REALITY IN ITS FOLDS: FLEXIONS, REFLECTIONS AND INFLECTIONS
Angel L. Pérez Villén
No one actually believes in the real, or in the evidence of their own real life, It would be too dismal.J. Baudrillard.1
We are liable to doubt even our own shadow. How can we not doubt that which is reflected in the mirror of experience, when experience is founded upon conjectures made explicit by perception, and perception itself is the object of disagreement among the scholars whose vocation is to research and theorise it? Moved by appearances, we cross the threshold of reality and decide to represent the world with the aid of ideas. Nevertheless, what occurs has no need of our attention to gain its badge of credibility; it simply happens. It is the projection of this repertoire of natural facts into the ambit of culture that arouses such uneasiness. The disjunction between animism and science is one of the reasons for the melancholy of modern man, as he refuses to suspend the evidence of his eyes in favour of the intuitive light of the spirit. Even more serious than the absence of will to overcome the indigestion of logocentrism, is the failure to exercise the power of objection, for we deliberately shy away from any analysis that might query the meaning of the spectacle we pretend to inhabit every day.
This collection of symptoms was denounced by Guy Debord2 at the end of the 1960s, when he predicted the conversion of the means of production into pure image, and foresaw that culture itself would subsist as nothing more than the ultimate manifestation of the economic interests of the capitalist system. Debord's description of the "society of the spectacle" provided the groundwork for subsequent analyses whose authors - notably Jean Baudrillard3 and Fredric Jameson4 - sought to delve deeper into the causes and effects of "simulation", defined as one of the paradigmatic symptoms of the postmodern condition5 which, in turn, denotes the predicament of contemporary society, characterised by the control of the formation and dissemination of opinion by three interlinked hubs of power; scientific knowledge, the ideologies informing economic domination, and the mass media.
We exist in a society overrun by new idioms and new word-plays, in which the hierarchical pier that used to order, with grim efficiency the meaning of the world and of human life, can no longer sustain itself. The narratives that once confirmed the primacy of the subject and the genuine competence of science are no longer valid, since not only the subject but also the performativity claimed by such accounts have crumbled away, overtaken by the same fate as befell enlightened reason before them. Historical categories have lost their meaning, while concepts such as social emancipation - affiliated to a notion of historical progress whereby the underclasses might look forward to an improvement in their material conditions - find themselves 'discarded. Hermeneutics is no longer admissible as a strategy for discerning the meaning of being and of its logos, and Utopia is the most discredited of all.
In this context, Baudrillard warns of the futility of conceiving the future as a locus of progress, or even as a historical phase that could herald radical change of any kind, since the messianic promises of Utopia have already been fulfilled in today's vertiginous society. We live in a global village that is fragmented and disjointed, and yet where communications in real time, on a planetary level, are effectively carried out. Ours is a society plagued by such a variety and versatility of vanishing-points and focuses of attention that it atomises and undermines any efforts at social consensus, any bid for a forward-looking project of universal relevance. Michel Foucault and Gianni Vattimo, among others, have used the term "heterotopia" to describe this radically incommensurable structure, and that term serves as a name for the whole decentralised universe of postmodernity. In a global society, the media are a fundamental instrument for articulating the political and cultural discourse of the citizenry. Yet faced with the information dished out by the media, the public reacts with about as much autonomy as that derived from a conditioned reflex, that is, little or none.
Of all the means of communication, television is no doubt the platform that best achieves the vampirisation of the individual required by the society of the spectacle. Television has revolutionised the concept of family, by replacing of the hearth around which family members once gathered to talk, i.e. to participate in the oral transmission of community values, with the electronic illusion of reality. TV sanctions what may or may not be real - for that matter, its version of reality is far more real than the other kind - but more importantly still, it implies an upheaval in the subject, the individual who subordinates his or her daily experience to the scheme of values proclaimed by the mediatic spectacle. In the words of Eduardo Subirats, a person watching TV is a monad under siege, a minimum unit of individual existence, cognitively pre-defined and linguistically programmed in accord with the performatisation of the electronic spectacle before him.6 The technifying of the mass media, the globalisation of discourse, and the consequent denial of the autonomy of the reflexive subject, combine to produce a repudiation of history as the agreed repository of collective community memory, which thus becomes irrevocably severed from the humanist or enlightened tradition.
Tete Alvarez is well-qualified to tackle these issues in his art work: his job as a TV cameraman has afforded first-hand experience about the correlation, or lack of it, between electronic discourses and the quotidian scene. One immediate response was expressed in "Pausa y tono"(Pause and Tone, 1993), an exhibition composed of several photographic series and an installation. The photographs represented a vast eye, flanked by the organs of speaking and hearing - the paradigms of, respectively, emission and reception in the communicative process. The magnification of the eye-treated as a metaphor for the power of television - stood in contrast to the ragged, blotted images of mouths and ears, alluding to the collective spectator, the anonymous receptor debarred from a leading role in communication. The installation consisted of a TV monitor in front of some empty chairs. Emitter facing receptor. But their normal roles were altered: the receptor - the absent audience - became the emitter's sole message, since the screen showed an endless, pre-recorded loop of the empty room with its empty chairs.
In the simulacrum thus being staged, the refusal to admit the public into the process of reading and projecting the images on the monitor symbolises a sentence of ostracism. The exile imposed on the public thwarts it of protagonism in the virtual scene in which it does not appear, and arouses the two-fold frustration of neither being able to see, or to be seen. It is reinforced by the ban on approaching or using the chairs, chained together to make this impossible. Communication vs. incommunication become explicit by means of an aural metaphor, the tape of a telephone line emitting a busy signal. "Pause and tone" is the sound of a communication that is not enacted, but arrested at the stage of repressed desire.7 Alvarez's 1996 piece titled "Nadie llama a tu puerta" (Nobody's Ringing Your Doorbell) followed much the same line of thought, in this case in the form of a video- doorman system that recorded one of the entrances to the exhibition room (an entrance that was closed to the public), while emitting the typical bleep of the apparatus in use.
Once more we find the denial of communication and the impossibility of intervening in a process already underway - not least because the process has been set in motion with complete disregard for the communion between equals, and purports to replace the physical event with a simulation of it. A further trait linking these two installations is the importance of metaphors of control and surveillance. Each in its own, opposite fashion, the TV and the video-doorman cast a vigilant eye over the public in order to reinforce their endogamous penetration of domestic space. "Paisajes" (Landscapes,1994) condemned the custodial zeal of the media by juxtaposing two broadcasts in real time: on one screen we saw satellite TV programming, and on the other, the images gathered by a number of surveillance cameras posted at different spots around the city of Cordoba. It was perhaps as a counterpoint to the works mentioned so far, in which the public was altogether negated and its physical participation forbidden at the same time as its experience was ignored, that Tete Alvarez decided to treat the presence of an audience as necessary after all, with the work titled "Vano" (Bay/Vain,1998-2000). Here, a dressing-room mirror like those reserved for TV, cinema or theatre divas became the support for a testimony to the viewers' willingness to inscribe their experience into the art work.
But this experience was a fleeting one, a perfect metaphor for that which is afforded by the mass media even at its best, and hence by the (never more aptly-named) society of the spectacle. And yet the allusion to the fifteen minutes of fame promised by Warhol to all mortals calls for more thoughtful examination, as the artist seems to suggest by naming the present exhibition Especulaciones (Speculations). His work has always lent itself to indiscriminate consumption, but underneath, the ferment of a generational culture broth can be detected, exuding a richness of reference that qualifies the work for a multidisciplinary analysis. Alvarez also betrays a liking for verbal games and puns, which brings his work very much into the spirit of the age. Ours is an eclectic, revisionist, cannibalistic era, of perpetual questioning. One of the first to criticise the hermeneutics that claims to interpret the text and unveil its deepest, most treasured meaning, was Paul de Man.8 His concept of the illegibility of reading fits in with the Derridean other and with deferral/difference, la differance,9 the concept which determined the emergence of the figure of allegory as the emblem presiding over any deconstructive operation.
Walter Benjamin10 also dealt with the concept of allegory, in the course of proposing that baroque culture tended to signify itself by means of insignia or emblems, rather than symbols. We recognise this substitution of the symbol by the allegory as a contemporary device too, and a frequent deconstructive"strategy. For whereas the former refers us to a series of processes which aim to centre the signified, the latter decentres it, to place it beyond the scope of the signifier. The paradigm under which all texts fall consists of a figure (or a system of figures) and its deconstruction. But precisely because this mode] cannot be closed off by a final reading, it engenders in turn a supplementary layer of figures, which narrates the illegibility of the first narration. Insofar as they differ from the first, deconstructive narratives - centred on figures and, in the last instance, on metaphors - we might define narratives that belong to the second (or third) level, as allegories.11
Tete Alvarez seems to make this statement his own when he embarks, in "Vano", on an exercise regarding communication that invites a multiplicity of readings. The mirror is built to the same dimensions as the bay next to it, opening onto the corridor leading to the other exhibition rooms. Thus the mirror becomes a surface for reflection - in all senses - and a metaphor for the threshold that communicates us with other possible worlds. Contrary to "Andando contra una pared" (Walking into a Wall, 1997), a video-installation in which the artist was seen attempting unsuccessfully to go through the wall, "Vano" alerts us to its artifice. And though the invitation to simulacrum does not conceal the reflected image of our failure, or the masks with which our fellow-men mutate their common condition for all that they stare at the strangeness of existence, still the sight of oursellves in the mirror of the mass media tips us into a speculation about vacuousness. Supposedly, we shall then step across that threshold to take possession of a critical consciousness, rendering us the true protagonists of our actions and thoughts.
An allegorical treatment also underlies other pieces which posit the difficulty of distinguishing an "experience of reality" from its imposture or simulation. Here the artist draws once more on the imagery of the mediatic world. The "Grandes teatros del mundo" series (Great Theatres of the World, 1997), with a title that winks at Golden Age playwright Calderon de la Barca, avails itself of the empty stages of several Andalusian theatres to explain that the space designed for representation, or show, has deserted the exclusivity of the theatrical black box, to infiltrate any point whatsoever of the social map. Circuses, too, being a spectacle in which the public lets its hair down and joins in with the events being enacted in the ring, are a favourite source for the works of Tete Alvarez. I might go so far as to say, thinking especially of pieces like "El espectáculo debe continuar..."(The Show Must Go On, 1996) or "Hale hop!" (Up You Go!, 1997), that his ultimate object is precisely whatever reading his audience makes of them. The functional duplicity in store for those who contemplate (themselves) and reflect (themselves) over photographs of the circus world - both representation and distant gaze projecting its analysis over the supplanted experience of the scene -, and the invitation to suspend contemplation, to swap absence for presence and to enter the scene, where the moves of play - despite knowing that the cards are marked and the bank always wins - are the only dispensation we shall be offered, constitute the two faces of a single representation: that of the experience of reality.
Like "Pausa y tono", "Clappers" (1996) stages the absence of the audience. Unlike "Hale hop!", it encloses no invitation to occupy any space that is not the space of reflection. Conceived as a ambit in which the banishment of the subject is conveyed by a sound-track of constant clapping, it leaves no option to that subject but to fathom his own bewilderment before a decor that seamlessly superimposes a representational void (no office to be applauded, no celebrant to be revered) and the clonic simulation of a full house. This dissociation recurs in "S/T" (1998-2000), a kind of random fresco of real subjects immortalised by the glossing-over of existing diversity. This is achieved by means of a treatment that in addition to conferring a choral quality on the crowd, has restored the currency value it possesses for the society of the spectacle. Masks concealing the deformed countenance of the subject, faces reflecting the undifferentiated skin of the public. Threshold and looking-glass, bay and lintel, flux of the image in light, sediment of reflection.
Every action contains a rejection, but also a choice. If we elect to charge red rags and jump through hoops, as we were invited to do at the beginning of En efecto (In Effect),12 we shall have to sacrifice our hermit's purity, but by the same token be situated within the edifice of language; a position from which it is easier to blow up its performative nucleus. This is why we must sign up for any enterprise which seeks to unmask the representation of reality concocted by the mediatic devices installed within the networks that control information.13 An excellent way of turning the scaffolding of propaganda to good use is to inject one message inside another, in other words, to take advantage of the structure set up by the media to drive in a wedge that might trigger the deconstruction of the whole apparatus. This is Tete Alvarez's procedure in "Retablo de las vanidades" (Altarpiece of the Vanities, 1999). The work functions by recuperating the propagandistic gearwheels of the baroque, adopting the same moralistic tone to denounce the venal, transitory nature of the world of fashion and advertising; a sort of contemporary vanitas to encourage a reflection on unfettered consumerism. The pious iconographic repertoire of the Counter-Reformation, that once filled the spaces along the streets of the baroque retable, has been pasted over by the commercial icons that incite us to compulsive consumption.
This interpretation does not exhaust the potential readings of "Retablo de las vanidades". The advertising slot inserted by the artist into the machinery of baroque propaganda harks back to earlier experiments with the confluence of several sources into a single register. The most impressive of these was Athanasius Kircher's magic lantern, an artefact refurbished by the genial Jesuit so as to actualise the interests of technology, science and art, in the landscape of a civilising utopia transmitted by the institutional propaganda of the Church.14 The update, in turn, of this paradigm is fundamental to Tete Alvarez's altarpiece, It usurps the real images on the retable, projecting over them the simulated fiction of another reality that supplants the physical or the objectual. This substitution further activates a compensatory meaning at the very heart of the media, so that in the face of the dwindling of reality, and its virtual conversion into a fetish devoid of any semantic incarnation, the hyperreality of that other borderland proposes itself as a place where facts are commuted by the effect of their narration: form into image, body into electronic imprint. A specular, mediatic domain which venerates the void through the hyperrealisation of the real.
The hyperreality of representation is one more strategy adopted by the various modes of analysis of the environment which flourish in artistic discourses of postmodernity. This is the context in which we must assess works presented by Alvarez in his Instalaciones,15 particularly "Espacio para la observación de la naturaleza" (Spaces for the Observation of Nature, 1995) and "S/T (manzanas)" (Untitled (apples), 1996). The space recreated in the first piece was that of an observation mirador in a nature park, with the difference that it was closed upon itself, thus inverting the terms.-The public, prevented from occupying the look-out post, ostensibly played the part of wildlife, while inside the closed booth - the area normally reserved for the lookers - there unfolded a representation of open-air nature, able to be watched through an eye-level slit cut into one of the sides. Less objectual but at least as complex and poetic, humble and artful together, was the virtual apple projected onto the comer where a real apple had sat moments before. It was the palpable proof of the supplanting of reality by its fiction, although we must surely agree that illusion is not opposed to reality, it is but a subtler reality, enfolding the first in the sign of its disappearance.16
The illusion of reality Baudrillard speaks of can be traced in more recent pieces such as "Tríptico" (Tryptich, 1998-2000) and "Espacio para la reflexion" (Room for Reflection, 1998-2000). This last quotes from the mirador piece, with the difference that here the public is activated without inverting the watcher-watched relation. The use of a double mirror causes the representation of a natural scene to be replicated ad infinitum, so that the subject feels trapped inside as though she were just another element of an image that fans out through time, shackled to time's pace, and reflected in the serried folds of an incommensurable fiction. For all its implementation of the hyperrealisation of nature, the work does not disclaim its artifice; on the contrary, the simulacrum is highlighted in order to stimulate a reflection - not only within the imagery-about the strategies deployed by the society of the spectacle. The illusion of active participation in the event is fortified when we find that we are, indeed, part of the representation or show, but at the cost of relinquishing our identity into the clonic saturation of a virtual, atomised double. The subject is diluted into the social framework, finding her image chopped into a reflection that is rather a choral mirage.
In "Tríptico", audience participation is minimal. Here, the observer can appreciate the subtle beauty derived from the simulative strategy and only at the end, after circling the whole work, discover the trick. Furthermore, the very act of mimetsing a nearby space - an inner court - on the model of the exhibition rooms, accentuates the circular rhythm of the piece itself. The movement is akin to that of any artistic proposal that takes as its starting point the physical coordinates of the gallery, structuring its discursive shape around this inside-outside flux; a dialogue that in the case of "Tríptico" smacks of the hyperrealist representation, allowing us to make a connection with the lavish trompe I'oeil of ecclesiastical retables, Nevertheless, the intention is not so much to simulate another reality, as to overtly endorse the simulated validity of the perception. In this sense, Tete Alvarez's work has more affinities with the genre of still life -by suspending, seizing and congealing the double of a motif taken from the everyday environment, but not doomed by the eye of Chronos - than with any other thematic. In reality, of course, all these speculations are nothing but expressions of the extended body that the timeless genre of the vanitas has appropriated for itself in our time.
An early example of still life can be found in "Codigo de tiempos. Diez mil frames" (Time Code. Ten Thousand Frames, 1993-1994). This is a one-track video tape lasting more than an hour that also functions as an installation. The fixed, open shot lets time flow over a fragment of reality, so that all the changes and mutations occurring in the representation actually took place in real time; however, the inclusion on screen of the digitalised information accompanying the sequence, that is, its electronic temporalisation (each unit of time is called a frame), adds an uncomfortable element of distortion to any prolonged contemplation of the successive scenes. Perhaps it is the overlapping of time- perception with the digital data of an image in real time that seems so disturbing.17 In any case, works like these which posit time as an artistic object, and propose a given perception of it, devolve onto us the capacity for querying and questioning - an ability that is often overlaid, in other types of artistic endeavour, by the power of the aesthetic experience.
