On fragility in Manuel Rivas, "Historia del arte"

Tal vez por eso lo primero que reparó
fue las cuerdas  de los violines
de la serie inconclusa de las Naturalezas vivas
donde había también abedules, caballos, garzas,
postes telefónicos, máquinas de coser,
el par de botas del padre
que andaba por los caminos del lobo
para sanar electrodomésticos
y orientar las antenas
de los primeros televisores.
--"Historia del arte"

This poem begins after the flooding of the river "Pequeno."  Its title gives way to a commentary about a running theme throughout Rivas's Desaparición de la nieve (2009): an almost dangerous fluidity between real objects (of all kinds) and impetus towards artistic expression (something like Harman's "sensual objects").  The small river's liquidity leaves its own topographical situation and enters into a painter's study, "looking for landscapes / all of that awake and oneiric material."  The artist, and custodian of all vanguards, attempts to salvage the drenched paintings, converting his studio into a painting hospital, trying to extract water from the drowned, filth from the muddied and rearrange the "amputated" images of the broken.  Rivas writes that he "wanted his pieces to be happy...or full of dispossessed sadness [saudade de tristeza]".  According to the text above, the painter first fixed his series entitled "unstill lives" (naturalezas vivas), which are comprised of random collections of objects: birches, horses, herons, telephone posts, sewing machines, a pair of boots....

Artistic expression is about a rearrangement after the disappearance of the originals, about the restoration towards a strange happiness that ultimately remains a "saudade desposeída de tristeza".  The artist, as the "custodian of all the vanguards," becomes "volcánico, plutónico, anátido, obsidiánico, astrográfico, ginkgófito, anfibio," each ascribing an attribute of geological, astronomical or biological origin.  These adjectives also point to the painting, or the poem, as a composite of different things, each interacting (or not) within the medium.  Perhaps most telling on this point is the adjective "ginkgófito" from the peculiar tree Gingo Biloba, itself a living fossil.

For me, this poem offers a compelling glimpse at what art looks like as an expression effected by the phenomenon of the flood.  The paintings material fragility draws it into the liquidity of floods, fires, oil spills and explosions.  This also seems to be why it is able to say something about a crisis--because it is there.  As a "living fossil," it's solidified but also fragile and alive.  The rescued and repaired paintings will still appear mutated, amputated and all mixed up.  The same might be said of the humans that read, view or make art objects.