Campaign Song: Respondele a Obama

Water Painting South America's "Disappeared"

Follow this link to a video of part of an art installation about South America's disappeared. The artist (Oscar Muñoz) paints a face of someone disappeared on stone using water, only to have this image, like the victim, disappear without a trace:
http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid626919000/bctid900554636

Oscar Muñoz, Proyecto para un monumento (Project for a Memorial), 2005. Video courtesy the artist and El Museo del Barrio, New York.

See more of this show on Slate: http://www.slate.com/id/2166386?nav=tap3

Art Review of Art Exhibit on Latin America's "Disappeared"

NYT
April 7, 2007
Art Review | 'The Disappeared'
Unresolved Chords Echo for ‘the Disappeared’
By HOLLAND COTTER

There may have been a more moving show of contemporary political art in the city this season than “The Disappeared” at El Museo del Barrio, but if so, I missed it. The title refers to a peculiarly chilling form of violence associated with political upheavals in Latin America over the last 40 years, one that is now becoming more common in Iraq.

A man leaves for work one morning, but doesn’t come home at the end of the day, or later that night, or the next day. A week passes. Relatives suspect that the missing man, who may or may not have had risky political ties, has been arrested or kidnapped. But they don’t know by whom, or where he’s been taken, or if he’s alive or dead.

He’s one of the disappeared, “los desaparecidos,” the victim of terrorism through stealth removal. A death permits mourning, assignment of blame, a possibility of closure. Disappearance generates uncertainty, paralyzes action, leaves an open wound. If I say nothing, a survivor thinks, maybe my husband, or child, or mother, or wife will be spared, even returned. If I inquire or accuse, I may seal their fate. As often as not, fear wins out.

The 15 artists in the show are all from Latin American countries that experienced totalitarian regimes in the late 20th century, when almost every family had friends who disappeared or were themselves forced into hiding or exile. Directly or indirectly, their art is about these experiences.

Some of it is explicitly autobiographical. Nicolás Guagnini’s father, a leftist journalist in Buenos Aires, vanished in 1977, when the artist was 11, at the beginning of a period that saw the disappearance, torture and death of some 30,000 of his countrymen. Mr. Guagnini, who now lives in New York, where he is a co-founder of the artist-run Orchard gallery on the Lower East Side, has made a single sculpture about his missing parent: a cluster of upright posts on which his father’s portrait is painted in fragments so that the face comes into focus, then dissolves, as the viewer circles the piece.

A photographic installation by Marcelo Brodsky, who is also from Argentina, expands the personal into a larger history. In early family snapshots, he is a child playing with his older brother, Fernando. In a 1967 group portrait of his eighth-grade class, he has circled 13 of the 32 figures, to indicate friends who as adults would go into political exile or disappear.

Fernando appears again, and for the last time, in a 1979 picture, taken in a military prison were he was jailed as a dissident and, Mr. Brodsky believes, murdered. In the late 1990s, the artist organized a memorial for all of these people from his past. It included a public reading of their names. The reading was recorded on video; the names sound through El Museo’s galleries.

Other work in the show is less diaristic, more about the facts of violence made visible. Sara Maneiro shows enlargements of X-rayed dental remains recovered from a mass grave of protesters massacred by government troops in Venezuela.

Iván Navarro, the youngest artist here, born in 1972, contributes a ladder made from fluorescent light tubes and printed with the names of Chilean police and secret service personnel indicted for torturing or killing fellow citizens. Arturo Duclos has covered a gallery wall with the outlined form of the Chilean flag made from human bones he collected over the years from medical students and other donors.

Fernando Traverso, an activist based in Rosario, Argentina, keeps the memory of dead friends alive by surreptitiously stenciling images of bicycles on city walls. Bicycles, hard to identify and easy to hide, were the favored mode of transportation for resistance fighters. When a bike was found abandoned, it usually meant its owner had been captured. Thanks to Mr. Traverso, there are still bikes in Rosario awaiting their riders’ return.

Not all the art is so specific in its references. Juan Manuel Echavarría, from Colombia, symbolically suggests the pathology of disappearance in photographs of a weathered mannequin displayed like a body on an autopsy table. In photographs by the Uruguayan-born Ana Tiscornia, newsprint portraits are half- obscured behind what looks like a coat of yellow slime. In several small videos, Oscar Muñoz paints similar portraits with water on light-colored stone; within seconds the water dries and the faces vanish.

No single work is more complex than “From the Uruguayan Torture Series” (1983) by Luis Camnitzer, an artist born in Germany, raised in Uruguay and for the last several decades an influential teacher and writer in New York. Combining close-up photographs of his own body with handwritten sentence fragments, he evokes the sensibilities of both tormenter and victim with corrosive subtlety.

Mr. Camnitzer is one of our finest political artists, which is to say one of our finest artists. Nothing he has done demonstrates this more persuasively than this devastating exercise in psychological portraiture, which is also self-portraiture.

