MARCELO BRODSKY | JORGE TACLA: UPHEAVAL presents recent work by two leading international artists that explore the after-effects of dictatorship, traumatic events, and social rupture. This two person exhibition features work by Marcelo Brodsky (b. 1954, Argentina) and painter Jorge Tacla (b. 1958, Chile). Both artists came of age during their countries’ periods of political violence (1966-84 in Argentina, and 1973-90 in Chile), when dictatorships responded repressively to the social justice movements that grew out of 1960s protests by committing wide-scale human rights abuses.
Q & A WITH TUFTS UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY AND JORGE TACLA
Brodsky, based in Buenos Aires, is best known as a photographer whose practice focuses on the physical and psychic effects of civil and human rights abuses during Argentina’s Dirty War (1976-83). His exhibition explores the historical arc of the international civil rights’ movement of 1968 and features a new audio-visual installation created for Tufts.
In the 1970s in Chile, where I come from, painting was not only a form of protest but was also in conflict with the more conceptual tendencies in contemporary art. Muralists and urban painters used painting as political denunciation, in response to the social struggles of their time. There was also a traditional school of painting that was uninformed about what was going on around the world regarding painting and its relationship with contemporary life. At the same time, there was a very conceptual force that was openly against painting—ironically, most of those artists, many associated with the Escena de Avanzada group, were the greatest painters of that time in Chile. I am very interested in painting’s struggle for survival in that conceptual artistic scene. That context informs my commitment to painting as an ongoing and contentious conversation to which I want to contribute.
Jorce Tacla, based in New York, creates paintings and drawings that are pictorial ruminations on social rupture and the psychology of trauma. Tacla’s paintings feature images of destroyed urban and architectural forms that serve as metaphors for civil and human rights abuses during the dictatorship of Chilean President Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) and the ending of Pinochet’s authoritarian regime through various forms of civil disobedience. This exhibition is organized by the Tufts University Art Gallery, in cooperation with the Tufts Latin Amerian Studies Program. Special thanks to Peter Winn, professor of history, for lending his expertise. The exhibition has been generously supported in part by Corpbanca and The Embassy of Chile.
Why painting? What is it about painting, and specifically painting in oil with cold wax, that you find to be the most compelling artistic tool for you now, and over your decades-long career? From my very beginning as an artist, painting was my medium. Early on, I was also a performance artist, and that work got me expelled from art school in Chile.
I started to use oil and cold wax in my early years in New York, more as an experiment because I was looking to develop my own representational language. Now I only use oil and cold wax on the series Hidden Identities. The materiality of this series refers to our own matter: the paint surface— worked with cold wax—is like human skin, sensitive and vulnerable to psychological and physical aggressions. The canvas shows the traumas and insanity of the human condition. Please explain your process of working with cold wax, oil paint, found photographs, etc., and the layering/mixing that occurs. My working system is based on contradiction: I use a very beautiful skin to talk about a tragic death, a very fragile layer to talk about the hardness of
concrete, or an abstract language to refer to a global disaster. My process starts with wide-ranging research, from news accounts and history, to psychology and memory studies, to poetry and philosophy. This research is juxtaposed with reference images of real events, taken from the media, photos sent to me from all over the world, and my personal archives. I am particularly interested in how trauma is represented in compromised landscapes and architecture. Next, I develop the image in oil on a canvas primed with rabbit skin glue. While the canvas is still very wet, I cover it with a thick layer of cold wax and pigment, almost obscuring the entire image. After that, I start to work almost like a surgeon, or psychopath, cutting layers and reconnecting spaces until only a very thin and vulnerable skin remains. The whole process happens very quickly because the surface needs to be wet. I think of my process as something similar to an autopsy, removing layers to get to the inside. Even though some of these images are famously associated with specific places or incidents, I name the paintings by number—for example, Hidden Identities 1, 2, etc.—to encourage viewers to think of the work as a broader critique. You have been called (by art historian Donald Kuspit) a painter of “subjective abstraction, allowing the expression of unconscious feeling that factual representation tends to repress.” Do you agree? Donald Kuspit used that phrase to describe my Rubble series, which I began in the mid-1990s and continue today. Those paintings are based on photographs of ruined urban landscapes, sometimes several photographs that I juxtapose or superimpose in a given image, from which I develop an abstract language. My process in this work is much slower than in Hidden Identities because I prime the canvas with gesso and marble powder to create a surface like fresco. I mark an image on the surface in oil or acrylic, then remove and re-paint it over and over to create a kind of ghost of the original form. The result is an abstraction of real sites, where the wreckage is discernable but not obvious, so the painting is not “purely” abstract.
