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Juan Downey’s “Anaconda” Map of Chile, 1975 JULIA BOZER We might perhaps say that wherever suffering and helpless humanity is found in blind quest for salvation, the snake will be close by, as an explanatory image of the cause. —Aby Warburg1 In April 1975, Juan Downey’s solo show, “Energy Systems,” opened at the Center for Inter-American Relations (CIAR) in Manhattan. At its center was an installation entitled Map of Chile, which featured a live green anaconda slithering atop a map of Downey’s native Chile (fig. 1). The artist had salvaged the map from a trashcan near the Chilean Embassy in Washington, D.C., colored it in by hand, and used it to line the bottom of a plexiglass-covered box.2 Air holes were drilled along each edge, and a small pool of water was added to the base, in order to sustain the snake. “Energy Systems” represented Downey’s second exhibition at the CIAR—he had participated in its group show of “Latin American New Painting and Sculpture” in November 1969—but it was to be his most eventful, for within hours of its performative debut the anaconda was forcibly removed from the venue. Downey opted to leave the rest of his piece intact, adding a handwritten note half explaining the act of censorship (fig. 2).3 His audience was left to wonder how, exactly, the snake had offended. The relationship between the anaconda and the map of Chile has resonance on multiple levels. Most obviously, the snake and the country bear a distinct morphological affinity. Geographically, Chile is so long and serpentine that, on the map, its length is distributed in three vertical sections; like the anaconda, it is forced to contort itself to fit within the horizontal frame of the box. More significantly, however, the anaconda lends its name to the US-owned Anaconda Copper Mining Company, which profited from Chile’s rich copper reserves before they were nationalized by socialist president Salvador 1 From Warburg, “A Lecture on Serpent Ritual” (1923), originally delivered as “Reminiscences from a Journey to the Pueblo Indians,” a lecture to a “non-professional audience.” Journal of the Warburg Institute, Vol. 2, no. 4 (April 1939), 291. 2 Marilys Downey recounted the events of the map’s discovery during an interview with the author on April 24, 2018. 3 The anaconda—along with the rest of the installation—would not be re-exhibited until thirteen years later, when it was reinstalled at Exit Art, New York, as part of the exhibition “The Debt,” June 28–July 9, 1988. 18 SHIFT Allende in 1971. The economic pressures exerted by Anaconda (and other multinational corporations) contributed heavily to the violent military coup led by General Pinochet against Allende’s government in 1973. Perhaps the formal dissonance between the snake and the map in Downey’s installation—where the smooth, earth-toned pattern of the anaconda’s skin clashes with the garish reds, blues, and yellows the artist has scribbled coarsely over the cartographic markings—underscores the contrived, abstract status of the map and its arbitrary divisions of space, compared to the natural lands they represent. Figure 1. Juan Downey, Map of Chile, 1975. Wood, water receptacle, colored pencil on found map of Chile, live anaconda, 83 7/17 x 66 15/16 x 17 11/16 in. Juan Yarur Collection, Fundación AMA, Santiago, Chile. Courtesy of The Juan Downey Foundation, New York. This essay interprets Downey’s installation as a multilayered geopolitical critique by tracing its formal and cultural roots. An examination of the CIAR’s specific institutional entanglements in the Chilean coup gives way to a wider analysis of how Downey used maps and national/natural resources as allegories to reflect on international relationships. As the following pages will show, Downey’s “anaconda map” emerged at a charged point in the artist’s career, when his approaches to art, ecology, technology, and travel converged as critical tools to confront the forces of cultural influence and political control that had come to define inter-American dynamics—and the inter-American art world—in the Cold War era. Bozer | Juan Downey’s “Anaconda” Map 19 Figure 2. Juan Downey with Map of Chile, installation, 1975. Photo by Harry Shunk. Courtesy of The Juan Downey Foundation, New York. The CIAR—known today as the Americas Society—had opened to the public eight years before “Energy Systems” at 680 Park Avenue, a six-story townhouse previously occupied by the Soviet Mission to the United Nations.4 The building’s reinvention—and the institution’s inception—paralleled the political strains of the Cold War, which had escalated in the Americas since the victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959. Led by chairman David Rockefeller, then the President of Chase Manhattan Bank, the CIAR promoted the interests of a group of US businessmen eager to keep the hemisphere’s remaining capitalist nations free from communist governments that would threaten their trade.5 At its inauguration on September 18, 1967, an address by then-Vice 4 The townhouse itself had featured prominently in a New York Times cover article in 1960, where an accompanying press photograph showed Nikita Khrushchev (then the Premier of the Soviet Union) delivering a speech from its stone balustrade. See “Khrushchev Offers Views from a Park Ave. Balcony” in The New York Times, September 22, 1960 (pages 1, 11). 