Page 57 - Fernando Sinaga. Ideas K

tacle which is filled with all that. The work of art thus becomes the receptacle of this yearning for absent totality sheltered beneath the reductionism of modern and passing forms, it is furthermore a container for allegory (Baroque).
Continuing along these lines, it is possible to find artistic influences attrib- uted to the artist; first Constantin Brâncuși, Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Serra, and above all the post-minimalist European versions, Blinky Palermo and Imi Knoebel, while Joseph Beuys hovers well above the scene. What is interesting about this mixture, coupled with Sinaga’s experience in the United States and Germany, is that those very terms “structure”, “system” and “totality” acquire contradictory meanings: according to a critical trend that subsequently catalysed after 1976 into the journal October, the notion of “totality” was one of the dividing lines of the art of the post-world-war period, which was still burdened by European metaphysical philosophy
and the representation of the artist as a demigod (whose greatest exponent was Beuys). This being doomed to totality was countered by the actual pragmatism of minimalism and its exploration of materiality and its simple forms as the representation of a world that is non-transcendental but whose theatricality, literality and objecthood (in Donald Judd or Robert Morris) were criticised by Michael Fried in his famous Art and Objecthood, as in his opinion art (modernist painting or sculpture) could be distinguished from the new objecthood by the fact that it defeated or suspended its own object- hood. Fortunately it was not all black or white, and Beuys’ ethical under- standing of art, in addition to his metaphysics of presence, were a vehicle for conveying educational values which made an impression on artists who espoused certain reductionist patterns such as Palermo and Knoebel, but also Reinhard Mucha and Gerhard Richter, in whom the Hegelian legacy of the dialectics of history, as the sum of unresolved historical contradictions which filter into the work of art, was traceable. This is the context, full of ideological struggles, in which Sinaga became an artist, out of the need, springing from historical, cultural and biographical over-determination, to bind together all these contradictory currents inside a body of work. It is
not possible to ignore this German component when in Hanover in 1985 he hails El desayuno alemán (marking the start of the exhibition reflected in this catalogue) as a moment of routineness yet also of realisation. Accordingly, whereas the notion of “sculpture” is laden with the weight of metaphysics, and minimalism incorporates the possibility of reductionism, the pictorial nature of his work (as painting), its retinal, perceptive and optic quality, frees the artwork itself from the risk of directing itself exclusively at the viewer’s body, in what was the literality of minimalism denounced by Fried (who stated that painting was at war with theatricality).
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