Imaging community: video in the installation work of Pepon Osorio

Pepon Osorio is a mixed-media artist whose work is grounded in Latino popular culture. He was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, in 1955, and moved to the South Bronx, New York, in 1975. From approximately 1982 to 1987, his work approached Puerto Rican identity from the perspective of one living on the island. During this time he worked primarily with objects of Latino popular culture and exhibited his work in Puerto Rico and at ethnic-identified museums in New York.(1)

In 1985, after a decade of living in the South Bronx, Osorio changed his visual and thematic vocabulary to address a need for cultural reaffirmation as a means of defining and validating self-identity.(2) By integrating a culturally specific visual vocabulary with his lived experience of social realities, Osorio further challenged prevailing notions about Latino art including that held by many intellectuals who define popular culture (seen by the community as everyday artistic expression) as kitsch. This change in Osorio's vocabulary culminated in 1987 with his most widely recognized work, La Cama (The bed).(3) This piece marks another shift in Osorio's artistic practice in which he began to focus on exhibiting in group shows, while working as a set and installation designer primarily in collaboration with choreographer Merian Soto, as part of evolving his visual and thematic vocabulary to more directly address and make visible the Latino body, both individual and social. Osorio tried to answer the question of where the body is in his work by supplementing art pieces with performance and dance. By physically performing as part of the work, Osorio juxtaposed the implied but physically absent body in such pieces as La Cama with his own stated and physically present body in performance. In 1991 El Museo del Barrio commissioned from Osorio El Velorio: AIDS in the Latino Community as part of a major retrospective of his work at El Museo. This exhibition further characterized his use of art as a form of community outreach designed to foster dialogue around important issues affecting the Latino community.

It was in the early 1990s, however, that Osorio began to incorporate video into his mixed-media work about Latino popular culture, beginning with his installation Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime?) shown in the 1993 Whitney Biennial. His selection marked his entrance into the mainstream art world, and significantly, it also marked his shift to the use of video, from his own performing body, as a cultural mediator. His Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime?) was featured in the New York Times's review of the biennial, which tied Osorio's work in with the major criticism launched against the show. The controversy around the biennial concerning what kind of works - and by extension, which social groups - could enter the dominant cultural museum space influenced Osorio's decision not to show new work in mainstream museums until it had been first shown in his community.(4) This decision was also influenced by his realization that though his contribution brought the museum's attention to the artistic cultural production of Puerto Ricans, it did not in and of itself bring Puerto Ricans into the museum. In other words the focus in his work on the Latino body did not necessarily guarantee the visibility of that social body.

This presents a source of anxiety for the artist that often surfaces in his attempts to stage, and thus make visible, the relationship between representations of the body (imaging) and the imagining of community. For example, La Cama represents the Latino body and culture through a structured absence and an implied body.(5) In The Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime?), the body is that of a woman who we are led to speculate has been murdered by her husband. Her body (a mannequin "corpse" lying face down on the floor) is roped off by police tape with the instructions "police line: do not cross," and the only access to the Latino body (individual and social) is by means of objects in the domestic space (personal photographs, sentimental bric-a-brac, trophies, patron saints) that signify the presence of "real" Latino bodies as having once inhabited this staged cultural space [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. As the title of the work suggests, however, there are the questions of whose crime scene this is and why the Latino body must necessarily be represented as an implied body.

Any initial reading of the scene as a "typical" representation of Latino domestic space is immediately deconstructed. This is achieved by Osorio's having roped off the scene, only allowing the viewer to enter the space conditionally. The welcome mat to the exhibit reads: ". . . only if you can understand that it has taken years of pain to gather into our homes our most valuable possessions; but the greater pain is to see how in the movies others make fun of the way we live." The issue of Latino domestic violence raised by the crime scene is redefined to confront how U.S. Latinos are represented in mainstream American culture primarily as violent criminals. Osorio establishes a direct connection between the wounded body of the crime scene and the imag(in)ing of Latino bodies in dominant cultural production. most especially in Hollywood film, by using video to underscore the relationship between representation and the real. Actual videotape boxes of films depicting Latino stereotypes are used to frame the space and the various fictitious portrayals of Latinos. On each box is a "statement" made by people in the Latino community Osorio interviewed about how they are affected by representations of Latinos in Hollywood film: