May 5 to July 15, 2016
860 11th Avenue (between 58th and 59th streets)
New York, 212 237 1439

“BASTA!” at John Jay College’s Anya and Shiva Art Gallery, revisits the relationship between violence and contemporary art in Latin America. Curators Claudia Calirman and Isabella Villanueva present works by 14 artists from Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Guatemala, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela. Latin American artists have always exposed social struggles of their countries, but “BASTA!” focuses on the conflict between representation and reality — inherent in the use of violence as a theme for art. “How to represent violence without aestheticizing it to the level of the banal?” asks Calirman.

Paintings, installations, and video works are distributed throughout the main gallery, while two videos are featured in darkened rooms. The exhibition is conceptually divided into two main groups: works that use violence as a tactic and those representing violence primarily through aesthetic means. Visitors find the latter when looking at Argentinian collective Mondongo’s Calavera 5 (“skull,” 2009–13), a six-by-six-foot Plasticine skull in which artists depicted tiny scenes of political crimes. Peruvian Giancarlo Scaglia, in his painting Stellar (2016), refers to the massacre of political prisoners — from the guerrilla group Sendero Luminoso — by the Armed Forces, in the 1980s, in Peru. White star-like spots over dark painted backgrounds correspond to the position of bullet holes on the walls of El Frontón prison, where the massacre occurred.

The play between aesthetics and violence is also explored by Brazilian Alice Miceli’s In Depth (landmines)/Colombian Series (2015), a series of six horizontal photographs that seem to depict a serene rainforest with mysterious red and white markings stuck to the ground. Each photograph shows the same location with slight variations, as if the artist moved closer to the markings. But reading the work’s caption the viewer learns that those are land-mine fields in Antioquia, Colombia, and realizes the risk implicit in the making of the piece.

If Miceli deals with risk of death through photography, Teresa Margolles creates a tension between death and life, in which aesthetics is not emphasized. For Irrigación (“irrigation,” 2010), Margolles diluted, in 5,000 gallons of water, the blood and bodily fluids of people killed by drug cartel violence in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The video shows the rear of a truck dispensing water along Highway 90, between Mexico and El Paso, Texas. Her action can be understood as a displacement of the dead, in which blood-evoking symbolisms are absent perhaps to emphasize the “invisibility” of unidentified bodies found in Mexican morgues: it is as if she turned blood into water to “recycle” violence.

Guatemalan artist Regina Galindo, instead, inflicts pain into her own body, producing blood as a tactic. In the video Perra (“bitch,” 2005), she wears a long, black dress, sits on a chair and uncovers her naked right thigh only to incise it with a knife. She carves the word PERRA, letter by letter, into her skin. Harder than looking at the moment of the incision, it’s to see Galindo moving the sharp knife over her leg, as if foretelling the pain. She softly holds her skin so that blood drops don’t slip away from the carved flesh, while the camera shakes above her.

Galindo’s self-mutilation refers to the culture of violence against women in Guatemala, where girls have been found mutilated with the word bitch written on their genitals. Female genital mutilation is a practice that occurs around the world, in different cultural contexts: by making that violence visible, Galindo pursues the pain of a ubiquitous crime. Though it is not the same pain caused by abuse that often happens in the private space, Galindo nonetheless becomes a victim as the viewer becomes a witness — she puts violence under the precision of her knife, complicating its aestheticization.

Other works in the show deal with the nature of systematic violence. In the video Testimonio (“witness,” 2012), Guatemalan Aníbal Lopez, who died in 2014, invited a sicario, a mercenary from Guatemala, to respond to the questions from an audience of art enthusiasts at dOCUMENTA, in Kassel, Germany. The video begins with the sicario’s silhouette behind a white screen — to protect his identity — framed by theatrical red curtains. The man explains his profession saying that he pays for his studies at the San Carlos University by doing “social cleansing” for the Guatemalan army, which pays him based on each victim’s social class. The images toggle between the man’s silhouette holding a microphone and shots of the audience: white men and women looking stupefied after hearing the sicario’s words.

Participants ask him questions for 40 minutes; as time passes by some people in the audience start to smile, even though many keep frowned eyebrows and bulging eyes at disturbing answers such as “One day I had to drown a lady but she wouldn’t die so I smashed her face with a stone,” or when asked if he cares about the spirits of the people he kills, “No, this is just my profession, I don’t have any feelings about it.” The raw brutality of his testimony contrasts with the silly naivety in the expressions and questions the audience asks such as, “Do you believe in God?” or “Do you play violent video games?”