Another piece that superimposes two distinct temporal registers, plunging us into the dichotomy of a split sensation, is "Espejo retrovisor de la historia" (History's Rear-View Mirror, 1998-2000). As the name suggests, the piece features a double rear-view mirror scrolling through a repertoire of scenes picked from twentieth-century history. The gaze to the fore that retreats in time, orthe reverse, the projection of memory onto the retina of daily incidence, serves as a metaphor of the decanting of information from one sphere to another. The borderline between the two domains, in this case that of perception and that of reflection, is guarded by the mirror. Thus two projections are made to co-exist on the same plane; the projection of contingency, to the fore of the glass, and that fed to us by history from the rear. The first is aware of the reader's presence, and permits the irruption of the second, that reproaches it for its detachment from the exigencies of memory. However, there is no frontier between the two from the perspective of the actual subject, because the performativity of historical narrative has been unmasked; because it is not possible to stand outside the text, evaluate the information in the light of context, and navigate among the waves of the metatext; because the limits have been overtaken and the two spheres are no longer impermeable or airtight; because everything has been contaminated by the crisis of reason.
I am not asserting the reactive desinence of these Speculations, for after all, the range of strategies we find in them are ratified by the postmodern condition of art; and yet, and therefore, they are patently resistent to a certain gullibility. That is why we should not look for hell-raising manifestos against postmodemity, norforthe watered-down wryness of disillusion, let alone a busy nihilism, refusing to champion the continuity of the modem project. A sceptical mistrust is perhaps the keynote of the works, allied to an urge to peer into the folds of meaning and so salvage the unruly, critical, transgressive spirit of the early avant-garde.
Pliny the Elder tells of a land peopled by shadows without men.
Rafael Perez Estrada18
Behind me (and before, in the twinned scene) passes the majestic caravan of the clouds. They efface from the blue the figures drawn in pain and with shadow. Everything becomes luminous, dazzling, for nothing has happened, and nothing ever can.
Jose Hierro19
Although there are some very different ways of thinking about shadows, they all enclose a symptomatology that coalesces around the locally relative deficiency in the quantity of photons20. The casuistries generated by said deficiency, the relations they establish with the object that casts the shadow, and the determination of the process adopted for its materialisation are so diverse - and in the case that interests us here, so irrelevant - that I shall spare you the unnecessary details. What is certain is that shadows have always pertained to the realm of imprecision, to dank primeval twilight, to uncertainty; the shadow is the terrain of potential action, the site of memories and regrets, of phantoms and monsters, the lunar dark side of the body, its topological projection, the most effective, sublime therapy for the warrior and the artist, the stuff of dreams, the form of the unconscious, the sustenance of the sane.21 In Tete Alvarez's recent work, shadows are the simulacrum of a reality that has been expunged from the space of representation, just as in earlier pieces - the supreme example is "Pausa y tono" - the subject was banished from the field of communication. But the true precedent of "Sombras" (Shadows, 1997- 2000) is to be found in the shadow of the public obliterating the projection in "El espectaculo debe continuar...", the allegory that used the circus milieu to describe the real-time, true-life show that prevails in a mass-media world. The individual who projects his shadow and fraternises with the cast of extras inhabiting the images is the sign of an open communication, the clause of an art that wishes to be emandpatory, reflective and reflexive. He is proof that the viewer can and must interfere in artistic discourse. It is not only a right but also a pressing necessity, in orderto resignify both the practice and the reception of contemporary art. It is also a recapitulation of the concerns put forward by the art of recent decades, the kind that required audience participation in orderto be fully realised, such as performance art and especially happenings and environment events steeped in psychedelia, optics, kinetics or pop, the art of the Sixties, the art that aspired to blend art and life, the art that tabled the romantic maxim of a "total work of art".
