TY - JOUR
AU1 - Johnson, Christie
AB - [W]hatever [is] produced by the video camera [is] not a representational image but an immediate and live ‘taking in’ of the world shaped by the technical/perceptual apparatus – just as the human nervous system always already shapes the visions that seem to just ‘hit’ the eye.1 [T]he ‘avanzada’ scene which emerged in 1977 sought to reformulate the conditions of artistic production through articulating new creative mechanisms intended not to ‘represent’ but to intervene in the real…2 Mid-way between the coup d’état of 11 September 1973 and the national plebiscite of 5 October 1988 that initiated the formal conclusion of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorial rule, the years 1978 to 1982 witnessed the emergence and emboldening of dissentient cultural movements across Chilean society. Momentous socio-political events during this time included, in 1980, Pinochet’s reconfirmation as president, a new constitution that extended his authority, and an economic crisis beginning in 1982 that would spark mass public outcry in the National Day of Protest on 11 May 1983. On the artistic front, in 1978 the National Union for Culture was founded to promote an alternative cultural movement, and the Museum of St Francis in Santiago held the Exhibition of Human Rights, as part of the Year of Human Rights called for by the Archbishop of Santiago, Raúl Silva Henríquez.3 In the following two years, the galleries CAL and Sur opened in the capital. Despite fierce censorship, local artistic production had continued to develop since 1973, encompassing experimental uses of photography and video and the birth and maturation of a local artistic performance tradition known as ‘art actions’ (acciones de arte). Use of video in Chile began in earnest in 1978.4 Several years later, in 1981, the French Embassy’s Cultural Service organised the first French–Chilean Video Art Encounter, which would recur annually until 1993. In 1982, Chile was unofficially invited to participate in the Paris Biennale after a ten-year absence. To understand the connections between performance, photography and video in this context, I consider two multimedia installations exhibited in Santiago in 1980 and 1982 respectively by Carlos Leppe (1952–2015), who lived in Chile throughout the dictatorship: Sala de espera (Waiting Room, 1980) and El objeto de la movida (The Object of the Commotion, 1982).5 The former comprised the video installation, based on Leppe’s performances, Las cantatrices (The Opera Divas, 1980) and the latter incorporated the sculpture Cita a ciegas (Blind Date, 1982?), also based on a live performance.6 Although Leppe is credited as the artist, viewing these pieces as products of collective authorship may be more accurate. Leppe, one of the most active though still under-researched practitioners of performance art in Chile, placed his own suffering figure at the heart of a practice that evinced an overriding interest in the use of cameras and associated technologies for the creation, exhibition and documentation of his artistic work. While the critical literature has paid significant attention to artists’ use of lens-based technology, it has largely concentrated on still photography and its interplay with painting.7 Performance’s relationship with photography and video deserves more attention, particularly the extent to which lens-based technologies played a role in creating artworks and shaping their receptive contexts.8 Sebastián Vidal highlights the visual artist Gonzalo Mezza’s opinion that cameras play a part in authorship (autoría).9 Néstor Olhagaray, in turn, sees video as ‘more authorial’ (más autoral) than other artistic mediums; however, these perspectives would benefit from further elaboration.10 Since Leppe’s art actions and installations relied so explicitly on the affordances of cameras and related technologies, his work is prime material for addressing these questions. Concentrating on cameras and auxiliary technologies enables us to problematise their roles in Leppe’s performances with the aim of deepening our understanding of early Chilean performance art and revisiting how we might think about that theoretically. Moreover, highlighting the intrinsic role of lens-based media in art produced by a member of the Chilean neo-avant-garde expands the discussion of performance as constituting a form of dissent against the military regime and opens avenues for reconsidering collaborative authorship.11 I posit that Leppe’s installations, by virtue of their use of lens-based technologies, grant audiences access to the performer’s body and imaginary spaces in ways that would otherwise be inaccessible. Relying on lens-based media’s capacity for verisimilitude, the new technologies of Polaroid and video enabled Leppe to fashion enduring material representations of alternative worlds that function as zones for encountering unacknowledged aspects of society. Video in particular was a ‘problematising’ medium: it did not seek to offer ‘solutions’ but raised questions.12 Since performance and lens-based work were co-nascent and complementary parts of his creative processes, Leppe’s photographs and videos are intermedial, composite artworks, not separate documents of performances. I open this discussion with an outline of the relationship between performance art and cameras in Chile in the 1970s in order to contextualise the issue at hand. In the three sections thereafter, I consider how the different modes of seeing through cameras, photographs and videos intensify action and adapt time in Las cantatrices and Cita a ciegas; how creative agency may be distributed between the artist and lens-based media; and finally, the ways in which audiences are implicated in the works’ receptive contexts. In summary, I argue that cameras and auxiliary technologies uniquely enabled Leppe’s performances to produce installations that operated according to a paradox of inviting and denying touch, drawing visitors close while holding them in abeyance.13 Ultimately, witnesses to these works depart with an enduring sense of unresolved tension, feeling responsible towards Leppe’s suffering yet limited in how they can respond to it. Performance and cameras The relationship between art actions and cameras has always been close in Chile. Leppe’s El happening de las gallinas (The Happening of the Hens, July 1974, Carmen Waugh Gallery, Santiago) is credited with being the first piece of performance art in the country.14 Sitting on a podium, the artist wore a funeral wreath and ate boiled eggs while an audience perambulated the contrived setting. Some visitors stole porcelain eggs which had been variously disposed on the floor. Photographs of the event were exhibited soon afterwards in the same space and the cameras’ flashes were likened by one journalist to a bombardment.15 Also by Leppe, El perchero (The Clothes Stand, June 1975, Módulos y Formas Gallery, Santiago) is remembered as a photographic installation produced in collaboration with the photographer Jaime Villaseca, while 1919/1979: Acción de la estrella (1919/1979: Star Action, 1979, CAL Gallery, Santiago) is notable for its employment of closed-circuit video. In El perchero, Leppe donned several costumes, including a silk dress and variety of appendages. This action played with notions of gender – a recurrent theme for the artist, as I discuss below – and involved straining his neck back to occlude his face. Leppe was photographed full length, with the resulting large-format prints being hung over clothes hangers and arranged on a rail to stage the installation. For Acción de la estrella – a citation of Marcel Duchamp’s Tonsure (1919 or 1921, Paris) – the artist had arranged to record the audience’s reactions as they witnessed a star being tonsured on the back of his head; the tape was played to them at the exit.16 In 1979, the Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA; Art Actions Collective) was formed by the visual artists Lotty Rosenfeld and Juan Castillo, sociologist Fernando Balcells, writer Diamela Eltit and poet Raúl Zurita. CADA devised artworks to resignify public spaces, such as Inversión de escena (Scene Inversion, 17 October 1979), in which a convoy of milk trucks drove a route from a milk factory in Santiago to the National Museum of Fine Arts. Upon arrival, in a gesture indicating that art exceeded institutional boundaries and spread across the city, they covered its facade with a white cloth. CADA worked with photography, video and film in a style that aimed to do more than merely documenting, and often published their work in magazines to guarantee wide public circulation. Richard said of Rosenfeld that she ‘convert[ed] the [video] recording into a re-intervening agent of a real space–time’.17 CADA’s manifesto La función del