In Testimonio, the performance’s participants compulsorily perpetrate a second violence: one marked by a temporary contract with the sicario’s mode of living, even though not free from judgment, and even though it occurs through an understanding of that man’s life as a theater. Many of the participants seem to judge both the murderer’s and the artist’s gesture as unethical, while others clearly believe the whole thing was staged: they laugh and look doubtful. The work oscillates between fiction and non-fiction, as it tests the limits of reality and truth, defying the boundaries between crime and art. Although the work plays with fiction, it may not matter if the man’s words are make-believe or not: as much as we would like to deny it, violence is institutionalized and can be profitable not only for individuals, but also for entire Latin American elites or imperialist governments that maintain their home countries “safe,” while violence spreads elsewhere. Lopez’s Testimonio disrupts the judicial system of the countries in which the sicario’s crimes had been executed as it snubs the borders between the geopolitical North and South. Ultimately, the anonymous sicario becomes a Trojan Horse whose speech unveils the violent reality of his developing country, but also the silent brutality of privileged countries — represented in the piece by the art world — casting their investigative gaze over the tragedies they’re directly or indirectly complicit with.

Adopting the logics of a confession, Testimonio shows a distinction in the way violence can be perceived across different countries: for the sicario, violence was so natural that it was a rule, not an exception. Because deadly crime rates in Latin America are among the highest in the world, violence is perhaps more palpable in those countries, whereas some people from developed countries may perceive violence through the spectacularization of “moments of exception,” such as when a terrorist act or a mass-murder occur close to home. But in many developing countries violence is endemic and normalized, not understood only through climax: high unemployment, inequality, and broken educational systems, among so many other reasons, produce living contradictions, such as that sicario’s life.

Less than through easy aestheticization, and more through elaborated actions, contemporary Latin American artists who expose and denounce violence ask us to look at it and learn how it works, for it’s through our bond with victims — and also with perpetrators’ minds — that we can seek change. Few of the artists in “BASTA!” offer options for healing, but some open a space for mutual mourning and for a critique of a global reality that expands well beyond the domains of Latin America.

The post Implicated Viewers: Looking at Violence through Contemporary Latin American Art appeared first on artcritical.

February 5 to March 26, 2016
528 West 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 315 0470

Ana Mendieta’s exhibition of experimental films at Galerie Lelong brings 15 works created by Mendieta from circa 1971 to 1975: nine of them had never been exhibited before, just recently uncovered during a cataloguing process. Besides being new to the audience, these experimental films have been transferred from their originals to digital media, which has added a fresh look to them. As we step into the gallery, our eyes are immediately captivated by an image of Mendieta’s face at the back of the main room. In Sweating Blood (1973), Mendieta’s serene semblance appears to be floating in the surrounding darkness. Her hair vanishes amid both the film’s pitch-black background and the walls. While Sweating Blood and Dripwall (1973) face spectators who enter the gallery, six other films have been distributed around the room on the left and right walls. In an adjacent gallery, we can see five more films, two series of photographs, and ephemera from Mendieta’s Estate, such as film reels, cassette tapes, and a notebook with a sketch for Sweating Blood.

Mendieta produced most of the films in the show during her pre-New York life, when she still lived in Iowa, where she had been exiled from Cuba since the age of 12. When she arrived with her sister, they lived at an orphanage. As a Latina, and outsider, she was ostracized and suffered prejudice. Later on, from 1969 to 1977, Mendieta completed two MFAs at the University of Iowa, the first in painting and the second in multimedia and video. She would move to New York only in 1978. Even though Mendieta participated in many progressive movements of her time, and she was definitely at the forefront of experimentation with the body and performance, it is hard not to feel traces of nostalgia in her work — something that she missed, perhaps due to her arduous life in Midwest, or perhaps as an omen of her tragic passing, her troubled marriage with artist Carl Andre. In the show, death is suggested, repelled and enacted: it begins with her speaking skull in X-Ray (ca. 1975), follows with Sweating Blood and Dripwall, and ends with Moffitt Building Piece (1973).

Sweating Blood, one of the most famous films in the show, is hard to ignore. The work lasts only three minutes, but it feels as if it’s way longer than that. Mendieta’s face, young and beautiful, with her closed eyes, is depicted as a self-portrait: we see her entire face, from the neck up. She does not move onscreen, but we can see when she swallows, or rolls her eyes underneath her eyelids, without opening them. At some point, her skin begins to change: the pores on the top of her forehead, where hair begins to grow, are emphasized, as if she just started to present pox, a rash. A red fluid appears on the top of her mid hairline and soon a drip of “blood” falls from her hair, just to find her left eyebrow. A second drop follows, running towards her left ear. The upper part of her forehead seems to be sweating blood.

