Feedback in The Amazon by Nicolás Guagnini

Feedback in the Amazon
Author(s): Nicolás Guagnini

Source: October, Vol. 125 (Summer, 2008), pp. 91-116
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40368513
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NICOLAS GUAGNINI
On Friday, June 11, 1993, the New York Times ran an obituary written by
critic Roberta Smith with the headline, "Juan Downey, 53, A Pioneer of Vi
Medium for Art." In her notice, Smith accurately observed, "From an invol
with perception and random sounds and images, Mr. Downey turned in the
1970s to ecological subjects and then to politics and history. His work freq
had an autobiographical aspect, making use of his Indian-Spanish heritage
his experiences in Europe and America to examine issues of identity and po
This statement rightfully positions Downey as a pioneer in tackling th
occupation with identities and multiculturalism that was current in Ameri
discourse in the early 1990s. The undesired aftereffect of applying multicultura
as a mapping machine for differences, however, was to re-encircle these differ
within identities that were considered as homogeneous constructs. In order to d
the methodology of classification had to be stabilized. Consequently, to ree
Downey's work critically means to try to establish specific historical, ideologica
theoretical parameters to preserve its heterogeneous nature.
In this text I will attempt to overcome the unintentional oblivion im
in Smith's obituary; describing Downey as an early practitioner of a late
discipline who posed questions before they became current somehow
shoots the postmortem critical reception of his work - or lack thereof. I
trace the ideological genealogy of Downey's Video Trans Americas that be
1973 and culminated in 1977. In this notable work, Downey, together wit
wife, Marilys, and her teenage daughter Titi Lamadrid, engaged the Yano
Indians of the Amazon basin. I will show that not only did Video Trans Am
problematize identities, disciplines, and fundamental categories such as an
pology and the document, it also problematized the very ontology of the "
and his attendant "body of work." Downey's avant la lettre experiments an
riences revealed and exploited a fault line inherent in the attempt to
1. Roberta Smith, "Juan Downey, 53, A Pioneer of Video as a Medium for Art," New Yor
June 11, 1993.
OCTOBER 125, Summer 2008, pp. 91-116. ©2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute
92 OCTOBER
possibilities
tools that ha
personified t
identity cons
The encoun
(that is both
relative obliv
themselves
establish a f
theories and
conclusions g
tive for the f
in an establis
Instead, thi
diverse discip
tual collage,
our present.
Before the Departure
Downey came to the United States directly after a stay in Paris from 1963 to
1965, where he had moved from his native Chile as a freshly graduated architect
involved with drawing and etching. There, he befriended fellow countrymen
Roberto Matta and Pablo Neruda.2 Both the Surrealist painter and the poet were
2. Another artist concerned with revolution whom Downey met in Paris, the Argentine Julio Le
Pare, informed the artist's notion of spectatorship. A founding member of the pioneering Groupe de
Recherche d'Art Visuel, Le Pare was then a kinetic artist also affiliated with the group around Denise
Rene's gallery (which included Jesus Rafael Soto and Carlos Cruz-Diez); a classic Marxist, he sought -
rather idealistically - to end the idealism of representation through awakening the spectators into con-
crete reality by purely perceptual means, simultaneously activating their revolutionary potential and
that of art making. A 1964 manifesto cosigned by a group of six artists that included Le Pare and
Francois Morellet extolled:
"One can embroider the edges of aesthetics, of sensibility, of cybernetics, of brutality, of testimony,
of the survival of the species, etc.; we will always remain at the same level. An 'opening' is necessar
escaping the vicious circle that is art in today's world. Art nowadays concerns a simple action called 'arti
tic creation.' The divorce between this 'artistic creation' and the public at large is blatant reality. ...
abandon the definitive, closed character of traditional works is, on the one hand, a reconsideration of
the overvalued creative act and, on the other, a first step towards reassessing a spectator who is always
compelled to contemplation, conditioned by his level of culture, of information, of aesthetic apprec
tion, etc. We consider the spectator capable of reacting with his normal powers of perception.
"A spectator aware of his power to take action and tired of so many abuses and mystification
will himself be able to create the true 'revolution in art.' He will put into practice the slogans:
"It is forbidden not to participate.
"It is forbidden not to touch.
"It is forbidden not to break."
Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel, "No More Mystifications!" in Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art of the
1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde, ed. Ines Ratzenstein (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2004),
pp. 55-56.
Feedback in the Amazon 93
Communists, and from th

must be revolutionary. By
Radical Software magazine
Raindance, and taking par
Beryl Korot, Andy Mann,
of other contributors to R
particularly video - to prod
Within the art world a
portable video equipment
mental activity. The poss
seemed to hold a special pr
The first was to hijack vi
from the leisure industry
ries" subindustry). Via this
communities learned to ex
duce their own news (and e
sort of social feedback loop
stream, broadcast televisio
television's potential use va
remained divorced from art
The second tendency was
temporal element to quest
consequently, the dialectic
tion in conventional galler
both the subject matter an
tendency clearly became r
lated as "art."
Dara Birnbaum, a second-generation video practitioner, witnessed the
unfolding of these processes firsthand, and her recollections help connect what
would be a tentative, abstract classification to specific artists, art works, art-
historical genealogies, canons, and dates:
From my own experience, I felt that early on there were two distinct
developments evident. The one you first mentioned, camera/body/mon-
itor, is best seen in the early tapes by Bruce Nauman or Vito Acconci.
They were coming out of what became known as "body art" but also from
a projection of an inner psychological state. But there was also another
area of development, which was to create alternative forms to broadcast
3. This essay is in part a response to David Joselit's recent book Feedback: Television against Democracy
(Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007), which has effectively weaved into the art-historical discussion this
aspect of video making. Since Joselit commissioned the present text and we have been in a dialogue,
this footnote will also serve as a grateful acknowledgment for his patient interlocution and support.
94 OCTOBER
television. H
the commun
With regard
the isolation of the artist's studio, such as Bruce Nauman's 1968
Stamping in the Studio, where he inverted the camera so that to the
viewer he appears to be walking on the ceiling. Even though he
repeatedly stamps in a rhythmic, almost primitive pattern, he is not
really participating in any social or communal rite. He remains indi-
vidualized in his own studio. Acconci's Centers (1971) has the artist
pointing at his own image on the video monitor, attempting to keep
his finger in the center of the screen. He was pointing away from him-
self and to an outside viewer. In that work he introduces another
aspect of video: using the video monitor as a mirror. The work also
begins to take advantage of the self-reflexive potential of video by
becoming more aware of the psychology of interpersonal relation-
ships. Other artists, like Dan Graham, were producing works where
this social awareness was evident, but they expanded this initial
awareness by also providing for a way that the viewer could interact
with their work, such as Graham's numerous delayed feedback/mir-
ror installations.4 Wipe Cycle [1969] incorporated the viewer's image
into delayed feedback loops. In Wipe Cycle, again the importance was
that the audience became participants by directly affecting the work
and thus the viewer was no longer passive. Gillette and Schneider
wanted to emphasize the process involved in a work.5
Downey, in the crypto-analytic and cyber-utopic tone typical of Rad