Because the titles of the paintings do not identify those sites, the work speaks to an unconscious perception of trauma, rather than to a factual representation of disaster. Kuspit has suggested that this method and vocabulary open a new way for painting to talk about politics, which is one of my fundamental interests as an artist. The Rubble series informs my work in Hidden Identities, which uses photographic sources in a way that’s more recognizable in the finished painting. Tell us about the inspiration(s) for the Hidden Identities series, selections of which are on view at Tufts. I have been working on this series of paintings since 2005. Across the project, I address sites ranging from the devastation in the Middle East (Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria), the impact of recent earthquakes in Haiti, Chile, and Japan, and the effect of terrorism (Oklahoma City, 9/11, and Madrid). Some of the most recent work in the set is on view at Tufts. The common denominator across the series is the reference to victims and agents, who are each hidden in different ways. The victims are unidentified, and the agent or aggressor is disassociated from his own identity. The paintings refer to the relationship between the victim and the aggressor, both in terms of the permeability of their identities and their negotiation. This work is part of my longstanding aesthetic commitment to international intervention. Like many Chileans, I come from a family of immigrants. My grandparents came from Syria and Palestine in 1910 to escape Ottoman oppression, joining a large community of Middle Eastern refugees spread across Latin America. That heritage made me aware from childhood of diasporic populations and their complicated experience of dislocation and resettlement. When I was 22, I moved to New York City, joining a diverse Latino community. My work was included in the Decades Show (New Museum, 1990), one of the earliest exhibitions to explore multiculturalism in contemporary art. I aim in my art to recognize my position as both a global citizen and a citizen of Chile and the United States, and to mobilize that privileged identity to shed light on
asymmetrical power dynamics in sites of conflict. Do you regard the representation of architectural space and cityscapes in the Hidden Identities series as the specter of historical and cultural memory? Tell us more about how you represent memory pictorially. Memory is fragile and can go to sleep easily. In my work I develop specific images as a wake up-call for memory. Images have the power to elicit old emotions. I think of my work as representing the conflict between remembering and forgetting. More than representing memories, I work with a system of images and references to keep memory alive. Although I work with historical events, I also work with current and premonitory events where sometimes memory has yet to form. In this case, the representation of architectural spaces functions as a pause, or as a space for thinking. Do you think art has the ability and responsibility to affect political and/ or social change? If so, what specific political or social changes do you wish to propel? I do think that art has the ability and responsibility to affect political and/ or social change. For me art has always been a form of denunciation, and my work deals deeply with the insanity of societies. It portrays physical and psychological aggressions that have been controlled and hidden by institutionalized power, using a visual language that invites contemplation. I want to amplify the voices of the victims of injustice and iniquity. In order to do so, I work with media images and theoretical analyses of conflicts around the world. I always look for the missing information, the restricted data, and negotiations of power. I create images that reveal what is concealed, using a metaphorical language to illuminate the one reality that is publicly shown, and the other reality that is hidden. My main concern is revealing human responses to injustice. You recently had a major exhibition in Santiago, Chile at the new Museo de la Memoria (Museum of Memory). What do you feel is your most significant contribution to social justice in Chile? In the broader world?
Having grown up as a member of an unpopular ethnic minority in a political system of dictatorship, I am deeply aware of the long story of racism, classism, misery, and rights abuses in Chile. Nothing that I see now is independent from what we saw in those days. The Hidden Identities exhibition at the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos this past summer included 41 paintings and 160 drawings from the series, some of which are part of the Tufts installation. The venue was important for me because it framed my international interests in a particularly Chilean context focused on historical memory and national consciousness. I have been involved in various Human Rights initiatives but always through my role as an artist. Through my paintings and activism, I contributed to an international discourse that worked to restore democracy in my own country. I hope that my recent work makes a similar contribution to conversations about abuses in the Middle East, where my family has roots, and other sites of global conflict. What would you like our student audience to know about you and your work? I would like students to know that we can develop a voice to denounce the insanity of societies. A lot of us artists who were working in New York in the wake of 9/11 had to struggle to find a vocabulary to address that tragedy. I would urge the next generation of artists and activists to use their work to engage the most pressing issues of our time, and I am encouraged by students’ leadership in the Black Lives Matter movement and the campaign to stop sexual violence on campus. How do you see your work relating to that of Marcelo Brodsky? I have followed Marcelo Brodsky’s work with great interest, and I see our projects as complementary in several respects. We are essentially contemporaries who use photography to make art deeply informed by a concern for collective memory and our respective experiences of growing up in Latin America in conditions of state terrorism, he in Argentina and
I in Chile. He uses photographs conceptually, poetically, and sometimes documentarily to consider the Perons’ devastating toll on Argentina and the country’s efforts to regroup in their wake. I make paintings based on documentary photographs of international sites of devastation and loss. As a result, Brodsky’s images actively reclaim the memory of those Argentine tragedies and their impact on his countrymen. My paintings, on the other hand, present the global diffusion of injustice and the difficulty of fixing historical memory.
