juan downey | a communications utopia Detail of Life Cycle. Soil + Water + Air+ Light = Flowers + Bees = Honey, All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace Electric Gallery, Toronto, Canada, 1971. Photo: Courtesy Marilys Belt de Downey, N.Y. I like to think (and the sooner the better!) of a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky. I like to think (right now, please!) of a cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics where deer stroll peacefully past computers as if they were flowers with spinning blossoms. I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace. Richard Brautigan, 1967 juan downey | a communications utopia Trained as an architect, the topological experience of video feedback led Downey to conceive of dematerialized and ecological architectures through drawings of projects for buildings and cities that promoted the flow of energy between nature and the built environment. One of Downey’s landmark works is the video-feedback-based installation Video Trans Americas. In 1973 he embarked on a journey that would take him from New York to Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, The work of Juan Downey (Santiago de Chile, 1940 – New York, Bolivia, and Chile, where he recorded the autochthonous cultures of 1993) covers a wide range of practices and mediums: drawing, each place and then showing them to the inhabitants of these places installation, video, and painting. Likewise, it addresses a series of and to others during the trip. Later, Downey decided to travel to complex issues, very current at the time, about the use of new the Venezuelan Amazonian basin and resided there, among the technologies in art and the implications this would have in terms Yanomami, producing one of the most singular bodies of work in of its reach and production of meaning in a context that went far recent art history. With these fundamental works, Downey positions beyond the museum and gallery exhibition space. himself as a “cultural communicant, an activating aesthetic anthropologist with a visual means of expression: video tape.” The exhibition Juan Downey. A Communications Utopia presented at the Museo Tamayo presents a significant selection from his major Upon his return to New York, at the end of the seventies and until bodies of work, taking as a point of departure the notion of feedback his death in 1993, Downey continued to make videos that reflected as a constant and structural aspect of his work throughout his on mass culture, the media, and representation, reaffirming his entire production. continued interest in communication structures. Juan Downey was a pioneering figure of video art in a moment in Downey’s cybernetic utopia proposed a radical reformulation of which the medium was just beginning to be utilized by artists, who the relations between man and technology, made manifest in the saw in it an enormous potential; the communicative power of the selection of works included in this exhibition, which presents Juan television medium, the immediacy of its transmission, its closed Downey as a thinker, of visionary and advanced ideas, aware of the circuits and its manifold possibilities of edition and feedback, lent complexities of his time. themselves to multiple experiments, not only in terms of image but also of perception and communication. Detail of With Energy Beyond These Walls: A System of Two Sculptures, 1970. Photo: Courtesy Marilys Belt de Downey, N.Y. with energy beyond these walls After his sojourn in Paris in the early 1960s, where he met Julio Le Parc and other members of the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (G.R.A.V.), Juan Downey became interested in energy exchange and notions of participation related to the particular vision of the kinetic promoted by groups such as the G.R.A.V., Zero, as well as the magazine Robho edited by Jean Clay. Upon arriving in Washington D.C. in 1965, Downey started to work with these ideas and developed several sculptural works that integrated electronic circuitry and machines. A profound interest in the invisible energies of the electromagnetic spectrum, such as radio waves, vibrations produced by radiation, and others, would inform these sculptures and modulate their function. Moreover, these works implied the active participation of the public and created systemic feedback dynamics between the spectator and the work, as we can appreciate in the project drawings made by the artist, as well as in the reconstruction of Against Shadows re-made especially for this exhibition. Reconstruction of Against Shadows, 1970. Photo: Carlos Lara. a research on the art world Detail of documental photography of Videodances, 1974. Video-performance at the Byrd Hoffmann School, 147 Spring Street, New York. Photo: Juan Downey, Courtesy Marilys Belt de Downey, N.Y. The 1970 project titled A Research on the Art World takes the structure of the survey and sociological studies to elaborate a statistical map of the New York art world. This project has close affinities to other works of the period by artists such as Hans Haacke, Mary Bauermeister, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Douglas Huebler, among others, for whom information became the material stuff of the work, evidencing an interest on behalf of artists for what Jack Burnham called a “systems aesthetic.”. invisible energies At the same time he was making electronic sculptures, Downey began to work with electromagnetic waves, what he called invisible energies. Prior to this, he had staged performances and happenings in Washington D.C. in which feedback dynamics provided the performative structure of the work. In 1969 he made several works in which diverse forms of invisible energies (radiation, seismic vibrations, and radio and radar waves) were translated creating a concert of sound signals that gave perceptible form to these invisible energies. He would later incorporate dance to these experiences in order to make the bodies of the performers interact with the spaces delimitated by the electromagnetic waves, as was the case of the performance he staged at 112 Greene Street in collaboration with Trisha Brown, Carmen Beuchat, Carol Gooden and Gordon Matta-Clark, among others. Detail of Plato Now, 1973. Photo: Harry Shunk, courtesy Marilys Belt de Downey, N.Y. Trip Video Trans Americas, Santa María de los Ríos, Mexico, 1973. Photo: Bill Gerstein, courtesy Marilys Belt de Downey, N.Y. plato now video trans americas In 1973 Downey staged the video-performance Plato Now in which Even if the work of Juan Downey during this period can be read nine performers meditated in front of a wall from which video through the very precise codes of the New York context of the 70s, cameras filmed their faces. In the darkened cavernous space only Latin America continued to be a pressing concern for him. From illuminated by a distant source of light, the meditating performers, his very first video-performance works Downey expressed a marked like the prisoners in Plato’s cavern, were only able to see the shadows of interest in issues of identity and difference. This constant preoccupation the public, who in turn could only see their faces through the monitors led him to undertake, in 1973, a series of trips that would take him placed behind the sitting performers’ backs. When the performers to diverse locations in the American continent—Mexico, Guatemala, reached a contemplative state they produced alpha waves which Peru, Bolivia, Chile—recording the autochthonous cultures of each were picked up by neurotransmitters and modified the signal feeding place and then showing them to the inhabitants of these places and into the monitors, alternating between the faces of the performers to others during the trip, using trademark characteristics of video in meditation and audio recordings of Plato’s dialogues. such as playback and feedback, while alluding to its topological possibilities. The result of these trips would be shown in successive and different installations as Video Trans Americas. life cycles Downey was deeply interested in systems–of communication, of energy transmission–and this approach to nature and culture becomes a constant in his work, echoing Gregory Bateson’s concept of ecology. Having trained as an architect, Downey directs these early interests in technology towards the field of architecture and produces a series of works such that conceive of architecture as a series of spaces that channel energy flows and can be seen today as models for an eco-friendly and sustainable architecture. In his architectural designs the presence of air is of paramount importance, and manifested in alveolar structures, circulation and ventilation shafts, an “oxygen religion” as he called it. In 1972, with Gordon Matta-Clark, Downey distributed oxygen to passersby on Wall Street through the Fresh Air Cart, documented in the video presented here. Detail of T-shirt Boycott Grapes, 1969. Photo: Harry Shunk, courtesy Marilys Belt de Downey, N.Y. from disinformation to the manufacture of consent This series of works produced in diverse moments of his career give an account of Downey’s political engagement. A great part of these works address the political situation in Chile, from the conflicts that led to the 1973 coup d’état, to the social, political and economic implications of the Pinochet dictatorship. This section of the exhibition evidences Downey’s political and ideological affiliations– from his critique of corporate intervention in global economics and communications to his support of workers movements such as the backing he and other artists gave César Chávez with the Boycott Documental photography of performance Fresh Air, 1972. Grapes campaign in the 1960s. Photo: Juan Downey, courtesy Marilys Belt de Downey, N.Y.