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TORN
IDENTITY
(Original Spanish text here)
INTRODUCTION
Jaime Davidovich has made artwork in the tumultuous years that span from the
end of the 1950s to the present, principally in Argentina and the United States.
These are the essential coordinates to begin to tackle his artistic career.
Although his work has been characterized by the use of a variety of media and
formal resources, this variety becomes coherent when placed not only in an artistic
context, but also in the social and political contexts of those years.
Davidovich grew up in the thriving Argentina of the years just after the Second
World War. The relations between Buenos Aires and the world were growing closer,
and artists were nourished by this contact; a fruitful dialogue with the major
international aesthetic tendencies began, particularly with the European post-vanguards.
Informalism would be one of the most influential movements among young Argentine
artists and, shortly, it would find many followers interested in exploring material
beyond the impositions of form. Among these artists was Davidovich who, in addition,
took an interest in tachism and North American abstract expressionism, a trend
that he had come to know on an early trip to Rio de Janeiro.
The post-War period was also the moment when two key figures broke onto the
Argentine political scene: General Juan Domingo Perón and his wife Eva
Duarte de Perón, known around the world as Evita. Inspired by Italian
fascism, Peronism took root by means of an uncommon use of the mass media as
well as a major public propaganda apparatus. Indeed, television came to the
Argentine Republic thanks to the foresightedness of Eva Perón, who after
a trip to Europe understood the importance of this medium in publicizing the
government’s acts and, as a result, decided to encourage it. The first
television transmission in Argentina was on October 17th, 1951, the anniversary
of the popular protest that had brought General Perón to power six
years before.
Peronist politics was based on mass public action and intense propaganda.
It was a politics of spectacle, which the media recorded and propagated throughout
the country. Jaime Davidovich masterfully sums up these years in a statement
at the beginning of his video Evita, A Video Scrapbook (1984): “When Evita
was in power, it was like watching television all the time”. Television
screens were overflowing with the presence of the First Lady and her voice resounded
tirelessly on the radio broadcasts. Newspapers and magazines never stopped publishing
accounts of everything she did and school children had to read her autobiography,
La Razón de mi Vida.
It is not by chance, then, that Davidovich’s work tends towards a systematic
questioning of the media from a contemplative, analytic and conceptual perspective.
His first videos are decidedly anti-spectacular and his later work in television
is critical, based on parody; it is cultural resistance that lays bare the
ideological mechanisms on which television discourse is built.
After a period of visual investigation that leads directly to conceptualism,
his work takes a radical turn and, through video, delves deeply into the universe
of the mass media. Nonetheless, a thorough observation of the artist’s
career undeniably demonstrates his permanent interest in probing the fundaments
of the construction of images, both in terms of their relationship to the
environment and in terms of the way their circulation binds them to a social
and cultural context.
His recent work confronts the discursive homogeneity of globalization in an
intimate and meditative way. Once again, the work is resistant in nature, but
this time it achieves this resistance through a return to both the artistic
and media sources which have solidified his work during these decades.
FROM FRAME TO CONTEXT
As is the case with many artists of his generation, Jaime Davidovich’s
first paintings demonstrate informalist influences. Textures, produced by brushstrokes
or the frottage technique, play a leading role, as do compositional elements
that accentuate the spatiality of the canvas. This is the Pizarrones Negros
period, when he made paintings with large black planes and highly textured surfaces
on which, eventually, horizontal lines would appear. Davidovich has related
these lines to the undefined horizons of the Argentine Pampa and his first approaches
to video. “What I wanted to do”, he says in an interview, “was
to capture an instant in painting that does not have a beginning or an end...when
I began to work with video, this translated into the delimiting of a frame
for something that keeps moving but never ends.” 1
In the early 60s, Davidovich had a show at the Lirolay Gallery, the space for
vanguard art in Buenos Aires; in that same years, he was fascinated by a show
of spatialist artists held at the Bonino Gallery. That show, especially the
work of Lucio Fontana, would exert a profound influence on him.
The Pizarrones Negros series was followed by a Pizarrones Blancos series. The
artist made this second series in the United States, where he moved in 1963
thanks to an academic fellowship. There, he discovered that the frame constituted
an arbitrary limit to his undefined spatial representations and, as a result,
he decided to eliminate this limit by incorporating the work into the exhibition
space. Thus, he got rid of the stretchers and began to place the canvases directly
on the wall. To do so, he used double-stick tape.
The siguiente step would be to eliminate the pictorial surface itself, replacing
it with tapes. With this, he put an end to all demarcation between the art work
and its environment and, thus, arrived at the environmental pieces characteristic
of his work in the late 60s and early 70s. The use of tapes made from different
materials (canvas, paper, vinyl) allowed him to keep investigating textures,
but soon his interest would shift from the materiality of the work to its process
and its relations to space.
The elimination of extra-pictorial references and the incorporation of the
work into its surroundings constituted a radical shift in the artist’s production.
That turnaround coincided with a similar rejection by the minimalists of the
relational properties of their work—that is to say, those that bind the
viewer to a piece’s formal qualities; this shift in minimalism emphasized
a piece’s connections to its surroundings and, as a consequence, the
position of the viewer in relation to both the work of art and its context.
2
It also coincided with the moment at which conceptualism rejected traditional
artistic forms in its attempt to question the very fundaments of artistic
production. “Being an artist today”, maintains Joseph Kosuth, “means
questioning the nature of art. If one questions the nature of painting, one
is not questioning the nature of art...This is due to the fact that the word
art is general, while the word painting is specific...” 3
Conceptualism rejected traditional categories for a new category, that of “art
in general”. According to Thierry De Duve “Something without precedent
in art history comes to the surface in the 60s: it begins to be legitimate
to be an artist without being a painter, a poet, a musician, a sculptor, a
novelist, an architect, a photographer, a choreographer, a filmmaker, etc.
