Juan Downey’s “Anaconda” Map of , 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, , 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.

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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

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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 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.

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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. As a political statement, it aligned with more overt actions Downey had orchestrated in the years since Allende’s defeat. These included Chile Sí, Junta No (Chile Yes, Junta No) (1974), in which demonstrators gathered outside the New York headquarters of International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT)—another institution with financial ties to the 1973 coup—wearing white T-shirts printed with the eponymous slogan and stained with blood-red spots.11 More in kind, Downey’s “anaconda map” recalls prior instances when he had used the names of US-owned multinationals operating in Chile to reflect metaphorically on the political events unfolding there, much as his friend and compatriot Pablo Neruda had done in his epic Canto general.12 For example, in Downey’s 1974 video Publicness, imaginary characters such as “Miss ITT” feature in satiric interviews in which they comment on the incidents of 1973 and parody associated organizations such as Anaconda and Kennecott Copper. In one performance, entitled Imperialistic Octopus, Downey had the names of eight major US corporations printed onto the eight long arms of a large, octopus-like sculpture—“tentacles” that ensnare their prey in much the same way as an anaconda. But to reduce Downey’s Map of Chile to such a two-dimensional, specific parable about the effects of one formidable predator/corporation on another exposed target/nation is to miss the project’s more nuanced critiques. The tense spaces and relationships that Map creates are constructed not around simplistic binaries, but in cleverly imbricated layers of contact, contradiction, and disjuncture. Resting on a subtle jest—despite the corporate reference, Chile is one of the only nations in South America where the anaconda is not native—and a thinly veiled cartographic challenge—if the political and economic reach of the United States is boundless, then what purpose do Chile’s national borders actually serve?—Downey’s installation examines the more complex currents at play between geographic identities, cultural institutions, and governing bodies during the Cold War. Specifically, in a venue such as the CIAR, founded on a purely hemispheric vision of the “inter-American relationship”—a capitalist West united against a communist East—Downey’s model questions the efficacy and wisdom of Pan-American partnership from a South American point of view. With the added Rockefeller link between the CIAR and Anaconda, the institution itself, and the “soft diplomacy” of the art world by extension, become complicit in the extraction of resources, order, and ultimately life from southern lands. The collaboration between history and art history in

11 Declassified CIA documents have since confirmed the connection between IT&T—which owned a majority share of the Chilean Telephone Company prior to Allende’s election—and the 1973 coup. 12 Neruda’s epic book of poetry, published in 1950, rewrites the history of the New World in fifteen sections from an anticolonial, South American perspective. In the section entitled “The Sand Betrayed,” he includes the poems “Standard Oil Co.,” “Anaconda Copper Mining Co.,” and “United Fruit Co.,” illustrating the damages these companies have done to South American lands. Downey had met Neruda while living and studying in Paris in the early 1960s. He references the poet often in his art, quoting his work in his travelogues and editing footage of his 1972 poetry readings into his videos. For example, for Do Your Own Concert (1968), Downey copied Neruda’s poem “Significa Sombras” by hand onto three accompanying drawings.

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disturbing balances of power is actually reinforced within Map of Chile by the presence of Pedro Lira’s La fundación de Santiago (1888) in the upper left-hand corner of the map; the iconic painting depicts in relatively peaceful terms the violent founding of the Chilean capital in 1541 by Spanish conquistador Pedro de Valdivia.13 An ambivalence toward idealistic models of cultural exchange in general, and Pan- American models in particular, came to mark Downey’s artistic career after his return to the Americas in 1965, after five years spent studying in Europe. That fall, he was featured in two shows almost simultaneously, one at the Pan American Union in Washington, D.C. and the other in the Galería Latinoamericana at Casa de las Américas in Havana, Cuba—two spaces dedicated to continental internationalism, yet fundamentally opposed in their respective methods and motivations.14 Following the Washington show, Downey reluctantly chose to relocate his life and studio to the United States, weighing his “solidarity with Cuba” and passionate rejection of “cold war imperialism” against the opportunities and connections that such a move could provide.15 Over the next decade, first in Washington, then in New York, Downey became immersed in the growing field of cybernetics. For him, machines and technology-based art represented vehicles of “invisible energy” that could encourage audience participation and facilitate human interaction across lines of difference.16 The majority of his resulting works were charted out in a universal, expansive conception of space that he called “invisible architecture,” where connections are forged through electronic and quasi-telepathic networks, rather