video (The Function of Video) speaks of that medium as a form of recording not of reality per se but of a ‘form of pre-constructed reality’ – of an ‘art-situation effected in and on reality’.18 They perceived video to be dynamic and plurivalent, enabling reuse and recycling, and directly related to action. As we can see, lens-based technology was implicated in early Chilean performance art in a variety of manifestations, from its documentation (Leppe’s Happening) to photo-performance (El perchero), through to indirect audience participation (Acción de la estrella). CADA’s social activism in the public sphere assumed new and broader modes of circulation through magazines and videos. Rather than adjuncts and servants to the performative moment, more than tools, lens-based technologies formed part of and enabled the performances; their products and auxiliary technologies featured in and influenced the reception of the artworks. What happens, then, when we attend to the effects that cameras and auxiliary technologies had on the genesis and exhibition of Sala de espera and El objeto de la movida? How might knowing that the performance aspects of these installations were designed to be captured by cameras affect critical responses to them? What are the effects of the complicities – the mutual alliances – between cameras and performance, and what ends did they serve? Intensifying action Performance art’s…full potential is rather situated in the process of transcription to different media and communicative distribution systems.19 …artists in Chile tirelessly pitted the dead time of the picture made eternal by the Museum against the new, mobile temporality of an art-situation that reprocessed substrates of vital experiences.20 Alice Maude-Roxby argues that when we look at performance artworks in photographs (though the same holds for videos) we experience performance through the camera.21 In other words, the ways the camera is used, composition and lighting have a bearing upon the work that sets the photograph or video apart from the performance.22 In this manner of thinking, the camera operator ‘translates’ the work, prolonging the life of an ephemeral event that was discrete from and prior to the resulting object.23 Las cantatrices and Cita a ciegas, in each of which performance formed a core element, complicate these views somewhat. Rather than experiencing the actions through the camera in videos and photographs that supplement and substitute them, audiences experience the actions because of the camera as a device whose artistic dispositifs had a definitive impact on the work. I borrow this latter term from Janna Houwen, who argues that a medium is characterised by its dispositifs – that is, both technologies of production (e.g. the camera) and conditions of reception (e.g. the installation format, television monitor etc.) – which all produce a viewing position for the spectator.24 Within the broader context of discussions of mediatisation in which the foregoing positions operate, a germane addition is Philip Auslander’s typology of documentary and theatrical performance documentation.25 Using Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void (1960) and Chris Burden’s Shoot (1971), Auslander proposes that Klein’s performance as received via his photograph only takes place in the document – a photomontage of two separate shots (hence ‘theatrical’) – compared with Burden’s performance, for which the photographs record the fact of his being shot (hence ‘documentary’). As we shall see, Leppe’s artworks may operate performatively as ‘theatrical’ documents, yet they also exceed this definition. Three of the four channels of Las cantatrices depict variations of the same basic performance: Leppe, encased in plaster and with a made-up face, miming words asynchronously to operatic arias playing on the audio (Figs 1–3). The visual artist Juan Enrique Forch and critic Nelly Richard directed these videos and then collaborated with Leppe on editing them. Each video has a different chroma-keyed background, blue, white and red.26 The fourth video, directed by Richard and edited by her, Forch and Leppe, shows Catalina Arroyo, Leppe’s mother, narrating his arduous birth and difficult early years (Fig. 4).27 Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Carlos Leppe, Las cantatrices, 1980, four-channel video installation (with audio), which also formed part of his Sala de espera, 1980, multimedia installation, Sur Gallery, Santiago. Screenshot of video still. (Photo: Screenshot of digitised colour video courtesy of Pedro Montes, D21 Gallery, Santiago). Leppe appears in three different casts, and three discrete recorded performances (one in each cast) were edited and re-combined to create the videos. One cast covered his whole upper body to his chin and over his groin, where an inverted triangular form had been placed. Another concealed and constrained him in the same way, minus the triangle and with a large circle cut from the front to expose his belly, including his navel. The third cast revealed his nipples and the encircling flesh. At various points in each video, Leppe appears fitted with a surgical retractor that holds his mouth open (Figs 2 and 3); he wore this intermittently in all three casts, meaning the performances were stopped in order to attach it. Splicing the performances together means each video shows a unique continuous performance that for practical reasons Leppe could never have enacted – the viewer never sees him exchange casts, and in fact none of them was easily exchangeable, since medical professionals were required to seal Leppe into each.28 In addition to enabling these composited portrayals, using video provided access to another real-world impracticality: the same person performing simultaneously in three different ways. Inevitable framing by the lens and encasement in monitors recontextualise the artist beyond the time and place of the originary performances and intensify the work’s essential reliance on video. The coloured backgrounds attest to further editing and emphasise Leppe’s separation from the television studio, to make him careen against flat colour fields in spatially undefined realms. Symbolically, red, white and blue refer to Chile’s national flag to evoke an alternative space for his operatic personae, which I explore below. Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Carlos Leppe, Las cantatrices, 1980, four-channel video installation (with audio), which also formed part of his Sala de espera, 1980, multimedia installation, Sur Gallery, Santiago. Screenshot of video still. (Photo: Screenshot of digitised colour video courtesy of Pedro Montes, D21 Gallery, Santiago). Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Carlos Leppe, Las cantatrices, 1980, four-channel video installation (with audio), which also formed part of his Sala de espera, 1980, multimedia installation, Sur Gallery, Santiago. Screenshot of video still. (Photo: Screenshot of digitised colour video courtesy of Pedro Montes, D21 Gallery, Santiago). Fig. 4. Open in new tabDownload slide Carlos Leppe, Las cantatrices, 1980, four-channel video installation (with audio), which also formed part of his Sala de espera, 1980, multimedia installation, Sur Gallery, Santiago. The image shows Leppe’s mother, Catalina Arroyo. Screenshot of video still. (Photo: Screenshot of digitised colour video courtesy of Pedro Montes, D21 Gallery, Santiago). The videos encourage a certain type of attention. Alternations between full-body shots and close-ups of varying degrees, from focusing on Leppe’s mouth or other parts of his body and/or plaster costume to distant takes of his face, bust, torso and legs rely on video’s technical affordances, such as zoom shots, fades and montage. Reception not mediated by the lens/screens could not be controlled like this, for, even if Leppe in the television studio could have arranged to coax an audience’s attention to the same parts of his body that the videos focalise, the specific levels of detail with which they actually looked would have been impossible to manufacture.29 Photographs of Leppe’s getting ready for the performances and contact sheets that preserve moments of intermission and boredom during shooting testify to significant waiting periods that a live audience would have found intolerable (Fig. 5). Camera equipment and technicians in front of Leppe (Figs 5 and 6) show that the recording process would have obstructed the live view of the artist. The videos seem to have been the intended work, then, with Leppe’s physical body their originary, yet ephemeral, substrate. Fig. 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Production view of Leppe in Teknos studio, Santiago, for Las cantatrices. (Photo: Author’s cropped digital photograph of original black-and-white contact sheet courtesy of Pedro Montes, D21 Gallery, Santiago). Fig. 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Production view of Leppe in Teknos studio, Santiago, performing for Las cantatrices. (Photo: Author’s cropped digital photograph of original black-and-white contact sheet courtesy of Pedro Montes, D21 Gallery, Santiago). Technologically manipulated and theatrically staged, the videos produce credible, realistic performances. The attention to texture in close-ups of Leppe’s fingertips poking out of the cast, of saliva glistening on his chin as he strains against the oral retractor (Fig. 7) and of particles and smears of plaster on the hairy skin of his upper thighs betrays a concern with incidental details. Such minutiae contribute to the videos’ reality effect, a consequence of the lens’ indiscriminately transferring the referent within its optical field to videotape.30 Enlisting lens-based reproduction created videos which show a world overlapping with reality but not in fact real. Fig. 7. Open in new tabDownload slide Screenshot of video still from Las cantatrices. The image shows Leppe, with made-up face and oral retractor. (Photo: Screenshot of digitised colour video courtesy of Pedro Montes, D21 Gallery, Santiago). The slippages between representation and reality transmitted by the videos are discernible in other ways, too. Leppe’s made-up face, the soundtracks and the title enable the work to function as a quotation of the stylised genre of opera, a cultural incursion from Europe. However, Leppe only lip syncs, either parodying operatic divas or implying that his own voice is dysfunctional or simply absent. His struggles against the retractor show that he endured a physically trying ordeal (Figs 2, 3, 7, and 8). In the violently repressive context of dictatorial Chile, where the state propagated a message of internal stability and social harmony at odds with people’s everyday existence under curfews and censorship, society was in the grip of a ‘crisis of codes’, a ‘discursive regime of concealment and Orwellian doublespeak, in which sociopolitical rupture was masked’.31 The camera-reliant media of print and television were instrumental in this. One of Pinochet’s first actions following the coup had been to silence dissenting voices, as decreed by the fourth article of the first proclamation by the military junta, issued on 11 September 1973: ‘The press, radio broadcasting stations and television channels addicted to the Popular Unity [coalition] must suspend their informational activities as of this moment. Otherwise assaults by air and ground will follow as punishment.’32 Several years later, the pro-government photobook Chile: Ayer hoy (Chile: Yesterday Today) was published, contrasting unfavourable photographs of ‘yesterday’ under the Popular Unity coalition led by the former president, Salvador Allende – scenes of demonstrations, empty shops and dirty streets – with photographs of ‘today’ under Pinochet’s regime – the same spaces, but sanitised.33 Fig. 8. Open in new tabDownload slide Installation view of Carlos Leppe, Sala de espera, 1980, multimedia installation, Sur Gallery, Santiago. The image shows three monitors of Las cantatrices, hospital tables, video players, fluorescent tube lighting, and a hollowed-out television caked in straw and mud containing a statuette of the Virgin of Mount Carmel wreathed in fairy lights. (Photo: Author’s cropped digital photograph of original black-and-white photographic print courtesy of Pedro Montes, D21 Gallery, Santiago). A variation on Auslander’s ‘theatrical’ document, Las cantatrices relied on an alliance of lens-based and auxiliary technologies with Leppe’s performing body, and featured screen-based media as an object of criticism in its receptive context. Leppe’s wounded and constrained subject, encased in nationally inflected television screens, performed operatically on loop. One could read this as both a critique of the dictatorship and, since opera may evoke links with colonialism, a comment on the historic intrusion of foreign ideas about civilisation into Chile.34 Richard appraises the citation of imported cultural forms through performance art as ‘reactivation’, or ‘reinserting the cultural fragment in a living corporeality as its new web of affects’.35 In presenting his body through the medium of video as passible, Leppe not only counterposed a broken and confused subject to prevailing national discourses of strength and stability: he also showed the body’s tight implication with technology in a way that unmediated performance could not have done. Suffering was part of Leppe’s target, surely, but so was the body as a represented phenomenon and, by extension, representation itself. The camera and photography perform a cognate service in Cita a ciegas (Fig. 9). Sixteen Polaroids in four rows show a series of self-portraits in which Leppe moves from an attitude of relative composure into a state of shocked distress. These photographic close-ups signal a minimal distance between the performing artist and the camera operator, meaning that any audience beyond Leppe’s collaborators would have beheld his performing to the lens. In at least five of the eight Polaroids in the first and second rows of images, and in the third row’s final shot, Leppe looks out to the operator/photographic audience. Thick white borders make the medium’s framing effect evident (like the monitors of Las cantatrices). Amelia Jones sees the photographic self-portrait as a ‘performative and life-giving’ genre that enables audiences to activate intersubjective encounters: building with this, we might say that the past one believes one sees in Leppe’s photographs by that very medium transfer into ‘the “not yet” of future possibilities’.36 Photography’s halting of action defines the receptive impact, eliminating the continuous flow of Leppe’s movements in the unmediated live moment (or, incidentally, as a moving-image recording might have rendered them). Consequently, Cita a ciegas plays with time to demand not the sustained attention a complex unfolding reality requires, but imagination, to fill in the gaps between the lived event and its static representation. Fig. 9. Open in new tabDownload slide Carlos Leppe, Cita a ciegas, 1982?, photo-performance sculpture, approx. 90 × 74 cm. Oxidised brass plate, adhesive, 16 Polaroids, chalk. This work formed part of Leppe’s El objeto de la movida, 1982, installation, Sur Gallery, Santiago. (Photo: Cropped digital colour photograph courtesy of Pedro Montes, D21 Gallery, Santiago). There is an element of just-taken immediacy implied by Polaroid and a temporality to the prints’ presentation in series, like a flipbook deconstructed and laid out in a grid pattern. In the third and fourth rows of Polaroids, one might interpret the red smeared across Leppe’s face as blood, portraying him as the victim of an assault. Each flash of the camera (a flare to the left of the artist’s head may read as a flash), or at least each pulse of the trigger, sent photographs slicing out of the device like blows to the face. The resulting portraits were arranged so that spectators can ‘play’ the attack on Leppe in their minds as a function of the pictures’ serial presentation, the medium’s implied instantaneity and the ‘life-giving’ potential of self-portrait performance work. The camera intensified moments from the original live situation. These camera-enabled adaptations of time render an audience’s reception arguably more affecting than unmediated live performance because of the imaginative effort required to give sense to the portraits. Additional violence lay in contemporary connotations of photography in Chile. Photographs of those disappeared by the military regime were published as a way of bringing to light and challenging cruelty and injustice, such as the portraits of disappeared persons contained in the seven volumes of ¿Dónde están? (Where Are They?) produced in 1978 by the human rights organisation the Vicariate of Solidarity (1976–1992). Moreover, as Houwen postulates, being caught on camera ‘while being physically attacked or threatened is often experienced as an act of aggression because it is a double objectification of the subject under attack’.37 Houwen refers to being filmed/recorded, but her point is that capturing images of (rather than helping) a person suffering violence desubjectifies them insofar as the camera renders them an object of representation: a ‘visual preservation and appropriation’ of a person being degraded is itself degrading, an ‘undignified “spectacle”’.38 Consider too the histories of photography as an administrative tool of control in colonial and disciplinary or judicial contexts. The camera’s proximity to and participation in the violence one imagines Leppe to be suffering in Cita a ciegas