In Dripwall (1973), three round holes appear on a white wall, coming from inside, one at a time. Red liquid leaks from them, dripping across the white plane. They reminded me of bullet holes. Moffitt Building Piece shows another of Mendieta’s experiments with blood. It was created in response to the murder of Sarah Ann Ottens, who was beaten, sexually assaulted, and killed in her dorm at the University of Iowa on March 13, 1973. In April of that year, Mendieta staged a violent rape scene in a performance at her apartment, later named Rape Scene, and then started her Moffitt Building Piece, which also responds to Ottens’s murder. Moffitt Building Piece begins with a view of the eponymous storefront in Iowa City. Mendieta is clandestine, filming from inside a car towards the façade of the building. A puddle of blood is seen on the sidewalk, in front of Moffitt’s door. After the camera gives a close-up on the puddle, we notice it’s lumpy, meat-like: Mendieta spilled an animal’s blood and meat on that sidewalk and then filmed the reactions of passersby, who look on the tableau with varying degrees of shock, concern, or disinterest.

While blood in Mendieta’s work has been labeled as “abject,” at Lelong, blood is empowering. Even though she created Moffitt Building Piece in reaction to the pervasive sexual violence against women, blood was not always a negative element for her. Instead, she used it as force, concomitant with her interest in Catholicism and the Afro-Caribbean religion Santería. In Sweating Blood, in Moffitt Building Piece and in Dripwall, blood evokes both presence and absence of a body: the power of blood to induce a trancelike state points to what happens beyond the body, a wall earns its “life” through bleeding like a body, and a woman’s death is exposed through the reminiscence of her corpse. These gestures are far from being abject; blood sanctions Mendieta’s body and creates bounds with our bodies, as spectators.

Magic is everywhere, as if these works were fragments of fairytales, or cautionary tales from a childhood in Latin America. In Dog (1974), filmed during a summer program in Mexico, Mendieta’s small silhouette is seen, moving far afield on an unpaved street in San Felipe, Oaxaca. As the camera focuses on her, we see she is on all fours, wearing a fur skin over her face and possibly naked body. She crawls. A man walks up the street, and ignores “the dog.” A woman and a boy pass next to her, no interaction. She still crawls, vulnerable, as if half-alive, recoiling, hesitant, woman, animal, and outsider.

The post An Outsider’s Tale: Ana Mendieta at Galerie Lelong appeared first on artcritical.

William Eggleston: American Color at Instituto Moreira Salles

March 14 to June 28, 2015
Rua Marquês de São Vicente, 476
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, +55 21 3284 7400

The only English-language review that I can find of William Eggleston’s retrospective at Instituto Moreira Salles (IMS) in Rio de Janeiro, has the title “What’s William Eggleston’s Doing in Brazil?” Despite the explicit surprise and no other mention throughout the American press, the retrospective, which went through the end of June, was a notable survey of Eggleston’s early work. “William Eggleston: American Color” was also the artist’s most ample recent retrospective in all the Americas — the last major one happened at the Whitney Museum, in 2009.

It was no wonder for Brazilians that IMS could stage such a great exhibition; the non-profit has a fundamental role in supporting arts and culture in Brazil. In Rio, IMS settled in the former residence of the Moreira Salles family, a large remodeled Modernist property in Gávea, wrapped in ornamental brise soleils, and with a landscape designed by Roberto Burle Marx. That atmosphere mingled perfectly with Eggleston’s works. It was like traveling in a time capsule that could combine and contrast the glamorous life of the 1950s in Rio with American landscapes and people of a few decades later. Besides the Modernist atmosphere, the show’s exhibition design borrowed creative solutions — such as special supports and curtains­ — from objects that Eggleston photographed. “We wanted to use those colors and materials, which were so new at the time when Eggleston captured them — those bright plastics, neon lights, Wal-Mart-like, industrialized, furniture,” curator Thyago Nogueira explained.

When Nogueira took over IMS’s contemporary photography department, Eggleston’s was the first name that came to his mind. “Brazilian enthusiasts were familiar with Eggleston’s most famous images, but we wanted to add more of his work to their repertory,” said Nogueira. And he did: the show’s five galleries were fully taken by 172 photographs from the first three decades of the artist’s career. Though many of these early works had been shown before in the US, the Brazilian retrospective brought the entire Los Alamos series and works rarely seen.