First with the Renaissance and then with the advent of modernity, the shadow came to dissipate its on'ginal clarity of projection, losing its auspiciousness for dual identities and giving way to Otherness. That essential double we once possessed became a stranger, a sinister emanation unknown to its progenitor.22 Tete Alvarez goes so far as to dispense with the motif, the hiatus separating light from shade, and shows us that sinister double, the shadow gambolling through the representational space, freed at last from filiation. "Shadows" negates the subject, content with his silhouette cast over the face of the city; it reverses the protagonism of the figure, absenting it, draining it of content, to install in its place the outlined virtuality of a fiction that, without losing the propitious character of a projection, announces the advent of nothingness. In the new context that looms over us, the norm will be that no longer do bodies cast their shadows, it is rather shadows that cast bodies, bodies that are no more than the shadow of a shadow.23 This evanescence of the body epitomises the crisis of the subject that afflicts western thought today, joining forces with the most despairing - black bile, the Ancients called it - of nihilisms.
Another kind of evanescence is that brandished by the conjurer. Magicians operate in the realm of the possible, hiding the trick, manipulating objects, weaving afiction that bends our perception of reality until we credit with likelihood what is only a hyperrealisation of the occlusion of reality. "Nada por aquí" (Nothing Over Here, 1998-2000) develops this idea, showing the moves of a magician's act against a black background. The allegorical strategy that articulates the discourse of this work attributes such a signifying versatility to it, that a variety of readings are in order. In the light of the artist's interests, we can take for granted the intention to dismantle the informative pretentions of television; the telespectator, like the person watching a magic act, has a hard time making out what exactly is going on when an event is being presented. The resemblance between the conjurer's audience and the TV equivalent24 is based on the predisposition of both to step into a virtual trance, into a ritual experience that tantalises them with anticipation without conceding the plenitude of enjoyment, into a simulation ablaze with promises and weighted with numbness. It is no hyperbole to compare drawing-room magic to other possible worlds that thrive off illusion, self-deception and pyrotechnics in general. We need look no further than the art world. The grand and beautifully-told lie that art seems to be is not news to anyone.
© Fundación Provincial de Artes Plásticas "Rafael Botí"
1El crimen perfecto. Editorial Anagrama, Barcelona, 1996. Pág. 131.
2La societe du spectacle, 1967. Many later editions have been published in several languages, including Spanish. The update, Comentarios sobre la sociedad del espectaculo, was issued by Editorial Anagrama, Barcelona, in 1990.
3Cultura y simulacro. Editorial Kairós, Barcelona, 1993. Also eloquent for this line of thinking is Las estrategias fatales. Editorial Anagrama, Barcelona, 1984.
4Teoría de la postmodernidad. Editorial Trotta, Madrid, 1996.
5LYOTARD, Jean Francois : La condición postmoderna. Editorial Cátedra, Madrid, 1989.
6Linterna mágica. Vanguardia, media y cultura tardomoderna. Ediciones Siruela, Madrid, 1997. Pág. 223.
7PEREZ VILLEN, Angel Luis :"El tercer ojo", in catalogue for Pausa y Tono, Caja Provincial de Ahorros, Córdoba, 1993.
8Allegories of Reading. Yale University Press (New Haven & London).
9La escritura y la diferencia. Editorial Anthropos, Barcelona, 1989.
10Discursos interrumpidos I. Editorial Taurus, Madrid, 1973.
11DE MAN, Paul. Opus Cit.
12Joint exhibition by Tete Alvarez and Rafael Quintero held in Cruce, Madrid, during October 1997.
13PEREZ VILLEN, Angel Luis :"Acuerdo Tácito : modelo para armar. Instrucciones y dos codas", in the exhibition catalogue for En Efecto, Cruce, Madrid, 1997.
14SUBIRATS. Opus. Cit. Pág. 132.
15Palacio de la Merced, Diputación de Córdoba, 1996.
16BAUDRILLARD. El crimen perfecto. Pág. 118.
17VILLAESPESA, Mar : "Genealogía del paisaje mediático", en Instalaciones. Diputación de Córdoba, 1997.
18"Sombras", en El ladrón de atardeceres. Plaza & Janés, Barcelona, 1998. Pág. 49.
19"Cantando en yiddish", en Cuaderno de Nueva York. Ediciones Hiperión, Madrid, 1999. Pág. 43.
20BAXANDALL, Michael : Las sombras y el Siglo de las Luces. Editorial Visor, Madrid, 1997. Pág. 56.
21TANIZAKI, Junichiro : Elogio de la sombra. Ediciones Siruela, Madrid,
22STOICHITA, Victor I. : Breve historia de la sombra. Ediciones Siruela, Madrid, 1999.
23BAUDRILLARD. Opus Cit. Pág. 52.
24SUBIRATS. Opus Cit. Pág. 140.
