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I’ve often said that my “graduate education” in contemporary art comes through my experience working as a freelance educator at The Studio Museum in Harlem and at El Museo del Barrio, in East Harlem.  You don’t have to be an artist to just assume that discussions of artists of color in art history and contemporary art classes are like the “special” segments that appear once in a blue if ever at all. By working with both institutions, I’ve been able to learn a huge deal about other artists of color out there doing their thing. I have also been greatly inspired by other artists who push boundaries and flip the meaning of aesthetics and artist materials to reinvent them into whatever tools they need to share a powerful narrative laced with war, conquest, slavery, racism, loss and so many other conditions of human suffering that art can serve to heal, if only temporarily.  Well at least art can bring awareness and blame the guilty and break the cycle of systematic oppression by exposing the truth. 

The current exhibition at El Museo del Barrio, on view till June 17^th has this very affect on me.  I love it when an entire exhibition can communicate the very essence of “rebelarte”.  The art is not pretty, or cute. The art is powerful, hits you over the head, knocks you over, leaves you gasping, traumatizes you, pissed you off, invigorates you, inspires you and even gets you to identify your long lost parents cuz you never knew you were adopted!!! That’s a powerful exhibit! This show is called The Disappeared/ Los Desaparecidos.  It was curated by Laurel Reuter of the North Dakota Museum of Art.  She wanted to learn more about the situation of the “dirty wars” throughout South America and how various coups and military regimes resulted in a campaign to end all resistance to the new governments.  Such campaigns involved the kidnapping/ arrest/ torture and killing (disappearing) of hundreds of thousands of people.    Reuter invited a group of artists representing some of the affected countries to be part of a traveling exhibition on the topic. 

However artists are very the people who carry this work on their backs.  When political repression suffocates one’s ability to express themselves, it is the artist, whether through art, poetry, music/ song, theater that is able to subvert creativity and inject it with coded messages of resistance.  It has been the case since the beginning of human struggle and the need to survive. Which is why I can’t understand when people wanna package art into entertainment and nothing more. 

Anyhow, the artists represented in this exhibition, many of them had already long been doing this work before having been invited to participate in this particular exhibit.  Like the elder master printmaker representing both Argentina and Uruguay, Antonio Frasconi who created a whole portfolio of prints entitled “Los Desaparecidos”.  His images show us identity-less individuals with sacks pulled over their heads led in lines from vehicles to torture sites, bound and knocked to the ground with blood seeping from beneath the sacks tied over their heads, marching in line as prisoners. 

What I most love about this exhibit are the artists who abandon the traditional, conventional, expensive ass artist materials to get deeper into the theme of war, loss, and memory.  Take for example Arturo Duclos who uses actual human bones, human femurs, to create the outline of his own Chilean flag.  This colossal flag, measuring about 11 x 17 feet leaves you with that feeling you get whenever you visit a cemetery, except he makes you feel that your standing in a grave, instead of on it. Also from Chile, Ivan Navarro uses light in his sculptures to create a coffee table with a red glowing swastika appearing beneath the glass.  His coffee table shows us how nazi ideology may have seeped into the homes/ salas of Latin American families after fleeing WWII Europe.  Perhaps this ideology fed the fascist tendencies of the military governments that kidnapped and killed so many resisters.  In another sculpture he uses florescent light bulb fixtures, that create the black rungs of a military ladder yet the names of the torturers and murders glow white for all the viewers to read the names of the guilty.  Navarro talks about the importance of “shedding light” on these hidden histories. What better way to do it, than with “light” itself. 

Another very uncommon material is used to communicate the subversive message behind another art piece. Brazilian Cildo Mereiles uses old-school Coca Cola bottles as his artwork.  You might wonder what’s so special about them until upon closer inspection you realize that he silkscreened the words “Yankees Go Home!” onto the bottles themselves, and he ain’t talking about the baseball team.   Mereiles’ bottles bring to mind the presence of U.S. troops in Brazil in the 1960’s, ¿pa’ que? Who knows. Maybe the same reason they decided to invade the Dominican Republic around that time too, y other places tambien.  The bottles with their white subversive text that is nearly invisible when empty would get sent back to the factory to be sanitized, refilled and redistributed.  In this way, one didn’t have to leave the favela to go to a museum to check out subversive art. The art came to you through the coded coke bottles or even through paper currency, money, that he stamped with equally subversive text.  This is art for the masses, art for the people. 

