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My First Blog Post

Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.
— Oscar Wilde.

This is the first post on my new blog. I’m just getting this new blog going, so stay tuned for more. Subscribe below to get notified when I post new updates.

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Gardens are sites of nourishment. They equally serve the mind and body, cultivating cultural values alongside an appreciation for the natural world. While their purposes have evolved over time, gardens are often designed to embody the belief systems and values of the societies that create them. Thus, gardens are complex microcosms offering opportunities for intellectual and aesthetic enrichment, social reinforcement, and solitary contemplation. They are sites of learning, and the knowledge contained in them is vast—sources of endless exploration and inspiration.

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Elemento de rescate: piernas (Rescue Element: Legs)

Carlos Leppe identifies the body, fragmented and bruised, as the receptor of violent social wounds inflicted by Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile. These works were shown in an exhibition entitled Reconstruccion de escena (Reconstruction of a Scene), which also included works based on photographs of him posing in uncomfortable positions that suggest acts of violence. Here, the artist’s lower legs, wrapped in medical bandages, exemplify the highly coded ways artists sought to avoid censorship while nevertheless expressing complex social and political realities.

Lleno de Sonrisas serias

Dalila Puzzovio emerged as a young artist in Buenos Aires in the early 1960s, before Jual Carlos Ongania’s repressive military regime (1966-70). The plaster casts were given to her by a friend who worked at a hospital. Each cast holds a story of a fracture that is unknown to the viewer, yet offers a precise outline of an individual body. Puzzovio regards them as “astral peels” that contain the ghostly vibrations of bodies they once covered, mended, and protected. They also recall fragmented and broken bodies — a reference to the wounds of the repressive regimes soon to come.

Anteproyecto de espacio represivo

Trained as an architect, Horacio Zabala examines the physical structures –particularly prisons and jails — that serve authoritarian systems. Espacio represivo recontextualized the punitive space of the prison inside the gallery. The architectural model, preliminary drawing. And photograph on view describe the original installation, which was constructed to human scale at the Centro de Arte y Communicacion in Buenos Aires. While the jail-like structure references the repression and political conflict in Argentina at the time, it also functions as a metaphor for an arts institution. In 1972, Zabala professed that

“ART IS IN JAIL.“.

This slogan appeared on many of his subsequent works and critiqued the (itself often oppresive and censoring) instituitionalized power of the art world.

Habito/Habitante (Habit/Inhabitant)

Against the cultural and political framework of the dictatorship in Brazil (1964-85), women artists, oppressed by both patriarchal society and military power, produced experimental artworks that radically changed how the body was represented. Martha Araujo began creating what she called “performatic objects” during the country’s transition to democracy in the mid-1980s. These wearable textile pieces invite the public participation and combine performance and sculpture. In Habito/Habitante, the viewers are encouraged to wear the garment that is secured to the gallery wall with Velcro. They can either remain attached to the wall –imprisoned, so to speak — or detach from it, thereby liberating themselves. In regard to her motivations, Araujo stated:

“I always wanted to tie myself up to then untie myself and feel freer.“

The Edge of Things: Dissident Art under Repressive Regimes

Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis, La Conquista de América (The Conquest of America), 1989. Courtesy D21 Proyectos de Arte, Providencia, Chile.

What is art for? Can it have a political function by making visible what has been erased or disappeared? During a time of violence and political repression, artists from Argentina, Brazil, and Chile questioned their role in society and the purpose of art itself. Expressing resistance to coercive military dictatorships, they navigated fluid lines between art and politics, public and private space, creativity and life, while experimenting with nontraditional materials and forms. The emergence of conceptual art in Latin America was directly informed by these political conditions and these artists’ sense of urgency in addressing social concerns.

The Edge of Things: Dissident Art Under Repressive Regimesgathers experimental artworks from the 1960s through the late 1980s made in a climate of fear and censorship. Facing oppressive social, political, and cultural conditions, including the persecution, torture, “disappearance,” and murder of dissident citizens, the artists approached the body, as well as the street, as political spaces to express subversion and resistance.

The effects of authoritative regimes on the bodies of citizens is a central theme for all the works in this exhibition—the body being the primary target of state violence and control. Art making offered a critical framework to address painful social realities and lived experiences that were otherwise obscured from public view. For these artists, art was an exercise in freedom, and the body was a material, source, and point of departure. Their diverse visual strategies and actions were a way to communicate, interrogate, and make visible what was being pushed to the edges of official state narratives.

Artists: Elías Adasme, Martha Araújo, Artur Barrio, Fernando “Coco” Bedoya, Paulo Bruscky, Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (CADA), Eugenio Dittborn, Victor Gerhard, Eduardo Gil, Carlos Leppe, Margarita Paksa, Letícia Parente, Dalila Puzzovio, Lotty Rosenfeld, Regina Vater, Edgardo Antonio Vigo, Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis, and Horacio Zabala. Special thanks to Stone Circle Bakehouse.

This exhibition will run parallel to Between Absence and Presence: The Arpilleras Movement in Chile, on view May 28 – Nov. 30, 2019 at the Michigan State University Museum.

The Edge of Things: Dissident Art Under Repressive Regimes is organized by the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University and curated by Carla Acevedo-Yates, Associate Curator, with support from Georgia Erger, Curatorial Assistant, Thaís Wenstrom, Curatorial Intern, Patrick O’Grady, Graduate Fellow in History, and Erica Lavista, Student Research Assistant. Support for this exhibition is provided by the Eli and Edythe Broad endowed exhibitions fund and the Center for Studies on Latin American Art (CLACS).

Considero mi cuerpo (I Consider My Body)

In a climate of social and political repression, where bodies of citizens were targets of state violence, the body of the artist became a political arena that reflected the wounds of a society in crisis. The text in spanish reads as follows:

“I consider my body (the body of the artist), as receptor and sender of all social concerns. My screen printing work should therefore be fulfilled in the field of the collective.“

This text describes Carlos Leppe’s belief that the body is a means of communication that represents social and political concerns, not solely those of the individual. Leppe is depicted here in a spontaneous pose covering his eyes with his hand, perhaps in a symbolic gesture to signal ways of seeing and not seeing.

Sleep Sanctuary

there are four walls floor and ceiling

four walls floor and ceiling

we enter an environment that has

four walls floor and ceiling

the wall to the right is equal to the floor

the wall to the left is equal to the floor

the wall in front is equal to the floor

the wall behind is equal to the floor

the ceiling is equal to the floor

the ceiling is equal to the walls

the floor is equal to the ceiling

the floor is equal to the wall

the angles are curved

it is a visual infinity

there is a bright spot

there is only one bright spot

the eyes are fixed on the bright spot

the eyes are fixed, it is a visual infinity

the eyes are fixed on the bright spot

the eyelids

the eyelids are heavy, heavy

now we enter a huge globe

a huge globe white and transparent

there are no longer four walls, floor and ceiling

only a huge balloon

we go down to a well

it is a very deep well

far, farther away

above there is only a bright spot left

far, farther away