A new artistic category appears-art in general or art in extension- that is
not absorbed into the traditional disciplines.” 4 Art
ceased to be bound to manual skills and centered, instead, on thinking. All
work that conveyed an idea was artistic, regardless of the medium used to
transmit it. The materialization of this idea came to be irrelevant. For Sol
Lewitt, “Only
ideas can be works of art...(however) not all ideas need to be materialized.”
5
Davidovich’s work was clearly headed in this direction. The abandonment
of painting and the emphasis placed on the relations between the work of art
and its space and viewer set off a conceptual cycle that could only be completed
by the experience of perception and by the intellectual activity that that experience
entails. His denial of painting’s formal values and, later, the rejection
of central and institutional spaces for exhibiting art work led the artist
to question the nature of art in general. This coincided with the intellectual
life of the times, which demanded that artists redefine artistic practice.
THE TAPE PROJECTS
The final shift from the canvas to adhesive tape gave rise to the Tapes Projects.
The project’s early pieces are reminiscent of the earlier pictorial stage:
the materiality of the tapes and the occasional placement of paint on them reflects
the same interest in textures that characterized the artist’s anterior
work. Nonetheless, the size of these pieces shifts the attention from aesthetic
considerations to the piece’s surroundings.
The first major Tapes Projects pieces were made with the support of Experiments
in Art and Technology (EAT), a group founded by artist Robert Rauschenberg
and engineer Billy Klüver. In 1971, Jaime Davidovich covered a wall at
Lake Erie College Painesville in Cleveland with different sized pieces of
tape made from paper, fabric and fabric painted with white acrylic. That same
year, in another EAT activity, Davidovich did an installation that involved
placing white and yellow paper tape along the stairways leading to the gallery
at John Carroll University.
In these pieces, the artist’s desire to intervene in the viewer’s
space is evident; the viewer ceases to be a passive observer who contemplates
the work of art from a space that the work imposes6,
and becomes, instead, an integral and vital part of the artwork itself. The
magnitude of the pieces demands a decentralized experience. It is the viewer
who, in his or her wanderings, guides the reading and who, in the end, must
reconstruct the original plan in his or her mind. At the same time, the pieces
began to be placed in unusual spaces, far from the white walls of museums and
galleries.
The siguiente year, Davidovich created a piece in a public space, the two blocks
of sidewalk between the Cleveland Museum of Art and the New Gallery, which commissioned
the project. The sidewalk was divided into two sections: in the first, Davidovich
emphasized the negative spaces between the concrete blocks by filling them with
a thin tape; in the second section, he emphasized the blocks, placing thick
tape across them. The piece lasted almost a year until it was destroyed by the
daily use of the sidewalk and the weather.
A curious paradox is produced by this piece, one that involves the medium and
the objects on which it is applied. The tapes cover, that is to say hide, the
surface that holds them. Yet, in this intervention, the tapes dis-cover, that
is to say, reveal or make evident, surfaces unnoticed by the viewer due to the
indifference imposed by daily use. In this sense, the tapes effect an estrangement
of reality similar to that sought by Bertolt Brecht in his critical
dramatics; they cause a renewed and contemplative observation of the urban environment.
That same year, in a project for the Akron Art Institute, Davidovich covers
a wall (a false wall7, actually) with transparent
vinyl tape. The material used accentuates another aspect, one that, in reality,
had been present since the first tape pieces: mainly, the production process.
The tapes reveal imperfections in the wall and their placement on the wall produces
super-impositions, air bubbles, wrinkles and stretches in the material, thus
calling attention to the process by which the piece was made.
This emphasis on process is another link between Davidovich’s work in those
years and conceptualism. This connection arises not only from putting in evidence
the production process, but also from the viewer’s active participation
in creating meaning.
Taken together, the Tape Projects can be considered systematic phases in an
exploration of the multiple possibilities of acting on viewers and spaces starting
from an unchanging premise (material). Thus, these pieces are in keeping with
systemic conceptualism, which is characterized by the use of systems or series
as an anti-formalist method of composition, one which tends to avoid the imposition
of an expressive ordering.8
In 1973, Jaime Davidovich was invited to participate in the Whitney Biennial.
This time, he chose to install a piece siguiente to the stairway that connected the
various floors, outside the exhibition spaces that held the rest of the show.
The piece was a vertical layout of tapes that went from the basement to the
top floor. To see the piece in it entirety, the viewer had to go up or down
the stairs. As in the earlier pieces, the activity of the viewer became essential.
That same year, Davidovich presented a similar layout of tapes along the central
space of an internal stairway at the New Gallery, as well as a project that
covered with tape the sides of a nearby railway bridge.
FROM TAPES AS ART TO ART ON TAPE
At the height of the Tapes Project, Davidovich moved towards a new medium: video
tape. His decision did not simply involve the incorporation of a new type of
tape, but rather the use of an entirely different tool and the challenge of
taking on a medium completely unknown by the author (and by most artists at
that time, given that video technology had just been put on the market).
The use of video as a medium entailed a return to the figurative image that
had gradually disappeared in Davidovich’s work. It also involved the use
of an image framed by the limits of the monitor, a re-centering of the perceptive
experience and an explicit channeling of the viewer’s gaze.
Nonetheless, Jaime Davidovich’s early videos are a systematic attempt
to transcend all the false premises of the electronic image. To achieve this,
the artist often resorted to video installation or video performance in an
attempt to overcome the limitations of an image enclosed in a screen and to
redirect the aesthetic experience towards an active reception on the part
of the viewer.
In truth, the Tape Projects were not replaced by video; for a long time, the
two media coexisted and engaged in constant dialogue. From this dialogue, the
project Tape as Art and Art on Tape emerged. Here, Davidovich set out to confront
the experiences produced by these two media.