Q & A WITH TUFTS UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY AND MARCELO BRODSKY Why photography? What is it about photographs that you find to be the most compelling artistic tool for you now, and over your decades-long career? Photography in its close relationship with reality and with language is a strong tool to interpolate what is going on in the world around you, and at the same time is an increasingly familiar medium in contemporary culture. Whilst we know of ourselves when we were kids or students through our family and group photographs, we now see how photography is becoming the most used language to exchange messages and to communicate emotion. Photography is in everybody´s hands and minds, and its power is immense and growing. Still, there is the risk of banality. Visual language has matured, and knowing how to create questions and ideas with images in their relationship with other ways of communication is an incredibly powerful resource in the arts and in contemporary culture at large. You have said that when you returned to Argentina from Spain at the age of 40, you were compelled to work on your identity. What were you confronting by returning to Argentina? I was coming back from exile in Spain, where I lived during the transition from the dictatorship of General Franco to a democracy. I was inspired by the ideas and debates that were characteristic of the Spanish transition, and that would become a reformulated part of the discussions in the Argentinean transition to democracy. But there was a very big difference: in Spain the transition was negotiated with pardon and no judgment for the crimes of dictator Francisco Franco and his collaborators. In 1984, the first year of democracy in Argentina, we judged the leaders of the military juntas and condemned them to life imprisonment for Crimes Against Humanity. Although this process went back and forth for almost 40 years, we are still judging the perpetrators in Argentina, and no judgment has been made in Spain, only memory works and literature.
How did you move from making the deeply personal work about your brother’s disappearance—and traumatic memories of loss which many other individuals and families in Argentina were also facing—to the subject of the international student protest movements of 1968 in your more recent works? I am interested in history and thought. There is a direct relationship between the ideas of 1968 and the revolutionary movements in Latin America in the 1970s inspired by “1968”, all part of the social process that ended with the bloody dictatorships of the late seventies. In the context of wars against communism (such as in Vietnam), that somehow were also responding to the social unrest of the late sixties in Europe and Latin America, repressive governments supported by the U.S. seized power in Latin America. Those repressive governments were fighting the ideas of 1968! Freedom of expression, student rights, political rights, trade union legal action, socialism, social change, the ideas of Che Guevara (who was murdered in Bolivia in 1967), the ideas of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., (who was assassinated in Memphis, TN, in 1968). There is a direct relationship between those ideas and those times. It is just that I started my more political artwork with what was closer to me—my disappeared brother, my disappeared friends, the empty space at the family table. Twenty years after that, I am working on the ideas of Martin Luther King, Jr. (in “I pray with my feet”), and the ideas of 1968 (in this series on view at Tufts, “1968, The Fire of Ideas”). You were only 14 in 1968—what do you remember about that time in Argentina? To what extent were you aware of the international revolutions that were happening taking place abroad around you? In 1968 we were in a period of dictatorship that started in 1966. The “night of the long sticks” (http://schugurensky.faculty.asu. edu/moments/1966uba.html or https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=dAp3hmAv214 in Spanish) affected the independence of the University. I was only 14 but had already entered the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, where political issues were always under discussion. I was more of a hippie at that time, long hair, the Argentinean version of Rock and Roll and some activity against the Vietnam War.