5 Rockefeller had already established the Business Group for Latin America (BGLA) in 1963 as the “private sector” branch of President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 Alliance for Progress, a policy intended to “accelerate the economic and social development of the participating countries of Latin America” and thus limit the appeal of communism. The BGLA would later become the Council of the Americas and would partner with CIAR upon the latter’s incorporation in 1965. Notably, the CIAR’s first president, William D. Rogers, had 20 SHIFT President Hubert Humphrey (also an honorary trustee) underlined how such economic concerns should become a political mandate for organizations like the CIAR. “Given the conditions of everyday life in many parts of Latin America,” he warned, “what is a tiny minority in this country could be a dangerous and broad movement—or a majority—in other countries of the hemisphere.”6 The Center’s membership, representing about ninety percent of US investment in Latin America, stood poised, under the safe guise of cultural diplomacy and artistic patronage, to hold significant sway in ongoing debates over US policy in the region.7 While it is unclear who explicitly took action, these muddied Cold War politics and their related ideological maneuvers are universally seen as responsible for (among other unfortunate events) the ousting of Downey’s anaconda. The political implications of the snake and its allusion to Anaconda Copper were apparently not lost on CIAR leadership.8 They were well aware that, for Downey and other left-leaning critics, Anaconda Copper served as a prime symbol for the US economic forces that fueled the Pinochet coup. But neither were the CIAR’s own ties to the mining conglomerate lost on Downey. Board chairman Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank had been Anaconda’s main creditor throughout the 1960s, and his great uncle, William Rockefeller Jr., had owned the company in its early years and overseen its expansion in the late 1800s.9 In the loaded game of cultural chess in which Rockefeller, the CIAR, and artists like Downey were engaged, Map of Chile thus contributed to what Luis Pérez Oramas—using the framework of Michel de Certeau—refers to as a “succession of tactical moves at the heart of a strategic institution.”10 been a former deputy United States Coordinator of the Alliance. See David Rockefeller, Memoirs (New York: Random House, 2003), 425–431. 6 The full transcript of Humphrey’s address was accessed in the René d’Harnoncourt Papers, [VII.56], The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. For a discussion of the political points made, see Homer Bigart, “Humphrey Finds Latin Parallel to U.S. Racial Strife” in The New York Times, September 19, 1967. 7 A summary of the institution’s membership is given in Rockefeller, Memoirs, 429. The full record of its leadership, membership, and financial contributors in early years (accessed in the René d’Harnoncourt Papers, [VII.57], The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York) unsurprisingly reads as a laundry list of US corporate giants—such as Standard Oil, the United Fruit Company, and the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation—with explicit business interests in South America, as well as prominent governmental figures such as Nelson Rockefeller, who would later become Vice President to Gerald Ford. 8 One source recounts that David Rockefeller saw Map of Chile shortly before “Energy Systems” opened. 9 Also, shortly before—and likely in anticipation of—Anaconda’s nationalization by Allende, the Vice Chairman of Chase Manhattan, John B.M. Place, was appointed to be Anaconda’s Chief Executive Officer. Notably, this was not the first time a Rockefeller of David’s generation had been involved in cultural censorship for political reasons. His older brother, Nelson, was responsible for the 1934 plastering-over of Diego Rivera’s fresco at Rockefeller Center—entitled Man at the Crossroads, it included a prominent portrait of Lenin. 10 See Luis Pérez Oramas, “Looking South: Strategic Visions, Tactical Revisions” in A Principality of Its Own: 40 Years of Visual Arts at the Americas Society, ed. José Luis Falconi and Gabriela Rangel (New York: Americas Society, 2006), 48. Bozer | Juan Downey’s “Anaconda” Map 21 In this light, it is tempting to view Downey’s Map of Chile as a straightforward protest by a Chilean national against an aggressive foreign state.

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