Linarejos Moreno
The Cloud Chamber (La Cámara de Niebla)

As an emerging artist, when Linarejos Moreno took over the ruins of her father’s metallurgical factory, we could say that she began to enact her own foundational myth, counterpointing the rational, conscripted, mechanical realm of the father with her own unbounded feminine imaginary. Linarejos Moreno was born and raised in Madrid. She, and other female members of her family were made to turn a blind eye to the emblematic world of the railroad industry her father was engaged in most of his life. Following Spain’s economic crisis in the last decades, the factory was forced to shut down, and thus, Linarejos finally entered that secret world in ruins, charged with industrial, mechanical and mathematical symbols and an aura of a past life she could scarcely fathom. Empowered as an artist, she still turns to this space again and again, infusing her countless transformative performances and installations in an “infinite regress,” as David Joselit would put it. Linarejos has photographed instances of her ritual performances amidst architectural ruins, industrial molds, machines, etc. She has also crafted phantasmagoric “mise-en- scènes” using clusters of threads that criss-cross empty spaces, or radiate in and out of thresholds, windows, mechanical parts, while, suddenly, they may appear in the act of being cut by fleeting actors holding scissors… their undulating fall caught by the eye of the camera. See Architectural Intersections, 2010, Cutting and Rebounding of Threads, 2010, Lacrimarios, 2007 and Wailers, 2007.

Her perspectival “mise-en-scenes” as well as the falling strings remit to Duchamp’s interest in optical phenomena, and his experiments with chance, as for example in the making of 3 Standard Stoppages. More importantly, what we take from Linarejo’s photographs of her performances, is how they elicit poetic evocations of what we do not see with our naked eye, in other words, what Benjamin called the “optical unconscious,” thus, showing her conviction that a full presentation or re-presentation of a given performance, with all its implications, in all its spatial/temporal dimensions is impossible. Hence, the incommensurable nature of a performance, "even" as Duchamp would put it.

Linarejos drives this point  further in other photographic works, such as Stalker, Uncertainty Assessment from 2006, and Stalker-Black Square from 2007, which literally capture mathematical formulas for indeterminacy scribbled by hand on interior and exterior decayed walls and furnishings. Seen in hindsight and following closely David Joselit’s analysis of  Duchamp’s The Great Glass in his book, Infinite Regress, Linarejos’s oeuvre - from the start - seems to be staged with underlying Duchampian references (though it is also phenomenologically grounded in her own biography). Both the measurable, mechanical realm of the Bachelors, found in the lower portion of The Great Glass, and the inconmensurable gaseous realm of the Bride, in its upper portion seem to have left a metaphoric imprint on her work. In fact, Linarejos actually alludes to The Great Glass in a witty, ironic feminist statement, photographing nine women dressed in black, as they move through the industrial setting. The work is titled Nine Female Molds, 2007. The same subjects reappear in a series titled, Automats, 2007. 

While Linarejos’s initial performances seem to ground her oeuvre with a mythic narrative, more recently the artist has proceeded to dismantle, or illuminate the mechanical paradigm underscoring a modern vision of the world, revealed in different spheres, in the period between 1880 and 1925. As Joselit states it, during that period, the economy of mechanical production, reproduction, and desire, conceived in technological, financial and sexual terms, not only defined industrial production as an ever increasing capacity to manufacture goods but also as a function of the fluctuating demands for commodities in the marketplace. In further discussions, citing Ford, Freud, and Lacan, Joselit explains how the mechanical paradigm is not only intrinsic in Capitalist production, but also in our modern understanding of sexuality, and visual representation, among other things. Its incommensurable opposite polarity is also produced. Lacan, for example, introduces the subjective concept of the gaze in opposition to his study of measurable perspective. Freud speaks of the deferred, repressed principle of desire as opposed to sexual reproduction, and in Duchamp’s case, the notes contained in the Green Box, also point to the concept of delay as a factor in the indeterminate realm of the unattainable (sexual union, mind/body integration of self, consumer satisfaction /commodity).

In Linarejos’s later work, Art Forms in Mechanism, the artist focuses on 19th Century botanical models. She photographs them in detail, showing how the mechanical paradigm permeates rational explanations of nature. At the same time, she intervenes a book by Karl Bossfeldt, Art Forms in Nature, changing the word “nature” for “mechanism” wherever the word appears. In La Camara de Niebla (The Cloud Chamber) from 2017, recently exhibited in Madrid, the artist discovers how this 1911 inventive machine, made to record images of cosmic rays, seems to have inspired Kandinsky’s abstract compositions, though the artist does not acknowledge those scientific sources in his famous manifesto, The Spiritual in Art published the same year The Cloud Chamber was invented.

Linarejo’s reconstruction of The Cloud Chamber with a display of its cosmic images in her installation work mingles objective and subjective content. On the one hand, she presents the original mechanical tool which can be seen in operation, and on the other hand, she constructs its simpler version, in her own terms, using domestic “found” objects, such as a champagne glass, a flower vase, a fishbowl. With this act, the artist seems to align herself with a Duchampian idea, that in art, machines do not need to be functional but rather, be allegorical. More significantly, with Linarejo’s feminine choice of “found objects”, her allegorical act points towards the unattainable cosmic dimension mankind wishes for, but will never attain.