Conference in Rio de Janiero, Brazil - July 2001

Problems of cultural translation: the context of Define "context"
by José Roca

In the summer of 2000, I curated an exhibition titled Define "Context", which was shown at Apex Art Curatorial Program in New York, a non-for-profit space devoted to the discussion of curatorial practice. I had originally intended to develop for this seminar some of the arguments from the curatorial statement (fragments of which are included here), but in the process of organizing the exhibition so many problems arose due to the very notion of context that I thought important to reflect on how reality imposes itself over the fiction that a curatorial proposal embodies. This "travelogue" intends to put in evidence the difficulties of every cultural translation, in this case from a precise context of production to the context of exhibition, and includes personal accounts and anecdotal facts related to problems we experienced during the preparation, installation and development of the exhibition.

When I conceived the exhibition, I never thought about it as a show of Colombian artists. In fact, the initial draft included a series of sensationalist documentary videos shown in France between 1992 and 1994 (which showed the "public face" of Colombian reality as perceived from abroad), as well as a series of images by German photographer Bastienne Schmidt (done on Colombian prisons) and a work by French artist Frederic Meynier, Le rŽpos (The rest), which had suffered a radical displacement as it was invariably perceived in our country. The work consists of a pile of logs, on whose ends the artist affixed casts in gesso of his feet. This work makes part of a series of "autoportraits" that Meynier has done with other fragments of his body like ears and hands, most of them primarily concerned with the world of childhood. I was interested in particular on the way this work was invariably read in Colombia: it was mentioned in many articles as a direct reference to death, as its iconography, in the local context, suggested the image of a pile of corpses, which are a common sight in Colombia.1 But in the end, responding to a local need (the need for opportunities of visibility) I decided that my discourse on contextual problems was to be put together with works by Colombian artists. This would provide a group of local artists an opportunity to show in a highly visible space in New York (as opposed to the "ghetto visibility" achieved by exhibiting in the Latin American or Latino circuit), even if there was the risk of the exhibition being perceived as a show of Colombian art.

The main argument was: which is the adequate context to properly experience a given work of art? Is there a tacit context for some artists, whereas for other artists it is necessary to make it explicit? Among the many articles that appeared in relation the Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles' exhibition at the New Museum, there was a patronizing remark that caught my attention: "If you've never been to a banana republic (except, perhaps, to buy a sweater), much of the historical import of Brazilian sculptor Cildo Meireles current retrospective at the New Museum may be completely lost on you."2 Even if it was only a loose remark in a New York cultural guide, I thought that the phrase embodied many of the prejudices that exist in relation to the so-called peripheries (is Brazil a periphery?). It has been common practice to regard artistic production from the fringes of the art centers as "impossible to grasp" unless an "adequate context" is provided, be it political, sociological or religious. This, of course, is either a fallacy (that can be used as a means of exclusion), or it also applies to a large part of the current artistic production regardless of where it comes from. Joseph Beuys' work can be seen by anyone without an explicit knowledge of his personal history, but it can be argued that his use of materials and their symbolic references can be somewhat lost without this minimum context. But in the case of art from the margins, it is assumed that the work inserts itself in the space of a common, largely homogeneous postcolonial history that is either taken for granted or presumed to be absent, thus leaving the work unable to be properly experienced or understood. In fact, there is a general context that tends to be shared, but not that of a "Latin American" specificity: within the parameters of western culture (and most artists, except for those whose work is considered "primitive", work inside this tradition), current globalization has made information available to all, and cultural referents are shared more horizontally by everyone regardless of the geographical or even political context. Under the cultural construct History of Art, some things tend to be homogeneous, and local specificity tends to connect to global concerns. How, then, to define this "proper context"?

The first artist I thought of was Antonio Caro, who was to be represented with two works. The first one, though, was not exactly a work done by him in a proper sense and it bore relation with an incident that took place at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 1997. The work I intended to show had been "created" by a curator, and showed that even if a work can be apprehended in a formal level, its critical level can be completely bypassed. Caro's best-known work, Colombia (1976), portrays the name of his native country written in Coca-Cola typeface, a gesture akin to some pop strategies -to which he is sometimes likened-, but with a totally different political agenda. While addressing the patronizing relationship between America and his country, Caro's move has proven premonitory (coca-Colombia) of the drug-related events that have marked bi-national relations for the last decade. But I decided not to show the original work, which is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá. Instead, I wanted to show a sign of its curatorial manipulation at one of the most important museums in the contemporary circuit, namely a reconstruction of the way this work was included in the Face ‡ l'Histoire exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 1997: a Mexican art magazine whose cover portrayed this work, inside a show case. Incredible as it sounds, the curators had no problem in creating a work from a document, without even contacting the artist. Caro thus entered one of the temples of cultural validation without knowing it, and with a work he never made or even saw, but which paradoxically represents him well, because the irresponsible curatorial action shows precisely the point Caro was trying to address: the colonial attitudes that still exist in north-south relationships.

The other work by Caro was to be the Homenaje a Manuel Quint’n Lame (Homage to Manuel Quintín Lame), a work that was first made in 1972 and has been reworked many times since. Antonio Caro was supposed to write on one of Apex's walls the signature of Manuel Quintín Lame, an important figure in the civil-rights movement of the indigenous communities in Colombia. Quintín Lame was a self-taught Indian leader from the twenties that learned law in order to be able to defend his people against neglect and abuse by the Colombian Government. He was tried several times and spent more than 18 years altogether in jail without a single charge being proved against him. In the eighties, a Guerrilla group that aimed to defend the interests of the Indian community named itself after Quintín Lame, so the original history has been replaced by a recent fact, leaving Lame's name related with current political violence. Nonetheless, Quintin Lame is still an obscure figure even for informed circles in Colombia; context has to be provided even here. This contrasts with a remark made by Uruguayan artist and critic Luis Camnitzer: "Quint’n Lame's signatures have power only in Colombia. The moment these works cross the Colombian border their impact is lost. Historical knowledge, the resonances of the legend beyond the strictly anecdotal facts, are part of the work. Without them, the only thing that remains is a visual skeleton that can be understood as an empty decoration. In this sense, this particular work of Caro's not only deals with a geographic specificity, but also with a specificity of audience-it negates the idea of the necessity of international understanding of a work of art".

As an interesting fact it should be noted that must probably due to Caro's bizarre looks (or maybe because of his total marginality in relation to the minimum characteristics that define a "formal" social being -possessions, employment, credit history-) and armed only with Apex's invitation and a letter by the Cultural Attaché of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Caro was denied a visa. As the work required his physical presence (to re-write Lame's signature) his enforced absence was in fact very consequent with the original sense of the work: the empty space was more radical than if the work had indeed been done.3 Considered part of the beginnings of Conceptualism in Latin America, Antonio Caro has developed a subtle and precarious work right from the margins of the periphery (he is marginal even in Colombia), working often with indigenous communities and with everyday people. Caro first developed an interest on Lame in the late seventies, in the wake of similar attitudes towards minorities prevalent in those days. Learning by heart Lame's signature, Caro reinstated a presence that all official histories had systematically obliterated, (and they still do). Lame's signature in itself is highly symbolic: a syncretism of nineteenth-century calligraphy and Indian pictograms, it has a formal quality that goes beyond an individual, coming to bear presence of two communities in uneasy coexistence.

Latin America was largely seen during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries alternatively as a paradise lost, with the myth of the noble savage (this cliched perception is sill valid for the alleged Latin American exuberance -both sexual and natural), or as an underdeveloped continent with no hope whatsoever owing to geographical determinism: the exuberance of natural environment resulted in the lack of possibility for a civilization to develop. As French voyager Charles Saffray put it clearly in 1869, "In this favored country, land is, I dare to say, too generous, because its fecundity delays progress. A rich soil and a mild climate do not demand from man but a few days of work for a year's subsistence". José Alejandro Restrepo's video installations combine images, text and historical research to provide a powerful critique to the way the realities of Latin America have been (and still are) portrayed from abroad. These prejudices are screens that mask a proper understanding of the realities here, as Restrepo's video installation Humboldt crocodile is not Hegel's, clearly shows. The work takes as its starting point an epistolary confrontation between Hegel, who never set a foot in the American continent but that felt nonetheless authorized to project his prejudices on it (using fauna to signify European superiority over the New World) and Humboldt, whose answer comes from an empirical look: experience vs. representation. The American crocodile was a much sought-after piece in the Cabinets de curiosités, mannerist predecessors of the Classical museum, and thus emblematic image of "the exotic"; confrontation between literary images -which is in the end a conflict between the old order an a new reality- contrasts with the video's impassive and in temporal image, resulting in a critical field of great power which metonymically replaces with a visual conundrum the actual measure of the problem.

The texts were translated into English in order to facilitate the reading of the work, but judging by the response of some critics that visited the exhibition, it became evident that the problem of the "minimum context" is more serious than it is usually acknowledged: one critic asked the artist who Humboldt was. Amazed, Restrepo answered "you really don't know Humboldt? And promptly added with irony "what about Hegel?" The symmetry of the formal structure of the work and the critic's ignorance was perfect: where does he place himself to exercise his critical judgement?

One of the works that presented the most problems during this transit from Context of production to Context of exhibition was Go on, a large on-site drawing by Miguel Angel Rojas, and not exactly due to problems of translation. Go on, is a drawing which seen from a distance recalls an illustration from a book on the Wild West; on close inspection, it becomes evident that it is constructed with green "dots" which are actually made with a hole puncher out of coca leaves. Even if the making of the work is--if somewhat a lengthy process--relatively simple to do, bringing the coca leaves from Colombia to New York resulted in an extremely complicated process, with obvious political implications. As curator of the show I contacted the Embassy of the United States in Bogotá, the DEA and the local drug enforcement agency, but was unable to get any of these authorities involved in officially bringing the material to New York or to issue a document that would legally cover it as an art work.4 The artist and I went through several alternatives, which were discarded one by one: to exhibit the letters of refusal from the institutions (too rhetorical); to get coca leaves in New York (we were not able to get them -besides, one of the points was to bring the coca from Colombia to the U.S); to send them by FedEx to the exhibition space (Apex, in an understandable attitude, refused to receive this "postal drug traffic"). The only alternative left was the one that we had discarded from the beginning, the most dangerous one: to bring the coca leaves inside the luggage. In the end, the work was done with coca smuggled by Colombians into New York, an action by which the material was symbolically recharged. Rojas' installation shows the recurrent vice of history to perpetuate its methods: the conquest of a territory by violent action finds another scenery and other actors, but the roles remain the same. By alluding to the conquest of territories "to the west" by blood and fire -turned into a mythical saga by Hollywood- Rojas inscribes his work in the current political scene. The official acknowledgement of the guerrilla/drug equation leaves the door open so that military intervention (which is conveniently and euphemistically named "aid") can begin to be put into place. Current "narcotization" of U.S.-Colombian relationships shows that the problem is actually not political: in the end, it is a question of the markets, of whose money goes where.

This narcotization of the relationships between Colombia and the U.S. has found a suitable metaphor in the image of the poppy flower, which has replaced Coca in the last decade as the main illicit crop. Until the eighties, according to DEA, there was no Colombian heroin whatsoever in the U.S. But in 1993 it took 15% of the market and lately this figure has risen up to 60%. This reality, which is affecting 600 000 Americans, has led that country to supply to the Police a fleet of Black Hawk helicopters, the same that has begun to defy the heights in search of the "wicked flower" (El Tiempo, Feb. 7, 2000). Juan Fernando Herrán's ongoing series Papaver Somniferum takes the Poppy, whose presence usually conjures images of beauty, romance or solidarity (in Great Britain, poppy blossoms are sold by the Haig Fund to aid war veterans), as a visual surrogate for the current political situation. There is local police use a visual code and army of portraying people under arrest with the "evidence" neatly arranged on a table before them. Herrán appropriates these and other images from the press (in this case a photo of a soldier candidly holding a bouquet of poppies he has just uprooted as a symbol of the effectiveness of police activity in eradication of illicit crops). In one recent interview, the chief of the drug enforcement service boasted that he had eradicated twice as many hectares of illicit crops as the previous government, while a DEA official remarked at the same time that the growth of those crops had surpassed historical records by far. Who is right? Ironically, both, because criminalisation of drugs (as in Prohibition) only makes business more lucrative. Herrán combines photographs from the newspapers with a German cloth he purchased near Istanbul (where the cultivation of poppies is controlled by the Turkish government), a fake velvet with fuzzy horizontal color fields--that brings psychedelia to mind--embossed with a poppy flower motif that can only be perceived when seen from the side, as in Holbein's proverbial anamorphical painting: only a biased gaze will permit a proper understanding of what is being put into question.

Delcy Morelos' work has often been interpreted as providing a visual representation of the bloodbath in which the country has been immersed for the last three decades. This might be true in part, but in a subtler, more personal way. Of Indigenous descent and born in an area of the country where violence has been present for decades, Delcy moved to Bogotá in the early nineties to pursue her career. Her works done in a muted palette -ambiguous, oversized forms that existed in tight tension in relation to the canvas- soon turned exclusively to a red pigment, applied in several layers over industrial paper with a sprinkle method, which resulted in heavily charged images. These volumes caught in the "decisive moment" in which all pulsions overflow their rational container soon gave way to ample fields of color that filled almost the whole painted surface. This gave way, in turn, to a series entitled Color que soy (color that I am), in reference to the late poet Raúl Gómez Jattin, who died tragically after living a life in dereliction. Color que soy consisted in huge paintings done in the same method, but with a subtler palette of muted reds and browns, which in fact are the skin tones of close friends of the artist. Color and culture are closely linked. In Spanish, to speak of an "artista del color" is clearly not the same as of an "artista de color"; the former makes reference to a pictorial language while the latter denotes race, but the term "de color" always refers to everything that is not white, as if the absence of color were the evidence of an absolute, impollute pristine state...the pure canvas is sullied with color. These generalizations fall well in a context where, in the absence of significant recent European immigrations to act as a contrast, people segregate from the heavily mixed racial margins, a country where to call someone "Indio" is considered an insult. There is nothing more pathetical than to hear a Colombian abroad stating with conviction his difference from what he considers "colored people", while his phenotype denounces him in front of those races from which he inherited the attitude and habitude of segregating.

Jesús Abad Colorado, a photojournalist based in Medellín, has followed human displacements caused by Colombia's internal wars, portraying the transformation of rural landscape due to political violence. Crude images in the press and TV are common sight here, so the visual sensibility of Colombians is "anaesthetized" as a result of a continued exposure to violent facts. Not so long ago, TV. Programs agreed to present images of carnages only in black and white as a way of mediating violence, a measure that only lasted for a few weeks until it also became integrated as a code in our visual conscience, and its goal thus neutralized. This visual numbing contrasts with the subliminal effect of violent images -that results in collective threat- as the public exposure of those murdered by the Mafia once acted as a warning for others: in its obligation to inform, photojournalism is symbolically kept hostage by those it is trying to denounce. Abad's images will be shown in a slide projection, to stress the ephemeral nature of a given photograph in its circulation in the papers, but also as a remainder of the lack of visual impact of crude images in a context saturated with them.

As a collateral event related to the exhibition, there was a conference organized by Nomads and Residents, an artist collective based in New York. In this format, the work of a local artist ("Resident") is confronted with the work of a visiting artist ("Nomad"), in this particular case the Define "context" goup. In order to shed new light on the clichŽed perception of Colombia in relation to the drug problem (which condemns production but not consumption), I decided to show a video by a group of young Colombian filmmmakers, aptly titled Legalizaci—n (Legalization). This video refers to the drug problem from a humorous point of view: if we really believe that the main problem with drugs is the damage they do to public health, we should then focus on the substance that statistically causes more deaths globally: cholesterol. Legalizaci—n shows how the repression on the producers of cholesterol-high foods such as breads and desserts has an effect in the skyrocketing price of eggs, and how the bakers and the like become more rich and powerful as an effect of the enforcement of the law. The "Resident" in this case was Venezuelan artist Javier Téllez, who allegued he was ill and sent a video-cassette without any explanation of its contents. In fact, it was an excerpt of an italian B-movie, appropriated by Téllez as ready-made. The discussion that followed this "mute" screening (without a minimum context, which in this case would have been the presence of the artist giving a frame of reference), was very heated. The Colombian artists considered it a mockery; Téllez' video put in evidence the uneasiness of being put in the place of "the other" by means of a gaze that completely biases the perception of a context that either is completely unknown or constructed from hyghly mediated fragments in which all kinds of prejudices find an adequate field to place themselves. Trying to reflect on how to define and adequate context, I became aware that what Beckett termed "the unnamable" ends up emerging in everything we do, and that our territory is indelebly inscribed in our collective unconscious. All of the works that conformed the exhibition revolved around the notion of context: questioning biased views of a territory that is not well known (José Alejandro Restrepo); reinstating suppressed histories, and showing that they can still be pertinent when removed from their conditions of production (Antonio Caro); making connections between similar concerns in totally different contexts (Juan Fernando Herrán); showing how a work is interpreted as a direct response to an extreme situation (Delcy Morelos); giving view to a local tragedy that is in fact the result of a global problem that refuses to be acknowledged (Miguel Ángel Rojas, Jesús Abad Colorado). Context should be defined within an artist personal history, as opposed to his or her cultural (as in Country) appertainment; I would go even further: within the work's particular history.

1. Very recently, in an interview of one of the lecturers in a Seminar on Civil Rights at the Luis Angel Arango Library in Bogota -where Meynier's Le Repos is exhibited- the protographer chose the work as a backdrop for the protrait.
2. Banana Republic is the name on a well-known American apparel company. With its inclusion in popular culture, the term has been stripped of the pejorative connotations it sill has in Latin America.
3. It is to be noted that after intensive work by the Direction of Culture at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs it was possible to obtain a visa for Antonio Caro. He traveled to New York and was able to do his work shortly before the close of the exhibition.
4. When I proposed to bring the coca leaves as a work of art, a bureaucrat at the DAS (the local investigation agency) told me with sarcasm that it was the most ingenious trafficking strategy he had ever heard.
5. François Bucher, a Colombian artist that was present that evening summoned it as follows: "In my opinion there is a point that is always bypassed, and I would put it like this: why popcorn cannot see itself as ethnic food? It is not part of the agenda to reveal that the New York context, with its Marxist discussions at the Whitney Program, with its ethics marked by a guilt complex plagued with colonies, understands itself as contingent? The Nomads and Residents revealed that day that all that is expressed through form, the so-called open and democratic conversation between the participants, is a fallacy. Because it is always assumed that the outsider should know the codes used in New York. There is a certain level in which the New York context is never put into question... and all the others are. I feel that here we can find a sort of initiation to the secrets of power. What is always discussed is a questioning of the "privileges". But those who have access to power tend to reproduce this dynamics of power that excludes everyone that does not know the certified footnotes of the "New York context". A context whose most flagrant feature is to consider itself as the quintessential "non-context". (Published in Revista VALDEZ #4, p.119-124. "Derecho al sur").

José Roca © 2001