It’s unfortunate that this show comes packaged in the kind of liberal guilt-tripping rhetoric that demands attention and sympathy for work as a redress for its former real or alleged exclusion, a demand that in my case, at least, induces avoidance instead of interest.
Amnesia is built on the conceit that contemporary South American (as opposed to Latin American) art has been paid scant attention in the United States and that this amounts to a collective cultural denial resembling the psychically repressive act of forgetting. As conceits go, this one overreaches but it fits right in the sentimental liberal narrative that casts Latin America as the perpetually abused victim of a brutish Uncle Sam—a narrative that fails to note that the most lethal of Yankee cultural exports has been the liberal notion of individual rights and the disdain toward inherited cultural values that it engenders.
Fortunately “Amnesia”—which grouped together the works of 16 artists from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela—had more to offer than rhetoric. For one thing it fleshed out the cursory sampling of work by some of the artists in the current show that Christopher Grimes put together as part of last year’s L.A. International biennial. And it also offered some startling and beautifully conceived meditations on the themes of dissociation and loss.
Of these, the most immediate in its impact was the Brazilian Tunga’s photographic records of a 1987 seashore performance titled Seeding Mermaids, which focused on the artist’s use of a long-haired rubber cast of his own head. One image showed the severed head with its closed eyes and its seaweed-like mass of nylon hair partially submerged in a tide pool, evoking a state of amniotic bliss while simultaneously bringing to mind pre-Raphaelite images of the drowned Ophelia. Another photograph showed the artist twirling the head by its hair at the edge of the sea in preparation to casting it away—either as a means of eradicating the evidence of a homicide (the fate of many of the Argentinean “disappeared”) or as a more symbolic means of drowning a troublesome memory.
Creepier still were Alfredo Ramirez’s (Venezuela) objects, which evinced a level of dissociation suggestive of a complete withdrawal of affect. In the L.A. International show, Ramirez exhibited a bifurcated metal spine attached to an electrical power source that induced it to arc noisily at regular intervals. His contributions to Amnesia consisted of another metal spine, this time suspended from the ceiling and attached to a refrigeration unit, slowly accumulating a porcelain-like coating of ice; a pneumatically activated, sparking, kissing machine probably inspired by Magritte’s couple swathed in embrace; and a video of a kiss endoscopically shot from within the mouth of one of the participants.
The most delicate, nuanced work was contributed by Oscar Munoz (Colombia), whose distorted and distressed self-portraits seemed like exercises in photographic expressionism when exhibited in the L.A. International but which Amnesia reveals to be artifacts of a process-intensive meditation on the painful fragility and ephemerality of identity. It turns out that the images are what remain after the artist has dusted charcoal through a silkscreen onto the surface of water-filled glass trays and allowed the water to slowly evaporate. In another installation, titled Aliento (1996-7), Munoz paid homage to the Argentinean “disappeared” by silk-screening the surface of a dozen polished metal disks with the obituary-sized snapshots of the victims of the military junta’s terror. Because he used grease as his medium (a material with a gruesome association to the Holocaust) the images remained invisible until the viewer breathed on them, at which point the faces briefly came into view and quickly faded away. Like fingerprints, they remained on the surface of the steel as accusatory traces awaiting forensic disinterment.
While between them the works of these three artists gives some idea of the variety of approaches encapsulated by Amnesia, they also reveal the erasure of anything resembling a regional cultural identity—a brand of amnesia this show seemed reluctant to address. The one exception was Sergio Vega’s The Sermon of the Birds (1998), which featured a talking statue of St. Francis preaching in Spanish to a pair of stuffed parrots nailed to the branch of a fake tree. In this instance the English-speaking viewer was as uncomprehending as the dead birds.
Published: Art & Text, November 1998
Plastic Regime 