13 At the “Energy Systems” show, Lira’s painting was placed in subtle dialogue with Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656), a copy of which was hanging in an adjacent room. The exhibition marked the debut of Downey’s video installation, also entitled Las Meninas, which (like the painting) involves spectators in a sort of spatial and perspectival game, rooted in the gaze of the king and queen. In addition to the copied painting, Downey’s installation included pre-recorded video footage (with professional dancers playing the various characters), mirrors, and live video feedback. For Downey, Las Meninas revolved around power dynamics: in his travelogues, he recounts how, for him, Velázquez “identified the monarchs with their subjects, infolding space and centuries in a video manner.” He then links these themes with the Spanish conquest and contemporary conditions, writing a string of words associated with imperialism, violence, and greed: “Bestialism, colonialism, gesticulation, stupidity, right-wing, decadence, crumbling, animalization, the wife of the cop, superimposed, anti-human, International Corporations, extortion, bloodshed, oppression, repression, death, and rebirth!” See “Travelogues of the Video Trans Americas,” reprinted in Nuria Enguita Mayo and Juan Guardiola Román, eds. Juan Downey: With Energy Beyond These Walls, exhibition catalogue (Valencia: IVAM Centre del Carme, Generalitat Valenciana, 1998), 332. A press release of the show from late March reveals that Las Meninas was meant to be the exhibition’s “principal work,” but it seems it was later displaced to an adjacent room to make space for Map of Chile in the center. (Juan Downey Artist File, Department of Drawings and Prints, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.) 14 The exhibition “Juan Downey of Chile” ran at the Pan-American Union in Washington, D.C. from September to October 1965; “Calcografías de Juan Downey” showed at Casa de las Américas in Havana, Cuba, in November 1965. 15 See James Harithas and David Ross, “‘Offspring of My Soil’: Juan Downey’s Art of the 1960s and 1970s” in Enguita Mayo and Guardiola Román, Juan Downey: With Energy Beyond These Walls, 88. 16 Juan Downey, “Electronically Operated Audio-Kinetic Sculptures, 1968” in Leonardo, Vol. 2, no. 4 (October 1969), 403.

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than physical structures. For instance, in his “happening” Invisible Energy Dictates a Dance Concert (1969), five dancers based their movements on sounds produced by different pieces of sensory equipment distributed around the Smithsonian, which responded to different “energies” emitted by the audience. When he tried to map this process in geographic, international terms, however—in his proposal Invisible Energy in Chile Plays a Concert in New York (1969) (fig. 3), the same sensory information would be transmitted via satellite—the model fell apart. The project was never completed. Internally, privately, Downey doubted whether institutions, technology, or even art could generate a sense of community and shift the determined power balances of cultural interaction. Writing about his interactive works, he maintained a cynical belief that they create merely “the illusion that the public can participate in the work of art. Actually, we are still spectators mystified by the order that makes the world grow and move, although we pretend that we are determining what happens to us.”17 Though his electronic works were planned as collaborative, cybernetic processes, it was the power of the “system,” and not the agency of the participants, that determined an event’s outcome.

Figure 3. Juan Downey, Invisible Energy in Chile Plays a Concert in New York, 1969. Collage, acrylic, and pencil on board, 60 x 40 in. Photo by Harry Shunk. Courtesy of The Juan Downey Foundation, New York.

17 Downey, “Electronically Operated Audio-Kinetic Sculptures, 1968,” 403.

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The same held true for the ecological “Life Cycles” Downey would construct in the early 1970s, which, like his “anaconda map,” used natural resources as shrewd political metaphors. The most explicit of these featured sodium nitrate, also known as Chilean saltpeter. Occurring in large deposits in the arid Atacama Desert in what is now northern Chile, the mineral was once valuable as both a fertilizer and as a key ingredient in gunpowder. It was the cause of multiple land disputes between Chile, Peru, and Bolivia over the region’s ownership, most notably during the War of the Pacific, fought between 1879 and 1884. Though Chile “won” the conflict, a majority of the profitable nitrate mines were actually under English possession, connected by a railroad network running

Figure 4. Juan Downey, from Make Chile Rich, 1970. Collage, 34 x 30 in. Collection of Raúl Naón. Photo by Harry Shunk. Courtesy of The Juan Downey Foundation, New York. across the desert.18 By the time a Chilean corporation purchased extraction rights in 1934, the industry was already operating at a substantial loss, as European chemists had developed a synthetic version of the compound in the 1910s—just in time to contribute to

