I Alfred Wenemoser (Graz, Austria, 1957) has lived in Caracas for twenty years. He is an artist whose work has not attained major notice thus far. Artists who exhibit within the latin american circuit are often confined to a niche which Wenemoser has managed to break free of. The international arts scene generally includes this niche within the classifications of the so-called production of the periphery than as that construct known as "latin american art." Wenemoser's work is also subject to the conflict inherent in its local readings which, together with his international experience, transforms him and his work into an example of the tensions between globalization and multi-culturalism, two terms which advance along different paths in spite of the attendant confusion which surrounds them. As it is impossible for him to be global, Wenemoser has avoided, at least provisionally, many of the resources used to promote the art of the periphery on the international scene. His work is not terribly convincing within the framework of multi-cultural arguments, its purpose is not to affiliate itself with a mestizaje (interbreeding) of the senses, it concedes no special interest to stereotypes, it does not pretend at all to reference any kind of cultural hybrid, nor has it ever bothered to formulate an artist's trauma of exile. Due to his status as an artist alien to the most common conditions that determine the local, his work is not easy to distinguish in the strategic terms used by artists who make context a self-referential problem. His work though, can be read within the notion of nomadism (because it has distanced itself from its European roots in the dominant vanguards and also because it is work that is very sensitive to the places where it unfolds). Wenemoser's work may considered as being inscribed within the European Diaspora, as one of those European artists who came to the Americas and whose contribution has been significant for the development of the local scene (in his case, Wenemoser collaborated with a group of performance and experimental language artists who gained a certain degree of acceptance in the constructivist movement in Venezuela in the mid 70s). Wenemoser, in a manner similar to other artists who are accepted as innovators, rejects the notion of local color in all its forms, and does not limit himself to the specificities of a single medium. In summary, one might say, Wenemoser's spirit of identity degree zero has allowed his work to remain indeterminate in relation to the context of its production. But the relativism of his contextual relations might make us invert that double approach. We might say that what connects him to the local also separates him from it, and that what distances him from the international context is also what brings him closer to it.
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