Registres de comportament (1994-1998) : Antonio Ortega

For several months in 1996, Antonio Ortega took care of a plant in his home that grew inside a long cardboard tube. The plant was forced to extend its white stem and cross a meter of darkness in search of light. When the plant finally managed to emerge, he placed a camcorder in front of it. In a single, fixed, real-time one-shot sequence, the pot, the long-corrugated cardboard tube, and the few leaves that emerged could be seen. Immediately, Antonio Ortega entered the scene and peeled off the connecting points of the cardboard. The tube came apart, separating from the plant and leaving it free. At that very moment, it collapsed. The long stem that had developed in search of light was unable to support its weight, thus causing its death. That which constrained it was also what kept it alive.

At the end of the 1990s, a significant part of Antonio Ortega's artistic work was based on the use of plants and animals. In front of the ecological advocacy and connection to the earth seen in some works associated with Povera and Land Art, he worked from an ironic distance. Living elements, usually plants, were not ends in themselves but tools. Sometimes they were used to inspect or subvert the functioning of the artistic ‘stablishment’; other times, the plant world was forced and even tortured, revealing an aspect of art that echoed the educational processes of childhood interactions with nature.

In the series En interior, Ortega documented the behavioral processes of various plants: one photograph displayed the result of aligning four onion plants based on a single lateral light source, causing the four stems to form a progression of twists from the farthest to the closest to the light; in another proposal, three plants received lights of the three primary colors, which affected and altered their growth; while in yet another experiment, the documentation and the behavioral process coincided, a photograph captured the only moment a plant received light, which was from the flash of the camera itself. The titles of this series of works often included the term "register," indicating a purely descriptive intent: to register something is to document it. For example, in Registro ahilamiento, the work was precisely the documentation of the etiolation process of a plant, meaning the thinning effect it suffered as it grew extremely slender in search of light, ultimately leading to its death.

In all these works, Antonio Ortega used audiovisual recording media such as camcorder or photography: he combined the documentary and descriptive desire with the aseptic will of conceptual. The fixed shots and the recording linked his proposals to the documentation of performances and conceptual art of the seventies: from Bruce Nauman's fixed shots in his studio to the fixed camera that records Chris Burden shooting himself, passing by Bas Jan Ader crying or falling in front of the camera, and the fixed shots of Jørgen Leth in 66 Scenes from America.

His early works embraced dematerialization strategies and the primacy of the idea of conceptual art, but they also introduced ironic, vital, and domestic elements with references to the practices of French 'Nouveaux Réalistes' artists like Yves Klein, Arman, Cesar, and also Piero Manzoni. Furthermore, he introduced debates and discourses from the art context, from the use of representational elements like academic drawing to resources from conceptual and Povera art.

With descriptive titles, documentary records, and a sort of attempt at precision, he sought to give his projects a scientific character. This scientific approach was directed towards the analysis of behaviors and conduct. The experimentation on plant behaviors constituted a possible metaphor for human behavior. It was also part of an ongoing process in which the desired union between art and life of the avant-gardes sought a solution by assimilating artistic work into everyday activity. In the studio and at home, the artist lived with plants that were his works. By proposing to make art in the domestic environment, he caused a movement in the artistic object that reclaimed the democratizing and de-auratic intention of the avant-gardes: to 'lower' the category of art to the daily level.

His attitude towards artistic practice was made up of homemade revelations, investigations, and small experiments undifferentiated from the everyday. At the same time that he recovered the symbolic function of art, he diluted the entity of the work. His work was situated on the boundary of the definition of art due to its lightness, triviality, and indefiniteness; on an edge where sometimes pseudoscientific, anecdotal, or domestic formulations intersected.

David G. Torres