18 The largest company—the Peru Nitrate Company—was established by English engineer James Thomas Humberstone, who had moved to Peru in 1875 to capitalize on the Atacama’s rich mineral deposits. Bozer | Juan Downey’s “Anaconda” Map 25

the weaponry of World War I.19 By mid-century, the Chilean markets were all but wiped out, and the country had lost a major export and source of revenue. Downey addresses this economic episode in Make Chile Rich (1970), an installation bearing thematic similarities to his 1975 Map of Chile. In a collage placed beside a sack of Chilean nitrate, he alludes to the international forces that played a hand in its production (fig. 4). Pitting “artificial” foreign fertilizers against the “natural” Chilean nitrates, the drawing’s text notes that the former has “proven to be, in the long run, harmful to animals, mankind, plants, soil, and even fatal to some species”—a sly reference not only to the health risks associated with synthetic products, but also to the damaging effects that industrialized, largely Western models of “progress” and trade (not to mention gunpowder-armed conflict) have had on Latin American countries. Shortly after his “Life Cycles,” in the early 1970s, Downey turned to another nascent medium—video—to fuse his participatory aesthetics and ideological undertones through the use of instantaneous feedback on a closed circuit. He partnered with artist collectives such as Raindance Corporation and contributed to journals such as Radical Software, which framed —and particularly the use of portable, handheld equipment like the Sony Portapak—as a viable, countercultural alternative to broadcast television and mainstream visual culture.20 Departing from these principles, in the spring of 1973, Downey began his most ambitious project to date: a series entitled Video Trans Americas, intended as a continuous three-month, videotaped road trip “from New York to the southern tip of Latin America.”21 Announcing his plans in a published manifesto, the artist described his own role in the project as that of a “cultural communicant” who would alternately record and screen his video footage in the different villages he encountered, in order “for people to see others and themselves.”22 In addition to these on- the-ground, impromptu screenings, Downey intended eventually to edit “all the interactions of time, space, and context into one work of art” that would collapse the distances and differences of his destinations into the illusive seamlessness of video playback. While utopian on the surface, in the idealistic, countercultural spirit of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road or Che Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries, Downey’s proposal also suggests an awareness of the role that travel and travel narratives—whether in the Spanish conquest or the expeditionary tradition of Alexander von Humboldt—had played in building an “imperial imaginary” of the tropical Americas, making its lands and

19 Contemporary accounts of these events are laid out in R.A.F. Penrose Jr., “The Nitrate Deposits of Chile” in The Journal of Geology, Vol. 18, no. 1 (January–February 1910), 1–32; and M.B. Donald, “History of the Chile nitrate industry” in Annals of Science, Vol. 1, no. 2 (1936), 193–216. 20 Raindance Corporation was founded in 1969 by video artists and media activists Frank Gillette, Michael Shamberg, and Ira Schneider. Inspired by cybernetics and communications theory (especially the ideas of Marshall McLuhan), Raindance supported video art that bypassed the centralized production and broadcasting model of mainstream television. In the summer of 1970, the group began producing Radical Software, a journal originally edited by artists Beryl Korot and Phyllis Gershuny. 21 Juan Downey, “Video Trans Americas” in Radical Software, Vol. 2, no. 5 (Winter 1973), 4. 22 Juan Downey, “Video Trans Americas,” 4. 26 SHIFT

resources attractive and accessible for political and commercial gain.23 As writers such as Julieta González have pointed out, Downey’s series serves as both an extension and a criticism of such histories by sharing the lines of vision—an attempt to “[subvert] the model and [turn] it into an instrument for the critique of colonial legacies in Latin America.”24 As Downey must have known at the time, however, his itinerary was overly optimistic at best. In another example of intercontinental frustration, there is no contiguous motorable road through North and South America. Even the grand Pan- American Highway is separated by the dense Darién Gap between Panama and Colombia and consists of a chain of individual, national highways that run through a variety of difficult terrains. Instead of an epic road trip, Downey’s route unfolded through discrete, sporadic trips by air, land, and water, first to Mexico and Guatemala, then to Peru and Bolivia, then to Chile, between 1973 and 1974, followed by extended stays among Guahibo and Yanomami tribes in the Amazon rainforest between 1976 and 1977. More distressingly, he was only a few months into his travels when political turmoil in Chile boiled over into the full-blown Pinochet coup on September 11, 1973. That day, from his home in New York, Downey recorded in his travel journal that he would “never, never, never forgive!”25 Later that year, while traveling in nearby Lima, he wrote of his ensuing nostalgia for and alienation from Chile as a self-imposed exile. Instead of the “cultural communicant” he had hoped to become for the Americas series—a connective figure bringing the villages of North and South into mutual contact—he had come to feel disconnected from both regions. A travelogue entry from December 1973 describes the final collapse of any remaining trans-American ideal into a total sense of isolation:

In my late childhood, I made up my mind to drive along the American continents. Later, I was enchanted by the reading of Jack Kerouac’s highway epics. In my twenties, after exposure to the New York art world I decided to return south and recuperate my culture. After ten years spent in Spain, France, and the USA, I realized that I would never adapt to the developed world and, conversely, my own third world would never be a market for my cultural aesthetic makings. A perpetual cultural shock was easy to handle at

23 References to Kerouac arise on more than one occasion in Downey’s travel writings—as in the below entry from December 28, 1973 [FN 20]—as do other countercultural road trip models like Ant Farm’s Romance of the Open Road (in an entry from Mexico City on July 27th, 1973). 24 Julieta González, “Notes on Juan Downey’s Project for a Fake Anthropology” in Juan Downey: El ojo pensante, ed. Marilys Downey (Santiago, Chile: Fundación Telefónica, 2010), 204–205. González bases her argument in large part on the critical analyses of “travel books written by Europeans about non-European parts of the world” presented by Mary Louise Pratt in her seminal Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). The connections between road narratives, colonizing expeditions, and liberationist theologies—and their impact on Downey’s work—is also discussed at length in Nicolás Guagnini, “Feedback in the Amazon” in October, Vol. 125 (Summer 2008), 91–116. 25 Juan Downey, travelogues, as transcribed and translated in With Energy Beyond These Walls / Con energía más allás de estos muros, 331. Bozer | Juan Downey’s “Anaconda” Map 27

first; but age only increased the gap and the saudade for a country that no longer exists.26

When “Energy Systems” opened at the CIAR in April 1975, Downey was between the two major stages of his Video Trans Americas travels, having returned from his final trip to Chile (in July 1974), but not yet having departed for the Amazon (in August 1976). The ongoing video project and its attendant issues of geography, identity, and encounter were still clearly on the artist’s mind. Indeed, while back in New York, he was in the process of editing his initial VTA footage for what would become its first exhibition four months later, in September 1975.27 Also troubling the artist, however, were questions of how to balance his growing political sentiment with his established artistic practice. The same month that “Energy Systems” opened, he reflected on these themes in his journal while riding the New York City subway, drafting a “partial soundtrack” for voiceover on his edited videotapes. In part, the entry reads:

An artist should just give an insight of the universe and not an account of domestic problems. . .

. . .There is no cultural freedom in socialist countries; consequently, artists should not be concerned with politics.

I hate non-political art.

What is this shit? Is this art or politics?

Should art be political?

Art and politics do not mix, but look beautiful together, just like oil and water. . .

26 Juan Downey, travelogues, 331. 27 A journal entry written very shortly after, in May 1975, declares, “The Video Trans Americas black and white expeditions have been completed.” (See “Travelogues,” With Energy Beyond These Walls, 333). Their debut as video art would occur with the inclusion of Moving (1974) in the group show “Landscape Studies in Video,” curated by David Ross at the Long Beach Museum of Art from September 27 to October 26, 1975. A solo show of “Juan Downey: Video Trans Americas,” also curated by Ross and including seven video installations, would follow at the same institution from February 21 to March 21, 1976. (See “Chronology of Film and Video Exhibitions” in Long Beach Museum of Art Video Archive, 1964–2003 at The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles). Prior to these exhibitions, Downey’s Video Trans Americas video footage had been screened only in “video-performances” where they accompanied live action performances, mostly dance. These included Nazca and Debriefing Pyramid, both 1974, which took place at The Kitchen in New York, and the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY, respectively. 28 SHIFT

. . .This is a political rally in Lima, Peru, in support of their leftist military dictatorship. The Peruvian government is right now about to nationalize foreign-owned copper mines. This government for the masses is not liked by the masses. But I dig it anyway because it has done some social good and because I love to hear rich people complaining at their plush dinner tables.

You are contradicting yourself.

