Dario Robleto’s wide-ranging reach—in which the deepest interiors and most distant exteriors mix with popular culture and early analog media—is getting more articulate with each pass.
Dario Robleto: The Signal
May 12–October 27, 2024
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth
The tender pragmatisms of flesh have poetries no enigma—human or divine—can diminish or demean. Indeed, it can only cause them, and then walk out.
—John Fowles, The Ebony Tower
Have a good trip.
—Georgi Gospodinov, The Physics of Sorrow
It’s a long way from the Milky Way to the Jacksboro Highway, but I hope in your travels you will make it to Fort Worth, Texas in time to see Dario Robleto’s The Signal at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. The show features sculpture, works on paper, and a seventy-minute commissioned video.
American Seabed (2014) is a large vitrine upon which several fossilized whale ear bones are mounted on brass rods anchored in cast concrete. Each bone is topped with a butterfly with antennae made from stretched audio tape of Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row. This inter-species work gives voice to our relatedness. The butterfly effect, that small changes in a system can influence large outcomes over time, is an obvious reference point for this work. It’s a concept in chaos theory from the ‘60s, which postulated that, say, the sound of Cinderella sweeping up in Brazil may eventually cause a tornado in Texas.
Unknown and Solitary Seas (Dreams and Emotions of the 19th Century) (2018) presents the earliest waveform recordings of blood flowing from the heart and in the brain during sleep, dreaming, and various emotional states, 3D-printed in brass-coated stainless steel. Presented with the look of golden sautoirs on black velvet in a high-end jewelry boutique, the piece may address the Victorian impulse to outward display as expected by social norms, while also giving graphic evidence of hidden inner states. These are artifacts from a séance of spiritual yearning, the need to know made manifest in physical objects.
The First Time, the Heart (A Portrait of Life, 1854-1913) (2017) is a selection of photo-lithographs of heart pulse-waves, revealing Robleto’s fascination with the earliest forms of analog media and his tendency to develop esoteric methods with his materials.
Survival Does Not Lie in The Heavens (2012), a triptych of framed astrophotographs focused on the Hubble Deep Field, is installed like a Christian altar piece such that the floor the viewer is standing on acts as the predella. Revelation comes with the knowledge that the galactic glimmers meeting your eye are not stars, but digitally appropriated images of spotlights from the covers of hundreds of live albums of now-deceased gospel, blues, and jazz musicians. The piece reveals Robleto, the painstaking researcher, as analogous to Robleto the record collector. Most of his early conceptual breakthroughs as an artist were because of the material relationship he has made with vinyl.
Pondering this, it is relevant to recall the artist’s story of how his father, whom he did not know well and was staying with for a brief period in the mid-‘90s, left for work one day, absent-mindedly leaving The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper CD on repeat. Just twenty-two, and unknowingly ready for a seismic shift, Robleto sat transfixed before the speakers as the thirty-nine minutes, thirty-six seconds of the album rewired the neurons of his brain, each repetition deepening the new groove within. That very afternoon, with a ride from his dad to get art supplies, Robleto made the epiphanic decision to commit his life to art. A few weeks later he moved on, never seeing or hearing from his father again.
Black-and-white throughout, it feels like a drawing that dreamed it was a documentary and woke up as a love letter mailed from the giant red eye of Jupiter.
Ancient Beings Long for Notice (2023-24), the featured video, is driven by a centuries-spanning array of images and a lengthy script read by the artist in voice-over, ably embedding word in image, image in word. The historical sweep of the video is entrancing. Black-and-white throughout, it feels like a drawing that dreamed it was a documentary and woke up as a love letter mailed from the giant red eye of Jupiter.
It tells the story of Voyager 1 and 2, deep-space probes launched in 1977—how they transformed the science of astronomy at 38,000 miles an hour, billions of miles from earth, and how the Golden Record, a goodwill greeting from our planet, is bolted to each probe, with a desire for positivity, diversity, and diplomacy, intentionally foregrounded.
Assembled by Carl Sagan, the Golden Record team included Ann Druyan, with whom he eventually fell in love while working on the project. Their romance is set alongside the rare alignment of the four great ice and gas planets, which opened a path for human exploration in deep space. Instances in the video narrative where their relationship is mentioned are accompanied by symmetry in the correspondent images, suggesting that love provides the possibility for balance, despite the asymmetry that allows everything to exist.
Further, it is told how recording engineer Will Gaisberg, in the final days of World War I, made the first ever battlefield recording in the hope that it would also be documenting the final war. Druyan, in her research for the Golden Record sixty years later, hears the “ugly repeating loop” of this recording, influencing her thinking about the possible recipients of the Golden Record. She figured that by recording the electrical/emotional impulses in her cells with an electroencephalograph as she listened to Gaisberg’s disturbing recording, she would etch into the Golden Record the true ways of our humanity so that we may be known, wars and all. Druyan felt that alien listeners should know of our failures, famines, inequality, and environmental devastation, and wonders within this if they are like us, and if they are not, why not?
On the flip side, she hopes that optimism and activism are also represented, even though the memory of soldiers, missing and dead, and of buried, unexploded ordnance, may be likened to the silence which has greeted the Golden Record.
Still, nothing is negligible. The oil can of human consciousness continues to find ways to lubricate the closed system of entropy.
These are stories of love and war, the far reaches of space, and the inscrutable, never-to-be-understood, unfolding of time. Robleto’s wide-ranging reach, in which the deepest interiors and most distant exteriors of our existence are mixed with contemporary popular culture and the early history of analog media, gets more articulate with each pass. It’s plain that Robleto’s mid-‘90s day spent with The Beatles, is still on repeat.
