Conversations: The Television Interview in Jaime Davidovich and David Lamelas daniel r. quiles the school of the art institute of chicago n 1990, Coco Fusco contributed a pointedly reluctant essay on the topic of I“Latinos and Media Art” to an edited volume on video art. She spends the first four pages reflecting on the task she has been assigned and questioning her own selection as an authority on the topic: “this assignment is . a bit strange because rather than being asked to write about video, I was asked to write about race . At this stage of multiculturalism, those designated as ‘other’ operate in a situa- tion in which the relationship between what they are and what they express is systematically underscored and scrutinized” (305). Fusco’s concerns clearly also pertain to the artists she goes on to discuss, given that “Latinos are not a race, nor do we together constitute a unified culture” (306). This points to the rele- vance of “post-nationalist, post-essentialist” strategies in her selection, which includes Latin American artists like Juan Downey, Tony Labat, and Gloria Ribe, thus expanding the category of “Latino,” which has historically connoted people of Latin American descent born in the United States.1 Fusco argues that such artists’ frequent use of “parody” in relation to ethnic stereotyping and mass media representation, “when done well, is far from lacking in acuity” (315). Fusco’s concerns and arguments pertain to David Lamelas and Jaime Davido- vich, two Argentinean artists working in the US in the era she was addressing (roughly 1975–1990). Producing installations, films, video and television work in relative ignorance of one another in Los Angeles and New York, respectively, Lamelas and Davidovich advanced sustained critiques of the mass media and its protocols. Yet the close proximity of some of their work to commercial formats, such as television programs, left open the possibility of participating in media circulation, inserting such works within media platforms. Lamelas unsuccessfully sought closer integration with Hollywood’s film industry, while Davidovich became a pioneer of public-access cable in New York City and elsewhere around the country. A central motif in both of their oeuvres is the television interview, which the artists explored via a range of formats and scenarios and with different degrees of seriousness or absurdity. In what follows, I argue that the interview 1 The more fashionable term “Latinx” has only been in use since 2004, with predominant use spiking around 2016. Other gender-neutral renderings of “Latino” have included “Latino/a” and Latin@ (cf. Morales). ................. 19364$ $CH5 11-15-19 14:20:50 PS PAGE 183 184 Revista Hispa´nica Moderna 72.2 (2019) served as a crucial figure of encounter for Lamelas and Davidovich, just two of the many artists who migrated to the Global North during the so-called “Years of Lead” in Latin America from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Lamelas traveled widely in Europe and North America after leaving Argentina in 1968, settling in Los Angeles in 1976. Davidovich moved to New York in 1963 and remained there until his passing in 2016. While political hardship and migration were indisput- ably part of their biographies, both artists used the television interview precisely to undermine geographic or political identity as markers of authenticity. Using the interview to dramatize awkward encounters over and over again, they were actively integrating into their new milieus while insisting on their status as out- siders. Thirty years on, Fusco’s skepticism regarding the pigeonholing of Latino art- ists remains relevant amid a surge of interest in Latinx and Latin American art that is symptomatic of a more global “multiculturalism.” Following her study, it is my contention that Lamelas and Davidovich provide us with the tools to question geographical associations and expectations for Latin American artists, even while we take advantage of institutional multiculturalism to draw more attention to their work. For example, Lamelas’s and Davidovich’s insistent cosmopolitanism complicates the oppositional narrative of postwar Latin American art relative to the US or Western Europe championed by some of the major exhibitions in the field: He´ctor Olea and Mari Carmen Ramı´rez’s Inverted Utopias and Luis Cam- nitzer, Jane Farber, and Rachel Weiss’s Global Conceptualism. Rather than “inverting” the propositions of Northern avant-gardes (Olea and Ramı´rez 1–15) or producing a politicized “conceptualist” alternative to Northern “conceptual art” (Camnitzer, Farber, and Weiss viii), Lamelas and Davidovich were active contributors to the artistic scenes they joined (and, in turn, influenced) in the US and Western Europe. Lamelas’s formative years in Buenos Aires and close integration with the avant-garde networks of the Instituto Torcuato di Tella pro- vided a foundation for his artistic sensibility and research into mass media. Playing out primarily in New York, Davidovich’s career featured a number of rapid transitions, none more abrupt than his turn to cable in 