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+2000/-2000, even is Osvaldo Romberg's commentary on 4000 years of history. In his
major work of the late seventies Mythologies, from Altamira to Manet-an Emotional
Analysis of Art History, Romberg demystified what he claimed to be the mythology of art
history and the myths of art-making. His art said in essence, art history doesn't exist, only
artists exist. In his current project, the artist goes a step further: he says history doesn't
exist, only people, time and events exist. The +2000/-2000, even project draws attention
to the idea of history as manipulated interpretation of facts. Additionally, the artist's
quotational use of reproductions from Eastern and Western civilizations, images drawn
from so-called evolved to so-called primitive cultures is a critique of the modernist cult of
the original and the modernist fetishization of style.
Romberg's installation +2000/-2000, even examines the fine line that separates the
relevance and the irrelevance of history. The work's broad implication is that there's really
a very small difference between legend and history. This fracture between fiction and fact
is emphasized in several ways. One way involves the artist's refusal to deal with history
chronologically; instead he selects and spatially arranges trivial and monumental historic
incidents at random. The artist's presentation of images and information according to
whim destroys the hierarchy of historical moments and ruptures the idea of the purported
significance of certain events in time. The viewer of the artwork is invited to move through
an installation space filled with suspended pages covered with images and texts in a fluid,
totally unsystematic way. This element of chance/play/randomness in the work suggests to
the viewer that there is no discernible or unified teleological goal in history but rather that it
(history) exists and that the goal (if there is one) expands subjectively along mutable
interchangeable connections and along a network of personal associations. The element of
time in +2000/-2000, even is apprehended in this work as in a dream. The artist applies
an art of additive surfaces, the collage, in this work, and this formal strategy is heightened,
magnified and made more complex by the use of transparency . Overall, the +2000/-2000, even project
is an amalgamation of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary applied
towards a visual/verbal commentary on the millennium.
This commentary alludes to the mechanisms of the production of history, that is, the role that
objects of knowledge, books, maps, images of art works and historical reportage have played in the
institutionalization of codes of knowledge. In Romberg's current work these sources are applied
towards a reinterpretation of historical reality. This reinterpretation examines the slippery
rapport between knowledge, its accumulation, and what the artist would call the appearance of
history. In the installation historicity is used, then supplanted by a Foucaultian effective
history, a history free from constraints and self-recognition, a history that recognizes the
contingency of knowledge and establishes the grounds for a destabilization (including its own)
between meaning and understanding.
In +2000/-2000, even Romberg's images are informed by short printed passages gleaned from source
books on events throughout the course of mankind's progression through time. The artist highlights
certain words that when read sequentially recombine to form sentences. These made-up universal
aphoristic commentaries, these ahistoric truths, are another part of Romberg's strategy of
emphasizing the rupture between recorded fact and fiction. Such subtexted commentaries act as
voices of timeless Greek chorus arising out of a millennial Tower of Babel. Coming from all points
of view and from all points in time, they are the subjective voices of the strong and the weak , of
belligerence and of tolerance, of reason and of fanaticism. And they point to a crucial aspect of
Romberg's installation: its humanistic resistance to ideology, its refusal to explore or give
credence to a specific system of domination (that is, to take sides, champion a particular cause, or
point blame). The installation instead carries a heavier burden. It is meant to simply bear witness
to all the wisdom and madness that has been part of the human condition through time. The
+2000/-2000, even project is easily the largest and most complex "book" Romberg has ever fabricated.
Seen from the back their transparent sheets, these floating cut-outs --- which are painted red, brown
or yellow, depending on the "crisis" flash-point condition of the historical moment in each of the
civilizations that is being commented upon -- are encoded reminders of the great late cut-outs of
Matisse with their self-imposed limitations. Other elements in +2000/-2000, even, such as
the title, the silhouetted allegorical iconography, and the transparency, recall Duchamp's The Large
Glass. Romberg's +2000/-2000, even project also holds close ties with classic surrealist
impulses, specifically (in Breton's words) the cultivation of the effects of a systematic displacement
and the exploitation of the fortuitous encounter of two distant realities on an unfamiliar plane.
