Feedback in the Amazon

Feedback in the Amazon NICOLÁS GUAGNINI On Friday, June 11, 1993, the New York Times ran an obituary written by art critic Roberta Smith with the headline, “Juan Downey, 53, A Pioneer of Video as a Medium for Art.” In her notice, Smith accurately observed, “From an involvement with perception and random sounds and images, Mr. Downey turned in the early 1970s to ecological subjects and then to politics and history. His work frequently had an autobiographical aspect, making use of his Indian-Spanish heritage and his experiences in Europe and America to examine issues of identity and power.”1 This statement rightfully positions Downey as a pioneer in tackling the pre- occupation with identities and multiculturalism that was current in American art discourse in the early 1990s. The undesired aftereffect of applying multiculturalism as a mapping machine for differences, however, was to re-encircle these differences within identities that were considered as homogeneous constructs. In order to do so, the methodology of classification had to be stabilized. Consequently, to reexamine Downey’s work critically means to try to establish specific historical, ideological, and theoretical parameters to preserve its heterogeneous nature. In this text I will attempt to overcome the unintentional oblivion implicit in Smith’s obituary; describing Downey as an early practitioner of a late artistic discipline who posed questions before they became current somehow over- shoots the postmortem critical reception of his work—or lack thereof. I will trace the ideological genealogy of Downey’s Video Trans Americas that began in 1973 and culminated in 1977. In this notable work, Downey, together with his wife, Marilys, and her teenage daughter Titi Lamadrid, engaged the Yanomami Indians of the Amazon basin. I will show that not only did Video Trans Americas problematize identities, disciplines, and fundamental categories such as anthro- pology and the document, it also problematized the very ontology of the “artist” and his attendant “body of work.” Downey’s avant la lettre experiments and experiences revealed and exploited a fault line inherent in the attempt to liberate 1. Roberta Smith, “Juan Downey, 53, A Pioneer of Video as a Medium for Art,” New York Times, June 11, 1993. OCTOBER 125, Summer 2008, pp. 91–116. © 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2008.125.1.91 by guest on 27 September 2021 92 OCTOBER possibilities of being and otherness via the methodological and technological tools that had suppressed those possibilities in the first place. His journey also personified the impossibility of self-representation through any kind of fixed identity construct. The encounter that Downey orchestrated is ultimately unrepresentable (that is both part of its historical significance and why it has thus far met with relative oblivion). There are very few documents of his feedback experiences, themselves the conclusion of a complex process. Hence, this essay does not establish a fixed object to be analyzed, promise conclusions and define which theories and attendant methodologies will be used to reach them, or predicate conclusions grounded on the description of an object. That structure is opera- tive for the form of video art that is consistently shown in galleries and museums in an established and replicable form, which facilitates its entry into the market. Instead, this is a collage of recollections and texts by various people from diverse disciplines. By approaching Downey’s experiments using a form of tex- tual collage, I also hope to conjure a context and a moment that resonate with our present. Before the Departure Downey came to the United States directly after a stay in Paris from 1963 to 1965, where he had moved from his native Chile as a freshly graduated architect involved with drawing and etching. There, he befriended fellow countrymen Roberto Matta and Pablo Neruda.2 Both the Surrealist painter and the poet were 2. Another artist concerned with revolution whom Downey met in Paris, the Argentine Julio Le Parc, informed the artist’s notion of spectatorship. A founding member of the pioneering Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel, Le Parc was then a kinetic artist also affiliated with the group around Denise Rene’s gallery (which included Jesús Rafael Soto and Carlos Cruz-Diez); a classic Marxist, he sought— rather idealistically—to end the idealism of representation through awakening the spectators into con- crete reality by purely perceptual means, simultaneously activating their revolutionary potential and that of art making. A 1964 manifesto cosigned by a group of six artists that included Le Parc and Francois Morellet extolled: “One can embroider the edges of aesthetics, of sensibility, of cybernetics, of brutality, of testimony, of the survival of the species, etc.; we will always remain at the same level. An ‘opening’ is necessary, escaping the vicious circle that is art in today’s world. Art nowadays concerns a simple action called ‘artistic creation.’ The divorce between this ‘artistic creation’ and the public at large is blatant reality. To abandon the definitive, closed character of traditional works is, on the one hand, a reconsideration of the overvalued creative act and, on the other, a first step towards reassessing a spectator who is always compelled to contemplation, conditioned by his level of culture, of information, of aesthetic apprecia- tion, etc. We consider the spectator capable of reacting with his normal powers of perception. “A spectator aware of his power to take action and tired of so many abuses and mystifications will himself be able to create the true ‘revolution in art.’ He will put into practice the slogans: “It is forbidden not to participate. “It is forbidden not to touch. “It is forbidden not to break.” Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel, “No More Mystifications!” in Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde, ed. Inés Ratzenstein (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2004), pp. 55–56. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2008.125.1.91 by guest on 27 September 2021 Feedback in the Amazon 93 Communists, and from them Downey absorbed the idea that an artistic practice must be revolutionary. By 1973, Downey had moved to New York, was writing for Radical Software magazine, collaborating with the community video collective Raindance, and taking part in Perception, a group composed of Frank Gillette, Beryl Korot, Andy Mann, and Ira Schneider. One of his main concerns, like that of other contributors to Radical Software, was the potential of new technologies— particularly video—to produce feedback. Within the art world and alternative culture, the recent emergence of portable video equipment had prompted a complex and expanded field of experi- mental activity. The possibility of generating live feedback almost anywhere seemed to hold a special promise reflected in two general tendencies. The first was to hijack video’s spontaneous, real-time capabilities, wresting it from the leisure industry (to which it was marketed as part of the “family memo- ries” subindustry). Via this repurposing of portable video equipment, groups and communities learned to exploit cable distribution’s nascent possibilities, to produce their own news (and eventually to become news themselves), and to create a sort of social feedback loop meant to challenge the monolithic narrative of main- stream, broadcast television. All these tactics represented an attempt to access television’s potential use value in social terms. This unfolding, until recently, has remained divorced from art history’s master narratives.3 The second tendency was carried out by artists who used video feedback’s temporal element to question the physical nature of the exhibition space and, consequently, the dialectic unity of subject-object relationships. This interven- tion in conventional gallery space made the perceptual process of the spectator both the subject matter and the material of the work. Ultimately, this second tendency clearly became reified, introduced into critical discourse, and circu- lated as “art.” Dara Birnbaum, a second-generation video practitioner, witnessed the unfolding of these processes firsthand, and her recollections help connect what would be a tentative, abstract classification to specific artists, art works, art- historical genealogies, canons, and dates: From my own experience, I felt that early on there were two distinct developments evident. The one you first mentioned, camera/body/mon- itor, is best seen in the early tapes by Bruce Nauman or Vito Acconci. They were coming out of what became known as “body art” but also from a projection of an inner psychological state. But there was also another area of development, which was to create alternative forms to broadcast 3. This essay is in part a response to David Joselit’s recent book Feedback: Television against Democracy (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007), which has effectively weaved into the art-historical discussion this aspect of video making. Since Joselit commissioned the present text and we have been in a dialogue, this footnote will also serve as a grateful acknowledgment for his patient interlocution and support. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/octo.2008.125.1.91 by guest on 27 September 2021 94 OCTOBER television. Here the concern was with relationships to and through the community, or a much more social “self.” Both fields overlapped. With regard to the self and the body, many works were developed in the isolation of the artist’s studio, such as Bruce Nauman’s 1968 Stamping in the Studio, where he inverted the camera so that to the viewer he appears to be walking on the ceiling. Even though he repeatedly stamps in a rhythmic, almost primitive pattern, he is not really participating in any social or communal rite.

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