Road (1972), the first video made by the artist, is a twenty minute long recording
of the dividing lines on a highway taped in a continuous traveling shot. The
actual sound of the place where the black-and-white image was recorded is
heard in the video. The extreme fragmentation of the recording makes the image
into a geometrical pattern of complementary lines that can be interpreted
either as white bands on a gray background or vice versa. The abstraction
of the image stands in contrast to the environmental sound which is highly
referential in relation to the title of the piece. This sound relates the
image to a space outside of it, one that transcends the limits of the television
screen. In this external reference, Road opposes an open space to the enclosure
of the monitor. At the same time, as there is neither a beginning nor an end
to the camera’s
movement stricto sensu, that open space appears like a prolongation of the traveling
shot’s unending course.
It is impossible not to see a direct reference to the tape pieces in the images
from Road: the screen seems to be crossed by vertical lines that bring to
mind the ordered figurations of those pieces. Yet in Blue, Red, Yellow (1974)
these references become even more explicit. The video begins with the “electronic
rain” characteristic of a television without images. Suddenly, a hand
appears on one side of the screen and begins to cover the television (the
one the camera is recording, but also the one we are watching) with blue adhesive
tape until the screen is completely hidden. Once this process has been completed,
it is repeated with red tape, and then yellow tape.
The apparent simplicity of this piece contrasts with its multiple readings.
First, in the selection of colors, a dialectical play is set up between the
codes of painting and those of video: in painting’s process of chromatic
addition, blue, red and yellow are the primary colors; electronic images,
on the other hand, are based on chromatic subtracting, and the primary colors
are green, blue and red. Second, there is a confrontation between the hand
that covers the television in the image and the recording that shows this
procedure. Another reading comes from the contrast of two time frames. While
the electronic sound follows no apparent time pattern, the hand that covers
the screen performs an act that takes a specific amount of time. Finally,
there is a performance act that transcends the recording and reoccurs each
time the video is seen: by framing the shot so that it coincides with the
borders of the television screen that is being recorded, as the performer
covers that screen he is also covering the television screen on which the
viewer is watching the recording. This produces the simultaneous disappearance
of electronic noise both on the screen and off of it, which is reinforced
by recording the action in real time.
The works Interior (1976) and Blue, Red, Yellow are closely related. The first
image in Interior is of a section of an empty room. A hand appears and begins
to cover the monitor with adhesive tape, but on this tape the image of another
section of the same room is inserted by chromakey. The process is repeated until
the four walls, the floor and the roof have all been seen on the screen. Each
image contains such scant information about the section it shows that a considerable
effort is necessary to identify each fragment. Once again, the recording in
real time means that the screen seen in the image and the television on which
the viewer perceives the piece are covered simultaneously with the tape used
by the performer.
While in Blue, Red, Yellow there are two levels of recording the image (the
electronic noise and the activity of the performer), in Interior there are three:
the image of the recorded television, the action of the performer and the image
placed on the tape. This fact implies another temporal phase in the production
of the piece; now, there is a pre-production stage (the recording of the different
sections of the room), a production phase (the recording of the performance)
and, finally, a post-production phase (when the images are placed on the tapes).
VIDEO AS AN EXPLORATION OF SPACE
In his first video installations, Jaime Davidovich uses the fragmentation of
the video image as a counterpoint to the extension of the exhibiting space.
Baseboard (1975) is one of the pieces most representative of this strain.
This piece focuses on a very simple image, the baseboard at the bottom of a
wall. In the piece, a monitor plays a video of a baseboard, shot from very close
up to resemble a straight path. The recording does not have a clear beginning
or end. It is displayed in the exhibition space on a television located on the
floor, against one of the walls, directly in front of the baseboard.
The reading of the piece depends upon a series of relations that the viewer
must set up by means of the scant elements that comprise the piece: the connections
between the static space of the room and the mobility of one of its parts, the
complete experience of the whole space and the fragmentary one of the baseboards,
the free perspective of the viewer versus the unchanging angle of the video,
the finite setting that holds the visitor and the infinity projected by the
image.
A piece’s integration into the space that it occupies is an important
theme of the environmental pieces from the Tape Projects. This relationship
is strongly emphasized in a similar piece, Corroboree (1979) in which the
monitor is linked to three different spaces.
Three adjacent exhibition spaces are identified through pieces of colored tape
that are stuck to the baseboards in the corners which are lit by spot lights:
the first is green, the second red, and the third blue. The monitor is in the
middle of the last of these rooms, the one that the viewer reaches last as s/he
walks through the piece. The image on the monitor shows a traveling shot along
the baseboards of each room in the same order in which the viewer has passed
through them. The color in the corners serves to set up the relations between
the image and the physical space, which does not possess any other identifying
features.
This is a video version of Baseboard that is related to Interior. The piece
begins with a traveling shot along the baseboards of an empty room. The relatively
tight frame, along with the visual fragmentation, makes it difficult to recognize
the image. After covering the whole room, the camera pulls back, revealing a
television screen which was the true source of the image, and showing the room
in its entirety, with the monitor resting on the floor in a corner. Just as
in Interior, it is a piece of information, in this case the monitor, that proves
that what the viewer is seeing is not just an image, but an image of an image.
Once again, the status of the video image as a register of reality is questioned
by revealing that the image is, in effect, an additional video generation removed
from reality.
Media’s construction of reality is a key line of investigation in Davidovich’s
work. Although he would take on this concern more assiduously in the pieces
linked to the mass media (especially television and internet), it is interesting
to note how, in these early works, there is a confrontation between the spatial
perception of the viewer and the version that the video image emits about
that setting.
In addition to the pieces where the medium gives itself away as a transformer
of reality, there is a series of pieces in which the artist intervenes in the
recorded situation so as to produce uncertainty in the viewer. In 3 Mercer Street
(1975), the camera engages in an endless pan shot around an empty room. Sporadically,
a performer (Stuart Sherman) who does incomprehensible things appears, but always
in a different place. The video is recorded in real time, which means that it
is the performer who moves about the space, changing his position with respect
to the camera, which stays in one place as it rotates.