Romberg's use of transparent imagery and text (and the infiltration, virus-like, of a new text) is
a fin-de-siecle updating of early surrealist games and literature that allows new levels of meaning to
arise out of a seemingly mundane material juxtaposed in a sharp unexpected way. On each of his
floating book sheets in this new installation, Romberg collages a small excerpted historical chronicle
with illustrations drawn from a worldwide cultural image bank. Using this basic technique, Romberg
interlaces two visual and linguistic strategies that lead the viewer through a doubled mental experience.
First, in each of the folders, the transparency allows the main text and the subtext to co-exist; the
simultaneity reinforces the overall Borgesian idea that in every text one has all the texts in the world.
Second, the artist does not allow the possibility of a logical bonding to occur between visual imagery
and the historical excerpts which form the initial reading. For example, a text describing a brief period
in Ghandi's life is accompanied by the image of a seated carved Egyptian Middle-Kingdom (c.2000 BC.)
scribe flanked by the images of two overlapping updated Jema's Head masks from Nok, Nigeria.
From the highlighted text emerges the aphorism "Imprisonment in prayer kills belief in hoplessness".
Such double displacement causes a momentary, dizzying semantic/visual deferral of meaning that upsets
ideological presumptions. Romberg's play with the disjuncture between the readings of iconography,
text and highlighted subtext questions the presumption of collective memory. The artist's newly
confabulated world history comprised of intertwined slivers of time from all cultures where an historical
text on the events in the life of Cleopatra is illustrated with an image of Modigliani nude in one instance
and where Frida Kahlo serves as a stand in for Sappho in another shakes the assumption of cultural
identity. +2000/-2000, even become reclaimed territory where uncharted ideological options
have been put into place. In this new space the artist's systematic dismantling of the nationalistic
idea of "belonging" creates a mental fold that eludes geographic borderlines and historical
timelines. Such elusiveness even embraces the parameters of the +2000/-2000, even
project itself, which opens simultaneously in fourteen venues internationally, and with the
artist declining to favor any particular site with his presence at any of the openings.
The flip side of cultural identity, of belonging and of collective memory is that of the
outsider, the foreigner. The Other, in the Rombergian world that includes imagery from
Eastern and Western cultures is dealt with in a specific way. The Other is rescued (through
revealment) from his traditional role as a non-actor, a bystander acted-upon in the play of
linear progressive history that has prevented him from participating in his own definition
and development. In Romberg's installation, the other becomes an active participant in the
making of a new non/history in our minds. In dealing with unfamiliar images drawn from
unfamiliar cultures, Romberg's work directs us our attention beyond the level of curiosity,
beyond the question, Well, what are these cultural images, these fragments of cultural
historical data? His work forces us to reconstitute and recapitulate how we have
assembled our interpretations of what we consider "truthful" in history. The artist asks us
to reconsider the traditional relationship between text and illustration throughout time.
Through this process the viewer mirrors Romberg's own artistic world that seemingly
lacks referentiality and meaning; objectified art images assume a reality that propels us
towards levels of subjectivity that act as screens for our own insufficiencies, desires and
fears, situating in this way the real content of the work in the viewer. This project, then, is a
reverie on the historical formation and deformation of Western (and, by contrast, Eastern)
identity. Moreover, +2000/-2000, even , with its overloaded volume of informational
imagery --- culturally loaded icons from all cultures, great and small, from diverse points in
time --- is an oblique commentary on the eventual merging of cultural identities. Finally, it
suggests a digging into the formation of cultural memory in order to obliterate it.
To completely understand +2000/-2000, even is to walk through the installation and
think it through the body. By doing this you apprehend that the artist has wanted all of his
installations to be participatory. This is in keeping with Mikel Dufrenne's contention in the
Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience that the virtue of the aesthetic object is largely
measured by its ability to seduce the body. This seductive quality in +2000/-2000, even
emerges out of Romberg's intention that a perception of an altered reality be gained
through a sensualized visual experience. The artist's walk through imagery and
unanchored, floating words envelops the viewer in a celebration of the diversity of styles
through time. What is sensed is knowledge brought to the level of lived experience. In the
eye of the viewer's mind, knowledge (and its manifestations) is wrenched away from the
cerebral cortex, pushed closer to the surface of the skin, and then drawn to the interior of
the human heart.
Dominique Nahas/ NYC / April 1996
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