Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle: Blinking out of Existence | Catalogue for exhibition at Rochester Art Center, 2007

Hold Yourself in Mid Air


And they departed from the mount of the Lord three days’ journey: and the ark of the covenant of the Lord went before them in the three days’ journey, to search out a resting place for them. And the cloud of the Lord was upon them by day, when they went out of the camp.
—Numbers, 10: 33, 10:34

When the Israelites departed for their forty-year exodus, they were accustomed to farming by diverting rivers to irrigate the dry plains of Egypt. So as the half-million people slowly moved from the lowlands to the semi-arid zones of Sinai and Canaan, they were surprised to find annual rainfall averages of more than fifteen inches. Is it any wonder that God should have appeared to them in the form of a cloud, reassuring them of their slow progress toward freedom? Simultaneously signaling mobility and the arrival of much-needed water, God as a swiftly moving cloud encouraged them to continue toward the promised land of Israel.

Aristotle saw clouds as harbingers of change. For nomadic peoples, the indication of change would be expected, even anticipated. A more localized wanderer, Baudelaire’s flaneur, looked to the drifting shapes in the heavens for constancy, seeing in their fleecy meanderings an affirmation of his own peripatetic tendencies. Since Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle questions the legitimacy and limitations of boundaries, it is appropriate that the cloud has become a fixture in his visual vocabulary.

Clouds first appeared in the artist’s work in 1997, when he created El Niño Effect during a residency at ArtPace in San Antonio, Texas. He built a New Age spa within the gallery, complete with two isolation tanks, changing rooms, and two television monitors playing identical videos of moving clouds. The entire installation, according to the artist, used the peregrinations of clouds and warm water to discuss a “politics of xenophobia.” The video, filmed by the artist in Nogales, Arizona, is titled Wind Shear, and the clouds are identified as hovering between the United States and Mexico. In an interview, the artist said:

The shot is of these beautiful clouds in a state of “shearing,” which means they are moving contrary to each other at different elevations, so they’re crossing the border both from north to south, and south to north…The clouds are nomadic bodies free of political boundaries. They become a metaphor for freedom, in that they represent the incapability of political or national boundaries to stop large climatic movements, or social ones such as immigration.

Heavenly Bodies (2003), a suite of nine digital prints on watercolor paper, is one of Manglano-Ovalle’s works elaborating on the cloud motif. Using DNA “fingerprints” scanned into his computer, Manglano-Ovalle took strands of indisputable evidence proclaiming the genetic predispositions of various people toward blue eyes, brown eyes, black hair, bushy eyebrows, large noses, and so on. He then transposed these rows of vaporous markings onto different celestial backgrounds. The prints collapse the opposite experiences of looking up into the endless sky and looking down into a microscope to examine the minute and astonishing evidence of human existence. To distinguish one print from another, the titles each include the name of the subject volunteering his or her DNA to the project. In Heavenly Bodies (Anna Kustera), Anna’s vibrating white blobs of chromosomes are tinged with aquamarine, resembling UFOs hovering in the night. Lori Lightfoot’s evolutionary makeup contrasts sharply with a field of deep blue evoking the vaulted sky of Montana. Joe Picket’s genes almost fade away completely, enveloped by a moody, overcast realm—perhaps in Chicago, the artist’s hometown.

A Rose

“Genetics can deliver certainty that other forms of representation couldn’t before,” Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle is saying. We are sitting in a compact, clean office built as a loft inside his studio—a studio so white and pristine it could be a laboratory. “Certainty,” I gradually come to realize during the interview, is a term the artist regards with little trust. The more “certain” something is, the more likely it is to be circumscribed by rules and regulations. As an artist for whom political concerns are paramount, challenging “certainty” has become enmeshed in Manglano-Ovalle’s art making.

Manglano-Ovalle’s first choice of a subject for a DNA portrait was a tea rose. Not an ordinary tea rose, but a hybrid that his wife, Barbara Holbert, created and grew in their garden in Chicago. After the O.J. Simpson trial of 1995, the artist immediately began to question the cultural significance of DNA evidence that was airtight and objective, especially under circumstances that were incredibly racially charged. The artist took a sample from the rose and had it sent to the same lab in Baltimore that processed Simpson’s DNA. After receiving the results, Manglano-Ovalle blew up the image digitally and colored it, titling the triptych of photographic images simply Rose. Each panel is identical, consisting of four columns of DNA. The base of each column is a deep pink hue, which quickly lightens until each column is almost transparent as it reaches the top of the frame. Once the piece had been made, he and his wife destroyed the flower, so that it only existed in the form of a portrait.

Manglano-Ovalle deliberately selected a rose for its symbolic weight, conveying as it does messages of truth, beauty, and love. But his rose was a hybrid—impure. By conventional standards, it was a monster. With the picture of these mutant genes, he reminds us that genetic engineering is not new—and our ready leap to judge people, even plants, whether we are looking at a photograph or an abstract smear for scientific purposes, also endures. Manglano-Ovalle’s work reveals how popular reception of scientific discoveries shapes the way in which we view what surrounds us, and what is inside us.

“I know of nothing sublime which is not some modification of power,” philosopher Edmund Burke wrote in 1757. Few modern symbols are more indicative of power than the double helix we now recognize as DNA. Completely invisible to the human eye, and as remote to us as the stars in outer space, it is regularly held up as a beacon for a future in which human potential exceeds the most ambitious expectations. Burke cites the diminutive as a source of the sublime equal to vastness:
As the great extreme of dimension is sublime, so the last extreme of littleness is in some measure sublime likewise; when we attend to the infinite divisibility of matter, when we pursue animal life into these excessively small, and yet organized beings, that escape the nicest inquisition of the sense, when we push our discoveries yet smaller, and the still diminishing scale of existence, in tracing which the imagination is lost as well as the sense, we become amazed and confounded at the wonders of minuteness; nor can we distinguish in its effect this extreme of littleness from the vast itself.

In resounding testimony to the mystery of our own physical essence, David exclaims in the book of Psalms, “I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” In Heavenly Bodies, the complexity of human existence is vividly reflected in images of the celestial realm.

By any other name…

In The Invention of Clouds, a biography of English pharmacist Luke Howard, who gave the names cirrus, stratus, cumulus, and nimbus to the cloud formations, author Richard Hamblyn writes that meteorology is “a search for narrative order among events governed not by laws alone, but by the shapeless caprices of the atmosphere.” This is a crucial reference point for Manglano-Ovalle, because Hamblyn compares weather to language: “Weather writes, erases and rewrites itself upon the sky with the endless fluidity of language; and it is with language that we have sought throughout history to apprehend it.”

The idea that “naming” a thing controls it is a prevailing theme in Manglano-Ovalle’s art. In an essay that interprets Manglano-Ovalle’s work through the writings of Michel Foucault, “Beyond Limits and Frontiers,” critic and curator Ralph Christofori points out that both the philosopher and the artist are careful not to assume a “posture of rejection a priori” toward modernism, that instead, the artist “elevates real relationships to the level of reflective criticism without falling into the trap of passionate implausibility.” Manglano-Ovalle’s works, Christofori continues, “lead the observer through aesthetical, political or epistemological strata without explicitly mentioning their limits or contradictions.”

The discourse of power, as elaborated by Foucault, is not strictly limited to “attack” and “counter-attack,” but is instead multivalent, allowing contradictory discourses to reside under the same rubric. Refusing to take a stance on any of the organizing factors—modernist architecture, genetic science, technology—that serve as structural bases for much of his art, Manglano-Ovalle insists that his art is only the beginning of the equation:

Art has the possibility to have an impact on a broader culture once it initiates a discursive practice. We get to talk and debate. That’s where it really exists. It has been a way to catalyze discourse. If you made a portrait and never showed it to anybody, it wouldn’t exist. In the political aspect of my work, social change occurs in language itself. We might cause a new term to be developed. Similarly, this is how science has the most change on our culture, through discourse. On a discursive level, scientific developments have a real impact in shaping everyday and social events.

“There are two meanings of the word ‘subject’,” wrote Foucault, “subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge.” Yet once the subject is “tied to his own identity,” an identity bestowed upon him by someone else, he is—ironically— also in a position to assert his rights. Being a subject has advantages; it is not a powerless position.