Of course, for a person present in the space itself, it is very easy to follow
the strange character’s actions. But for the viewer of the video, it
is practically impossible to do so, due mostly to the fragmentation of the
frame. Although it might seem obvious, it is important to note that the entire
performance has been designed with that very limitation of vision in mind
and that, although the performer seems absorbed in his inexplicable actions,
the true explanation of them is that they are done for the camera.
The presence of the performer serves to emphasize both the position of the
camera and the artifice of the supposed documentation. At the same time, it
is enigmatic that the camera does not stop to show the man’s actions
and, in fact, chooses to keep scrutinizing a space that is unchanging. But
it is in this game that the complicity of the viewer is sought, as s/he, like
the camera, can anticipate the characteristics of the space, but can not foretell
when the performer will appear.
In the video Surveillance (1976), the screen is divided into two parts. In
one of them, on the left, we see the artist spinning around and looking at
his surroundings; on the right, we see images from a pan shot of the room.
The relation between the images suggests that the recording on the right is
what the artist actually sees. Nonetheless, the size of the frame used to
film the interior of the room (it is a very tight shot) makes that relation
practically impossible. What’s
more, while Davidovich does not change the position from which he rotates,
the things in the room get closer and closer until they are so close that
the image is not compatible with the position of the artist, who is recorded
in a neutral space without objects around him.
This lack of connection between a situation and what seems to be the result
of its recording was explored by Davidovich in a video installation at the
Lorain County College in 1973; at this point, Davidovich’s work was at
the juncture of the Tape Projects and video. A rectangular panel made from
adhesive tape was hung from, or rather, glued onto a wall; a few meters away,
a television showed a hand placing adhesive tape as had been done on the panel.
A closer look, however, could determine that this was not a recording of the
making of the piece; judging from the relation between the tape and the hand
recorded in the video, the pieces of tape in each instance were clearly different
sizes.
A similar power of observation is necessary in Two Windows (1976), a video that
shows two identical windows from each of which hangs pieces of paper that move
with the wind. With time, it can be seen that the pieces of paper do not necessarily
follow the comings and goings of the wind, since sometimes a piece of paper
from one of the windows behaves differently from its neighbor. In addition,
the camera jumps at certain moments (this is difficult to perceive due to the
still camera), but there is no discontinuity in the sound, which is a recording
of the urban setting around the windows.
A POOR SOUL ON TV
Despite the success of his videos and video installations (for which he was
given grants from the Creative Artists Public Service Program and the New York
State Council on the Arts, an invitation to produce in the Synapse Studios in
Syracuse, and numerous exhibitions in the most prestigious spaces in the United
States), Jaime Davidovich decided to change directions, convinced that the natural
place for video art was not museums and galleries, but rather public access
television.
At that time, video tapes were seen on televisions set up in small rooms in
museums and art galleries with chairs available for viewers. Davidovich noticed
a great contradiction in that practice: if viewers at museums looked at pieces
in the same passively receptive position that they did at home in front of the
tv, it made no sense to take them from the comfort of their houses. On the other
hand, distribution through conventional art circuits made video art into an
updated variation of traditional art forms, thus hindering access to a wider
audience.
The popularization of cable broadcasting in the seventies made it possible for
artists to gain access to television space at a reasonable cost. In 1976, Jaime
Davidovich and other artists founded Cable SoHo, and became its first programming
director. One year later, he was a founding member of Artists Television Network
(ATN), an institution aimed at using television to disseminate the arts and
works by artists; he was the director of that institution from 1977 to 1983.
In 1978, Davidovich produced SoHo Television for ATN, and the program was broadcast
by Manhattan Cable TV and Teleprompter Cable TV. The siguiente year, The Live! Show
began; this was a weekly program on Channel J, a public access space9
belonging to Manhattan Cable TV.
SoHo Television was a program of informal interviews where the invited artists
spoke to an interviewer about their work. In general, the guests belonged to
the North American art vanguard and worked in performance, video creation or
alternative television. Guests included artists of the magnitude of John Cage,
Laurie Anderson, Vito Acconci, Dennis Oppenheim and Les Levine, to name a few.
Often, the artists showed their work or composed live for the audience, as John
Cage did one of the times he appeared on the show. Other times, the guest was
not an artist but a group of artists, a critic or a representative of an artistic
circle. Discussions involved the issues faced by contemporary art. Of these
programs, the ones dedicated to analyzing the Concepts of Time and Space (moderated
by Dora Ashton), the Perspectives of the Vanguard (led by Robin White) and The
Changing Role of Art Museums (led by Gregory Battcock) were particularly outstanding.
Just from the description, it is clear that Soho Television was aimed at a specific
audience. The programs sought to generate a space to speak seriously about the
artistic activity of the times and it did not underestimate the intellectual
level of the viewers. Each program was an effort to bring to the public the
most current discussions in the field of aesthetic creation and to provide a
space where artists could reach a broader public; it also implied a renewed
attempt to increase the role of art in mass media.
In general, the programs were divided into long blocks recorded in real time,
without effects and with a minimal variation in the camera’s position.
The presence of the guest, the exhibition of his or her work, and the discussion
were always privileged. With this structure, the program sought to meet two
objectives which Davidovich himself described in these terms: “What we
try to do is give artists from the vanguard a first class display window and,
at the same time, generate an audience that can appreciate their work.”
10
The Live! Show was a program quite different from, and in some sense almost
the opposite of, its predecessor. Like a variety show, it consisted of independent
segments in which a series of characters took on the task of formulating a sharp
criticism of commercial television. If SoHo Television was television looking
at artists, The Live! Show was a group of artists looking at television.
All of The Live! Show programs showed a great sense of humor, principally due
to the histrionics of the characters who appeared. The fact of having to formulate
a critique of television from a television space meant that most of the segments
were satires of the most classic tv formats- extremely subtle satires executed
with an intelligent sense of humor .
One of the essential characteristics of The Live! Show was that it was taped “live”. For this reason, many of its ideas involved viewers’ participation
by telephone, a technique that was further developed some years later in an
experimental program made using QUBE technology (see below).