The first room included around 40 photographs from the Los Alamos series, and four early black-and-white works. In this room, visitors encountered some of Eggleston’s most famous images, such the redheaded boy leaning over a supermarket cart. In a second room, there were exhibition catalogues in display cases and one of Eggleston’s original portfolios, Troubled Waters (1980), a popular format among collectors of that time. In the third, main room of the exhibition, visitors followed Eggleston’s shift of subjects, when he photographed his family and friends and started using dye-transfer, a sophisticated advertising technique, to have control over each color.

One of the show’s highlights was encountering, in the fourth room, Eggleston’s large-format portraits, taken in 1970s and printed in 2000; most of them were shot at hangouts and bars. These works were accompanied by Eggleston’s Stranded in Canton (1973/2008), a film that depicts a fictional country invented by him and his friends, where “you can smoke marijuana, hang out naked and never need a passport.” I was so overwhelmed by seeing selfies all over social media that finding those portraits was soothing to my eyes: I took time looking at ordinary things like teeth, pores, pupils, hair. It was as if those people could get together with us. They gave me room to imagine my own stories about them: a rock-band singer, with his hairy chest and opened leather vest, stoned eyes, hypnotized by a prophetic song. Or a pizza-delivery boy, who found time to make a pose, with his naïve smile and broken tooth, happily gazing at me.

When I moved to the US, years ago, I had the feeling I was in a movie. Thanksgiving turkey, baseball and Rocky Balboa seemed distant fabrications on screens, but the moment I stepped on American soil they became magically real and a little less stereotyped. For most Brazilians though, that change won’t happen; a compacted, fanciful, American society will continue to dwell in their minds, given the extreme and continuous exposure to the American culture. Although my Brazilian eyes loved the fictional exercise of looking at Eggleston’s works, the recent shooting in Charleston and the polemics about the Confederate battle flag kept drumming on my head. Through Eggleston’s images I was looking at the crossroads between two eras, the Old and the New South, full of expectations, but inhabited by a racial conundrum that, to this day, hasn’t come to an end.

This reality came to my mind when I saw Untitled (from the portfolio Troubled Waters) in which beautiful black children are barefoot, walking on a field in Eggleston’s relatives’ cotton farm, under a bright blue sky. They wear yellow and blue outfits, the older girl in pigtails; they all look straight at the camera, curious and a bit wary. Then later, in Untitled (Sumner, Mississippi, Cassidy Bayou in Background) (1971), a white car and two men stand over a carpet made of autumn leaves. The white man wears black suit and a striped tie; he has his back to the black man, who wears a white jacket. Their postures are alike, they have both hands in their pockets, and both avoid Eggleston’s eyes, staring at the same unknown event. There is a third man barely seen in the car, with his hands on the wheel, his door is open, as if he would get out. The relationship between the standing men is not clear, but their similar stare and pose suggest they are bound to each other. The same tension is within the children’s gaze and gets spread throughout Eggleston’s works. He keeps the puzzle incomplete, the mystery unsolved. That’s why an ambiguity between fiction and non-fiction, between desolation and enchantment by the South ­­just lingered in my mind; I kept feeling a bit of both.

For Brazil’s photography enthusiasts, having Eggleston’s first retrospective in the country was matter of honor. But one of the most important accomplishments of this show was that of offering Brazilian visitors a “guide” in redefining our sight and the way we make images. We are becoming tamed by an online culture of self-curated pictures, but all that these images have to say is “I’ve been here and I’ve done this.” That eagerness to empower ourselves through images doesn’t mean we are able to read and understand all of them. Eggleston took pictures because he was bound to what he had seen, bound, but not imprisoned. He gave space to what was outside of him and it’s within that space that we plunge to connect with his work. If in the past he raised color and an amateur style to the status of art, today we look for him again in hope of finding some mystery, some crookedness, uncertainties among our self-controlled realities. I guess that was what William Eggleston was doing in Brazil.

Instituto Moreira Salles and its magazine, ZUM, have compiled numerous articles and other online content on the retrospective, including a nine-minute interview with Eggleston and Nogueira, available here: http://revistazum.com.br/we/

The post A William Eggleston Retrospective on Tropical Soil appeared first on artcritical.

February 28 through April 11, 2015
132 Tenth Avenue (between 19th and 18th streets)
New York, 212 367 7474

The first New York solo exhibition by Brazilian Jonathas de Andrade recently closed at Alexander and Bonin. De Andrade works mainly with installation, video and photography, and is a rising star in Brazil’s contemporary art scene. Based in Recife, on Brazil’s northeast coast, de Andrade has shown his art throughout Europe and the United States. Last summer in New York, the Guggenheim’s survey on contemporary art from Latin America, “Under the Same Sun,” featured de Andrade’s Posters for the Museum of the Man of the Northeast (2013).