Software, instead of consigning feedback to the specific realm of video tech
ogy, proposed a visionary biopolitics whose initial impulse coincides w
Birnbaum's critique of Nauman: "Even though he repeatedly stamps in a rhy
mic, almost primitive pattern, he is not really participating in any soci
communal rite. He remains individualized in his own studio." (emphasis mine
A text for the now-mythical winter 1973 issue of Radical Software, tellingly t
"Technology and Beyond," outlines Downey's personal trajectory from Marx
to an epistemological horizon that is part proto-New Age, part critique of b
dialectics and linguistics. His writing begins to express the inherent contrad
tion of being both within the West and beyond it, an extraordinarily educa
mix of Mapuche Indian and European expatriate, living in the center of
4. Temporality's functioning within the specificity of each medium is clearly identified in

Graham's notes for his 1972 videotaped performance Past Future Split Attention: "As video tape is a
tinuum (unlike film, which is discontinuous/analytic re-construction with separate sound [verba
visual tracks), it is an ideal medium for presenting this sequence." Graham rightly does away with f
as a medium closer to representation and instrumentalization. Dan Graham: Works 1965
(Dusseldorf: Richter Verlag, 2000), p. 139.
5. Interview with the author tor Cabinet y (Winter 2U02/U3), p. 5b.
Harry Shunk.Jtian Downey

on the fire escape outside his
White Street studio. 1974.
© Harry Shunk. Courtesy of
The Juan Downey Foundation.
York's technological explos

even though he constantly
Nineteenth-century ind
natural effects, thus crea
fragmented roots: milli
become monuments to th
quent glorification of tr
obvious source of ecolog
the web of centralized i
for these networks of
96 OCTOBER
political mad
with our ne
humanity. E
tem reshape
expanding o
space relationship, rendering apparent its dependency upon time
The invisible architect becomes one with energ

wave-material. Invisible Architecture re-explain
as a bio-feedback tool in evolving the collectivi
transmit and receive (non-verbally) high frequ
energy. Direct communication is beyond symbo
powers the significant.6
The figure of an "invisible architect" who "becom

"render [s] apparent its dependency upon time,
cerned with capital and its modes of circula
revolutionary stage of organic-technological in
achieved by technology itself. Such a notion exemp
contradiction at yet another level.7 This oscillat
sciousness and enhanced consciousness was prom
exploding amid political dissatisfaction. It was a
West as it was of Stalinism and state control in
Fahlstrom's 1972-73 manifesto "S.O.M.B.A. (Som
may summarize this best:
15. A New Sensibility
The new rebellion is both moral and aesthetic, ra

class struggle." (Marcuse) . . .
USA and Western Europe. The three major trend
1. Dada. Zen, John Cage. The sixties: new art, p

events, mixed media. The Living Theatre. Coun
style, communalism, new drugs.
2. Ways to self-realization. Mysticism, meditat

Reich, Lowen, Janov, Schultz, rerls, Laing.
6. Juan Downey, "Technology and Beyond," Radical Software 2

7. The "invisible architect" is obviously Downey's response to
A number of ecological utopic architectural projects, and the
of "invisible architecture," which Downey associated with the
ing it the highest form of nonmonumental and antistate funer
Downey also kept up a close friendship with Roberto Matta's so
collaborated on the action and videotape Fresh Air (1971-74).
3. New consciousness: women, minorities.
USSR: the political (material) revolution that never grew into a psy-
chological revolution.
USA: Maybe, in the future, USA will generate some kind of psycholog-
ical revolution. But will it ever become political?
The dilemma: can you be happv (individual happiness = the deep and
total being in the Now) and still feel enough outrage to rebel?8
The terminology that both Fahlstrom and Downey use is ponderous: "psy-
chological revolution," "deep and total being in the Now," "direct
communication is beyond symbols," "cybernetic technology operating in syn-
chrony with our nervous systems is the alternative life." Lucid and active
inhabitants of the counterculture in 1973, they situated in the future these
ostensibly radical alterations of our being in the world at both an organic and
linguistic level, as well as whatever coincidences existed in many of the premises
and works of the neo-avant-garde movements and the "ways for self-realization"
enumerated in Fahlstrom's text. Not surprisingly, these visions also shared an
idealized origin.
The idea of primitivization, yoked to the tribal, exerts an ever-fantastic
hold on the Western imagination and is present in almost every Utopia as a pos-
itive projection onto egalitarian societies to come. The romanticized belief in
the primitive spans Rousseau's Enlightenment colonialist myth of the noble
Bon Sauvage, Marx and Engels's definition of primitive communism as the origi-
nal hunter-gatherer society of humanity (anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan in
turn had influenced Marx and Engels here), and the hippies' much later return
to nature, which, significantly, was synced with psychedelia. The projection is
both forward and backward in time. The large cultural promise inherent in the
topological manipulation of time through technological feedback, be it in the
social realm or circumscribed to the sphere of art, is that of a union, an eman-
cipatory reconciliation in the now of these equally idealized past and future
stages in which value and profit no longer regulate exchange, and in which lin-
earity and causality no longer domesticate consciousness.9
8. See http://www.fahlstrom.com for this and other texts by the artist.