1976. Interviews allowed both artists to examine the communicative dynamics between inter- viewer and interviewee, the former performing curiosity, the latter performing foreignness. Stereotypes and expectations can determine the choice of media, and at the root this investigation is also a revision of what has been understood as “Latin American video art.” Laura Baigorri Balları´n’s edited volume on Latin American artists working both within and outside the region is an important precedent in this regard. Lamelas and Davidovich help to undermine generalizations about the Latin American video of this era, such as that of Pacific Standard Time’s recent survey: “During the 1970s and 1980s, video artists positioned the body as the site of expression in traumatic political contexts” (Phillips and Shtromberg 7).2 In addition, while both Lamelas and Davidovich made many videos, their 2 A more extensive book related to the LAXart exhibition is presently underway, with research coordinated through the Getty Research Institute. ................. 19364$ $CH5 11-15-19 14:20:51 PS PAGE 184 quiles, Conversations: The Television Interview 185 use of interviews reminds us of the degree to which television informed and intertwined with video art in the 1970s and 1980s. That television has been a crucial component and reference point—and possible medium of transmission to expanded publics—for video art from its inception has attended its critical and art-historical literature from the 1970s onward.3 In recent years, several key exhibitions and publications have shifted the focal point of inquiry to “artists’ television” as its own genre. In the mid-2000s, David Joselit focused on the rela- tionship between video art and television, reprising Frederic Jameson’s close association of the two. For Joselit, mainstream television’s power derived from addressing its viewing subjects as members of consumer groups, which ends up “short-circuiting the establishment of actual collective action among citizens” (Feedback 155). In response, early video artists and media collectives countered television messages with noise, alterative content that yielded its own publics, subjectivities designed to resist narrow identity markers, and by opening media circuits to democratic use (171). Joselit’s work on television included an edited volume of October with “global” case studies such as Nicola´s Guagnini’s overview of Downey’s Video Trans Americas project. More recently, Franc¸ois Bovier pub- lished a set of papers on the “diffuse networks of video art” from the perspective of distribution: “Video, as we have said, does not merely circulate in the shape of magnetic tapes or audiovisual environments. It can also be distributed through a more intangible transmission channel, namely television” (42). While there is insufficient room to detail their activities here, it bears noting that Lamelas and Davidovich were part of a wave of artists from Latin America who took up video and television to varying degrees at this time, many of whom were also expatriates drawn to the easier access to prohibitively expensive tech- nology for recording, editing, and broadcasting. Among many others, this list would include Maris Bustamante, Gloria Camiruaga, Miguel A´ ngel Ca´rdenas, Ulises Carrio´n, Juan Downey, Anna Bella Geiger, Tony Labat, Rau´l Marroquı´n, Mo´nica Mayer, Margarita Paksa, Leticia Parente, Proceso Penta´gono, Edin Ve´lez, and Pola Weiss. Some of these practitioners knew and collaborated with one another, while others operated in parallel. Regardless of their degree of associa- tion, they share affinities beyond regional identity. For example, many had expe- rience with prior conceptualist idioms defined by circulation: postal art, experimental publications, and inexpensive editions of artworks. In the links of these practices to Fluxus, there was also a drive, by turns parodic and sincere, to business and corporate models of organization, as Mari Dumett has recently chronicled (1–37). In many of these artists’ later videos and television work, there is a prevalence of alter-egos that repeatedly appear in interviews with other fictional characters, real members of the art world, or unsuspecting passersby in the street; the use of the interview format as a basic template of commercial television from which to forge parodies or alternatives; oblique and ambivalent 3 An early example of the “artists’ television” moniker can be found in David Ross, “A Provisional Overview of Artists’ Television in the US” in New Artists Video: A Critical Anthology, edited by Gregory Battcock (138–65). Ross’s role in starting the media center at Long Beach Museum of Art is addressed below; significantly, he does mention Downey’s Video Trans Americas (157). ................. 19364$ $CH5 11-15-19 14:20:52 PS PAGE 185 186 Revista Hispa´nica Moderna 72.2 (2019) engagement of political topics via generalization, camp or archetype; collabora- tions with local artists that reflect on confrontations between native and for- eigner; and a marked desire to radically amplify art’s audiences through televisual broadcast.