Floats Like a Butterfly, Stings Like a Bee por Florencia Qualina

FLOATS LIKE A BUTTERFLY. STINGS LIKE A BEE.

Notes on Adriana Bustos

By Florencia Qualina

Note I (Checking the synchrony)

A hand, depicted in the style of the ancient codices, with an astrological symbol on each finger. A few centimetres to the left – which in fact corresponds to hundreds of years – other hands appear, but these are measured in anthropometric diagrams; a team of scientists pose in front of psychedelic motifs which look like something out of the Twilight Zone; beside this image is a deformed clock. Adriana Bustos also drew turtles, atoms, experiments; in the centre is a celestial map that shows the sky on a certain night, at a certain indecipherable moment in time. She looks at the ‘Imago mundi’ a while longer. She turns on the television because she is still tied to the 20th century. On the screen, the Encuentro channel glows. José Pablo Feinmann looks like a tenor; he takes a deep breath of air, adjusts his round glasses on his nose and exclaims, gesticulating as if he wanted to take flight, ‘That’s a mammoth sentence!’ This exclamation came after reading a bit of Nietzsche, who said, ‘In some remote corner of that universe which is dispersed into innumerable twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowledge. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever beasts had to die.’ Thought travels through the ether and rests in the night drawn in the atlas.

Roots

‘I read [materials] from areas such as forensic psychology, psychoanalysis, anthropology, history, and literature. I am very attracted to scientific discourse, I always look for information there, and I know that this perhaps separates me from some of the spaces reserved for the sensitive artist,’ says Bustos, in an interview

with Eva Grinstein published in a monograph dedicated to the artist.1 Her words speak to two genealogies that exist in Argentine visual culture, one that is named and another that remains hidden. The former, the sensitive, involves explorations of domestic environments, often self-referential or familiar, and with a personal bias. The small scale is predominant. Sometimes, the sensitive bias takes on something of the ‘Method’ promoted by the Actor’s Studio: it turns to the emotional memory. At times, it identifies with a strong anti-theoretical matrix, for which a short historiography may prove useful here. In 1997, in a milestone exhibition that marked the end of his career at the Rojas, Jorge Gumier Maier curated El Tao del arte [The Tao of Art] at the Centro Cultural Recoleta. In the forward to the exhibition catalogue, Gumier Maier presented a long-held perspective in which art is seen as an event without purpose, as mysterious, scintillating. Aesthetic contemplation is an experience closely related to satori: ‘That art, like life, leads to nowhere, is the reason for our freedom, the possibility of our salvation […]. With the phosphorescence of rapture, it empties us of understanding. Like the hypnotic murmurs of a koan, the logic of thought is suspended. Our reasons are repossessed.’2 With controversial ambition, Gumier Maier directed his attacks against the bureaucratic/Cartesian machinery that understands art as a manifestation that must – or should – be understood, be explained. In one fiery passage, he wrote, ‘What happens when academic-journalistic verbiage comes up against these works that have strayed from the comfort of nomenclature, [when it encounters] that which flourished unaware of and deaf to their demands and bribes?’ The complexity of this manifesto born in the twilight of the twentieth century was marred by later stances that were full of over-the-top romanticism and unsophisticated veneration.

So, if the work of Adriana Bustos is reluctant to go down this path, to which genealogy can it be subscribed? To answer this in broad terms – and not absent the danger of erring – we must go back to the historiography and examine the conceptual experiences developed, above all, by the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAyC) at the end of the 1960s and 1970s. Under the direction of Jorge Glusberg, the CAyC established a programme that was guided by the intersections between art and knowledge of the exact, natural and social sciences. Beginning with his first exhibition, Arte y cibernética [Art and Cybernetics] in 1969, he established the core

1 Adriana Bustos, Ignacio Liprandi Arte Contemporáneo, Buenos Aires, 2013, p. 21, digital edition. 2 Jorge Gumier Maier, El Tao del arte. Ediciones Gaglianone - Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas, Buenos Aires, 1997, p. 13.

concept of a theoretical approach to works of art and exhibitions. There were at least two common elements that brought together the diverse group of artists associated with the CAyC. One such element was the traction of politics in their work. In the tense period between the two coups d’état that marked the decade from 1966-1976, politics was at the centre of the public sphere, or, as Rodolfo Walsh put it in 1973, ‘It is impossible in Argentina today to create literature that is detached from politics’.3

The other common element was the adoption of conceptual art as an aesthetic strategy. Guided by linguistics and semiotics, art communicated ideas. A central component of conceptualism in the 1970s was the strong intervention of the written word, the use of maps, and the expansion into essays. The works of Horacio Zabala, Juan Carlos Romero, Margarita Paksa and Elda Cerrato are just a few examples of how the work aimed to build critical consciousness through such processes.

Adriana Bustos belongs to this conceptual tradition.

In the interview mentioned above, when Grinstein asked her about how her works are received by the public, Bustos responded, ‘I am trying to represent that which cannot be represented, which is capitalism. Many things are said, and at the same time, many things are kept quiet; it is the schizophrenia of the system. I am grappling with that and I don’t know if it’s easy to transmit it to people, but I think that many people are struck by the information contained in these images. It is clear – at least to me – that they demand the active engagement of the reader. The data is there, but the connections are made by those who look at them’.4 This is the root of a continuity that runs through her work and is also a major departure. The conceptualism of the 1970s was shaped by Roman Jakobson’s theory of communication, in which he defined six communication functions, sender – receiver – message – channel – code – context. Broadly speaking, then, according to this perspective, the interpretation of the content is provided by a relative univalence. However, the distance between the 1970s and the new millennium involved dramatic political, economic and cultural transformations. It is inevitable at this point that we recall the profound perceptual change that was brought about by the incorporation of the internet into our everyday lives. It entails, among other variables, coexisting with simultaneous screens which, at the same time, contain successive open tabs. This generates a shift from a unidirectional to a multi-purpose model. The epistemological-cognitive

3 In María Moreno, Oración. Carta a Vicki y otras elegías políticas, Literatura Random House, Buenos Aires, 2018, p. 343.

4 Adriana Bustos, op. cit., p. 21.

transformations generated by the use of the World Wide Web are evident in Bustos’ work. In works such as Quién dice qué a quién [Who Says What to Whom], El retorno de lo reprimido [The Return of the Repressed], Antropología de la mula [Anthropology of the Mule] and the ‘Imago mundi’ series, the artist condenses the logic of the screen and articulates, through the use of traditional languages (figurative drawing and handwriting) and systems (diagrams, cartographies), a methodology of movement through the expanse of the image that is typical of the interaction with digital interfaces.

Another layer of Bustos’ work incorporates the procedures and ideas of Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin. Bustos’ Atlas device and her own conception of the montage derive from these sources. In Mnemosyne Atlas, Aby Warburg, that visionary German art historian, created a network of spatial-temporal relationships composed of passages, jumps, persistences, and affinities. Never mediated by an explanation, the images gain meaning through the relationships between them. If Warburg’s Atlas were an oracle, Bustos’ own words would make an apt carving for the entrance: ‘The data is there, but the connections are made by those who look at them’.

On the other hand, central to Bustos’ excavation of culture is the notion of the dialectical image created by Benjamin. Bild or dialektische Bild [Image or Dialectical Image] is the event in which past and present come together to make history visible. Could there be a more eloquent dialectical image than Antropología de la mula [Anthropology of the Mule]? In black pencil on an enormous piece of paper we see border police, a conquistador, mules at work, and a naked woman’s torso, all merged into a map that points to several routes: Mule route. 16th century. Cordoba - Potosi - Lima. Precious Metals Route. 16th century. Lima - Panama and Europe. Route of the mules. 21st Century. Tacna - Córdoba - Buenos Aires to Europe.

‘Mule’ has at least two meanings, one of which refers to the pack animal. During the 16th and 18th centuries in Córdoba, Argentina, a relatively prosperous industry emerged that was dedicated to the breeding of mules for the transport of goods on the trade routes to the Potosi mines. The other meaning refers to people who traffic cocaine by swallowing capsules filled with the substance, acting as human couriers. Bustos found a converging and overlapping plunderous network of extractionists working in mining and drug trafficking that stretches from the interior of South America to the ports, and from there to the heart of the empire. The mule is ‘an irretrievable image of the past that threatens to disappear with every present that does not recognize itself as intended in it’.5

5 Walter Benjamin, Conceptos de filosofía de la historia [Theses on the Philosophy of History],

Gradiva

‘There is, in fact, no better analogy for repression, by which something in the mind is at once made inaccessible and preserved, than burial of the sort to which Pompeii fell a victim and from which it could emerge once more through the work of spades.’ S. Freud. 6

Back to the future

Adriana Bustos’s visual essays involve the reading of far-reaching historical processes. Her work, sustained by complex research in which she delves into archives, interviews, and documents extracted from diverse archives, composes a panorama that could be thought of as an archaeology of culture. Her work is part of a constellation that includes other artists such as Magdalena Jitrik and Cristina Piffer, who are also dedicated to thinking about history and exhuming episodes obscured by canonical narratives. At the same time, all three are inscribed in a time that is concerned with contemplating the past. Within the contemporary artistic sphere, the past is a gravitational force of enormous density. Since the second half of the 2000s, this retrospective gaze has had ramifications that are aimed at vindicating women artists, at attending to regional arenas that were previously considered peripheral and backward, and at problematising the representation of canonical images in the patriotic pantheon via public monuments. The Exemplum Virtutis carved in stone spurs opinions that range from overthrowing the iconoclasts (Julio A. Roca, Christopher Columbus) to calling for the inclusion of forgotten figures of the liberation (Juana Azurduy, María Remedios del Valle). Each action or demand – in which it is impossible not to situate language as an open field of discussion – is born out of the identification of the dominant and the subordinate that rests in the symbolic field. However, it would be a mistake to understand this paradigm shift in terms of the left–right schema, even if at the heart of the transformative demands is the advocacy of feminism and the LGTBQ+ movements, of indigenism and Afro-descendant communities.

This rewriting of history is also on the agenda of the infinite tentacles of financial capitalism. It had already occurred to Giuseppe di Lampedusa, who, in the sharpwittedness and unsurpassed beauty of The Leopard had Tancredi say, ‘Unless we ourselves take a hand now, they’ll foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay

Terramar, La Plata, 2007, p. 67. 6 Sigmund Freud, “El delirio y los sueños en la `Gradiva´ de W. Jensen” [‘Delusions and Dreams in W. Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’’], in: Psicoanálisis del arte [Psychoanalysis of Art], Alianza, Madrid, 1973, p. 141.

as they are, things will have to change.’7 To see for yourself, one only has to go to Netflix and watch, for example, Ryan Murphy’s series Hollywood. Set in 1950s Los Angeles, it tells the story of a group of screenwriters, directors, actors and actresses hoping to make it big. They include gays, Asians, Afro-descendants and women who suffer rejection, harassment and all kinds of humiliation for belonging to these communities. However, they manage to overcome and, by sheer will, they achieve success. The narrative is reassuring, the past is rendered as a childlike fable in which the dreams of the individuals are fulfilled if they are tenacious. The history of oppression is erased with the catatonic stupor of a sleeping pill in the guise of entertainment. In an era that has seen the coining of the term ‘post-truth’ and the media flooded with fake news, these doctored visions of the past carry with them a certain danger. And thus, we must return to the work of Adriana Bustos and look – as well as read – her work El retorno de lo reprimido [The Return of the Repressed], which is dedicated to tracing relations between the slave trade and liberalism. In one area of the composition, we can read: ‘travel back in time and witness the horrors of slave trade first hand. You will work as young slave steward on a ship crossing the Atlantic. You are to serve the captain and be his eyes and ears. What do you do when you realize that our own sister has been captured by the slave traders?’. Architectural plans; a white girl riding her Afro-descendant nanny as if she were a horse; identikits; statistics and classifications establishing the values of the ‘Atlantic slave complex’ (man–metal, man–merchandise); a ‘racial historical body diagram’ that shows portraits of gagged men and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Haiti’s first ruler after the 1804 Revolution for independence. El retorno de lo reprimido is a multidimensional exposition of the economic, scientific and philosophical variables that establish the commonality between capitalism and racial violence. And, once again, it shows how these conditions are tied into every second of the present day and threaten the future. To paraphrase Steve Jobs: ‘You cannot connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in the future’.

Note II

The first impression was pleasant. Under a spell, I looked at the panorama offered by these drawings made with such skill. I wandered back and forth across the paper, deeper and deeper. The journey became dark.

7 Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, El Gatopardo [The Leopard], Altaya, Barcelona, 1996, p. 45.