directly implicate photography in the performance for that artwork. Irony is a feature of this work as it is in Las cantatrices. The prints’ background shows Joseph Beuys’s Demokratie ist lustig (1973), a serigraph based on a photograph of Beuys taken in 1972 when he was escorted out of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf after being dismissed for staging a protest with students. Stilling and framing in Cita a ciegas’ Polaroids ensure that Beuys is not overlooked, which he almost certainly would have been live, between Leppe’s smearing his face, general distractions, the camera operator and camera. Reusing a photograph of an artist known internationally for his performances and democratic ideals signalled a productive citation, or ‘reactivation’ in Richard’s terms. Beuys’s tranquil, broad smile over the right shoulder of Leppe’s naked figure assimilates the two artists while highlighting emotional contrasts and ironies. At a remove of ten years, Germany’s ‘merry democracy’, where even a student protest was subject to police regulation, recalled Pinochet’s ongoing attacks on democracy. Interestingly, Beuys’s supposedly ignominious exit was photographically captured as a triumphant emergence – he seems larger compared with the other figures; cowed-looking security officials stand far away; Beuys and his students wear defiant smiles – and it was reworked as a serigraph the following year. To this, Leppe’s isolated figure creates a saddening contrast: the democratic hope of Beuys is a mere black-and-white memory, present but barely visible behind the full-colour reality of someone enduring great pain. The agencies of technology As discussed in the previous section, lens-based technologies prevailed in the creation of Las cantatrices and Cita a ciegas. Here, I reflect on how screen-based and photographic media were used in Sala de espera and El objeto de la movida, the installations in which those two works were incorporated. This will allow us to appreciate how the artworks exposed reality as discursively determined and thereby challenged attitudes towards religion, national pride and social propriety. I also examine authorship and reception as processes subject to often unacknowledged distributions of agency between humans and technology, drawing principally on Ina Blom’s and Janna Houwen’s recent theoretical work.39 Crucially, acknowledging the subtle agency of video offers one possible perspective on Mezza/Vidal’s and Olhagaray’s claims about the authorial role of cameras referred to earlier. Moreover, this approach enables us to see how the screen-based elements of Sala de espera create the conditions for live, albeit mediated, encounters with Leppe’s performances. Blom notes that memory ‘defines life and separates it from the non-living’, arguing that ‘even an apparently stilled or frozen video image has a form of living memory built into it, based on the constant movement of a signal scanning the screen’.40 Video images – the macrotemporal movements on a screen perceptible by the human eye – result from an electron beam’s scanning 525 lines thirty times (or 15,750 lines) each second.41 Passing in timeframes which evade human perception, such microtemporal particularities resemble neuronal processing: ‘video memory may even be seen as a form of thought/action’.42 Furthermore, videotape does not store images and sound per se: rather, signal-based recordings function as triggers for the continuous flow of new signals just as human recollection brings memory together in a dynamic process.43 Whereas analogue photography and film are basically fixed images that show or can be used to project phenomena and events past, video’s uniquely charged electromagnetic particles can only ever generate new signaletic events; its signal transfer ‘is always a live force’.44 Since video playback does not render a materially static representation, the tape carries the potential for new live performances. Read alongside Houwen, who argues (after Christian Metz) that ‘movement cannot be represented, it is always real, happening now’, Blom’s position would mean that viewing Las cantatrices is to experience Leppe live, for, as video performances, they remain susceptible to the contingency which characterises live action.45 A visible (if accidental) example of this are the tracking lines preserved in Leppe’s now-digitised videos (e.g. Fig. 2, bottom), which expose the original technology’s scanning feature. Such indexes of contingency are like the uncontrolled flow of saliva Leppe’s mouth secreted (Fig. 7). The artist created certain conditions for his pieces but could not fully control the results: he deliberately wore an oral retractor, but could not foresee the precise effects this device would produce when he mimed to operatic lyrics. Likewise, he and his collaborators staged and recorded his performances in a television studio, but they necessarily surrendered a good deal of control to the camera, its auxiliary equipment, and various technologies of display which have since assumed new forms in response to technological advancements. Video exceeds human agency to produce the possibility of contingent images whose emergence coincides with their reception. In Houwen’s formulation: [H]uman actions exert pressure on the development and design of material technologies, and the material aspects of media technologies in turn ‘softly’ affect the possibilities and limits of human actions. Neither human subjects nor material technologies have full control over each other in this reciprocal relationship.46 Identifying similarities and interdependencies between video and human capacities enjoins us to probe the limits of the authorial force that technology had (or continues to have) in Leppe’s work.47 Certainly, the artist used video with an obvious interest in its technical affordances to edit and therefore particularise, not simply document, his art actions. Video technology undoubtedly marked the works as products of its own unique capacities. As mentioned earlier, Olhagary and Richard saw video as a ‘problematising’ force that could reconstruct reality, perhaps to the extent of having its own social impact. Video’s ability to generate liveness and an effect of reality were consequences of the medium, not of human agents. Whether or not we agree that video performances witnessed on screen carry a force of liveness comparable to unmediated live action, when it comes to Las cantatrices the technology undoubtedly collaborated in its own ways with human agents to produce performances largely generated by technological means. The question of comparable liveness between unmediated and video performances may even be irrelevant according to Barría, who proposes that video images permit a different type of energetic exchange with the performance compared with contiguous unmediated live action: ‘The use of media resources [i.e. video] restores to the audience their status as spectators-in-action, as subject-bodies capable of resisting the performer’s affect-rush [embate pulsional]’.48 Again, this refers us back to the subtle agency of video technology and its impact not only in the art-making processes but also in the artwork’s reception. Ronald Kay and Pablo Oyarzún, writing at a remove of twenty years from each other, offer ways to think more specifically about the relationship between audiences and lens-based media, video and photography. In Del espacio de acá (launched in Sur Gallery at the same time as Sala de espera’s exhibition there), Kay avers that ‘[p]hotography and the successive means of mechanical reproduction (cinema, TV) condition a perception that is built on distraction—not concentration and contemplation, which are the cultural modes for perceiving painting’.49 While his argument concerns the effects of photography on how space and landscape in postcolonial Latin America have been imagined, Kay’s comment about perception and distraction is highly germane. As we shall see, beyond Las cantatrices, Sala de espera challenged visitors’ attitudes towards the presence and effects of lens-based technologies in their own lives. In its artistic mode, video, according to Oyarzún, ‘suspends – interrupts, deforms, manipulates – the flow of information to expose the visual elements in which that flow consists, the ideological conditions on which it depends, the perceptual and social effects it has available’.50 I would add that the ways in which Leppe used video and other screens in preparing work for and mounting Sala de espera in 1980 constitute part of an idiom that would recur in El objeto de la movida. Within Sala de espera, television monitors and video players were necessary for showing Las cantatrices. Besides these, a projector illuminated a photograph of Leppe as a toddler with his mother, a television on