Muu Blanco
Artmedia Gallery

ARTNEXUS 99, by Elisa Rodríguez Campo
December 15, 2015

Venezuelan artist Muu Blanco presented a multidisciplinary show devoted essentially to sampling as a contemporary creative method, based on which he gives us a soundtrack and thirteen photographs from the second volume in the series Nuevo pensamiento compositivo ("New Compositional Thinking"), began a year after he resettled in Miami.

From the start of his career as a musician and DJ, more than three decades ago, Muu Blanco built his creative thinking on the foundations of sampling culture, assumed as a philosophy and a research method. consisting in taking a sound fragment (sample) from a source, recorded in any kind of support, and reusing it in the creation of a new piece.

Since the emergence of Concrete Music and the first "Noise Concert" in the late 1940s (Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry), sampling has never ceased to evolve, notably with Hip Hop in 1970s New York, in connection to new digital platforms that allow us to intuitively
manipulate, store, edit, and transform sound sequence through the use of effects.

On the basis of sampling, Blanco also uses new sites for reflection about the visual arts, through collage, photography, and various techniques for the digital manipulation of images.

In his series NC Tx13 Sample, Blanco chose Retromundo, a 1986 photo-book by Paolo Gasparini as the support for his intervention and conceptual action, dusting its pages with a handful of crushed multicolor pills and photographing the results to infuse them with a new meaning. Blanco reflexively explores the elements of his everyday experience, and he came across Gasparini's book randomly in coincidence with his pill prescription for a respiratory ailment. In the artist's own words, NCTx13 Sample is a series of "aesthetic infractions". Musically speaking, sampling culture tends to de-contextualize a given sound and fix it on a different support, a procedure not always done with the acquiescence or the knowledge of the titular rightsholder. Blanco's interventions on the pages of Retromundo were not communicated to the photographer, Paolo Gasparini, or to the book's designer, Alvaro Sotillo; nevertheless, the latter visited the Miami show and is pleased with the new meanings acquired by his design, now covered in pill dust.

In Retromundo (1986). Gasparini engages Latin America's visual history and contrasts it with its European counterpart, in a photographic journey through Venezuela, Peru, Cuba, Brazil, and Mexico. The images in the book are accompanied by insightful texts, and the combination is an effective tool for critique and protest. Retromundo is also the result of a significant collaboration, featuring, alongside Alvaro Sotillo's masterful design, contributions by Carlos Rodriguez and Victoria de Stefano (texts).

Interestingly, the book begins with a quote by Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach: "And undoubtedly the present age prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence.” Following these premises. Muu Blanco's intervention on the pages of Retromundo becomes sarcastic and incisive.

Several levels of reading emerge from the series NCTx13 Sample, yet the artist insists that his intervention does not imply a nostalgic look at the pages, but an irreverent dialog that intersects the discourses of Latin American modernity that Retromundo effectively unseats, and which Blanco focuses on by noting that the suffering portrayed is still with us, now interacting with a few pills that seem to traverse the plane.

Unfortunately, we become increasingly more inured to the images of our era's atrocities. We have also become desensitized to the effects of pharmacological substances compulsively consumed in every society. Muu Blanco calls for a thoughtful consideration of the issues is both original and coherent.

Since moving to the United States, Blanco has entered a prolific creative period. He has become an active participant in the local music scene, both in New York and Miami, and he has produced many book interventions with a well-honed critical eye, completing many series of collage-filled notebooks. A landmark is his photographic series Nuevo Pensamiento Compositivo, Vol. I, recently exhibited at The Chill Concept in Miami, which gave way to Vol. 2, NCTx13 Sample, the subject of these lines. With fifteen other artists, Blanco will participate in the 12th Media Arts Biennial in Chile, centered on the subject of the destruction and transformation of language. Specifically, he will represent Venezuela with an intervention about the Guaica language, spoken by the Yanomami people. This exhibition will travel to Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo. Buenos Aires, Santiago. Caracas, Lima, La Paz, and Montevideo, and it will be presented at the Venice Biennale, at the Mousonturm in Frankfurt, the Ethnologische Museum in Berlin, and the Goethe Institut New York.

ELISA RODRÍGUEZ CAMPO