Aesthetics and Revolution are difficult to balance: a little bit of this and how big a bit of that?28

Downey appears to have met these tensions and contradictions in the middle, and, using the fraught spatial models inherent in the Videos Trans Americas, applied them to his display at the CIAR. Though it appears that Downey originally intended to screen tapes from the Americas series at “Energy Systems,” in the end he simply used language from its original proposal as an introduction to Map of Chile in the entrance hall.29 Transferred verbatim from the second paragraph published in Radical Software, they read:

A form of infolding in space while evolving in time. Playing back a culture in the context of another, the culture itself in its own context, and, finally, editing all the interaction of time, space, and context into one work of art.30

Repurposed within the space of the CIAR, however, and specifically applied to Map of Chile, the words take on a different meaning. On the most simplistic level, by seeking to hold the institution and the art world accountable for the actions of their sponsors, the work quite directly examines a “culture itself in its own context.” On a more abstract level, the “infolding” of space referenced in the text now transpires over a number of meaningful associations. The anaconda—while standing for an overreaching American corporation and its company town in Montana—is also Chile itself, echoing its winding shape across the length of the map.31 In formal terms, the active, irregular movements of the anaconda recall the “gestural abstraction” of the New York School, while as a symbol it evokes the “exotic,” primitivistic style expected at the time from Latin American

28 Downey, “Travelogues” in With Energy Beyond These Walls, 333. 29 Press release for “Energy Systems,” March 31, 1975 (Juan Downey Artist File from the records of the Department of Drawings and Prints, The Museum of Modern Art, New York). 30 From the Americas Society Archives, as quoted by Luis Pérez Oramas in “Looking South,” 51. 31 Interestingly, the title of the company (borrowed from the large Anaconda Copper Mine near Butte, Montana) also derives from an important territorial split, this time during the US Civil War. The first prospector to buy the mine was Michael Hickey, a Civil War veteran who named his new asset after the “Anaconda Plan,” the successful wartime strategy developed by General Winfield Scott that involved surrounding Robert E. Lee’s army like a giant snake. Bozer | Juan Downey’s “Anaconda” Map 29

artists.32 Most significantly, though physically constrained by the confines of the box and thus by necessity coiled over one area of the map or another, the green anaconda (the longest snake in the world) could potentially extend to untold dimensions, creating geographical connections yet to be imagined—certainly beyond the drawn borders of Chile, probably beyond the implicit span of South America. In the end, the serpent is not one symbol but many, both local and international, both dominant and submissive. It presents not a definitive conclusion, but a complex series of questions around internal and external hierarchies and encounters that a viewer, at ground level, can only begin to piece together.

Figure 5. Juan Downey, Map of Chile, 1975 (detail). Juan Yarur Collection, Fundación AMA, Santiago, Chile. Photo by Harry Shunk. Courtesy of The Juan Downey Foundation, New York.

At the same time, as the snake enters and emerges from its hollowed water pool at the map’s center, its damp body slowly smudges Downey’s colorful markings and erodes his map (fig. 5). Eventually, the artistic interventions, the original cartographic lines, and all the borders of Chile will be erased. Already, as the snake glides across the picture’s surface, it conceals countless regions and boundaries under its girth, shifting entire geographies through natural motion. This new cartographic model of disintegrating demarcations—indicating the breakdown of national and international politics—would open for Downey other ways of thinking about the relationship between structures of space and structures of power. In particular, it would lead to a phase in his artistic career in which maps would become increasingly “malleable metaphors” to explore the possibilities of identity beyond imposed contours, linear structures, and coercive partnerships (fig. 6).33 Ultimately, for the culminating Amazonian travels of his Video

32 This snake’s association with gestural abstraction is taken from Luis Pérez Oramas, “Looking South,” 48. 33 Sarah Montross, “Cartographic Communications: Latin American New Media Artists in New York, Juan Downey and Jaime Davidovich (1960s-1980s)” (PhD Dissertation, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2012), 157. 30 SHIFT

Trans Americas series, it would inspire Downey to seek out, if naively, an imagined source of the “pure” southern continent, unencumbered by the neocolonial industries of the North. For this, he headed to the indigenous tribes of the Amazon—ironically, to the tropical home of the anaconda.

Figure 6. Juan Downey, Map of America, 1975 (detail). Colored pencil and synthetic polymer paint on map on board, 34 1/8 x 20 in. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo by Harry Shunk. Courtesy of The Juan Downey Foundation, New York.

Julia Bozer is a PhD Candidate in Art History at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she concentrates on modern and contemporary traveler-artists in the Americas. Before beginning her doctoral studies, she earned a BA in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University in 2005 and an MA in the History of Art from the Courtauld Institute, London, in 2009.