a plinth played silent footage from the national channel TVN (Fig. 10), and a hollowed-out television caked in straw and mud contained a statuette of the Virgin Mary wreathed in fairy lights (Figs 10 and 11). In El objeto de la movida, a live but untuned television with a Polaroid print stuck to its screen sat in a makeshift wooden box in front of Cita a ciegas. The peculiar presentations and arrangements of these domestic technologies served to defamiliarise them for visitors, prompting them to recalibrate their relationships with the objects. Fig. 10. Open in new tabDownload slide Installation view of Carlos Leppe, Sala de espera, 1980, multimedia installation, Sur Gallery, Santiago. A hollowed-out television caked in straw and mud containing a statuette of the Virgin of Mount Carmel wreathed in fairy lights sits on the floor next to a plinth on which a television was placed playing footage from the national channel TVN. (Photo: Author’s cropped digital photograph of original black-and-white photographic contact sheet courtesy of Pedro Montes, D21 Gallery, Santiago). Fig. 11. Open in new tabDownload slide Installation view of Carlos Leppe, Sala de espera, 1980, multimedia installation, Sur Gallery, Santiago. A view of the ‘television’ containing a statuette of the Virgin of Mount Carmel visible in Figs 8 and 10. (Photo: Author’s cropped digital photograph of original colour Polaroid print courtesy of Pedro Montes, D21 Gallery, Santiago). Did the immutable scene of the cheaply illuminated Virgin in Sala de espera and the ‘Polaroid–television’ in El objeto de la movida imply that the screens visitors had at home, despite seeming to play changing images, in fact played repetitions of the same? By crafting a television that simultaneously resembled a shrine to Mary and the Chilean tradition of the animita (a roadside memorial), was Leppe suggesting that the medium vies with or even supplants the complex traditional social articulations of religion?51 The Marian iconography chosen was of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, a revered symbol of the nation.52 Negatively recasting an accepted archetype of both religious sanctity and the imperviousness of republican spirit (which she had stood for since circa 1817) redoubled the insult. On her lowly mundane plane in a crude diorama which recalled the starry night of Christ’s birth, Mary stood still in contradistinction to the animated TVN footage playing on the screen above and the three operatic Leppes sitting adjacent (Figs 10 and 8). The juxtaposition suggested that religion and statehood were competing with entertainment: transcendent and supposedly universal ideals had dwindled to an elective segment in a larger selection of worshipful icons, all of which could be switched ‘off’. The mute and static figure of Mary which evoked the Immaculate Conception and Nativity contrasted, too, with the monitor on the opposite side of the gallery showing Catalina Arroyo, Leppe’s mother (Fig. 4). Arroyo’s understated performance testifies to the gruelling ‘miracle’ of Leppe’s birth – an ordeal that caused her to lose all her teeth and much blood.53 The severe pain she recounts suffering mirrors and intensifies Leppe’s video-performances placed adjacent to and above the Virgin Mary (Fig. 8). Further, Arroyo’s account connects the historic clinical context of Leppe’s delivery with medical references in his own videos and the installation as a whole – namely, Leppe encased in plaster as if recovering from an accident or operation, the evidently painful oral retractor he wore, the hospital tables on which all the monitors were placed, and the title ‘Waiting Room’. Most Chilean visitors would have been familiar with the difficulty Mary suffered prior to giving birth, but the traditional story omits details of the labour, whereas Arroyo vividly describes a bloody and terrifying hardship. Presented thus, the two births become comparably miraculous – one for the fact and source of the pregnancy and the other for the ultimately successful delivery. As the only one with a meaningful voice, Arroyo spoke over and in place of the silent TVN footage and mute portrayal of Mary, as well as Leppe, lost among the clashing operatic lyrics of the three audio channels of Las cantatrices. Sala de espera may thus be seen to overturn the logic, supported by the dictatorship, of the ideal woman as seen through the lens of the Catholic Church – the Madonna – and the stable family unit that was expected to ensure the continuation of the homeland into the future.54 Arroyo lays bare the family’s imperfection, undermining the state-propagated rhetoric of stability that was predicated on normative familial conceptions.55 Further, Leppe’s contorted operatic bodies seem designed to confuse: encased within plaster casts and apparently male, he sports a made-up face and anatomically remaps himself. Does the inverted triangle symbolise the female reproductive system? Do his exposed nipples and surrounding flesh mimic breasts or highlight their absence? Is his protruding belly a reference to pregnancy or its absence–impossibility? Leppe offers ‘a model of frustrated sexual reproduction—so as to interrupt the reproductively oriented teleologies of the dictatorship…’.56 Las cantatrices’ triptych of a deconstructed flag operates along similar lines. The theme of the nation formed part of a long local discourse surrounding identity, questions of ‘Chileanness’ (chilenidad) and gender roles, which Leppe’s work contested.57 His plastered body evoked wounds inflicted and concealed within the homeland, and confinement, recalling the thousands whose freedoms were curtailed and those who were tortured and/or killed by the regime.58 The retractor implied restrictions on freedom of expression and bodily vulnerability – a reference to censorship and the state’s use of torture, which by now had become public knowledge. Symbols of triumph and celebration like the flag and the high art of opera are undermined in Sala de espera’s universe. Moreover, the installation’s technological abundance (six monitors, rising to seven screens including the projection of Leppe and Arroyo) highlighting divergent portrayals of motherhood and femininity meant that visitors could not fail to notice the competing incongruencies, thereby encouraging an engagement with the resignifications of religion, the media and the nation. In light of this, and given their simultaneous appearance in Sur Gallery, I read Sala de espera as tacitly acquiescing in Kay’s contention that technologies like photography and television promote distraction rather than contemplation by demonstrating the inverse. Leppe’s installation showed that lens-based media could in fact be repurposed against their more widespread applications in society in order to challenge the flows of information offered by television and coherent narratives of social stability and identity propagated by tradition and the media. This perhaps illustrates Oyarzún’s claim about video’s ‘interruptive’ artistic capacity. Seeking (but curtailing) responsiveness Focusing on tactility and risk, this final section considers how Leppe’s works morally implicate audiences in the pain and violence they describe, producing visitors as responsive subjects. Ultimately, however, they predetermine the limits of an audience’s responsiveness, leaving people unable to discharge any sense of responsibility or resolve ambiguous feelings. To frame this argument on the receptive impact of the installations, I enlist the notion of haptical looking, Jonah Westerman’s concept of the inframedium and Barría’s thoughts on liminality and the camera–performance interface.59 Comparing Las cantatrices with photographs from the production shoot offers us a testing ground for this. Houwen suggests that video and installation encourage a haptical form of looking – a form of vision-as-touch which ‘grasps’ on to texture and roves across a field of sensory experience dispossessed of a singularly absorbing locus of attention.60 It casts the visitor as an effect of the medium, imaginatively producing the artwork during its reception and consequently existing in a relationship of reciprocity with it.61 I would add that installation art’s distinction as a practically always ‘presentational artform’ contributes to the haptical mode of vision. I borrow this term from Margaret Morse, based on her view that [i]f there are two planes of language, a here and now in which we can speak and be present to each other, and an elsewhere and elsewhen, inhabited by people and things that are absent from the act of enunciation, then these new arts [i.e. video installation] explore expression on the plane of presentation and of subjects in a here and now.62 Because installations invite visitors to wander around and negotiate enforced or