In plain terms, Dario Robleto takes amazing things and performs
operations on them. Did you know that the first nuclear
test
explosion instantly melted the sands of the New Mexican desert into
glass? Did you know there are million-year-old blossoms? Did you know
that French women scoured World War I battlefields for wedding bands
when there was nothing else left of the grenaded bodies? Did you know
the longest-married couple in history made a recording about their love
before they died?
Robleto specializes in finding these things. He is an artist, but
half his time is spent researching history and collecting its detritus.
(A network of nerds helps him.) Once he gets the precious material, he
changes it. He grinds bones to dust, pulverizes love letters, melts
vinyl records and cassette tapes, makes casts of bitten bullets and DIY
prosthetic limbs, and brews homemade remedies from plants and
powders.
These are the materials of his final works, usually sculptures with
many parts resting inside vitrines with wall labels that are also part
of the art. Often, Robleto writes the labels before the pieces are
made. The ingredients are dictated not by their appearance but by the
story or song he wants them to conjure when they’re read.
Looking is not the principal way information is exchanged in
Robleto’s art. It is a faith-based art. You will not necessarily
see ground pituitary gland, even though it is in the list of
materials, and you will certainly not see any certification that it’s
actual ground pituitary gland.
But the elaborately composed wall label is the artist’s claim to the
truth of his materials—he says it’s important to him that
everything is precisely what it says it is in his art—as well as
his testament to our fetishization of origins, of smoking guns, of
timed starts. The artist’s mind is usually where art begins, but not
here. Here, art begins in the magically real, in things so unbelievable
that they vex the whole concept of the real while affirming it at the
same time. Robleto unburies the true pedestals of art: life, which,
yes, is separate from art, and loss. In Robleto’s work, art must have
access to the real to survive. Art is an extension of life, an address
to loss, and nothing without those.
That’s a platform I can get behind.
For Robleto, who grew up in San Antonio raised by his grandmother
and his mother—his mother ran first a honky-tonk and then a
hospice—the wounds and the losses are everywhere, and so are all
stripes of nurses and doctors. Robleto thinks of himself as DJ, not RN,
but both labels apply. His main subjects are popular music and war, his
methods are alchemical and medical, and the result is a practice
furiously opposed to the self-satisfaction of irony and in full
agreement with the technique of the remix.
Robleto rose to national prominence about a decade ago. His first
survey, Alloy of Love, kicks off its tour at the Frye Art
Museum in Seattle this spring. Concurrently on display at the Frye is a
commissioned installation by Robleto mixing new sculptures with the art
collection and history of museum founders Charles and Emma Frye. The
Fryes left no children behind, only a collection of
paintings—plenty featuring children, Robleto noted when he did
his research.
That show, only appearing in Seattle, is called Heaven Is Being
a Memory to Others. It’s worthy of its own book, not only because
it is of historical importance to Seattle and will not recur, but also
because of its sheer power.
Ultimately it is a collaboration led by Robleto and including
curator Robin Held. Each room represents one or more implied points of
view: lover, soldier, grieving woman, bride, salesman peddling life
improvements. The sight lines and the shadows cast by the temporary
walls are as intense and revealing as the objects they connect. This is
what is really meant by artist-as-curator.
Alloy of Love, the survey exhibition, is set up to address
the commissioned show through the passageways of the small museum, but
it acts most effectively as a separate distillation of Robleto’s
emotional and political abilities and sympathies—political not
because of anything overt, but because of a documentarian-like
insistence on actuality and engagement. The methods couldn’t be more
different, but the project is not so far from Donald Judd’s, or any
number of minimal, pop, and conceptual artists addressing the loss
between what is represented and what is.
Robleto once folded the candy wrappers from a Felix Gonzalez-Torres
installation into origami airplanes for a work of art, and
Gonzalez-Torres is the artist he’s most influenced by and associated
with. But his loosely assembled bits remind me, paradoxically, of Tony
Smith’s masterwork of metaphor and fact, mythic innards and human
scale—his six-foot black cube called Die.
The difference is, Robleto wants to heal, and the expression of this
desire in his work takes on the character of the one treatment neither
science nor superstition has a hold on: the placebo effect. Robleto
completed one of his first artworks, before he started making
sculpture, on the block where he grew up, sneaking around at night
replacing the lightbulbs on people’s porches with slightly
higher-wattage ones. People wondered why things were a little
brighter. 