9. Topology was a dominant mathematical metaphor of the period, and it has been recently theo-
rized and established as an art-historical figure of analysis by Eric de Bruyn in "Topological Pathways of
Post-Minimalism," Grey Room 25 (Fall 2006), pp. 32-39. Paul Ryan, who was a regular contributor to
Radical Software and was in a dialogue with Downey, published his book Cybernetics of the Sacred in 1973.
In this book, Ryan discusses the communitarian and therapeutic uses of videotape and comes up with
topological models using feedback loops.
98 OCTOBER
Video Trans Americas
The initial proposal for Video Trans Americas appeared for the first time in
the winter 1973 Radical Software, on the page following Downey's trippy
"Technology and Beyond" essay:
Many of America's cultures exist today in total isolation, unaware of

their overall variety and of commonly shared myths. This automobile
trip is designed to develop a holistic perspective among the various
populations inhabiting the American continents, thus generating cul-
tural interaction. A videotaped account from New York to the southern
tip of Latin America. A form of infolding in space while evolving in
time. Playing back a culture in the context of another, the culture itself
in its own context, and, finally, editing all the interactions of time,
space and context into one work of art. Cultural information (art,
architecture, cooking, dance, landscape, language, etc.) will be mainly
exchanged by means of videotape shot along the way and played back
in the different villages, for the people to see others and themselves.
The role of the artist is here conceived as a cultural communicant, as
an activating aesthetic anthropologist with visual means of expression:
videotape. The expedition will leave in July and return to New York in
early September, where the videotapes will be edited and presented in
final version.10
Downey's initial Video Trans Americas proposal encompassed an entire conti-

nent through video, with a finished totalizing art work defined as the "final
version." Downey imagined he could integrate political activism into his odyssey,
serving as "a cultural communicant" in the undetermined "villages" he would pass
through, thus, in effect, carrying out cultural and political unification across bor-
ders. Of course, to realize this proposal within three months was utterly naive and
unfeasible. Instead, between 1973 and 1976, Downey invested all his energies and
resources in a series of four trips to and from New York and different locales. His
various itineraries skipped between Texas, Peru, Bolivia, Mexico, Guatemala, and
Chile. He abandoned the spatial and temporal linearity that would have been
granted by the use of an automobile alone.
Downey edited almost all the material from his trips at Electronic Arts
Intermix in New York, a non-profit organization founded in 1971 and devoted to
the preservation and distribution of video art. He consolidated everything into a
complex multimedia piece, which he exhibited in at least two versions at three
American institutions: the Everson Museum of Arts, Syracuse, New York, in 1974;
the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas, in June 1976; and the Whitney
Museum of American Art, New York, in October of the same year. The Whitney was
10. Juan Downey, "Video Trans Americas," Radical Software 2, no. 5 (Winter 1973), p. 4.
then notoriously averse to s

text that could only enhan
Americas. A couple of phot
existing documentation of th
A north-south axis line is drawn across the room of the floor. Three
monitors for two-channel tapes have been placed at the North. One
monitor for the single tapes has been placed at the South. From a
point on the ceiling in the centre of the north-south axis line a film is
projected onto a screen built just off the floor. The viewers are invited
to put on slippers that have been placed around the screen. They can
then stand on the screen under the projector and their image is picked
up by a video camera, also on the ceiling, which casts their picture onto
two single monitors, while the north-south monitors simultaneously
play the double-channel and single-channel tapes. The viewer standing
directly under the projector is caught in a pyramid of light.11
Here, Downey attempts to integrate literal video feedback that directly invol
the spectator's perception with the social feedback implied in playing back va
ous cultures of the Americas in a North American context. The final version of
the installation combines quasi-ritualistic elements (donning special slippers to
enter a pyramid of light), a rendering of geographical coordinates in expanded
sculptural terms, and live video feedback. Through the latter especially, spectators
can become conscious of their own interactions within that elaborately con-
structed environment. Clearly, Downey used the video feedback loop in an
attempt to realize the biopolitics proposed in "Beyond Technology": "By expand-
ing our perception, electronic circuits strengthen the man/space relationship,
rendering apparent its dependency upon time."
The tapes run between twenty and thirty minutes and configure a sort of
gigantic, chapterized road movie. Downey considered each constituent segment
to be an individual piece as well as part of the whole. Lengthy horizontal traveling
shots taken from different means of transportation (cars, trains, airplanes, boats)
give the impression of perpetual movement. This constant, unifying motion is
combined with quasi-documentary material from the different locales, giving pref-
erence to public gatherings, everyday chores, popular music, and dance.
Everything comes together in Downey's ambivalent and autobiographically frag-
mented time frame. As part of his working process, he also kept a diary of his trips
and further elaborated on those notes, writing voiceovers as he was editing, mix-
ing these with bits of theory and research. These voiceovers lent coherence to the
heterogeneous material of his montage.
11. Juan Downey, "Video Trans Americas: Continual Installation at the Whitney Museum of American
Art, New York, September/ October 1976," in Juan Downey: With Energy Beyond These Walls, exh. cat.
(Valencia: Institut Valencia d'Art Modern, 1998), p. 335-36.
100 OCTOBER
No evidence,
political comp
the culture its
On the Road
Jack Kerouac's 1957 novel and the road movie culture it engendered served
as a model for Video Trans Americas. Downey's original proposal, which unrealisti-
cally declared the automobile as its chosen form of transportation all the way
from New York to the very southern tip of the continent, makes this evident. The
trip itself had become as much of a trope as the intended contact with the cul-
tures of the Americas that "exist today in total isolation." The allure that altered
states of consciousness - mingled with romanticized otherness and often located
in an archetypal past - held for U.S. artists and writers had already produced a
remarkable genealogy in which Video Trans Americas could be inscribed, with
Kerouac ending up in Mexico (which to him represented another world),
Burroughs chasing a mythical drug, Smithson pursuing hallucinations and Carlos
Castaneda, enlightenment. All these trips held out the promise of getting lost,
coupled with self-revelation. They were trips into the self, undertaken in front of
the realization that there is no unified self or subject.
Before Downey could fully access his self, which he began doing by turning
the tapes into an autobiographical epic, he had to fulfill the generational politi-
cal mandate to take the obligatory, liberatory trip across the Americas. The
liberation in these trips was meant to result in both travelers and locals being
opposed to colonialist occupation (including the taxonomic conquest of
Alexander von Humboldt and Aime Bonpland, the first Westerners in the
Amazon, the first namers of the things found there). The ultimate initiatory rev-
olutionary trip is Che Guevara's 1951 journey from Cordoba, Argentina, to
Peru's San Pablo leper colony on the banks of the Amazon River, narrated in his
book The Motorcycle Diaries. Guevara's saga, from his initial encounter with the
stark poverty of those who had been colonized to the successful Cuban revolu-
tion and the unsuccessful forays into Congo and, finally, Bolivia, where he was
assassinated in 1967, is but a series of mythic, liberatory trips.
Guevara, as well as the revolutionaries inspired by him, took Jose de San
Martin and Simon Bolivar's early-nineteenth-century anticolonialist military cam-
paigns as a model. These campaigns were long trips throughout the continent
that concluded with the establishment of separate nation states patterned after
the Spanish Crown's prior geopolitical and economic divisions. Starting in the
nineteenth century, the British Empire - whose extensive neocolonial influence
was epitomized by the combination of the ferocious Barings Bank, which con-
trolled fluxes of capital, and the Royal Navy, which controlled fluxes of
commodities - came to replace the colonial domination of Spain and Portugal.
Feedback in the A mazon 101
Throughout these shifts

Catholic Church remained undiminished. Its role in the erasure of vernacular cul-
tures, as a means of maintaining economic control, lingered well into the late
twentieth century. Downey's search for cultural difference, and the search for a
part of himself in that difference, inevitably meant facing the complexities and
distortions of syncretism as well as the question of Catholicism's grip.
Moving Ideas
It would take more than a century after the consolidation of Latin American
nation states for U.S. imperialism to replace British colonialism. Notably, this
process played out on its own without any Latin American intervention whatso
ever. After this transition, an effective critique of Catholicism's hand in
perpetuating economic servitude was launched. In the Second Ecumenical
Council of the Vatican, opened under Pope John XXIII in 1962 and closed under
Pope Paul VI in 1965, liberation theology emerged. Liberation theology's
methodological innovation was to approach theology from the viewpoint of the
economically poor and oppressed. Obviously, this shift implied an auto-critique o
the Church itself and of an analysis of the reasons and forms of the oppression it
helped to foster. Ultimately, this critique was carried out in Marxist terms.
Two priest-theorists, Brazilian Leonardo Boff and Peruvian Gustavo
Gutierrez, carried out the seemingly impossible task of reconciling Catholicism
and Marxism. Ultimately, an assertion that Gutierrez extracted from theologica
sources - that we must recognize the suffering face of Christ in the face of the
poor - became both a slogan and an image of lasting power for social activists.
Their writings became mandatory reading for all South American Leninist and
Guevarist - and even early Maoist - militants in the 1960s. Many would-be guerril
las emerged from those grassroots Catholic activist groups that sought to help th
poorest. Their writings and actions shaped the ethics and aesthetics of Downey'
generation. Liberation theology acolytes typically would travel to the most impov
erished rural or urban areas and try to transform them at a local level. Thi
process reflects another aspect of Guevara's trip, in which a descent from the
comfort of the urban middle class into the social infernos of the most oppressed
classes illuminates and informs the need for the subversion of dominant Western
power structures.
The adoption of Foquismo, or "Foco [focus] theory," multiplied and intensi-
fied the effects of liberation theology. This theory proposed, against predominant
Marxist theory, that there was no need to wait for the "objective conditions" of a
popular uprising to engage the last stage of the revolutionary, that is, armed,
struggle. Foco theory was based on the revolutionary experience of Che Guevara
in Cuba, and formalized by the French intellectual Regis Debray, who taught at
the University of Havana in 1960 and was captured and jailed in Bolivia in 1967
102 OCTOBER
during the rev

small, fast-mo
tent against a
the original th
by the late 19
movements. G
World countrie
and the peasan
Significantly,
of a precolon
modernity. A
coincidences a
realities of opp
were not opera
ried at the ver
and artists of
an instrumenta
allel between t
of actual socia
Brazilian educ
associated with
12. Downey never

gle, but was entir
Allende in his native Chile.
Downey traveled to Chile in 1974 as part of Video Trans Americas. He owned his means of produc-
tion and had access to editing facilities and conditions of production and exhibition in the U.S. with-
out risking torture or his life, unlike Chilean artists and filmmakers of the period. (Censorship was
another matter. Downey was censored by no less than a Rockefeller when he exhibited his 1975 Map o
Chile in New York's Center for Inter-American Relations. The map featured a live anaconda on top sym-
bolizing the exploitation by the Anaconda mining company of Chile's copper.) He also had access to
Chile's artistic spheres and its intelligentsia. These circumstances enabled him to produce a unique se
of works. The three pieces described below synthesize in my view Downey's lucid position on this trau-
matic period in Chile's history.
Chile (shot in 1971, edited in 1974) and Chicago Boys (1982-83) tackle directly Allende's loss and
the economic consequences of Pinochet's coup. In Chile, Downey himself translates and does the voice-
over for Allende's famous farewell speech shortly before his assassination. Then he enumerates revela
tory data from the first year of Pinochet's military budget. Chile signals a shift in Downey's relationship
to his motherland: he is not an elective expatriate anymore. He has become an exile.
In Chicago Boys, he mixes several "situation" shots of life in Chile that could very well be part of
some BBC special with interviews of Chilean economists trained by professors at the University of
Chicago. Instead of denunciation or a confrontational exchange, the interviews are borderline comic.
Downey made his subjects feel comfortable, so their arrogance and disconnect between economic the
ory and reality can express itself.
Finally, No (1988) is a one-minute promotional spot for the campaign of the 1988 plebiscite that
would end Pinochet's regime. Downey co-opts the nascent aesthetic of visual effects characteristic of
early MTV and combines this hypertechnological visual aspect with sound produced by a Mapuch
Kultrun drum and his voice in sync with his own heartbeat. This is a piece in which Downey produce
art as political advertising to be played on open TV, in another display of his deep understanding o
media ecology.
exploit established social st

instruments of oppression b
Freire had started to do soci
ing in presidential elections
education, class, and politica
acy in the Brazilian Northea
then exiled during the 196
year he wrote his influentia
Freire theorizes educationa
defined by both educand an
verticality that perpetuated
the educational system. Thu
and literacy, that is, langua
and structural level.
The fundamental thought processes of these revolutionary forms of theol-
ogy and pedagogy are clear: Catholicism is here to stay. So are Spanish and Portuguese
as the official languages of Latin American nation-states. We are the West, at least in our
political form as nations inhabited and animated by language and religion. We must refor-
mulate them to include the excluded. The excluded belong to non-Western cultures,
languages, and religions that are nonetheless permeated and dominated by the West and fun-
damentally fractured. The course of action, then, is to infiltrate the dominating structures,
and the disciplines and methodologies that regulate them, in a reflective reversal.
Without oversimplifying Freire 's, BofFs, and Gutierrez's intertwined contri-
butions, one can parallel Downey's approach to portable video technology with
those thinkers' attempts to exploit Catholicism and the educational system in the
service of liberation. All forms of image capturing and the representations arising
from them have been an instrumental part of colonialist and neocolonialist domi-
nation. For that reason, within liberation struggles, many perceived advanced
technology such as video as a tool of oppression. Downey clearly took colonialism
and imperialism to be his subject matter and attempted to transform the role of
video in shaping reality in this context.
In Video Trans Americas, the contradictions between social and perceptual
video feedback, nonlinearity, and all-encompassing structure in the exhibition
of a multipart art work are analogous to the contradictions inherent in attempts
to reconcile Western theology and pedagogy with the sociocultural and geopolit-
ical realities of the Third World. Downey aligns himself more with a logic of
subversion than with a logic of total change, identifying both within and outside
himself the need to integrate the contradictions of being both in the West and
its beyond. Video technology is then a locus for inner and external transforma-
tion. The inherent idealism of Video Trans Americas, which specifically cast video
as a cure for fragmentation, hasn't structurally changed much since Downey
embarked on his first trips: "The role of the artist is here conceived as a cultural
104 OCTOBER
communicant
expression: vi
Poetic
In December
of his epic in
nation-states
Spanish and w
Virgin Mary
tion of liberat
with the mak
number of So
social artistic
called ALFIN
Peru within f
had between t
The ALFIN pr
Alvarado. In 1
Terry failed t
ousted him in
surrounded hi
Allende, Fidel
matic relatio
program based
dent groups m
encouraged ar
as they were id
Among those
director Augu
Spanish in Bu
analysis of the
ing conditio
constitutes an
break theater d
Boal anticipate
In the beginn
singing in th
Later, the ru
dividing walls. First, they

spectators: people who act
Secondly, among the actors
mass. The coercive indoctri
Now the oppressed peop

more, are making the th
down. First, the spectator s
theater, image theater, etc
private property of the
"Joker" system.13
Boal's call to action amoun

from political revolutionary
pline like theater. Boal's wri
from an extensive and rigoro
ular, explaining the mechani
though guilt, later reenacted
for indoctrination and domination:
How Aristotle's Coercive System of Tragedy Functions
The spectacle begins. The tragic hero appears. The public establishes a
kind of empathy with him.
The action starts. Surprisingly, the hero shows a flaw in his behavior, a
hamartia; and even more surprising, one learns it is by virtue of this same
hamartia that the hero has come to this present state of happiness -
[T]hree interdependent elements (peripeteia, anagnorisis, catastrophe)

have the ultimate goal of provoking catharsis in the spectator (as much
or more than in the character); that is, their purpose is to produce a pur-
gation of the hamartia, passing through three defined stages.14
Boal's analysis negatively engaged the subject-object that both the "cam-
era/body/monitor" and the "social self" fields of video feedback practitioners
were trying to address either as literal presence or as information. This
involved a classic, modernist reading of Bertolt Brecht applied to paradigms of
language and to the notion of character. In the latter, political character and
theatrical character seem to have collapsed into one entity. Boal, like Downey,
13. Augusto Boal, Theater of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride (New
York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985), p. 119.
14. Ibid., pp. 36-37.
106 OCTOBER
was preoccup
of a theory. A
degree of poli
If we were t
belonging to
with subject,
Beach!" Here
impulses wer
Cuba; "invade
On the other
type propose
presence of a main clause and a subordinate clause, in which
"Kennedy" would continue to be the subject; but the subject of the
main clause would be another. The sentence which would best
explain the dramatic action, in this case, would be something

this: "Economic forces led Kennedy to invade Giron Beach." I beli
that Bertolt Brecht's position is clear: the real subject is econo
forces which acted behind Kennedy. The main clause is alway
interrelation of economic forces. The character is not free at all. H
an object-subject.15
This kind of leap from aesthetic and linguistic theory to politica

by way of incendiary examples, is absolutely typical of the South Ame
ligentsia of the period. Moreover, this way of thinking informe
art-making - and poetics - just as much as the New York video
Marshall McLuhan, the ultimate guru of the Radical Software bun
Boal's penchant for classical Greek culture. The rhetoric of McL
Radical Software, however, generally invokes classical culture and philo
abstract explanatory level, without making a connection to current ev
The word "metaphor" is from the Greek meta plus pherein, to ca

across or transport. In this book we are concerned with all forms
transports of goods and information, both as metaphor and
exchange. Each form of transport not only carries, but translates and
transforms, the sender, the receiver, and the message. The use of any
kind of medium or extension of man alters the patterns of interde-
pendence among people, as it alters the ratios among our senses.16
As his proposal for Video Trans Americas stated, Downey clearly intended the
15. Ibid., p. 92.

16. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964),
pp. 89-90.
transformation of "the sende

only from the standpoint of
social subject matter deployed
In terms of Minimalist and po
video art into the canon of ar
disqualify him. Downey co
terms, both as an exemplar
Accordingly, he understood t
tion. Downey's text "Beyon
bio-feedback coupled with ant
dented. He published this tex
proposal for Video Trans Ameri
thesize the lines of thought e
As a classic Marxist milita
making entailed strict attent
those he wanted to liberate. H
forms of participatory theat
ple to develop and organize
reproduced these pictures a
them in any way. Instead, th
not to harbor any contradict
"Maybe the theater in itself i
without a doubt a rehearsal of the revolution."17
In contrast, an entry in Downey's diary, dated New York, April 1975, reveals
his ambivalence about dissolving art-making into direct political action, even if it
were only at the level of the model:
The following text was written in one shot during a subway ride from
home to Hunter College, as a partial soundtrack for the Lima videotape:
17. Augusto Boal, Theater of the Oppressed, p. 120. Boal, Downey, and myself may have been in Peru at
the same time. In February 1973, I was six years old, and together with my mother we went to visit my
aunt Marta Campana, who was part of ALFIN. She had studied puppeteering in Socialist Czechoslovakia.
We made a trip in a small truck staging a puppet play in several villages around Cuzco, in both Quechua
and Aymara, followed by a Spanish version. The troupe was mixed Argentine and Peruvian. We crafted
new puppets in every village together with the locals. In the play, peasants killed the oppressive hench-
men of the landowner and formed a cooperative that enabled them to profit from the land and their
labor. Often, by the end of the play a group would approach us with guns so we could go fetch the
landowners and their employees and actually kill them. My mother and aunt went to great lengths to
explain that this was just a representation meant to make them think, and that we were not going to par-
ticipate in any direct action, which was ultimately up to them, and was very likely to be disastrous and
immediately crushed. I vividly recall being preoccupied with the question of the truth (my mother would
constantly nag me about not lying about my whereabouts, for I was frequently drifting around with the
village children, etc.) and the devastating effect it had on me to perceive that those people had an indis-
soluble contract between the symbolic and the real. Where was the consciousness we were trying to
impart with puppeteering in ourselves? It was we who were removed from reality.
Boal lived in Buenos Aires and married an Argentine psychoanalyst who was in my family's social
circle. However, I only met him later while he was living in Paris in 1983.
108 OCTOBER
Art should re
Art should ch
Art is coming
An artist sho
of domestic
Today's worl
do not understand the art of the elite.
There is no cultural freedom in socialist countries: consequently, artists

should not be concerned with politics.
I hate non-political art.
What is this shit? is it art or politics? . . .
This is a political rally in Lima, Peru, in support of their leftist military

dictatorship. The Peruvian government is right now about to national-
ize foreign-owned copper mines.
This government for the masses is not liked by the masses. But I dig it
anyway because it has done some social good and because I love to hear
rich people complaining at their plush dinner tables.
You are contradicting yourself.
Aesthetics and Revolution are difficult to balance: a little bit of this and
how big a bit of that?18
Yanomamis
By October 1976, Downey had acted upon most of the ideological contra-
dictions and convergences that had prompted the Video Trans Americas project.
He had tried out Marcuse's dictum - as Fahlstrom pasted it in his manifesto,
"the new rebellion is both moral and aesthetic, rather than a clear-cut class
18. Juan Downey, "New York, April 1975," in Juan Downey: With Energy Beyond These Walls, p. 333.
struggle" - in the actual s

forth between radically dif
the New York art scene in
as how to find a balance between aesthetics and revolution. Nonetheless, the
project remained inconclusive, both in clarifying the questions of the self that
are implicit in video art and in Downey's search for his own, authentic selfhood
by means of merging his video practice with a continental journey.
In those social spaces, Downey encountered, documented, and reflected
upon the significant political and cultural landscape of the Americas in the
period, but he never discovered the pure primitive whom he romanticized and
yearned for. In his imagination, this idealized and extreme other would complete
his own self-identity. If the logic of self-examination through video implied a
dynamic between an other and the self, mediated by technology, Downey found in
the exoticized "outside" the same contradictions already present inside his own
subjectivity. By "outside" I mean not only that which constituted the subject mat-
ter of his work, what he found in the trips, but also the audience to which he
presented all this in U.S. museums.
The fundamental contradictions were if anything clearer, because finally
"editing all the interactions of time, space, and context into one work of art"
and showing the results in the Whitney Museum was not going to transform
them. The ghost of the autonomous art work, deactivated by the very same cir-
culation system that renders it legible, haunted this project. Downey had not
succeeded in altering the production/reception equation. The idea of "playing
back a culture in the context of another, the culture itself in its own context"
was both an aspiration never really fulfilled and a summary of the use of video
technology as social feedback in a project that attempted to define "the role of
the artist conceived as a cultural communicant." It also serves as an index of
Downey's direction and frustration.19
Downey decided to go into the Amazon, where he would live with the
Guahibos in late 1976 and with the Yanomamis until May 31, 1977. He hoped that
this would be the ultimate realization of Video Trans Americas. Only the contact
with the pure primitive could finally destroy the autonomy to which art-making
seemed to be condemned: "Although the black-and-white expeditions are a well-
rounded work of art themselves, it seems necessary to expand into the areas where
an encounter with the savage mind will most likely occur."20
Before going into the jungle to meet people he considered neither
19. The idea of playing American spectacular culture in and against its own context, which has its
subversive roots in Warhol, was executed with video and TV networks by Dara Birnbaum in 1979: "[My
piece] Technology /Transformation: Wonder Woman was put on cable TV opposite the "real" Wonder
Woman on network TV. So if you were channel-flipping, hopefully you could come across both ver-
sions - which I felt could destabilize the meaning and intention of the original network program. The
attempt to change context was very naive but very honest. We were trying to change things by permeat-
ing different territories." Birnbaum, in Guagnini, "Cable TV's Failed Utopian Vision," p. 36.
20. Downey, in Juan Downey: With Energy Beyond These Walls, p. 336.
110 OCTOBER
oppressed nor
nized rural an
conducted ex
Pierre Clastres he found a kindred Marxist but one with an anarchist bent, who
wrote about a perfect leisure society where "total social facts" were aligned with
Downey's deep desire for a "direct communication beyond symbols":
And when the Indians discovered the productive superiority of the

white men's axes, they wanted them not in order to produce more in
the same amount of time, but to produce as much in a period of time
ten times shorter. Exactly the opposite occurred, for, with the metal
axes, the violence, the force, the power which the civilized newcom-
ers brought to bear on the Savages created havoc in the primitive
Indian world.
Primitive societies are, as Lizot writes with regard to the Yanomami,

societies characterized by the rejection of work: "The Yanomami's
contempt for work and their disinterest in technological progress
per se are beyond question." These constitute the first leisure soci-
eties, the first affluent societies, according to M. Sahlin's apt and
playful expression.
If the project of establishing an economic anthropology of primitive

societies as an independent discipline is to have any meaning, the lat-
ter cannot derive merely from a scrutiny of the economic life of
those societies: one would remain within the confines of an ethnolo-
gy of description, the description of a non-autonomous dimension of

primitive social life. Rather, it is when that dimension of the "total
social fact" is constituted as an autonomous sphere that the notion of
an economic anthropology appears justified: when the refusal of
work disappears, when the taste for accumulation replaces the sense
of leisure; in a word, when the external force mentioned above
makes its appearance in the social body. That force without which
the Savages would never surrender their leisure, that force which
destroys society insofar as it is primitive society, is the power to com-
pel; it is the power of coercion; it is political power. But economic
anthropology is invalidated in any case; in a sense, it loses its object
at the very moment it thinks it has grasped it: the economy becomes
a political economy.2i
21. Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State (1974; repr. Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books, 1987),
pp. 196-97. On the question of work and the orthodox Marxist obsession with production, Henri
Lefebvre is lapidary: "Economic statistics cannot answer the question: 'What is Socialism?' Men do
not fight and die for tons of steel, or for tanks or atomic bombs. They aspire to be happy, not to
Clastres arrived at a form

anthropology," to avoid a p
primitive social life" (which
Yanomamis on video). Non
avant-garde artist, knew al
thinks it has grasped it." V
(even under exhibition con
suffice. Such an approach
Western artist or anthro
Yanomamis. To realize video
images that will inevitabl
choosing to use this techno
access to the experiential.
The Yanomamis' "contemp
progress per se" nonethe
Downey's technology of ch
instrumentalized. Total leisure would disconnect it, in effect, from an
immediate network of the exchange of signs and value. This promised an esca
from the deadlock formed by New York's two prescribed modes of video feed
back application: the positions of "art-making" as an alienated disciplina
activity that inevitably ends up in the cul-de-sac of exchange value, and socia
activism with its belief in the re-endowment of use value in a portable techn
ogy designed for the leisure industry. It also presented a quasi-pure social and
cultural reality free of oppression, uncontaminated by Spanish or Portuguese
semantics and grammar, indifferent to the imperatives of both Catholicism a
political revolution. In short, a wholly functional society without Christ and th
state, outside the West.
Concurrent with the Amazon period of Video Trans America, Downey specif
cally theorized how the "tribe" of video artists was beginning to produce its ow
political economy. Like him, these artists valued experiences and experiments t
rejected a stable and permanently re-playable (or not even able to be restaged
"work of art" exemplified by recorded video - as opposed to live feedback. In
1977 text, he formalized the inherent impermanence of Fahlstrom's "deep an
total being in the Now" as actually being diametrically opposed to making and
circulating videotapes:
The TV box stands between us and the imagery bombardment, as a
view from a bay window is removed from the lively, foaming, regenera-
tive exchanges of the constant ocean. The videotape object markets
itself as a Zen paradox. The aspiration of permanence for videotapes is in
produce." Critique of Everyday Life, vol. 1, trans. John Moore (1947; repr. London: Verso Editio
1992), p. 48. Absolutely in line with Fahlstrom: "USSR: the political (material) revolution th
never grew into a psychological revolution."
112 OCTOBER
itself the Ki
(emphasis mi
Downey never
which would h
new move or p
that the way
the technologi
situation as an
the primitive
archies of dev
This ideologica
tal revolution
trauma that u
with technolog
By putting t
Downey would
time-only enco
Jacques Lizot, a protege of Claude Levi-Strauss, whom Clastres referenced as

the anthropologist who observed the Yanomami's leisure society, met Downey in
the Amazon. Lizot had lived there for about eight years. The two forged a friend-
ship, and Lizot appears in The Abandoned Shabono, a 1977-79 videotape. The
voiceover was, this time, co-written by the artist and the anthropologist. This sin-
gular tape departs markedly from previous Video Trans Americas tapes. As far as I
can tell, it is the only piece that Downey declared to be an anthropological docu-
ment of his own production in the Amazon.
The Abandoned Shabono documents experiences with video feedback, splitting
Downey into both documentarian-anthropologist and subject, somehow placing
"art-making" in suspension between the two. In one sequence, the Yanomamis
play with a camera and a monitor in feedback mode. This is followed by shots they
have taken of a disheveled, Robinsonian Downey. Footage of ritual drug use
ensues, in which two shamans shoot powdered hallucinogenic seeds in each
other's noses through both ends of a blowgun. The parallel that the editing high-
lights is explicit: feedback had become an effect of magical reciprocity and thus,
from an anthropological perspective, deserved to be documented. Photons equal
alkaloids, generating "invisible energy."
An interview between Downey and Lizot, shot in New York and self-
mockingly staged like a highbrow talk show, concludes the tape. Here, Downey
22. Juan Downey, "Architecture, Video, Telepathy. A Communications Utopia," in Juan Downey: With
Energy Beyond These Walls, p. 347.
ironically has donned a tie

scrutinizing his own produc
once contact has been established:
Downey: So you are the prophet of the Indian's death, then? (raising one
eyebrow)
Lizot: I am not only the prophet of the Indian's death but I believe that
I am as well the prophet of our own death. One must clearly under-
stand that the end of their civilization prefigures our own death.23
Circa 1977, the system of successive breakthroughs that historicism deploys