self-determined levels of proximity with objects, they are embodied experiences: moving, stopping and standing, sitting, contemplating multiple elements from a single vantage point and altering one’s position in order to appreciate a single object all enlist the body’s faculties ‘synaesthetically’, a term Jones uses to describe encounters with video screens that involve ‘all the bodily senses, as well as the very unconscious thought processes that synthesise them into spatialised and temporally complex understandings without our knowing’.63 Video has ‘a propensity for appealing to the spectator’s whole body’, which leads them to recognise what they behold as represented, rather than the illusion of reality.64 Partly, this is due to the quality of video images, which have a highly textured surface owing to pixel density, low contrast ratio, video decay, and variations in colour and tone.65 It is also an effect of the conditions of reception for video installations which display rather than occlude apparatuses of image reproduction. In consequence, the eye cannot be absorbed by video images as happens with the high-resolution smoothness of moving film images, the typical dispositif of which, moreover, requires viewers to sit immobile in a darkened room where the projector is out of sight and thereby heightens the film’s illusion of reality. Thus, the visible video players and multiple monitors of Sala de espera militate against illusionism. Contrasting with film’s disembodied, absorbed mode of viewing, installation art disables a visitor’s visual mastery over the work by exposing reproductive apparatuses, stressing the materiality of objects and complicating vision by distributing it across multiple centres of attention.66 Being physically implicated, the visitor makes more viewing choices and takes more responsibility for exercising their agency. For photography, the case for hapticity has been evocatively made by O’Dell’s research on performance photographs.67 Concentrating on a photograph by Babette Mangolte of Trisha Brown’s Group Accumulation in Central Park (Central Park, New York, 1973) printed in Art and Artists in January 1974, O’Dell postulates that the spectator assumes the photographer’s viewing position when beholding the image, thereby sharing the latter’s undeniable implication in the depicted moment.68 Noticing physical contact points in the image while holding the magazine displaces touch from the live moment, via the camera and the photographer’s finger on its trigger, to the time of reception. O’Dell probes the etymology of the word ‘behold’, whereby she identifies looking with touching (‘hold’) and, therefrom, posits moral responsibility (being ‘beholden’) as inherent to vision. Photography’s pliability as a medium strengthens O’Dell’s framework. For instance, Houwen writes that photography does not possess a dispositif ‘so characteristic to the medium that deviations from it would affect the medium’s specificity, expand [its] field or push it beyond its limits’.69 Moreover, photography is conventionally familiar through its connections to the family and home, meaning that, unlike artforms typically proscribing touch, we can reasonably imagine a tactile encounter with any photograph. Taken together, Houwen and O’Dell offer a valuable approach to Leppe’s works. In the final two Polaroids of Cita a ciegas (Fig. 9, bottom right), Leppe tentatively reaches to his face, signalling pain, vulnerability and uncertainty. Seeking to know again the contours of his profile, is he frightened to touch himself, unsure whether he will be stricken again? Coming into a tactile relation with himself, his hands thematise touch, an effect which the contrasting textures of the glossy Polaroids and brass plate with its degraded relief and jagged edges enhance.70 The adhesive, oozing substantially beyond the photographs’ edges, similarly emphasises superficial differences, depth and contouring – touch. Moreover, the unmistakable white framing and broader lower edge of Polaroid recall the medium’s instantaneity as a combined camera and developing device. Not only are these photographs more immediate than their traditional film-based counterparts in terms of processing, but their discharge from the camera would have invaded the intimate space between operator/device and Leppe. One by one, in quick succession, they isolated moments of the performer’s assault and partook in that: first, because their surfaces would have caught his agitated breathing and any particles of spittle whose trajectory they intercepted, and second, because they struck forth like the blows to the face one imagines he sustained. As a function of the proximity between Leppe and the operator, each Polaroid is therefore an index and a relic. Just as seeing the artist live, obstructed by the camera and its operator, would have been a different performance from the one witnessed in the photographs, neither could the unmediated live performance have afforded the same organic intimacy that they convey. Since viewers reconstruct an attack from the photographic portraits, risk forms a cardinal feature of Leppe’s performance, albeit only imagined. By looking into the camera in multiple Polaroids, he used portraiture to relate more intimately with his audiences across space and time. Las cantatrices is similar: Arroyo tentatively but unmistakably regards the camera (Fig. 4), addressing the audience while recounting the perils of labour. Less direct in his own three videos there (for Leppe’s gaze only obliquely and warily meets the camera’s), the overwhelming focus is nonetheless his face, which plainly indicates his discomfort as he endures multiple forms of invasion and restriction. These various portraits establish a relation with observers, thereby promoting an identification on the audience’s part with both Leppe’s suffering subject and the risk to their own existence, since images of flesh and blood ‘mandate a viewer’s consideration…of similarity/difference, closeness/alienation, empathy/disregard, etc. between the artist and the viewer by virtue of the viewer having an obvious share in the material aspects of those images’.71 If the installations brought audiences to an awareness of themselves as active subjects by encouraging embodied involvement, haptic forms of looking and decision-making, then those audiences would feel personally implicated. Be they feelings of empathy, horror, revulsion, indifference or pleasure, their witnessing was a form of participation which carried responsibility. The liveness and instantaneity of video and Polaroid heightened this sense of responsibility through suggesting that the actions were ongoing, unpredictable and contingent. However, by being confronted with works physically displaced from the real locations of the violence to which they grant access, the audiences cannot requite any obligation they might feel to intervene. Unlike unmediated live art that offers physical contiguity in time and space with the artist’s body, displaced performances like Las cantatrices and Cita a ciegas suspend any possibility of physical contact and direct response.72 Westerman proposes the term ‘inframedium’ to describe performance art as a mode of artistic production–reception in which there is ‘a mobile and profoundly indistinct dividing line that joins form and experience’.73 In common with Barría, speaking for the Chilean context, Westerman acknowledges the expenditure and theorised exchange of vital energy fundamental to performance as a practice that questions the sensory limits of the performer and the spectators’ limits in the receptive context.74 He employs Burden’s Shoot and Klein’s Leap into the Void as works that hold action and image in tension; similarly, Barría views performance as a practice that produces liminality.75 Turning to Leppe’s installations, we find indeterminate zones hovering between life/death, safety/danger, health/sickness, real/unreal. Those in a waiting room (sala de espera) sit between origin and destination, or – as in Leppe’s and his mother’s cases – states of health. Going on a blind date (cita a ciegas) places someone on a threshold between pondering an encounter and the real event. Additionally for Cita a ciegas, sixteen Polaroids preserve inconclusive moments apparently just after a physical attack. Its installation as part of El objeto de la movida included a television placed inside a box with its screen facing up. A Polaroid was glued to the screen and the device was switched on, but without a signal. All this precluded engagement with any broadcast. Sala de espera’s and El objeto de la movida’s states of suspended being, partial stories and displaced live action rendered audiences intellectually and affectively dissatisfied, their responses limited to witnessing and reflecting