Since television is first and foremost a service, here are some of the “services”
The Live! Show offered its audience: a rock-and-roll psychiatrist (played by
musician Paul McMahon) who diagnosed and treated the problems of the viewing
public through songs; “Dr. Videovich,” a doctor (played by Davidovich
himself) who specialized in problems of television addiction and was a “graduate
of the University of Buenos Aires where he studied how to manipulate the media
with German professors”; the humorous editorials of painter John Torreano
on recent occurrences, both relevant and irrelevant, in the art world; a “videokitsch”
telephone sales section, offering a complete line of products based on the television
apparatus; art classes under the direction of Jaime Davidovich who often described
a drawing and how to do it, and other important and useful services. In addition
to these permanent sections, there were sketches by visiting artists and, occasionally,
works of video art. The segments were divided by commercials that advertised
different “videokitsch” products or by Tee Vee, The Poor Soul of
Television, a cartoon starring an anthropomorphized television set who frequently
felt misunderstood, frustrated or not fully integrated into the family. The
use of visual effects like colorization or the insertion of images was common
and often commented on by viewers when they called in.
Audience participation gave the show freshness and dynamism. At times, it
led the characters to unforeseen and hilarious situations. “I am used to watching
television in the bathroom, but I still don’t know how to avoid electric
shocks when I take a shower,” one television viewer complained, while another
made public his concern about Mary Tyler Moore’s possible overdoses. The
answers were no less delirious than the questions: “Do anything with your
television set just don’t break it, because if you do you will have to
buy a new one and the production companies will make even more money and television
programming will rise due to an increase in demand,” advised Dr. Videovich
on another occasion.
In 1980, thirteen episodes of Soho TV were aired in Columbus, Ohio, a city that
was experimenting with a television system known as QUBE11.
This was an interactive system designed to encourage the participation of television
viewers. It consisted of a console with five buttons in addition to a channel
selector; these buttons emitted signals to the broadcaster. When a button was
pushed, the signal was processed in a computer and transmitted in the air, and
then translated into a percentage of the overall participation. In this way,
viewers were able to directly respond to multiple-choice questions formulated
by the programmer, and their feedback was then seen in real time on the screen.
When The Live! Show was no longer on the air, Davidovich went to QUBE studios
to collect the public’s opinion of the program and to attempt a new type
of interaction with the viewers. The results of the QUBE processes were broadcast
in a show entitled SoHo Wants to Know. With this show, Davidovich sought to
use QUBE as a creative tool as well as to demonstrate the limitations of this
voting system, a “zero degree democracy”, as the French critic Jean-Paul
Fargier would call it ironically12.
To achieve his first objective, Davidovich designed two ways of participating: “The
first entrusted to the audience the basic decisions about the video- image,
sound effects, main color- while the technicians added certain visual effects.
The public voted that Carole Stevenson (host of the program) be in the image,
that the background color be blue and that there be classical flute music
in the background. All of these decisions were made from a set of options.
The second experiment consisted of a television viewer giving instructions
by telephone to studio technicians on the use of the lenses and camera movements,
while the rest of the audience voted on which camera should be used.”13
In the second experiment, Davidovich tried to prove that “QUBE works with
percentages, not quantities...(so) its polls are hardly scientifically rigorous.
Furthermore, the questionnaire comes from the broadcaster, hence it is not difficult
to select the responses that facilitate the anteriorly desired result. For example,
to the question ‘What do you think of Soho TV?’, the viewer is helped
along by the following five responses: ‘I like it,’ ‘I like it
a lot’, ‘I like it quite a lot’, ‘I don’t dislike it,’
and ‘It’s not bad.’ The poll could never produce an opinion like
‘I can’t stand it, it is awful’, because such an answer is censured
from the beginning.” 14
Although the program was mostly shot inside a studio, The Live! Show did tape
outdoors on a few occasions. When it did, in episodes like The Gap 15
or Saludos Amigos: Dr. Videovich Goes to Texas, the interest in public participation
meant interviews with passersby on issues related to television, the arts and
the use of video by artists.
The Live! Show was an alternative space in television that critically used
that medium’s format until 1984. It was a vehicle for artists who sought to
question both the limited distribution of video art in artistic circles and
the standardized production of commercial television indifferent to artistic
work. “These were the beginnings of cable television,” Davidovich
points out, “and as such probably the first and the last chance to be
able to participate in the cultural process in its entirety. It gave us a
small window to the outside world that allowed us to show our work, creating
a truly alternative television.” 16
A HOT CONCEPTUALISM
Since the seventies, Jaime Davidovich’s art work has been clearly conceptual.
Like many conceptual artists, Davidovich uses his work to express ideas; his
work is oriented towards a dematerialization that emphasizes the creative
process, encourages the reflective participation of viewers and rejects institutionalized
spaces, searching for a wider audience. Nonetheless, his approach to conceptualism
is not limited to the linguistic-tautological or the analytic-systemic ones
so favored by his North American colleagues17.
The political events that ravaged Argentina during the 1970’s – a
violent military dictatorship murdered thousands of intellectuals and political
activists – led Davidovich to adopt a critical attitude shared by other
Latin American conceptual artists of the period18.
Davidovich took part in numerous exhibitions of Latin American artists in those
years19. Through his participation in these shows,
he developed a political discourse where he contemplated not only the situation
in his native country, but also his status as an Argentine artist living in
the United States. This line of work anticipated his concerns about the effect
of globalization on regional identities, a topic which he would explore further
in the siguiente decade. Perhaps the earliest explicit political reference in his
work is Freedom of the Press (1974), a project from the Tapes Project that was
presented at an exhibition at the International Cultureel Centrum in Antwerpen,
Belgium20. Here, he covered pages from Latin American
newspapers with pieces of adhesive tape. The siguiente year, Davidovich made La Patria
Vacia (The Empty Homeland) 1975, a documentary-like video based on an interview
with an Argentine exile in New York. In this piece, he analyzed the repression
and social insecurity that characterized the last Peronist government.