Those bottles also bring to mind the Colombian union organizers who have gone missing after trying to work for better conditions of their employers and the Coca-Cola corporation that exploits the workers and hasn’t done a thing to investigate why these folks have turned up missing, or excuse me why these folks were “disappeared”.   (This is happening today by the way, it ain’t just history, or of the past) Seems like Cildo Mereiles knew with his bottles that the case of los desaparecidos wasn’t specific to Latin America or the wrongdoings of Latin America alone.  I’m sure he knew about Operation Condor, created by the CIA to stop the spread of socialist and communist ideologies in Latin American and for which the U.S. would go to great lengths to enforce.  EG.  Allowing a military coup (Pinochet) to over throw a democratically elected President (Salvador Allende) in Chile.  Many other examples exist. 

In another installation created by the Uruguayan artist Luis Camnitzer, we can’t help but think of the School of the American in Georgia where the US trained military officials from here and elsewhere (like Latin America) in various torture tactics. Nor can we help but think of tortured suspected “terrorists” in Guantanamo today. Camnitzer uses his own body to simulate image after image of torture tactics.  (See above image)

It’s not that I’m sadistic and love art that depresses me.  I love the challenge of how an artist can work as a magician and take human emotion and translate it into creativity.  Colombiano Oscar Muñoz paints portraits of victims of la Violencia.  He uses the typical brush, but rather than dipping it in paint, he dips it in water.  He paints the portrait onto a warm slab of stone and within minutes of being completed the portrait disappears as the water evaporates like a soul lifting out of a murdered body.  This is the same artist who created a series of aluminum disks that look like plain mirrors until you get close enough to have your breath fog the surface and out of nowhere appears the face and words of an obituary taken from a Colombian newspaper. You breathe life back into a life taken/ stolen. When your breath dissipates, so too does the obituary, the memory of this murdered individual.  Hot damn, that’s great art!!!!

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And lastly on a traumatizing but equally warm and fuzzy tip is the work “Identidad”, a collaboration between 13 Argentinean artists. The work shows photos of countless couples who were kidnapped while expecting a baby.  Alongside the images are texts about when their child should have been born and a mirror. The mirror isn’t to check out if you got a moco in your nose or if your lipstick is smeared. First having debuted in Buenos Aires, the purpose of the mirror was to identify the missing children, kidnapped shortly after their births, after the murder of their parents and adopted into a family that supported the regime so that their parents’ revolutionary ideas would forever cease to exist.  And believe it or not, several people who looked into the mirror alongside the faces of their previously unknown parents were able to recognize themselves as the lost children of the disappeared. Upon identifying a lost child, their parents images are removed from the installation, having fulfilled it’s duty, the rest of the artpiece continues on its mission to claim a lost history.  Again, that’s great art.  Not to entertain, not to decorate, but to expose history and change the world. 

Thanks,

Rebelarte(AKA, Yaz, AKA, Yasmin Hernández) 

PS. This show is by no means comprehensive.  It doesn’t touch upon the thousands of disappeared in Peru, nor the countless disappeared Dominicans and Haitians under Trujillo.  It doesn’t talk about every country affected, nor the political repression in Puerto Rico. However, the bookstore at El Museo has done a pretty good job at collecting pertinent books, CDs and DVDs showcasing the rebel artists to have come out of these conditions in many countries throughout Latin America.  So be sure to stop by and check it out if you see the exhibit.

Also this Saturday, June 2^nd at 1 and at 2PM I’ll be offering community tours of the exhibition explaining the work and background behind the artists/ and art.  The tours are free with museum admission….El Museo is at 5th Ave. bet. 104th and 105th Streets in East Harlem.

For more information on El Museo: www.elmuseo.org