Context
In this review of the work of Teresa Margolles and Doris Salcedo, I attempt to provide the reader with a grounded historic-political context for the works discussed first as I open debate regarding the State and its corresponding Cultural Institutions that facilitate this art to be of international relevance. As much as Salcedo and Margolles promote a critical and radical vision towards the failed politics of the State, the same state has officialized their discourses through its Cultural-Institutional arm to represent their countries in the highest competitions and exhibitions, such as Biennials and Museums in the West.
For if we go into the higher interests of our administrations, producing competent art at a global level has been paramount, since Modernization, to present a nation as a universal power among other nations.[i]
In Latin America, art has exponentially developed a highly political character throughout the 20th century, and although its authoritarian governments have been known for suppressing intellectual criticism against them (especially coming from the arts), as Latin American countries in its entirety have been subjected to the same hegemonic project of globalization, in turn, has also given rise to global programs of art circulation. For Margolles and Salcedo, who became internationally known in the late ’90s creating neo-conceptual art and ready-mades within a well established global network of art, the development of the free art market, the increasingly powerful curatorial/intellectual context in contemporary art, and the funding of art institutions in favor of private and state interests was opening up several channels for artistic experimentation and political critique in which powerful and intriguing art (mostly conceptual) was demanded.
It is precisely in this internationalist context of critique and multiculturalism that the work of Margolles and Salcedo has been highly acclaimed for one clear reason, they have radicalized the practice of conceptual art, as they have been concerned that the tragic narrative of violence and decomposition they work with, is traced to the very specific raw material of the trauma; I explain: they use real matter left of the story they present, forensic material, corpse remains, weapons, abandoned belonging by victims of violence, and so on. While this narrative may seem familiar to some, it is very controversial when it is elevated to broader diverse audiences, as people naturally question the ethic of their work. A lot of debate and discontent has arisen in the general public and the critics regarding the moral, the corruption, and the actual quality of their works. The critiques, in my opinion, are often valid, still, there is something undeniable of their practices that deserves acknowledgment and admiration, both have developed creative and powerful languages of social realism that set a high bar for Latin American critical art.
As for the institutions, if we dare to look closely, the state is very much concerned with art (if it’s a tool or a threat) as an apparatus that consolidates ideology and culture. In this sense, Slavoj Žižek points out to us at the beginning of his book “The Parallax View” that there is an established and conflicted trinity between elites (the groups in power), brutal violence (as a way of governing/sustaining power), and the fine arts (as the aesthetic-sensitive representation of these).[ii] I will emphasize later on this matter. So, while in the spheres of the ‘high culture’ history is commonly delighted as an aesthetic experience, the real tragedy, that of war, that of fear, reaches its highest peak when it is converted into art. In literature, the plastic, scenic and cinematographic arts the narrative of human suffering is treated until it becomes a phenomenal representation-interpretation of tragedy, this not only for the privileged few but for the masses in general; as most of the art produced in the XX century and so forth is meant to reach mass audiences. To produce and perform art at the scale Margolles and Doris do requires mediation, funding, and permission from corresponding powers, mostly art institutions.
While artists work on what is relevant to their reality and collective history, the institutions in charge of generating and managing culture indeed depend on the artists. In that sense, it seems that the artistic narrative that triumphs is the one that is in accordance with the desires of the institutions and those of the popular audience, even if these desires constantly clash. However, when the discourse of art is conflictive, cynical, and puts at risk the legitimacy of the state and its institutions, does the exhibition space–commonly institutional and linked to the State– not serve as a “tolerance zone” for protest and radicalisms?
Long before museums became zones of tolerance, Latin American artists already had a history of assuming important roles in interpreting the tragic events that mark their populations as narratives of cultural value, of utmost relevance not only to the elites, but their discourse has been consolidated with a higher social purpose. In literature and the visual arts, there is a large repertoire of oppositional theory and art in Latin America. As far as the visual arts are concerned, conceptual art established itself as an effective apparatus of ideology around the world (conceptualism)[iii], in Latin America, there are important avant-garde conceptual art interventions that could be understood under the main purpose of social realism.
What is in the essence of much of Latin American conceptualism is the pain and tragedy that governs our societies and writes our history, failed states, war, political conflict, corruption and drug trafficking have become the conditioning factor of the various realities experienced in Latin America. For some time now, several artists have been denouncing various problems in the lower and higher fields of culture.
A bit of history…
Since the beginning of the 20th century, the wounds of colonization– to say it in a romantic manner– continued to fester on a continental level, creating new forms of precariousness and violence. The anguish in the aftermath of colonization and independence wars on the continent and its peoples were already illustrated by modernist painters prior to conceptualism, such as those of the Muralist movement present in Mexico, Cuba, Argentina, and Uruguay.[iv] Telling the complicated ‘Latin experience’ was a good rhetorical resource for art during the first half of the century. However, these artists, mostly charged with leftist political ideology, held a positive and hopeful view towards the partidocracy and the State (with Marxist values). Therefore art was not used as a radical protest against the oppression of the nation-state, nor did it highlight the atrocities of the nation-state towards its populations in the present.
A few years later the fever of Modernity in Latin America had died down and what remained was the apex of American imperialism and predatory globalization that centered Latin America once again as the strategic playground for Western powers and local rulers. Interest in the continent’s southern hemisphere’s natural resources and labor force became the catalyst for an endless series of violent conflicts and systematic oppression. Many genocides, displacements, civil wars, coups d’états’, dictatorships, and political persecutions occurred openly perpetuated and financed by the global powers.
It is in this context that the artist with its creativity, intellect and sensitivity becomes a suitable mediator of social discontent, and art, as the state censors and suppresses it, gains rhetorical power and legitimacy.[v] And so denouncement became inevitable, the artist acquires, almost unwittingly, a social responsibility to act against silence. As Margolles rightly said: ‘What else can we talk about?[vi] However, the tactics to convert art into protest were diverse in the localities and evolved over time.
Dating from the late ‘60s deeply political avant-garde art movements in Argentina (Tucumán Arde and the Comité Coordinador de la Imaginación Revolucionaria, 1968), in Mexico, almost simultaneously, as social decay and state oppression became increasingly shocking, to counter the officialist rhetorics of progress, a lot art was produced collectively with the social focus of denouncing systematic violence (Los Grupos). If anything, conceptualism in Latin America was guided by its commitment to developing a social realism of impact, well described by artist Juan Pablo Renzi, ‘we aspire to turn each piece of reality into an art object that turns upon the consciousness of the world, revealing the intimate contradictions of this class society.‘[vii]
In the last period of the twentieth-century geopolitical conflicts had multiplied and intertwined with a larger systematic problem that had developed particularly in Colombia and Mexico: drug trafficking (narcotráfico). The state conveniently ceases to be the main apparent enemy to its people, and by the 1980s organized crime (the cartels) had become extensive organizations of war and government to which the state supposedly fought against as a matter of national security. The reality is much more complicated. In Mexico on the one hand the cartels were organized into the first continental infrastructure for drug trafficking (mainly cocaine) to the United States, led by Felix Gallardo (aka El Jefe de Jefes) starting in Colombia, Felix established the first distribution network that made the Cali Cartel and the Medellin Cartel (led by Pablo Escobar), as well as the united cartels in northern Mexico extremely powerful and wealthy. In Colombia, this was unleashed alongside a ‘civil war’ considerably more violent than Mexico’s situation at the time, as armed insurgent groups and self-defense groups had been fighting for years for the political power and territory control. ‘Las FARC’ (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), which was financed by massive kidnappings, displacements, and drug trafficking,[viii] sustained a civil war against the consolidated right-wing paramilitary groups such as the ‘AUD’ (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) led by the very powerful Carlos Castaño Gill, financed by displacements and sale of land to particulars, land rights, transnational corporations (such as Chiquita Brands)[ix] and also drug trafficking. In Colombia, the paramilitary groups, in particular the AUD, were for many years the unofficial armed wing of the state. There are countless deaths that this armed conflict left and the damage it caused is irreparable. It is in this niche of this ‘irreparability’ that Salcedo’s art is born.
Colombia’s civil war could be a more complex and political conflict than the case of the drug violence on Mexico’s northern border, yet they have parallel motives and in their essence are the same: Conflict between armed groups for power over land and resources, as well as for the drug trafficking routes that finance their activities. These armies of organized crime (call them cartels, paramilitaries, self-defense groups, insurgent groups) defend not only political management interests, but also financial interests for transnationals, therefore they are not alien to the national economy, they are elemental to it, and are closely linked to the government, or are the government itself. Inside these forms of government–commonly denounced as ‘narcogobierno‘, ‘narco-paramilitarismo‘, ‘FARCgobierno’–the more the state colludes, the more difficult it becomes to pinpoint the ultimate culprits of the atrocities committed, the more difficult it becomes to conceive of justice and thus the more impossible it becomes to restore the social fabric.
Margolles and Salcedo
It is in this context of systematic violence and despair that Margolles and Salcedo, almost simultaneously begin to produce art to counteract the silence and the impunity left by these ‘civil’ wars. However, something remarkable of their art is that this would not only function as local-social interventions, but as an amplification of the local conflict to the highest spheres of culture (the international). For their art, it would already be part of an international contemporary art circuit in an expanding market, following this, the logistics of its production and exhibition would become more costly and complex, requiring also a certain degree of complicity from cultural-state institutions.[x]
This is a bit more evident in the case of Margolles, as she requires noticeable illegality to be able to smuggle forensic remains transnationally, such as her intervention in the Venice Biennial and the multiple pieces mentioned by Cuauhtémoc Medina in his promotional essay “Zones of Tolerance“. In the case of Doris, it does not requires much to figure out about the permission and collaboration of the State to carry out her performances/installations. For example, the one she carried out in the Palace of Justice in Bogota in 2002, entitled “Empty Chairs of the Palace of Justice”, a consensual performance-intervention that lasted 53 hours. Yet the most notable collaboration of the Colombian government with Doris would take place recently, in 2016, when the weapons surrendered by FARC from the Peace treaty were disposed at Doris’ will to create a piece of work to conmemorate the end of this civil war.
This decision was probably made anticipating that Doris would make the weapons a monument to the resolution of the conflict. However, Doris chose to melt down the weapons and use the iron to collectively create, together with women victims of the conflict, a piece composed of cocked plates that would form the floor of the what now is the art gallery ‘FRAGMENTOS’, intended to exhibit political and socially useful art.[xi]
There is a substantial concept underlying ‘FRAGMENTOS’ which is also present in most of Margolles’ art, that of ‘anti-monumentality‘. While a monument is meant to be a proud commemoration, most monuments also sing songs of war and pain. They still have the common purpose of remembering and being an ideological maintenance apparatus. A peace monument would be meaningless to a deeply wounded people who could never recover what has been taken from them during the civil wars of drug trafficking and paramilitarism as in the case of Mexico and Colombia. An anti-monument, would rather be an act of collective memory that pays homage to no one, on the contrary, it is a lament.
In respect of ‘Fragmentos‘, which as I mentioned, was created with the fusion of 60 tons of weapons surrendered by the FARC in the peace agreement of 2016, Salcedo tells us that she was not interested in building a vertical monument (obelisk) of victory, since no one is a winner in a war, she seeks a horizontal monument, which does not oversee the people but instead remains below them.[xii] The iron of the melted weapons would be treated with hammers by several women victims of the war until it becomes plates that would form the floor of the gallery. The argument that Salcedo clearly explains is that these plates are fragments of memory and trauma, this is the fixed interpretation of the work.
For these pieces, the viewer is supposed to look at them with a disconcerted sadness, contrary to the way an honorary monument is to be observed, the anti-monument is then an aesthetic object-experience that projects pain, and triggers the viewer to mourn for a pain that surely did not experience. This mourning projected by these works specifically narrates the tragedy of forced displacement. What are the unoccupied and deranged ‘furniture’ presented in ‘Unland’ (1995-98)[xiii] if not fragments of something that was lost? The issue of forced displacement is also addressed by Margolles in many of her works, the most specific perhaps being her sculpture ‘La promesa‘ (The Promise) composed of the remains of an abandoned house in Ciudad Juárez. Here she was in charge of directing the demolition of an abandoned house, one of the 120’000 abandoned houses in the city due to forced migration as a result of drug war violence.[xiv] The house, which is a lost memory, a broken promise, is recontextualized to become a sculpture, and therefore embodies many memories–conceptually of course–reduced to a wall of dust.
‘Fragmentos‘ and ‘The Promise‘, as their names suggest, are works composed of fragments of memory and broken promises (Margolles refers to them as ‘compacted memory‘), an odd figure: the fragmentation of mind (immaterial) put together by the fragmented–now compacted–residual matter of tragedy (material). A light breaks through such fragmentation, opening way for a reversed journey, one which begins in the viewer’s eyes, leading the way of a vortex that never ends but leaves one wandering a low-resolution territory: between remembering tragedy and the tragedy of remembering.
Acknowledging the creative effort that Salcedo and Margolles have developed to denounce the consequential violence of failed states, I want to wrap up this analysis by raising awareness in the reader that political art is never to be interpreted as separated (or dismissing) from the Institution that hosts it, and the financial and political logistics that it implies. At a time when there is no room for the political persecution of artists (at least in the West, at least apparently), it would seem that freedom of expression does not represent any kind of threat to the State; on the contrary, these expressions are at work in consolidating its ever-deceptive historical narratives and adorning the decaying project of “social reconciliation”.
Notes
[i] Briefly mentioned in Barriendos, “Geopolitics of Global Art.” p.110
[ii] Žižek, “The Parallax View.” p.3
[iii] Gallo, “Adventures in collectivism during the 1970’s.” p.161
[iv] Anreus, “Siqueiros’ travels and “alternative muralism” in Argentina and Cuba.” p. 243
[v] Camnizter “Tucumán arde.”
[vi] Emblematic title for her contribution to the Mexican Pavillion in the 53rd Venice Biennale.
[vii] Renzi is cited by Luis Camnitzer in “Tucumán arde: Politics in Art.” p.62.
[viii] El Tiempo, “Las FARC y el Narcotráfico.” 2000
[ix] In 2007 Chiquita Brands plead guilty before the U.S. Department of Justice for “Making Payments to a Designated Terrorist Organization” (financing paramilitary groups in Colombia). Chiquita Brands agreed to pay a $25 Million fine. U.S Department of Justice, “Chiquita Brands.” 2007.
[x] Medina, “Zones of Tolerance.” p.48
[xi] This gallery is located in the address Cra. 7 #6-16, Bogotá, Colombia. For more info, visit https://www.plataformaarquitectura.cl/cl/919532/fragmentos-nil-contra-monumento-granada-garces-arquitectos
[xii] Mentioned by Salcedo in the video “Fragmentos” produced by Mimbre, 2018
[xiii] Salcedo, ““Interview with Charles Merewether.” 1998
[xiv] Addressed by Margolles in the video interview about her piece “La Promesa” by Periscopio Muac, 2015
WORKS CITED
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Teresa Margolles at 53rd Venice Biennale». https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/38082/teresa-margolles-at-53rd-venice-biennale/.
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