Cloudmaking

When dealing with clouds and DNA, both of which are frequently the focus of scientific scrutiny and documentation, the problem of writing, or labeling, remains. There is a finality to the photograph and the printed word; they are testimony that an event took place. Once the event is recorded it passes into the annals of history. How does one represent something so fleeting, and still allow it to retain its mystery and ephemerality? Using tools that circumvent physicality, such as video, or digital prints, even sculpture that is first realized on a computer program, the virtual medium redoubles the effect of the dissolution of solidity. Prompted by the realization that genetics “can deliver certainty that other forms of representation couldn’t before,” Manglano-Ovalle’s art undermines this certainty both through the immateriality of the digital media used to make the Heavenly Bodies prints, and through the thing that they evoke: the cloud.

Art historian Hubert Damisch writes in A Theory of /Cloud/ that representation, as defined by Foucault, refers to “the relation between the signifier and that which is signified seems to be one of standing for it, of substitution, reciprocity, and a strictly binary organization in which the sign appears as a representation that duplicates and reduplicates itself.” Damisch points to the interchangeable significances of clouds in religious painting: “/cloud/ has no particular meaning in itself; its only meaning is that which stems from the relations of consecutiveness, opposition, and substitution that link it to other elements in the system.”

This sort of upheaval has a long tradition in the representation of clouds. Manglano-Ovalle’s work is laced with art-historical references, and the Heavenly Bodies, his suite of prints, is no exception. He based Cloud Prototype no. 1 (2003), a titanium and alloy sculpture of a thunderstorm cloud, on studies of an actual storm cloud created at the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Illinois. The shaping of Cloud Prototype no. 1 and the Heavenly Bodies reflects the influence of science on Romantic painting. Luke Howard’s classification of clouds had a profound impact on the English painters who were his contemporaries. This aspect of the history of art is extremely important to the artist:
If you look at clouds in paintings before Luke Howard, they have a kind of unrecognizable formlessness, but after him painters such as Constable and Turner started to be able to paint clouds the way they actually are. My contention is that, as always, forms do not exist without language, and once we are able to name things, we are able to give them forms. So, in a way, Howard allowed Constable and Turner to create their clouds, to give form to these ephemeral things.

Constable believed in meteorology as an approach to art: “Painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature,” he claimed. John Ruskin fiercely defended Turner’s portrayals of cloud formations, preferring their modern aura of mystery to the solidity of clouds in Renaissance and Medieval paintings. Though clouds were being catalogued by science, a deeper understanding of their make-up contributed to their being less cartoonish, and more expressive, in painting. “There is no excellence without obscurity,” Ruskin wrote, echoing Burke. From a philosophical standpoint, clouds, despite the fact that language gave them form, still manage to create a sense of slippage in painting. Formless and weightless, clouds defy the confines of perspective. There are no boundaries in the sky. Damisch wrote:
Perspective only needs to “know” things that it can reduce to its own order, things that occupy a place and the contour of which can be defined by lines. But the sky does not occupy a place, and cannot be measured; and as for clouds, nor can their outlines be fixed or their shapes analyzed in terms of surfaces. A cloud belongs to the class of “bodies without surfaces,” as Leonardo da Vinci was to put it, bodies that have no precise form or extremities and whose limits interpenetrate with those of other clouds.

“At the moment we see something beautiful, we undergo a radical decentering,” Elaine Scarry writes in On Beauty and Being Just. Presented as flatly as possible, the cloud/DNA of Heavenly Bodies bypasses perspective, a “structure of exclusion,” and suggests instead that space is without limits. Perhaps clouds cannot be tied to a specific location or assume a particular meaning because they lack a center. Our comprehension of their structure-less beauty decenters us in turn, permitting us to envision possibility that, Scarry argues, leads to a general promotion of social justice. The cloud foils the irrefutability with which we have come to associate genetic data. Heavenly Bodies shows that clouds can’t be contained or constrained, just as humans cannot, not even through language.

Hold Yourself in Mid-Air
The DNA used in Heavenly Bodies originated in an earlier work titled Garden of Delights (1998), an installation that includes sixteen triptychs of the DNA prints in strong, vibrant colors. Looking at this work, we see that it is the source not only of the material being employed in Heavenly Bodies, but that this is where some of the crucial underlying themes of Heavenly Bodies begin to develop. Garden of Delights hinges on two art-historical references. The more obvious reference is evidenced in the title, borrowed from the central panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s fantastic altarpiece depicting an idyllic setting where naked people, mutants and bizarre creatures romp in unabashed celebration of the grotesque and the sinful.