The video was not a simple documentary in terms of image or the weight of
the subject’s words; it made formal contributions that referred to the rest
of the author’s work. For example, in one of the scenes, a hand covers
with adhesive tape the central strip of an Argentine flag that is being shown
on a television. A different camera angle on the television show turns that
strip of tape into a gag placed directly over a speaker’s mouth. Towards
the end of the piece, a hand covers with adhesive tape a television that is
transmitting images of Peron’s funeral; when the monitor is uncovered,
it shows a map of Argentina crossed by the words of the piece’s title.
In The Empty Homeland , Argentine symbols-the national anthem, asado (a typical
Argentine barbecue), tango, Eva Perón, maps- appear for the first time;
these symbols would appear frequently in Davidovich’s later political work.
Indeed, there is a complex system of symbols throughout this entire stage of
the artist’s production that contrasts notably with the Tapes Projects
and the rest of his extraordinarily bare and ascetic videos from that earlier
period.
TORN IDENTITY
From 1978 to 1984, the weekly demands of SoHo Television and The Live! Show
meant that Davidovich put off production of his own video work for a few years.
At the end of that period, he made Evita: A Video Scrapbook (1984), an investigation
into the historical and mythical figure of Eva Perón. In this piece,
the opinions of Argentine emigrants to the United States unsupportive of the
Perón regime are combined with a reflection on Evita’s historical
transcendence and the role of the media in constructing the public figure
of a popular leader.
The beginning of this video is similar to that of Evita, the Broadway musical:
images from Pampa Bárbara, an Argentine film by Lucas Demare, are suddenly
interrupted to announce the death of the spiritual leader of the nation. Throughout
the video there are references to the commercial ends to which Evita’s
figure was used, such as an advertisement for a line of cosmetics that bears
her name. The video ends with another fragment from Pampa Bárbara: this
one refers to the creation of Argentina as a consequence of the secret destruction
of the native population, and it reinforces the opinion of one of the people
interviewed in the video: mainly, that Argentine history has been constructed
on ignorance of the facts and the acceptance of its “versions.”
As the name suggests, Evita: A Video Scrapbook is a sketch, not only of the
figure of Eva Perón, but also of the historical context that gives her
power, a context that is endlessly rewritten and reinscribed on the memory of
Argentines. For Davidovich, Eva Perón is an ineludible symbol in the
formation of a national identity with respect to history and the image of Argentina
abroad. Perhaps that is why the figure of Eva appears again in a video installation
from 1990 entitled Eva Perón, Then and Now, part of the Ideas and Images
from Argentina show.
Gradually, explicit references to Argentine history and politics come to form
the fundaments of an incomplete and fragmentary identity. The 1990’s debates
on globalization lend particular relevance to Davidovich’s work, which
sets out to think the local in the face of a unified global perspective.
Torn Identity (1992), is a video that resolves that conflict through a divided
screen. The video begins with the image of a parade of Argentines through the
streets of New York. The parade is led by a float that carries two tango singers
and a couple of dancers. The float is escorted by official vehicles identified
by their American flags. The images of the parade interact with two other images:
some from a butcher shop and some from recent Argentine history: military parades,
The Falklands War, political demonstrations, elected and de facto presidents,
etc.
The comparison of the Argentine military parade and the parade in New York brings
the question of legitimacy from there to here: just like the military parade,
the one in the streets of New York offers an image of Argentina that hides more
than it reveals. This lack of correspondence between the visible and the invisible
is present throughout the piece. The alternation between the two sectors of
the screen produces a critical exchange between the past and the present, between
national ambiguity and national stereotypes.
La Isla del Tesoro (1989) (Treasure Island) extends this reflection on stereotypes
and one’s identity in the world. The installation involves two basic
images: the image of an Argentine map that has been cut up and reassembled
incorrectly, and the image of an Argentine street musician. The image of the
musician, who is playing the bandeon, an instrument typical of tango, is seen
on a monitor that lies within the apocryphal map. The video focuses on the
relationship between the musician and the money that passersby have left in
his case. This relationship encapsulates a larger economic reality where national
identities are hardened into cultural stereotypes.
FROM NEW YORK TO CYBERSPACE
In Davidovich’s work from the nineties, his reflections on national identities
take a different path. If at the onset these reflections involved amplifying
discourses anteriorly silenced by the “grand stories” of modernity,
they slowly came to exemplify cultural resistance against the homogenizing
attempts of economic globalization.
These cultural issues permeate the video installation Forces/Farces presented
at Exit Art in 1991. For this piece, Davidovich uses six television sets on
six painted panels; each one constitutes a different conceptual environment.
The names of these environments are We The People, Media Blackout, Globalism,
Do Not Pass/Do Not Enter, Overexposed and Seduction and Desire. The images on
each panel are generic ones common to most contemporary metropolises. We The
People, for example, contains images of streets crammed with people from different
places on the planet; Do Not Pass/Do Not Enter shows streets and highways from
around the world; Seduction and Desire shows merchandise displayed at a shopping
mall and Globalism visits different McDonalds around the globe. Towards the
end of the installation, the public is invited to participate by answering a
questionnaire about the effects of globalization on their daily lives. These
opinions are recorded on video and included in the piece on a daily basis, making
it a true work in progress. Thus the work becomes a question, an occasion to
think about the present, stimulated by the flow of images. The commentaries
of the artist combine with the opinions of the viewers to produce the final
meaning of the piece. As in the television programs, the audience once again
constitutes the nucleus of the aesthetic proposal.
Similar images form part of another piece , Los Pueblos Quieren Saber De Qué Se
Trata (The People Want to Know What it is about) (1992), presented at the
Banco Patricio Foundation in Buenos Aires. The title refers to a founding
event in Argentine history, when, during colonial times, the people gathered
in front of the government house to inquire about the possible replacement
of Spanish officials by the first national government.
