This article by Venezuelan writer, poet, and literature professor Rafael Castillo Zapata begins by quoting a passage from Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History,” and then goes on to cite Marcel Proust in relation to his understanding of memory and the gates it can open up. He then describes the image of Gego’s Reticulárea at the Museo de Bellas Artes of Caracas covered in spider webs. He asserts that it “strikes him suddenly as a perverse act of symmetrical justice, a web of another web like an equally light shroud, a wrapping put up by the workings of air, a fitting catafalque”; it is a symbol “of the slow assault to which Venezuelan museums are, at present, subjected.” To further his criticism of the state of museums in Venezuela, he remarks on the stories in the book, Los museos abandonados [Abandoned Museums], by Uruguayan writer Cristina Peri Rossi, drawing historical analogies to an incriminating pamphlet released in 1919 in which Oskar Kokoschka is accused of maintaining that a work by Rubens (bourgeois art) was more important than the life of a worker.

This chronicle, as Rafael Castillo Zapata calls it, is not strictly speaking, a work of art criticism or of art history; its aim is to protest the neglect and crisis facing museums and other cultural institutions in Venezuela at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Nonetheless, it is important insofar as it demonstrates the symbolic power of Gego’s Reticulárea. Indeed, that work had symbolic importance from the time it was first installed at the Museo de Bellas Artes of Caracas in 1969. No intellectual, artist, essayist, poet or writer of fiction has been indifferent to Reticulárea, and the work has been the topic of poems—some of them brief and comic (Hisopo, 1977), and others long and imbued with a modern conception of the relationship between the word and space (Alfredo Silva Estrada, 1980). There has been a wide range of writing on Reticulárea: in the early eighties, Venezuelan author Salvador Garmendia wrote a literary piece about it, and in 2004 Rafael Castillo Zapata wrote this essay, which does not address the visual arts per se. In Garmendia’s short text, one busy Sunday a resident of Caracas finds refuge from urban chaos in Reticulárea and in the sense of well-being and beauty that it brings. The contrast between that text and Zapata’s chronicle, in which the emblematic work, with its metaphoric web of wires, is covered with actual spider webs as a metaphor for neglect and ruin, shows the scope of the work’s symbolic power. The literary value of Castillo Zapata’s text is striking, as is its ability to link the book by Cristina Peri Rossi, with its examples of dogmatism against so-called bourgeois art—Dresden 1919—to the critical situation facing Venezuelan museums. Though not facile propaganda, this document depicts Venezuelan culture at a given moment. At the time that this annotation was written (June 2011), the gallery that houses Reticulárea remains closed, and neither the work nor the gallery has been given the necessary conservation or facilities it requires. A fragment of this text (original in Spanish, English translation by Paulette Pagani in 2010) was selected for publication in the bilingual book Desenredando la red. La Reticulárea de Gego. Una antología de respuestas críticas / Untangling the Web: Gego’s Reticulárea, An Anthology of Critical Response, organized by María Elena Huizi and Ester Crespin, currently in the process of being published by The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Fundación Gego, Caracas.