The lesser-known allusion is to the eighteenth-century casta paintings made in Mexico. These works portray the social caste system in Mexico through a taxonomic study of race mixing among the three major groups that resided in the Spanish colony: Indians, Spaniards, and Blacks. The images were meant as an admonition to Spanish settlers to keep their blood “pure.” In an interview with curator Ivo Mesquita, Manglano-Ovalle discussed the European casta paintings, saying that they represent “the overwhelming desire of the Spanish colonizer to name and control the uncontrollable” and “a wish for order and a way of organizing races and relations within colonies.”

Casta paintings portrayed mother, father, and child in a domestic setting (and often with surprising tenderness). To lend the paintings an air of scientific authority, titles were given to each of the families, such as “Spaniard and Albino Makes a Black-Return-Backwards” or “Spaniard and Indian Produce a Mestizo.” The only convincing category—or, more accurately, non-category—among the casta paintings is tente en el aire. This particular classification, “Hold Yourself in Mid-Air,” finds its ultimate expression in the Heavenly Bodies series. Not quite cloud, and not quite DNA, their indeterminacy defies all attempts at marginalization. Through the titles of the casta paintings, originally conceived as an instrument of oppression, Manglano-Ovalle found an opening through which he could blast the repressive system wide open, leaving only the sky as a limit.

When the casta painters adopted the inscription “Hold Yourself in Mid-Air,” they were unwittingly signaling a viable possibility for a future in which race is no longer an issue, when all races have been intermingled to the point that it is not possible to hold one race as superior over all others. Heavenly Bodies subverts the symbolic power of DNA to advance the hope of suspending all racial boundaries. It is a stunning affirmation that the social construction of race—a concept as flimsy and ephemeral as a cloud—will one day disappear.

—Claire Barliant

1. Numbers, 10: 33, 10:34 NAE (New Analytical Edition).
2. Richard Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001)
pp. 18-19.
3. Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting, trans. Janet Lloyd (1972; rpt. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002) p. 36.
4. Valerie Palmer, “In Ordinary Time: Interview with Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle,” New Art Examiner (January-February 2002): 34.
5. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 59.
6. Ibid., 66.
7. Psalm 139:14 NAE; this phrase is also misquoted by Burke on page 63 of A Philosophical Inquiry.
8. Hamblyn, 11.
9. Ibid.
10. Ralph Christofori, “Beyond Limits and Frontiers,” Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, ed. Ralph Cristofori, Ivo Mesquita and James Rondeau. (Madrid: Fundacion “la Caixa,” 2003), 41.
11. Conversation with author, November 29, 2003.
12. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, Brian Wallis, ed. (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 420.
13. Damisch, 55.
14. Ibid., 45.
15. Ivo Mesquita, “A Conversation with Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle,” Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, (Madrid: Fundacion “la Caixa,” 2003), 56.
16. Hamblyn, 222.
17. Damisch, 189.
18. Ibid.
19. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 111.
20. Clouds are comprised of tiny water droplets. The droplets materialize from excess water vapor that rises upward. A clear description of cloud development can be found at The Weather World 2010 Project, created by the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Retrieved from on February 22, 2004.
21. Mesquita, 45.
22. Maureen P. Sherlock, “Shadow Dancing: The Work of Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle,” Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle: The Garden of Delights (Winston-Salem, N.C.: Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, 1998), 29-31; and Ilona Katzew, “Casta Painting: Identity and Social Stratification in Colonial Mexico,” retrieved from on March 1, 2004.
23. A tente en el aire was the offspring of parents who were of mixed descent. Katzew quotes Idea compendiosa del Reyno de Nueva Esparña (1774) by Pedro Alonso O’Crouley, a native of Cadiz, on the lineages of New Spain: “Because it is agreed that from a Spaniard and a Negro a mulatto is born; from a mulatto and a Spaniard, a morisco; from a morisco and a Spaniard, a torna atras [return-backwards]; and from a torna atras and a Spaniard, a tente en el aire [hold-yourself-in-mid-air], which is the same as mulatto, it is said, and with reason, that a mulatto can never leave his condition of mixed blood, but rather it is the Spanish element that is lost and absorbed into the condition of a Negro…”.

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle: Blinking out of Existence | Catalogue for exhibition at Rochester Art Center, 2007

Hold Yourself in Mid Air


And they departed from the mount of the Lord three days’ journey: and the ark of the covenant of the Lord went before them in the three days’ journey, to search out a resting place for them. And the cloud of the Lord was upon them by day, when they went out of the camp.
—Numbers, 10: 33, 10:34

When the Israelites departed for their forty-year exodus, they were accustomed to farming by diverting rivers to irrigate the dry plains of Egypt. So as the half-million people slowly moved from the lowlands to the semi-arid zones of Sinai and Canaan, they were surprised to find annual rainfall averages of more than fifteen inches. Is it any wonder that God should have appeared to them in the form of a cloud, reassuring them of their slow progress toward freedom? Simultaneously signaling mobility and the arrival of much-needed water, God as a swiftly moving cloud encouraged them to continue toward the promised land of Israel.

Aristotle saw clouds as harbingers of change. For nomadic peoples, the indication of change would be expected, even anticipated. A more localized wanderer, Baudelaire’s flaneur, looked to the drifting shapes in the heavens for constancy, seeing in their fleecy meanderings an affirmation of his own peripatetic tendencies. Since Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle questions the legitimacy and limitations of boundaries, it is appropriate that the cloud has become a fixture in his visual vocabulary.

Clouds first appeared in the artist’s work in 1997, when he created El Niño Effect during a residency at ArtPace in San Antonio, Texas. He built a New Age spa within the gallery, complete with two isolation tanks, changing rooms, and two television monitors playing identical videos of moving clouds. The entire installation, according to the artist, used the peregrinations of clouds and warm water to discuss a “politics of xenophobia.” The video, filmed by the artist in Nogales, Arizona, is titled Wind Shear, and the clouds are identified as hovering between the United States and Mexico. In an interview, the artist said:

The shot is of these beautiful clouds in a state of “shearing,” which means they are moving contrary to each other at different elevations, so they’re crossing the border both from north to south, and south to north…The clouds are nomadic bodies free of political boundaries. They become a metaphor for freedom, in that they represent the incapability of political or national boundaries to stop large climatic movements, or social ones such as immigration.

Heavenly Bodies (2003), a suite of nine digital prints on watercolor paper, is one of Manglano-Ovalle’s works elaborating on the cloud motif. Using DNA “fingerprints” scanned into his computer, Manglano-Ovalle took strands of indisputable evidence proclaiming the genetic predispositions of various people toward blue eyes, brown eyes, black hair, bushy eyebrows, large noses, and so on. He then transposed these rows of vaporous markings onto different celestial backgrounds. The prints collapse the opposite experiences of looking up into the endless sky and looking down into a microscope to examine the minute and astonishing evidence of human existence. To distinguish one print from another, the titles each include the name of the subject volunteering his or her DNA to the project. In Heavenly Bodies (Anna Kustera), Anna’s vibrating white blobs of chromosomes are tinged with aquamarine, resembling UFOs hovering in the night. Lori Lightfoot’s evolutionary makeup contrasts sharply with a field of deep blue evoking the vaulted sky of Montana. Joe Picket’s genes almost fade away completely, enveloped by a moody, overcast realm—perhaps in Chicago, the artist’s hometown.

A Rose

“Genetics can deliver certainty that other forms of representation couldn’t before,” Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle is saying. We are sitting in a compact, clean office built as a loft inside his studio—a studio so white and pristine it could be a laboratory. “Certainty,” I gradually come to realize during the interview, is a term the artist regards with little trust. The more “certain” something is, the more likely it is to be circumscribed by rules and regulations. As an artist for whom political concerns are paramount, challenging “certainty” has become enmeshed in Manglano-Ovalle’s art making.

Manglano-Ovalle’s first choice of a subject for a DNA portrait was a tea rose. Not an ordinary tea rose, but a hybrid that his wife, Barbara Holbert, created and grew in their garden in Chicago. After the O.J. Simpson trial of 1995, the artist immediately began to question the cultural significance of DNA evidence that was airtight and objective, especially under circumstances that were incredibly racially charged. The artist took a sample from the rose and had it sent to the same lab in Baltimore that processed Simpson’s DNA. After receiving the results, Manglano-Ovalle blew up the image digitally and colored it, titling the triptych of photographic images simply Rose. Each panel is identical, consisting of four columns of DNA. The base of each column is a deep pink hue, which quickly lightens until each column is almost transparent as it reaches the top of the frame. Once the piece had been made, he and his wife destroyed the flower, so that it only existed in the form of a portrait.

Manglano-Ovalle deliberately selected a rose for its symbolic weight, conveying as it does messages of truth, beauty, and love. But his rose was a hybrid—impure. By conventional standards, it was a monster. With the picture of these mutant genes, he reminds us that genetic engineering is not new—and our ready leap to judge people, even plants, whether we are looking at a photograph or an abstract smear for scientific purposes, also endures. Manglano-Ovalle’s work reveals how popular reception of scientific discoveries shapes the way in which we view what surrounds us, and what is inside us.

“I know of nothing sublime which is not some modification of power,” philosopher Edmund Burke wrote in 1757. Few modern symbols are more indicative of power than the double helix we now recognize as DNA. Completely invisible to the human eye, and as remote to us as the stars in outer space, it is regularly held up as a beacon for a future in which human potential exceeds the most ambitious expectations. Burke cites the diminutive as a source of the sublime equal to vastness:
As the great extreme of dimension is sublime, so the last extreme of littleness is in some measure sublime likewise; when we attend to the infinite divisibility of matter, when we pursue animal life into these excessively small, and yet organized beings, that escape the nicest inquisition of the sense, when we push our discoveries yet smaller, and the still diminishing scale of existence, in tracing which the imagination is lost as well as the sense, we become amazed and confounded at the wonders of minuteness; nor can we distinguish in its effect this extreme of littleness from the vast itself.

In resounding testimony to the mystery of our own physical essence, David exclaims in the book of Psalms, “I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” In Heavenly Bodies, the complexity of human existence is vividly reflected in images of the celestial realm.

By any other name…

In The Invention of Clouds, a biography of English pharmacist Luke Howard, who gave the names cirrus, stratus, cumulus, and nimbus to the cloud formations, author Richard Hamblyn writes that meteorology is “a search for narrative order among events governed not by laws alone, but by the shapeless caprices of the atmosphere.” This is a crucial reference point for Manglano-Ovalle, because Hamblyn compares weather to language: “Weather writes, erases and rewrites itself upon the sky with the endless fluidity of language; and it is with language that we have sought throughout history to apprehend it.”

The idea that “naming” a thing controls it is a prevailing theme in Manglano-Ovalle’s art. In an essay that interprets Manglano-Ovalle’s work through the writings of Michel Foucault, “Beyond Limits and Frontiers,” critic and curator Ralph Christofori points out that both the philosopher and the artist are careful not to assume a “posture of rejection a priori” toward modernism, that instead, the artist “elevates real relationships to the level of reflective criticism without falling into the trap of passionate implausibility.” Manglano-Ovalle’s works, Christofori continues, “lead the observer through aesthetical, political or epistemological strata without explicitly mentioning their limits or contradictions.”

The discourse of power, as elaborated by Foucault, is not strictly limited to “attack” and “counter-attack,” but is instead multivalent, allowing contradictory discourses to reside under the same rubric. Refusing to take a stance on any of the organizing factors—modernist architecture, genetic science, technology—that serve as structural bases for much of his art, Manglano-Ovalle insists that his art is only the beginning of the equation:

Art has the possibility to have an impact on a broader culture once it initiates a discursive practice. We get to talk and debate. That’s where it really exists. It has been a way to catalyze discourse. If you made a portrait and never showed it to anybody, it wouldn’t exist. In the political aspect of my work, social change occurs in language itself. We might cause a new term to be developed. Similarly, this is how science has the most change on our culture, through discourse. On a discursive level, scientific developments have a real impact in shaping everyday and social events.

“There are two meanings of the word ‘subject’,” wrote Foucault, “subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge.” Yet once the subject is “tied to his own identity,” an identity bestowed upon him by someone else, he is—ironically— also in a position to assert his rights. Being a subject has advantages; it is not a powerless position.

Cloudmaking

When dealing with clouds and DNA, both of which are frequently the focus of scientific scrutiny and documentation, the problem of writing, or labeling, remains. There is a finality to the photograph and the printed word; they are testimony that an event took place. Once the event is recorded it passes into the annals of history. How does one represent something so fleeting, and still allow it to retain its mystery and ephemerality? Using tools that circumvent physicality, such as video, or digital prints, even sculpture that is first realized on a computer program, the virtual medium redoubles the effect of the dissolution of solidity. Prompted by the realization that genetics “can deliver certainty that other forms of representation couldn’t before,” Manglano-Ovalle’s art undermines this certainty both through the immateriality of the digital media used to make the Heavenly Bodies prints, and through the thing that they evoke: the cloud.

Art historian Hubert Damisch writes in A Theory of /Cloud/ that representation, as defined by Foucault, refers to “the relation between the signifier and that which is signified seems to be one of standing for it, of substitution, reciprocity, and a strictly binary organization in which the sign appears as a representation that duplicates and reduplicates itself.” Damisch points to the interchangeable significances of clouds in religious painting: “/cloud/ has no particular meaning in itself; its only meaning is that which stems from the relations of consecutiveness, opposition, and substitution that link it to other elements in the system.”

This sort of upheaval has a long tradition in the representation of clouds. Manglano-Ovalle’s work is laced with art-historical references, and the Heavenly Bodies, his suite of prints, is no exception. He based Cloud Prototype no. 1 (2003), a titanium and alloy sculpture of a thunderstorm cloud, on studies of an actual storm cloud created at the Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Illinois. The shaping of Cloud Prototype no. 1 and the Heavenly Bodies reflects the influence of science on Romantic painting. Luke Howard’s classification of clouds had a profound impact on the English painters who were his contemporaries. This aspect of the history of art is extremely important to the artist:
If you look at clouds in paintings before Luke Howard, they have a kind of unrecognizable formlessness, but after him painters such as Constable and Turner started to be able to paint clouds the way they actually are. My contention is that, as always, forms do not exist without language, and once we are able to name things, we are able to give them forms. So, in a way, Howard allowed Constable and Turner to create their clouds, to give form to these ephemeral things.

Constable believed in meteorology as an approach to art: “Painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature,” he claimed. John Ruskin fiercely defended Turner’s portrayals of cloud formations, preferring their modern aura of mystery to the solidity of clouds in Renaissance and Medieval paintings. Though clouds were being catalogued by science, a deeper understanding of their make-up contributed to their being less cartoonish, and more expressive, in painting. “There is no excellence without obscurity,” Ruskin wrote, echoing Burke. From a philosophical standpoint, clouds, despite the fact that language gave them form, still manage to create a sense of slippage in painting. Formless and weightless, clouds defy the confines of perspective. There are no boundaries in the sky. Damisch wrote:
Perspective only needs to “know” things that it can reduce to its own order, things that occupy a place and the contour of which can be defined by lines. But the sky does not occupy a place, and cannot be measured; and as for clouds, nor can their outlines be fixed or their shapes analyzed in terms of surfaces. A cloud belongs to the class of “bodies without surfaces,” as Leonardo da Vinci was to put it, bodies that have no precise form or extremities and whose limits interpenetrate with those of other clouds.

“At the moment we see something beautiful, we undergo a radical decentering,” Elaine Scarry writes in On Beauty and Being Just. Presented as flatly as possible, the cloud/DNA of Heavenly Bodies bypasses perspective, a “structure of exclusion,” and suggests instead that space is without limits. Perhaps clouds cannot be tied to a specific location or assume a particular meaning because they lack a center. Our comprehension of their structure-less beauty decenters us in turn, permitting us to envision possibility that, Scarry argues, leads to a general promotion of social justice. The cloud foils the irrefutability with which we have come to associate genetic data. Heavenly Bodies shows that clouds can’t be contained or constrained, just as humans cannot, not even through language.

Hold Yourself in Mid-Air
The DNA used in Heavenly Bodies originated in an earlier work titled Garden of Delights (1998), an installation that includes sixteen triptychs of the DNA prints in strong, vibrant colors. Looking at this work, we see that it is the source not only of the material being employed in Heavenly Bodies, but that this is where some of the crucial underlying themes of Heavenly Bodies begin to develop. Garden of Delights hinges on two art-historical references. The more obvious reference is evidenced in the title, borrowed from the central panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s fantastic altarpiece depicting an idyllic setting where naked people, mutants and bizarre creatures romp in unabashed celebration of the grotesque and the sinful.

The lesser-known allusion is to the eighteenth-century casta paintings made in Mexico. These works portray the social caste system in Mexico through a taxonomic study of race mixing among the three major groups that resided in the Spanish colony: Indians, Spaniards, and Blacks. The images were meant as an admonition to Spanish settlers to keep their blood “pure.” In an interview with curator Ivo Mesquita, Manglano-Ovalle discussed the European casta paintings, saying that they represent “the overwhelming desire of the Spanish colonizer to name and control the uncontrollable” and “a wish for order and a way of organizing races and relations within colonies.”

Casta paintings portrayed mother, father, and child in a domestic setting (and often with surprising tenderness). To lend the paintings an air of scientific authority, titles were given to each of the families, such as “Spaniard and Albino Makes a Black-Return-Backwards” or “Spaniard and Indian Produce a Mestizo.” The only convincing category—or, more accurately, non-category—among the casta paintings is tente en el aire. This particular classification, “Hold Yourself in Mid-Air,” finds its ultimate expression in the Heavenly Bodies series. Not quite cloud, and not quite DNA, their indeterminacy defies all attempts at marginalization. Through the titles of the casta paintings, originally conceived as an instrument of oppression, Manglano-Ovalle found an opening through which he could blast the repressive system wide open, leaving only the sky as a limit.

When the casta painters adopted the inscription “Hold Yourself in Mid-Air,” they were unwittingly signaling a viable possibility for a future in which race is no longer an issue, when all races have been intermingled to the point that it is not possible to hold one race as superior over all others. Heavenly Bodies subverts the symbolic power of DNA to advance the hope of suspending all racial boundaries. It is a stunning affirmation that the social construction of race—a concept as flimsy and ephemeral as a cloud—will one day disappear.

—Claire Barliant

1. Numbers, 10: 33, 10:34 NAE (New Analytical Edition).
2. Richard Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001)
pp. 18-19.
3. Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting, trans. Janet Lloyd (1972; rpt. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002) p. 36.
4. Valerie Palmer, “In Ordinary Time: Interview with Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle,” New Art Examiner (January-February 2002): 34.
5. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 59.
6. Ibid., 66.
7. Psalm 139:14 NAE; this phrase is also misquoted by Burke on page 63 of A Philosophical Inquiry.
8. Hamblyn, 11.
9. Ibid.
10. Ralph Christofori, “Beyond Limits and Frontiers,” Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, ed. Ralph Cristofori, Ivo Mesquita and James Rondeau. (Madrid: Fundacion “la Caixa,” 2003), 41.
11. Conversation with author, November 29, 2003.
12. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, Brian Wallis, ed. (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 420.
13. Damisch, 55.
14. Ibid., 45.
15. Ivo Mesquita, “A Conversation with Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle,” Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, (Madrid: Fundacion “la Caixa,” 2003), 56.
16. Hamblyn, 222.
17. Damisch, 189.
18. Ibid.
19. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 111.
20. Clouds are comprised of tiny water droplets. The droplets materialize from excess water vapor that rises upward. A clear description of cloud development can be found at The Weather World 2010 Project, created by the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Retrieved from on February 22, 2004.
21. Mesquita, 45.
22. Maureen P. Sherlock, “Shadow Dancing: The Work of Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle,” Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle: The Garden of Delights (Winston-Salem, N.C.: Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, 1998), 29-31; and Ilona Katzew, “Casta Painting: Identity and Social Stratification in Colonial Mexico,” retrieved from on March 1, 2004.
23. A tente en el aire was the offspring of parents who were of mixed descent. Katzew quotes Idea compendiosa del Reyno de Nueva Esparña (1774) by Pedro Alonso O’Crouley, a native of Cadiz, on the lineages of New Spain: “Because it is agreed that from a Spaniard and a Negro a mulatto is born; from a mulatto and a Spaniard, a morisco; from a morisco and a Spaniard, a torna atras [return-backwards]; and from a torna atras and a Spaniard, a tente en el aire [hold-yourself-in-mid-air], which is the same as mulatto, it is said, and with reason, that a mulatto can never leave his condition of mixed blood, but rather it is the Spanish element that is lost and absorbed into the condition of a Negro…”.