Where do you find the photographs you use in “1968, The Fire of Ideas” series? Who are the photographers and what is your connection to them (if any)? For 30 years I have directed Latinstock, a picture agency based in Latin America, that represents photographers from all over the world, from Magnum to the Science Photo Library. So I have always worked professionally with the archive and archival images. The use of archival images is part of my professional practice as a photographer. Some of the photographers that shot the images I am using in “1968, The Fire of Ideas” I know personally, like Rodrigo Moya in Mexico and Evandro Teixeira in Brazil; they willingly participated in the project by lending their images. In other cases, I just licensed the images from picture agencies or from the estates of the photographers. Explain the use of language in the 1968 series. Does the text on the photographs change with each iteration? What is the purpose of these textual interventions into, and literally on top of, the photographic surface? How important is it that viewers be able to read the text? It is important that the viewers are able to read the text. The writing interacts with the image and aggregates meaning. They bring the issues and ideas of 1968 to discussion: Liberty of expression, sexual freedom, the use of the public space to protest, the possibility of imagining a different world, more equal, more open- minded, in which creativity, freedom, and the individual had a central role. Each image in the installation and each piece of text are different since they are determined by national conditions. But they still have plenty in common, as they are all part of the spirit of the zeitgeist. I believe those ideas of 1968 are strong and important at this moment, when some societies seem to be going in the opposite direction, toward a period of obscurity, repression, and intolerance. Rescuing, reexamining, reviewing, and resignifying these ideas makes a lot of sense now; and the combination of image and text is a powerful way to deliver this message. There are no specific boundaries between media, all is culture, all is art, text, image, music, sculpture, photography, painting, installation, voices...
Could you tell us more about how and why you shifted from a focus on human rights abuses in Argentina during the Dirty War (a national focus) to a more global perspective on civil rights activism and human rights abuses in other countries? Our village is the world. Human rights are a central value in the contemporary world, when violence is becoming a permanent threat to society. Humanist principles are being questioned by people and organizations that have no respect for human life. Events happening anywhere may affect everybody´s life. Human rights have always been a global issue. In fact, when we could not put the perpetrators of the Dirty War in Argentina on trial, we presented our cases in the courts of other countries and received a lot of support and solidarity. Now, when we are judging the perpetrators in Argentina, it is our responsibility to express our solidarity and to be active against human rights violations around the world. How do you create a space for the discussion of historical and cultural memory in your work? Why is this important? What are your goals? I believe photography has a strong role in bringing history up to date. By reading images of past events today, we can make connections, understand the spirit of the times and learn from experience. Visuals have multiple, hidden meanings that are resignified with the passing of time. Images are rich with meaning and information. By connecting images, we can build an alternative narrative with new questions and inquiries. The goals are to open up the mind to different ideas and multiple interpretations of our experience. Visual culture is open. Art asks questions and does not give answers. On a stylistic level, I would say that my interventions are mediations on meaning—an attempt to bring to the surface ideas and conflicts that are visually present in the image and that are developed poetically with words. Do you think art has the ability and responsibility to affect political and/ or social change? If so, what specific political or social changes do you wish to propel?
“Art is a social act of a solitary man,” is a phrase by Yeats that I wrote in my first poetry book in 1982, “Palabras” (“words”). I believe in the power of art to generate discussion and public debate, to spread ideas, to influence society, and to favor social change. More freedom, more culture, more debate, more writing, more music, more visual arts can only be positive for society. Please describe your process of community collaboration on public art projects in Argentina or elsewhere. I have worked on different public art projects, such as the Memorial Park that remembers all the victims of state terror in Argentina, and have been involved in different initiatives to support human rights’ movements and organizations through visual action in Mexico, Brazil, and Chile. In Mexico, we organized an international campaign to support Tlachinollan, a human rights organization that is defending the 43 students victims of forced disappearance in the Rural Teachers School of Ayotzinapa, Guerrero. Images were produced around the world by groups of students and they are now on exhibit at the School. Fifty-five different human rights, photography, arts, academia and media organizations supported the visual action. What do you feel is your most significant contribution to social justice and activism in Argentina? In the broader world? The fact that we judged the military responsible for the State Terror during the dictatorship (1976-1983), and that we are still judging them, is a major achievement of the Argentinean Human Rights movement and a strong message against impunity to the world. What would you like our student audience to know about you and your work? I would like that the students face the work with an open mind, that they relate it to their own lives, that they ask questions about how the events I address relate to their own experience. I am interested in the artwork as a dialogue between the artist and the viewer, as a means of communication
and exchange. How do you see your art work relating to that of Jorge Tacla? I am interested in the exchange, in how our artworks dialogue practically in the exhibition space.
ON VIEW JANUARY 21 to MAY 22, 2016 Thursday, March 10 | 5-6:30pm Symposium with artists Marcelo Brodsky and Jorge Tacla, moderated by Professor Peter Winn. Co-sponsored by the Arts & Sciences Diversity Fund, Latin American Studies Program, and the Consortium on Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora Remis Sculpture Court
Wednesday, April 6 | 5-6pm Tour of Upheaval with Peter Winn, Professory of History at Tufts Koppelman Family Gallery
40 Talbot Avenue; Medford, MA 02155 artgallery.tufts.edu artgallery@tufts.edu 617-627-3518