At Alexander and Bonin, de Andrade re-installed Posters for the Museum of the Man of the Northeast, and included other works that expand it. In the ground floor’s main gallery, the first piece was 40 nego bom é um real (“40 Black Candies for 1 Real,” 2013), a two-wall installation in which illustrations and text provided a recipe for a banana candy produced in a fictional factory. One could follow the story as if it were a comic book on the wall, with montages of digital images og the production line of Nego Bom, a real banana candy popular in the region. In Brazil, nego is often a “warm” way of calling someone black, although it also contains deep-rooted racist connotations.

There is humor in the fact that one follows a recipe and a production line in the form of comics, with directions on which ingredients to use, how to let the mixture rest, or when to add sugar. The workers are focused, often smiling. But as one’s eyes moved along to the installation on the right wall, irony started to replace comedy. Two prints depict another illustration from the fictional factory and the plantation: arrayed on two plywood sheets are 40 small notes printed on paper, and 40 small portraits of workers. Each note has a short description about each worker and their monthly pay, and after assembling the pieces of de Andrade’s inventory one realizes those men were part of a system of cheap labor.

In Posters for the Museum of the Man of the Northeast, in the rear gallery, a similar semi-fictional account continued. Photographs hung from the ceiling, suspended at the viewer’s height by monofilament threads; many more pictures were mounted on the walls, their distribution and position varied. These photographs were color portraits of men from northeastern Brazil, printed on wooden posters, all sized equally. While in 40 Black Candies for 1 Real the pictures of workers seem to be taken from history books, in Museum the photographs show ad-like faces and bodies enlarged, bleeding to the posters’ frames.

The installation had a strong anthropological tone, as if de Andrade were studying these people. On one wall, he reproduced two newspaper sheets with classified ads. One reads, “I’m looking for a strong, brown-skinned man — ugly or handsome — for a photograph of the poster of the Museum of the Man of the Northeast.” Another said, “I’m looking for a man over 30 years old, who works with his hands and knows of local craftsmanship for a photograph poster of the Museum of the Man of the Northeast.” In 2012, de Andrade advertised in local newspapers and documented his encounters through photographs and notes. The project for the artist’s Museum is a comment on a real institution of the same name, in Recife. Founded in 1979, the mission of the actual Museum is to preserve customs and crafts from the northeast of Brazil. It takes its inspiration from the writings on “racial democracy” by Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto Freyre (1900 – 1985), who wrote on the emergence of the Brazilian mulato, a brown-skinned ethnicity from the northeast, the children of indigenous peoples, blacks, and Europeans.

In de Andrade’s works, though, the traces of Brazil’s colonial origins of color prejudices and stereotyping are recounted. Brown-skinned northeastern farm workers are one of the most neglected classes in Brazil, whose struggle with racism mingles with labor exploitation. One could spend hours reading and comparing the excerpts from these stories, and could fill the fiction’s gaps with one’s own imagination about these characters. The portraits are also stunning, funny. When these men take over de Andrade’s Museum, they become models. As they strike a pose, they look incredibly sexy, sometimes feminized, working against the stereotypical idea of the macho northeastern man. Some of them reveal to the camera their bare, muscular chest — forged by labor rather than a gym — while they hold objects like hammers or plumbing tools.

De Andrade provided that group of workers with a temporary empowerment, which may have survived at least the span of a camera’s shutter release: the piece consolidates the artist’s attempt to break with stereotypes, even though one could question what happens with that subversion when an installation with portraits of minorities goes for sale in a gallery. The flip side of that question, though, is de Andrade’s continuing concern with labor and exploitation, which is part of a broader project on reviewing his own position as an artist: he stands on a contradictory threshold between being implicated within exploitation and enacting the role of a pseudo-anthropologist. And it is through humor and fiction that de Andrade sustains this contradiction, as when he adopts the supposedly friendly word “nego” to reveal prejudice. As a Brazilian myself, I am also interested in what we, as spectators, do when these stories pass on to our hands. To select the best portraits of the Museum, or to scavenge information among classified ads often makes us smile, but it may also make us think about the position we occupy: of those who exploit, of those who observe in silence, of those who commiserate, or of those who take action.

The post Jonathas de Andrade: Subverting Cheap Labor and Racism in Brazil appeared first on artcritical.