on suffering. Archival photographs of Las cantatrices offer us an instructive comparison for elaborating this argument on the works’ receptive impact. Barría suggests that ‘the narrative-filmic apparatus [i.e. the video camera…] changes live action, disintegrating the thickness of the present to transform it into a simulacrum’.76 The cameras trained upon Leppe’s performances did undo the ‘thickness’ of the present in which he performed in the studio and the resulting videos certainly offer representations, but they are representations of a specifically charged kind. In Figs 5 and 6 – photographs from the production studio for Las cantatrices – Leppe appears surrounded by camera equipment and production assistants. By contrast, in the videos, he floats against flat colours (Figs 1–3). The video images may indeed appear ‘thin’ when considered alongside the comparatively ‘thick’, layered reality of the monochrome photographs of the production. However, while those photographs arguably provide depth (or ‘thickness’), they also reveal the overall performance as pretence: irrespective of Leppe’s discomfort, distress or pain, the production images show the artist surrounded by others and preserve the action as historic and regulated. By contrast, the videos are abuzz with potential – images of Leppe alone and in peril at a physical distance with which the viewer, as argued above, has an affective relation. Any sense of responsibility provoked in audiences by the videos is absent for the photographs’ audiences. The seeming instantaneity and serial presentation of Polaroids may arguably have a similar effect for Cita a ciegas, which presents a recent violent occurrence at an unknown location and similarly thwarts any impulse a spectator might have to intervene. Consequently, Leppe’s audiences may depart carrying a durable relation with the artist – a type of ‘prosthetic memory’ of undischarged responsibility in the face of his apparently mortal predicament.77 In this article, my aim was to examine the deliberateness with which cameras and their auxiliary technologies were used for creating Leppe’s performances, both to make the case for complicity between these two complex methods of art-marking and to explore the effects of such human–technological alliances. Because the performances were captured by cameras, the receptive potential of Las cantatrices and Cita a ciegas is enhanced through different techniques of focusing attention, affecting an audience’s experience of time and removing extraneous content from the originary contexts of performance. Editing the videos created performances that would otherwise be impossible for an audience to experience (such as Leppe’s triplicated simultaneity with himself) and the particular arrangements of Polaroids and video monitors stimulated visitors’ curiosity and imagination. Aspects of video enact an effective – albeit customarily unacknowledged and subtle – form of agency, not least in guaranteeing liveness beyond the time of recording. Importantly, by displacing action while retaining the potential of liveness, video may allow for a different type of energetic exchange between artwork and audience, one that enables audiences to be active spectators. The implied recency of Polaroid may have a similar effect. The installations rely on an audience’s capacity for touch and affective engagement. Thus, humans and technology exist in a situation of mutual constitution. Technology defines a limit, however, prescribing the terms of encounter: through technological means, one witnesses Leppe’s suffering as either live or having recently occurred, but at a physical and undetermined distance. This separation circumscribes an audience’s responsiveness. One effect of this may be to impede the audience’s deliverance from a heightened sense of emotional and psychic investment, an inconclusive state that serves to leave them with a durable affective trace of the work. Footnotes 1 Ina Blom, The Autobiography of Video: The Life and Times of a Memory Technology (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), p. 80. 2 Nelly Richard, Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile since 1973 (Melbourne: Art and Text, 1987), p. 159 (italics in the original). Translations from Spanish are the author’s unless stated. 3 In certain sources, it is also referred to as the International Exhibition on Human Rights or the International Exhibition of the Arts. 4 Milan Ivelić and Gaspar Galaz, Chile, Arte Actual (Valparaíso: Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, 1988), p. 235. 5 Sala de espera was shown at Sur Gallery in 1980. The much smaller El objeto de la movida debuted there as part of the group exhibition Con/Textos in 1982. 6 For schemata of the installations, see <http://carlosleppe.cl/1980-sala-de-espera> and <carlosleppe.cl/1982-el-objeto-de-la-movida-instalacion/>. Las cantatrices was first shown as part of Sala de espera at Sur Gallery in 1980. No production or exhibition data, as far as we are aware, exist or have been published for Cita a ciegas (Mariairis Flores, ‘Cuerpo de/en obra: Reconstituyendo a Leppe’, in Artishock, 26 July 2016, para. 13 (artishockrevista.com/2016/07/26/cuerpo-deen-obra-reconstituyendo-leppe/) [accessed 17 August 2021]. 7 See for example Ronald Kay’s Del espacio de acá: Señales para una mirada americana (Santiago: Metales Pesados, 1980). Osvaldo Aguiló acknowledged in 1983 the prevalence of lens-based practices in Chile, including video (Plástica neovanguardista: Antecedentes y contextos, ed. by Sebastián Valenzuela-Valdivia [Santiago: Écfrasis, 2018]). More recently, Kate Jenckes has written on Dittborn’s uses of painting and photography (Witnessing beyond the Human: Addressing the Alterity of the Other in Post-coup Chile and Argentina [Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2017]). 8 Critical contributions on performance and video are Carla Macchiavello’s ‘Marking the Territory: Performance, Video, and Conceptual Graphics in Chilean Art, 1975–1985’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Stony Brook University, 2010) and Mauricio Barría Jara’s ‘¿Qué relata una performance? Límites y tensiones entre cuerpo, video, performance’, in Mauricio Barría and Francisco Sanfuentes (ed.), La intensidad del acontecimiento: Escrituras y relatos en torno a la performance en Chile (Santiago: Universidad de Chile, 2010), pp. 13–29. Francisco González Castro, Leonora López and Brian Smith consider ‘Body and Technology’, in ‘Performance art’ en Chile: Historia, procesos y discursos (Santiago: Metales Pesados, 2016). 9 Sebastián Vidal, En el principio: Arte, archivos y tecnologías durante la dictadura en Chile (Santiago: Metales Pesados, 2012), pp. 81–2. 10 Interview with Olhagaray in Claudia Aravena and Iván Pinto, Visiones laterales: Cine y video experimental en Chile (1957–2017) (Santiago: Metales Pesados, 2018), p. 170. 11 The term ‘neo-avant-garde’ relates to the Escena de Avanzada, or ‘Advanced Scene’, referenced by Richard above. Although it is often used, it is a contested term. 12 Néstor Olhagaray, ‘¿Arte video o video arte?’ (1985), quoted in Nelly Richard, ‘Contra el pensamiento-teorema: Una defensa del video-arte en Chile’ (1986), repr. in Aravena and Pinto, Visiones laterales, p. 218, n. 5. 13 I use ‘visitor’ after Margaret Morse, since an installation requires individuals to be ‘in the piece as its experiential subject, not by identification, but in body’ (‘Video Installation Art: The Body, the Image, and the Space-in-Between’, in Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer (eds), Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art (New York: Aperture/BAVC, 1990), p. 155). Kate Mondloch uses the term similarly in Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 14 Since Juan Downey and Francisco Copello had emigrated well before the coup, Leppe is seen as the artform’s local originator (Aguiló, Plástica neovanguardista, p. 81), although the genealogy of performance art in Chile requires further investigation. 15 Quoted from Qué Pasa magazine by Carl Fischer in his Queering the Chilean Way: Cultures of Exceptionalism and Sexual Dissidence, 1965–2015 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), p. 138. 16 Nelly Richard’s Cuerpo correccional (Santiago: V.I.S.U.A.L., 1980), launched simultaneously with Sala de espera, features six photographs of the playback (p. 58). 17 Richard, ‘Contra el pensamiento-teorema’, p. 215. 18 CADA, La función del video, single-page text photocopied and distributed at the Video Biennial, Chilean–French Cultural Institute (Santiago, 1980), repr. in Robert Neustadt, CADA DÍA: La creación de un arte social (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2001), p. 141. 