to make us evaluate a work of art as a function of its position within an unbroken
chain of events was running out of steam. This essential condition of European
modernism signals its demise in the Holocaust and Hiroshima. During late capi-
talism's unobstructed, universal expansion in the Americas, the radical and
terminal demands formulated in the decade prior to Downey's trip became ever
more impossible to meet: dissolution of art into everyday life, prevalence of
process over product, liquidation of authorship as a patriarchal and commercial
trademark - in short, a total undoing of Western art as a commodified instrument
of domination at both the production and circulation levels.24
This was the challenge for (and in) art-making that Downey understood so
well. It is under these recognized conditions that he produced and exhibited
Video Trans Americas both as videotapes and as a large installation. Ultimately,
these contexts had already condemned their practitioners and their produc-
tions to existential impossibility (or to an indexical, critical, and self-referential
demonstration of the complicity inherent in that impossibility, as we have seen
in the artist's statement about the marketing of videotapes).
Moreover, all revolutionary attempts in South America that, for Downey, had
an ideological correspondence with the aforesaid demands and could generate
modes of existence to allow them to breathe had been drowned in bloodshed.
The Cuban revolution, proving to be not the historical rule but the exception,
could not be exported to South America. Foco theory and Guevarism had failed
abysmally, literally taking away the best of Downey's generation and several of his
personal interlocutors.
Withdrawal was not an option, nor was acquiescence or total integration.
23. This statement, meant to be uttered from an anthropological standpoint and towards an ideo-
logical position for the discipline, was also insightful as to Downey's fate. Downey suffered bouts of
malaria, as almost every foreigner that enters the rain forest does, that went untreated. He went deep-
er into Yanomami territory to avoid the official boat that carried DDT for fear that he would be force-
fully removed from the Amazon to be hospitalized. This, in conjunction with the powerful hallucino-
gens he ingested to participate in rituals, debilitated his body, and in the long run he paid with his life.
Interview with Marilys Downey by the author, July 9, 2007, New York.
24. The last contestatory rock subculture, punk, emerged m 197b. Not surprisingly death alter 3\)
was part of their anti-hippie program. Punk can be seen as the final foreclosure of the 1960s, and the
last self-conscious sprout of suicidal anarchism before the sellout of the '80s began.
114 OCTOBER
(Downey had
even though
Documenta, m
the remaining
verted Weste
demands. He d
seeing him, r
munity. This
to the death
The implicatio
Wher
As Levi-Strau
tion of uniq
Levi-Strauss al
primeval parad
pended; on th
him - and us -
of progress, n
As art work
tions call for
the object of
solely to int
undertaking:
Yanomami co
tricity gene
unexplored pa
nature, Down
guage of a da
males die fro
and children
ing of strange
Downey took
video equipme
at Downey's s
few photos he
allowed them
tioned videot
experiences, e
the implacabl
found neither answers nor resolutions. His search instead revealed an ethical
dimension, a discursive resi

of production. As an epilogu
diary, the only other available
The Yanomami took great in

Untiringly (far beyond the exten
film and tapes that I had of th
the camera took pride and ple
enthusiastically to playing with
able angles and distances. Since
t
cause sorrow to their descendan
tronic and cybernetic technology
transition of behavior, a game
which did not violate their ritua
temperament and fancy.
One night we were watching
dozens of mosquitoes were flying
ting on the screen itself, obscur
the great numbers of mosquitoe
nous content emerging from th
whatever happens in the blue con
Or, better still, the concomitan
watchers absorbed in the program
The Yanomami seemed to see n
both representations are a redu
tal eyes, which have witnessed t
and their presumed progress from
For the Indians, both are noresh
son; but never is it the person itse
Video, as process or as instrum
motor, a shotgun or a flashlight.
another thing that the "strange
trast, in our culture, T V. transp
goods!) Closed circuit or live televi
Last night I woke up torment
who live in our loft in New York
refused to give it back to us on
awoke, so much so that I thoug
prise, I heard the midnight ne
internationally accused of viol
several government buildings i
25. Juan Downey, "Noreshi Towai," i
116 OCTOBER
50 much happin
to me a possible
dreamed of an
marvelous it w
countries were
afraid I would a
cruel than all t
exploitation wil
Perhaps I have
lization, and a
one level of con
me that I projec
these possible
Washington, or
munication, wo
range of my be
this kind of ide
disjunction, th
science I have b
26. Juan Downey

Feedback in The Amazon by Nicolás Guagnini

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Feedback in the Amazon

Author(s): Nicolás Guagnini

Before the Departure

Communists, and from th

Downey, in the crypto-analytic and cyber-utopic tone typical of Rad

4. Temporality's functioning within the specificity of each medium is clearly identified in

Harry Shunk.Jtian Downey

York's technological explos

The invisible architect becomes one with energ

The figure of an "invisible architect" who "becom

The new rebellion is both moral and aesthetic, ra

USA and Western Europe. The three major trend

1. Dada. Zen, John Cage. The sixties: new art, p

2. Ways to self-realization. Mysticism, meditat

6. Juan Downey, "Technology and Beyond," Radical Software 2

3. New consciousness: women, minorities.

8. See http://www.fahlstrom.com for this and other texts by the artist.

Video Trans Americas

Many of America's cultures exist today in total isolation, unaware of

Downey's initial Video Trans Americas proposal encompassed an entire conti-

then notoriously averse to s

Throughout these shifts

during the rev

12. Downey never

exploit established social st

dividing walls. First, they

Now the oppressed peop

Boal's call to action amoun

How Aristotle's Coercive System of Tragedy Functions

[T]hree interdependent elements (peripeteia, anagnorisis, catastrophe)

explain the dramatic action, in this case, would be something

This kind of leap from aesthetic and linguistic theory to politica

The word "metaphor" is from the Greek meta plus pherein, to ca

15. Ibid., p. 92.

transformation of "the sende

There is no cultural freedom in socialist countries: consequently, artists

I hate non-political art.

What is this shit? is it art or politics? . . .

This is a political rally in Lima, Peru, in support of their leftist military

You are contradicting yourself.

how big a bit of that?18

struggle" - in the actual s

And when the Indians discovered the productive superiority of the

Primitive societies are, as Lizot writes with regard to the Yanomami,

If the project of establishing an economic anthropology of primitive

gy of description, the description of a non-autonomous dimension of

Clastres arrived at a form

Feedback in the Amazon

Jacques Lizot, a protege of Claude Levi-Strauss, whom Clastres referenced as

ironically has donned a tie

Circa 1977, the system of successive breakthroughs that historicism deploys

dimension, a discursive resi

The Yanomami took great in

25. Juan Downey, "Noreshi Towai," i

26. Juan Downey

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