Portraiture is, of course, an art form expressly designed to resist oblivion. And it is the essence of this show, which opens with a floor-to-ceiling spread of monotype memorial portraits by Antonio Frasconi, born in Buenos Aires in 1919, and concludes with an extraordinary portrait project called “Identity” by a collective of Argentine artists who use that word as their name.

Collaborating with the Association of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, women who have for years publicly demonstrated against government silence on disappearances, the collective has gathered photographs of couples who had children, or were expecting children, at the time they vanished. The installation, continually being added to, has been exhibited in Buenos Aires. The hope is that if any of those children, who would now be adults, survived, they might recognize the face of a lost parent and be reunited with living family members.

Whatever its practical results may be, it gives an overpowering sense of the sheer statistical enormity of loss. You think you’ve reached the end; you turn a corner and find more. It goes on and on, face after face, out of the gallery, down the hall.

This all may seem long ago and far away to us, but every Thursday in Buenos Aires, groups of women continue to hold their protests demanding a full accounting of their children’s fates.

“The Disappeared” was organized by Laurel Reuter, founding director and chief curator of the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks. It is scheduled to travel through North and South America for three years, and has a bilingual catalog that is a work of art in itself. From Ms. Reuter’s stunning essay to the supplementary material, it is a total- immersion emotional experience.

And why is it that an on-the-road exhibition from a small museum in the Midwest is the most potent show of contemporary art, political or otherwise, in town? All I can say is that curators in our local museums should pay a visit, and ask themselves that question.

“The Disappeared” (“Los Desaparecidos”) continues through June 17 at El Museo del Barrio, 1230 Fifth Avenue, at 104th Street, East Harlem; (212) 831-7272, elmuseo.org.

M&C note: see original for slideshow on exhibit.

Aymara time metaphors

Indians see past, future in reverse, study says
By Bruce Lieberman
San Diego UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

June 22, 2006

The future is in front of us, and the past is behind.

It's an idea so ingrained in human thinking that most people don't think twice about it. Scientists, too, have long believed that everyone perceives the passage of time this way.

But the reverse is true for the Aymara Indians in the mountains of northern Chile. For the first time, researchers have documented a culture that uses words and gestures to describe how the past stands before an individual and the future lies behind – unseen.

The discovery is described in the current issue of Cognitive Science. It suggests that the metaphors people use to describe abstractions – even everyday abstractions like time – are at least partly determined by culture, said University of California San Diego researcher Rafael Núñez, who co-authored the study with University of California Berkeley professor Eve Sweetser.

Aymara is spoken in the Andean highlands of western Bolivia, southeastern Peru and northern Chile.

Over an 18-month period, Núñez and Sweetser taped about 20 hours of conversations with 30 Aymara adults from northern Chile. A majority of the volunteers were bilingual speakers of Aymara and Spanish.

Aymara speakers use the word nayra – which means “eye,” “front” or “sight” – to refer to the past. They use qhipa – which means “back” or “behind” – to refer to the future.

But Núñez and Sweetser did not draw any strong conclusions without looking at how those words were reinforced by gestures.

The Aymara subjects, particularly the elderly who didn't have mastery of Spanish, thumbed or waved over their shoulders when speaking about the future. And they swept their hands or arms in front of them while speaking of the past – closer to their bodies for events in the recent past and wider gestures for events in the distant past.

“It was quite striking when people were starting to point . . . in directions that seemed totally unnatural to us,” Núñez said. “We're talking about non-technical, everyday notions of chronology here.”

Researchers still need to study how the Aymara's view of time influences day-to-day life, as well as their concept of progress, prediction and organizing society for future generations, Núñez said.

He and Sweetser do know that the Aymara have a profound respect for their ancestors, tradition and history. These Indians also place great significance on whether an event has been witnessed by the speaker.

For example, the phrase “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue” is incomplete in the Aymara language. The speaker must elaborate on how he or she knows that fact, either through attribution or other evidence.

This may explain why the Aymara metaphorically place the past before them because past events are knowable. And the future? Aymara elders see little point in speculating about events that haven't occurred.

David McNeill, a linguist who studies gestures as a component of language, described the Aymara study as a landmark.

“I consider the Núñez-Sweetser paper very important, because it forces us to consider the interaction of (physical gestures) and culture in the creation of basic beliefs about the world,” McNeill said.

The study shows that understanding the complexities and subtleties of language – and how gestures enrich and reveal meaning – is vital for people trying to relate to other cultures, he and other scientists said.

“It's really important to understand the conceptual systems of peoples around the world,” said George Lakoff, a linguistics professor at Berkeley. “There's a dominant view in this culture that . . . everybody thinks in pretty much the same way, and that therefore you don't have to take into account different world views.”

Núñez said he planned to explore whether other South American groups used similar metaphors to describe the past and present.

“I have a gut feeling there may be other languages in the Amerindian family that also share the same thing in one way or another,” he said.