• About the Work
• About the Artist
• Interview
• Responses

Excerpt from Arturo Herrera’s two-channel digital projection Les Noces, 2007. Installation view, Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. Courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

Excerpt from Arturo Herrera’s two-channel digital projection Les Noces, 2007. Courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.

Responses

ARTURO HERRERA’S “LES NOCES”:
A MARRIAGE MADE THROUGH TIME

Nell Andrew

Visiting Assistant Professor, Art History, Northwestern University

Criticism on Arturo Herrera’s work often highlights the artist’s rigorous mining of modernist art history, from the use of collage and action-painting gesture or large scale, to his play between flatness and depth, figuration and abstraction. This remains a rich framework for viewing his installation piece Les Noces, but in placing the work within the exhibition Adaptation, I want to consider the multiple layers of adjustment Herrera used to adapt a work of dance and music to plastic art. Just as exciting in Les Noces is Herrera’s adaptation of his own past work by using fragments of photographs from previous work in his projected images. Read more…

THROUGH A CURTAIN GRAYLY:
ARTURO HERRERA’S “LES NOCES”

Darby English

Associate Professor, Art History, University of Chicago

I wanted to view Arturo Herrera’s Les Noces as video art, but discovered upon arriving that I couldn’t. Answering this frustration, I devoted an inordinate amount of time puzzling that very difficulty before deciding to get over it. Why worry about what to call it? What kind of perceptual limitations did that worry betray? What possibilities and differences came into play with their overcoming? What looking isn’t also an asking? What certainty isn’t also a refusal? After all, I told myself, one enters Les Noces through a profound velvet curtain, one weighty enough to close itself behind you Read more…