19 Barbara Clausen, ‘Documents between Spectator and Action’, in Alice Maude-Roxby (ed.), Live Art on Camera: Performance and Photography (Southampton: John Hansard Gallery, 2007), p. 76. 20 Richard, Margins, p. 137 (italics in the original). 21 Maude-Roxby, Live Art on Camera, p. 3. 22 Hans Breder, ‘Documentation and Ana Mendieta’, in Maude-Roxby (ed.), Live Art on Camera, p. 60. For similar discussions in the Chilean context see Kay’s Del espacio and Sebastián Vidal’s ‘Contrapuntos mediales como práctica artística en la obra temprana (1975–1979) de Gonzalo Mezza’, in Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos (online 2 October 2017). 23 Maude-Roxby, Live Art on Camera, pp. 2–3 and 55. 24 Houwen extends Jean-Louis Baudry’s theory of the cinematic dispositif to video in her Film and Video Intermediality: The Question of Medium Specificity in Contemporary Moving Images (New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), esp. chapters 7, 8 and 11. 25 Philip Auslander, ‘The Performativity of Performance Documentation’, in Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield (eds), Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History (Bristol and Chicago, IL: Intellect, 2012). 26 Each tape contains a unique version of the performance on loop three times: blue (approx. total running time: 55:23), white (55:41) and red (55:34). 27 Like the three other videos, this video was on loop three times (approx. total running time 55:21). 28 Richard, Cuerpo correccional, pp. 62–70. 29 Frédérique Baumgartner remarks that photo-documentation allowed Gina Pane ‘to guide more closely the viewer’s gaze’ (‘Reviving the Collective Body: Gina Pane’s Escalade Non Anesthésiée’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 34, no. 2, 2011, p. 249). Pane saw her work in three equally important parts: groundwork, ‘actual performance’ and constats (‘photo-documentation’). I argue that Leppe used photographs and videos differently. They were not intended as proofs or documentation of performances but as the performances themselves. 30 Because the production of images is largely automatic, ‘the registration of details can hardly be prevented’ (Houwen, Intermediality, Part I; quotation from p. 26). 31 Richard, Margins, p. 72 and 143; Fischer, Queering, p. 124. 32 Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, ‘Primer comunicado de la Junta Militar’, Memoria Chilena (online), <http://www.memoriachilena.gob.cl/602/w3-article-92134.html> [accessed 17 August 2021]. 33 Anonymous, Chile: Ayer hoy (Santiago de Chile: Gabriela Mistral, 1975). 34 Additional examples of dubious external influence are the advent of photography on the development of visual culture in Latin America (as explored in Kay’s Del espacio) and Pinochet’s so-called ‘Chicago Boys’, economists trained at the University of Chicago who were instrumental in Chile’s transformation into a neoliberal market. 35 Richard, Margins, pp. 150, 87, 70 and 143 (italics in the original). 36 Amelia Jones, Self/Image: Technology, Representation and the Contemporary Subject (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 42 and 72. 37 Houwen, Intermediality, p. 254. 38 Houwen, Intermediality, p. 255. 39 The affinities between Blom’s work and that of N. Katherine Hayles in, for example, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2017), together with Bernard Stiegler’s arguments in Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), bear mentioning. 40 Blom, Autobiography, pp. 70, 117. 41 Blom, Autobiography, p. 99. 42 Blom, Autobiography, p. 14. 43 Blom, Autobiography, p. 160. Blom builds on Maurizio Lazzarato, who, drawing on Bill Viola, has said: ‘[T]he video recorder is already a simulation of [human] intellectual labor’ (Videophilosophy: The Perception of Time in Post-Fordism, ed. and trans. Jay Hetrick [New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2019], p. 93). 44 Blom, Autobiography, pp. 10 and 44. 45 Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 41, in Houwen, Intermediality, p. 27. Metz wrote about film, but it is his contention about movement’s non-representability, its constant liveness, that is germane here. 46 Houwen, Intermediality, p. 163. 47 Blom may use European and North American examples to illustrate her argument, but it applies to Chile insofar as the standard video cameras and auxiliary equipment there were no different. 48 Barría, ‘¿Qué relata?’, p. 25. 49 Kay, Del espacio, p. 28. 50 Pablo Oyarzún, Arte, visualidad e historia (Santiago: La Blanca Montaña, 2000), p. 167, in Barría, ‘¿Qué relata?’, p. 19. 51 This echoes Richard in ‘Contra el pensamiento-teorema’ (p. 220). 52 Macchiavello discusses the Virgin’s maternal and nationalistic connotations (‘Marking the Territory’, pp. 337–38). 53 For the script (from which Arroyo departs at times), see Richard, Cuerpo correccional, pp. 106–7 and 112–13. 54 Robert Neustadt, ‘Diamela Eltit: Clearing Space for Critical Performance’, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, vol. 7, no. 2, 1995, p. 220, in Fischer, Queering, p. 125. 55 Fischer writes of the links the state drew between heteronormative conceptualisations of the family and the country’s success and progress (Queering, pp. 125–6; 142). 56 Fischer, Queering, pp. 133–4. Correlatively, Blom writes for the early 1970s US context that ‘The emergent human/machine composites of the electronic realm functioned as the model for a critique of unitary conceptions of being, and their consequences for the political constructions of race and gender’ (Autobiography, p. 144). 57 The notion of chilenidad has been debated since the early days of the republic and became a topic of renewed interest following the 1973 coup. See Joanna Crow, ‘Negotiating Inclusion in the Nation: Mapuche Intellectuals and the Chilean State’, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, July 2010; and Sophie Halart, ‘Epidermal Aesthetics: Skin and the Feminine in Chilean and Argentine Art (1973–Present)’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University College London, 2017), pp. 61–2. 58 About 3000 people are known to have been killed or disappeared by the regime, while a conservative estimate for torture victims is ‘dozens of thousands’ (Steve J. Stern, Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile, 1973–1988 (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2006), p. xxi). 59 Jonah Westerman, ‘Between Action and Image: Performance as “Inframedium”’, Tate Research Feature (online January 2015). 60 Houwen, Intermediality, chapters 8 and 9. See also Jones, Self/Image (chapters 2, 4 and 6); Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensual Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Mondloch, Screens. 61 Houwen, Intermediality, pp. 145–46. 62 Morse, ‘Video Installation Art’, p. 156 (italics in the original). 63 Jones, Self/Image, p. 215. 64 Houwen, Intermediality, p. 80 and 92. 65 Marks, Touch, pp. 9–10. 66 Houwen, Intermediality, pp. 93–6. 67 Kathy O’Dell, ‘Behold!’, in Maude-Roxby’s Live Art on Camera, pp. 30–8. See also O’Dell’s ‘Displacing the Haptic: Performance Art, the Photographic Document, and the 1970s’, Performance Research, vol. 2, no. 1, 1997. 68 O’Dell, ‘Behold!’, pp. 32–3. 69 Houwen, Intermediality, p. 89. 70 Tereza Stehlíková writes about contrasts evoking touch in ‘Tangible Territory: Inviting the Body into the Experience of Moving Image’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Royal College of Art, 2012). 71 Kathy O’Dell, ‘Toward a Theory of Performance Art: An Investigation of its Sites’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, City University of New York, 1992), in Jones, Self/Image, p. 77, n. 48. 72 Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 5 (1974, Student Cultural Centre, Belgrade) illustrates the crossing of the boundary between performance and reception. The artist had lain down inside a wooden stelliform frame that was burning. The fire consumed the oxygen within the star, Abramović lost consciousness, and audience members intervened to save her life (Sean O’Hagan, ‘Interview: Marina Abramović’, in The Observer [online 3 October 2010]). 73 Westerman, ‘Between Action and Image’, paras 15–16. 74 Barría, ‘¿Qué relata?’, pp. 15–7, 24. 75 Barría, ‘¿Qué relata?’, p. 16. 76 Barría, ‘¿Qué relata?’, p. 29. 77 Alison Landsberg, ‘America, the Holocaust, and the Mass Culture of Memory: Toward a Radical Politics of Empathy’, New German Critique, no. 71, Spring-Summer 1997, pp. 63–86. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - Complicities with the Camera: The Performance and Installation Art of Carlos Leppe
JF - Oxford Art Journal
DO - 10.1093/oxartj/kcab037
DA - 2022-04-07
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/complicities-with-the-camera-the-performance-and-installation-art-of-N5bTsncdrg
SP - 105
EP - 126
VL - 45
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -