall text records—or makes—a single work. The writing is diaristic but largely propositional—lengthy notes-to-self or a Proustian to-do list. Several “actions” are incomplete or in progress. They include the interventionist (planting pumpkin patches), the performative (waiting by the telephone) and the anticipatingly sculptural (a collection of the saddest sounds imaginable). The characteristic themes of Robleto’s practice are sown in abundance: transformation (editing the Unabomber Manifesto into a love letter), healing (repairing cloth with collected lint), extrasensory phenomena (broadcasting the Sex Pistols at a pitch audible only to animals), hope (increasing the brightness of his neighborhood’s front porch lightbulbs), melancholy (shopdropping compasses magnetized to point down) and loss (being silent and absent). The language being rather straightforward, it is in Robleto’s penchant for rhythm and tone—the line breaks, the gaps—and, similarly, the reach of his sentiments, where he hits poetry and poignancy. Unchallenged by material evidence, his text works rest soundly yet freely in imagination, and in the viewer. A few early objects also on view in an adjacent room disappoint by comparison. Without the seduction of Robleto’s intricate brand of fetish-finish they thin like adaptations of finer fiction; desire is hampered by its representation. Seeing is not, after all, always believing.
As a producer of faith, the Robleto of Oh, Those Mirrors resembles more a theorist, bard or daydreamer than his mature illusionist role. Whiffs of sentimentality betray a less complicated approach, one that is reflective of our relationship to objects, memory and truth. But wistfulness—personal yet universal, as inconsequential as it is hopeful—is the drive of the work’s appeal. In one piece, Robleto describes burying lumps of coal and, sixteen years later, digging them up with the hope of finding diamonds. The words don’t specify what he actually finds. But, much like these text works, I want to see gems.
Kurt Mueller is an artist and writer based in Austin.