In recovery - Chilean art - Report from Chile

Art in America, Oct, 1996 by Ann Wilson Lloyd

Museums dedicated to contemporary art are encouragingly popping up in remote places like Chiloe, a far-southern coastal island, and Valdivia, a mid-southern city. Some 800 miles south of Santiago, the Museo de Arte Moderno de Chiloe claims to be the southernmost contemporary art museum in the world. It has a well-chosen collection and shows interesting temporary exhibitions during Chile's summer season, January and February. Construction has just started on the city of Valdivia's new Museo de Arte Contemporaneo (MAC), which will open in early 1998. Once a German brewery, the site has been an abandoned ruin since a devastating 1961 earthquake. It was recently donated to Austral University to be restored for use as a museum.

Late next year, MAC Valdivia will host an international exhibition of site-specific works curated by Dan Cameron, but already temporary installations have appeared in the still-unfinished building. Early this year, three Santiago-based artists inaugurated the space with a collaborative installation in one of the huge brewery's basement corridors. They marked the transformation of this former site of colonial enterprise with a high-tech art-historical deconstruction, a work in the planning stages at the time of my visit.

Juan Gabler, Felix Lazo and Patricio Flano work collaboratively under the name Mallok-O, which comes from the town (Malloco) where they made their first joint installation in 1992. At Valdivia, they hung seven slide projectors from the corridor ceiling, triggered to randomly flash scrambled passages from art books, thus creating new fragments and new possibilities for the new space.

Mallok-O's collaborative work is marked by a wry, poetic and economical meshing of site-specific issues with others that refer to the broad collective culture, and they frequently make use of found objects, technology and literary themes. "Codice," an ambitious 1995-96 installation that occupied all the galleries of Santiago's contemporary art museum, had three subthemes. "Journey" began with a pathway of rubble at the museum entrance that referred to the history of the museum's beleaguered Beaux-Arts building, a former fine-arts academy attached to the back of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. The building was closed throughout the dictatorship, having been damaged twice by fires and again by an earthquake. The first floor only was reopened in 1992 as the contemporary museum, though "Academia de Bellas Artes" is still etched across the stone facade. "Codice" played upon the lingering idea of the traditional academy by having viewers walk across rubble taken from the reconstruction of the city's Avenida Grecia, the site of student demonstrations in the early years of the dictatorship.

From this unstable beginning, viewers entered the galleries to find eight separate installations such as Urea Pro Nobis and Still Life. The catalogue explained that Urea Pro A7obis, a bank of seven urinals connected by precise and intricate loops of copper tubing, had to do with recycled energy circulating through the human body and represented the subject of "Light." But Duchamp was the persistent reference. In Still Life--the subtheme is "Matter"--three tripods made of cinnamon wood (the sacred tree of Chile's Araucanian tribes, according to the catalogue) held a dead rabbit and two video monitors. One monitor showed a flickering image of a female nude, while from the other a single blinking eye stared across at the nude. One's first thought was of Beuys, yet Still Life touched on such sweeping subjects as indigenous cultures, art history, desire, death, the male gaze, etc. Its spare multiplicity exemplifies Mallok-O's guiding principle of the "open work," summed up in the catalogue by a quote from Umberto Eco: "Openness understood as the essential ambiguity of the artistic message is a permanent part of all works at all times."