In this installation, a tall stack of newspapers holds up a monitor with images
relating to globalization. As in colonial times, the people are left out of
important decisions affecting their future. This distance is emphasized by
the height of the monitor, which makes seeing the images difficult, and by
the wall of newspapers that constitutes a true barrier against the viewers’ approach.
Three years later, in an exhibition entitled La Tierra Prometida (The Promised
Land) (1995) at the Buenos Aires Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana,
Davidovich presents Yo, Errancia, (I, Wandering) a series of digital compositions
in which national symbols are integrated into images from global culture.
The use of the digital medium is significant. Not only does it permit a better
integration of the images, it also embodies one of the major causes of globalization
in the media: digital technology.
This technology has been responsible for the almost infinite expansion of communication
networks. Davidovich used the most important of these networks, the World Wide
Web, to explore the possibilities of cultural regionalization in a media universe
where there are no borders. The piece is called Haciendo Dulce de Leche en Cyberspace
(1996) (Making Dulce de Leche in Cyberspace), and it is one of the pieces in
Digital Diaspora, an Internet site that Davidovich designed with another Argentine
emigrant artist, Alejandro Fogel. The piece is an astute reflection on that
regional-universal problematic. It reworks an Argentine symbol par excellence
(dulce de leche) in the creation of a new virtual space on the information superhighway.
PAINTING IN REAL TIME
Jaime Davidovich’s Internet art is a logical extension of the concerns
that have always been central to his work. His acts of communication have
always had a clear and constant target: the viewer. From the Tape Projects
to his recent installations and his television programs, his work has often
comprehended the need for feedback from the audience.
The Internet, however, has become a largely commercial and de-personalized environment;
it has lost the experimental and mysterious quality that attracted many artists
in its early years. This may be why Davidovich moved away from the Web to embark
on a new type of work, one more finite, relational and intimate.
The video paintings that he has been producing for the last few years are an
attempt to transcend the limitations of traditional paintings by combining them
with electronic images. These pieces are the result of a reflexive look at the
work he has done throughout his career and, at the same time, another step in
pushing the limits of two media that have been historically connected to his
work. Generally, these pieces are small format abstract paintings onto which
Davidovich projects or through which he emits a video image; usually, the video
image is an almost unedited recording of a landscape or group of objects.
It is impossible not to see immediate reference to the artist’s own pictorial
work (the black and white board series, for example), or his electronic work,
especially his early videos. There is also a clear reference to television,
inasmuch as each small painting emits a framed image like the one on a home
television set.
At the same time, it is a curious coincidence that television has now come
to offer real time as one of its products. The most characteristic example
of this is the reality shows that have flooded screens in the past few years.
Davidovich’s
proposal, however, is radically different from the objectives of mass media.
In the current discourse on technology, real time now has maximum value. No
practice, no connection, no action is valid if it is not done “in real
time,” if there is no “immediate response,” and if it is not
as instantaneous as possible. In the current language of the media, real time
seems to be an antidote to the growing unreality of experience due to the
very same media profusion. Reality shows present themselves as non-fictitious
experiences whose truth is based on the temporal immediacy of their recordings.
In truth, however, they are nothing if not another step towards the fictionalization
of life where instantaneousness and a direct relation with things are constructed
as rhetorical effects.
In his video paintings, Jaime Davidovich employs real time and representation
but from an altogether different perspective. Because here, the real time
to which he returns is not derived from digital culture, but rather from the
beginnings of video when that term meant capturing the world as it unfolded
before the camera, without fissure or manipulation. This image is now an occasion
for meditative contemplation. Without effects or distracting editing, objects,
actions and situations demand a slower appreciation, creating associations
and reawakening the evocative power of images. What resoundingly differentiates
these pieces from television, if not from Davidovich’s television, is
their almost private and intimate nature, which once again establishes direct
contact with the viewer.
Painting now provides a context for video recording. This association calls
into question the supposed antagonism between these two media. By combining
them, Davidovich sets up many levels of dialogue.
Although he cites themes and classical genres from art history, Davidovich
does so in a reflexive manner. On the one hand, he makes evident video’s
definitive assimilation into that history and its undeniable participation
in contemporary art. On the other hand, he tests the limits of representation,
working on the perceptive vacillation between the projected video recording
and the image on the pictorial support. This perceptive vacillation is responsible
for activating a novel sensorial quality in video, a media traditionally associated
with the coldness of the electronic pulses.
Furthermore, landscapes and still lifes are motifs in the revival of a more
humanistic artistic practice. The Video paintings exude a clear impulse to capture
the vital, the daily, traces of a time that changes quickly but that, in its
flux, leaves images that cannot be erased.
The first pieces from this series make explicit reference to the painters from
the Hudson River School21 and to pictorialist photographers22 from
the end of the XIX century. The Hudson River School is evoked mainly through
Davidovich’s landscapes (recorded in the Hudson River Valley) and atmospheres;
the pictorialist photographers are evoked through the iridescent shine of
the surfaces, which the artist produces by using a special varnish, one reminiscent
of the silver plates favored by North American pictorialist photographers.
The epicenter of the series’s new landscapes is New York. In general,
the format continues to be the individual painting, although the artist has
explored multi-screen projections and even the use of sound. In View From
Above (2000), an installation made at the Deep Listening Center, for example,
the artist works with images captured from the 91st floor of Twin Tower number
one, where he did a residency. With the same distant and contemplative attitude
characteristic of his video paintings, this installation brings together views
of the Hudson River, the Brooklyn Bridge and the park beneath the Twin Towers,
as well as music by Reynols, which creates a subtle and meditative auditory
atmosphere.
His most recent work along these lines explores another pictorial genre: the
still life. In some pieces, the television set, a key object in contemporary
daily experience, appears. The image is full of ambiguity. On the one hand,
it offers a slower, resting look at an apparatus characterized by the speed
of the news. On the other, here the television is linked with a format from
the history of composition, one that resonates strongly in the past, perhaps
implying that television already belongs to that historical tradition more than
to the strictly contemporary (without a doubt, the icon of the present is the
computer; it is not strange, then, that the television has been relegated to
this place).
Most importantly, though, the television once again appears in Davidovich’s
work as it did when he first used it: as an object. Just as in the Tape Projects
where the tapes called attention to the television set as an object, the video
paintings take up that same perspective to invite us to reflect once again
on the technological support, to move us out of a fascination with the media
and call our attention back to the world that unfolds beyond its windows.
EPILOGUE
To revisit Jaime Davidovich’s artistic career is to pass though the primary
veins of artistic thinking in recent years and to understand intimately the
importance of the new media in contemporary art. An abandonment of painting
for installation and video, and a movement from traditional artistic circuits
towards the public space of media are occurrences that today we consider natural,
but at their time they embodied deep schisms, radical ideological stances
and a commitment to the artistic practice that left deep marks on XX century
art history.
In his current production, the artist once again opts for a non-conformist
attitude. In the face of the spectacular electronic production that characterizes
biennials and other mega-exhibitions, Davidovich insists on a reflexive and
intimate experience that resists the pressures of commerce and the semantic
annulment of global politics. He insists, fundamentally, on an ethics of the
artistic practice, that which, according to Catherine David, trusts that art
will keep being “a
vital source of symbolic and imaginary representations whose diversity is
irreducible to the (almost) total economic domination of the real.” 23
Rodrigo Alonso
NOTES
1. Cited in MATTURRI, John. Jaime Davidovich. Unpublished Monograph
1979.
2. For information on these characteristics of minimalism, see : KRAUSS,
Rosalind: "Overcoming the Limits of Matter: On Revising Minimalism",
in ELDERFIELD, John (ed). American Art of the 1960s. New York: Museum of Modern
Art/Abrams, 1991; FOSTER, Hal: “The Crux of Minimalism”, in The
Return of the Real. Cambridge (Mass.): The MIT Press, 1996; COLPITT, Frances.
Minimal Art. The Critical Perspective. Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1997 (1990).
3. KOSUTH, Joseph: “Art After Philosophy”, in Studio International,
October, 1969. Reprinted in MEYER, Ursula. Conceptual Art. New York: Dutton,
1972.
4. DE DUVE, Thierry. Kant After Duchamp. Cambridge (Mass.): The MIT
Press, 1996.
5. LEWITT, Sol: “Sentences on Conceptual Art”, in Art-Language:
The Journal of Conceptual Art, N° 1, 1969. Reprinted in MEYER, Ursula,
op.cit.
6. Following Panofsky, this is how Craig Owens puts it when he assures
that “the relation of the viewer to the work of art is prescribed, anteriorly
assigned, by the representational system”. See OWENS, Craig: “Representation,
Appropriation and Power”, in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power
and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
7. The false wall was an imposition of the gallery to protect their
wall, but Davidovich was interested in the idea of covering with tapes a wall
that, at the same time, was covering another wall.
8. For further information, see: MORGAN, Robert: “A Methodology
for American Conceptualism”, in Art Into Ideas, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996.
9. Public access television emerged in New York in 1971 as a consequence
of a city regulation that, in keeping with the First Amendment that guarantees
freedom of expression, obliged the two cable channels to reserve spaces for
citizens who wished to express themselves on them. A more detailed description
of the television systems in those years can be found in BONET, Eugeni: “TV
USA: The Dinosaur of the Empire” in Video Actualidad, N° 26, Barcelona,
September, 1983.
10. Cited in “Video Tape Review”, Video Data Bank Catalog,
1986.
11. “The name QUBE does not mean anything; It was chosen because
it rhymes with tube”: declaration of the president of QUBE, Lawrence
B. Hilford, in “Can’t Stand the Show? Budgets Lets Viewers Rule”
in Detroit Free Press, December 1, 1977, cited in D’AGOSTINO, Peter:
“Proposal for QUBE”, in TV Magazine, Pilot Issue, New York, 1980.
12. FARGIER, Jean-Paul: “Jaime Davidovich, Le Câble et le
Qube”, in Cahiers du Cinéma, N° 337, June, 1982.
13. Cited in “SoHo Wants to Know” in TV Magazine. Pilot Issue,
New York, 1980.
14. TORRENT, Jordi: “Against the Giant Marble: ATN” in Video
Actualidad, N° 26, Barcelona, September, 1983.
15. For an analysis of The Gap, see RAPAPORT, Herman: “On Television
/ Off Television”. The Live! Show (catalogue). New York: American Museum
of the Moving Image, 1989.
16. Cited in The Live! Show (catalogue). Op.cit.
17. See, for example, MORGAN, Robert. “A Methodology for American
Conceptualism”. In Art Into Ideas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996.
18. For information about the development of conceptualism in Latin
America, see: RAMIREZ, Mari Carmen. “Tactics for Thriving on Adversity:
Conceptualism in Latin America, 1960-1980". In Global Conceptualism:
Points of Origin 1950s - 1980s. New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999.
19. Mainly in shows organized by the founder and director of the Centro
de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC) (Center for Art and Communication), Jorge
Glusberg, in different art institutions around the world.
20. Organized by Jorge Glusberg through CAYC.
21. The River Hudson School was a group of North American painters
led by Thomas Cole that worked from approximately 1835 to 1870. Their paintings
focused on a romantic rendition of landscapes from the Hudson River Valley
area; they used pictorial effects that emphasized the luminosity of the composition,
which is why they are also known as the Luminists.
22. Pictorialist photographers sought to produce photographic images
with a pictorial quality. To do this, they either used lenses that dispersed
the light or manipulated photographs in order to make them look like the impressionist
paintings of the times.
23. Catherine David: “Introduction”. In Documenta X. Short
Guide. Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz Verlag, 1997.