Leandro Katz at the Museo del Barrio - photography installation in New York City museum - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Art in America, Dec, 1996 by Christopher Phillips

In two installations, both related to ongoing projects, Argentine born artist and filmmaker Leandro Katz suggested the interweaving of myth and history in Latin America. The first centers on the drawings made by Frederick Catherwood, a British artist who visited the Yucatan in the 1830s and published the first accurate renderings of the Maya ruins at Chichen Itza and Uxmal. In 37 photographs, both color and black and white, Katz uses a range of formal devices to spur the viewer's curiosity as to what is revealed and what is concealed by Catherwood's images. In some cases Katz simply juxtaposes a reproduction of one of Catherwood's drawings with his own present day photograph of the site, taken from precisely the same vantage point (inevitably, the tourists). More theatrically, using repeated flash exposures at night, Katz populates an architectural ruin with shrouded, ghostly figures--an allusion to the striking absence of the Maya themselves in Catherwood's drawings.

The more dramatic Project for the Day You'll Love Me, an offshoot of a film that Katz is preparing on the myth of Che Guevara, confines itself to imagery associated with Che's final days. An extensive chronology, presented as a 41-foot-long chart running the length of one gallery wall, follows the Argentine-born revolutionary's disastrous 11-month campaign to spark an uprising in Bolivia, which ended with his capture and execution in October 1967.

The visual components of the installation, which consist mainly of large photo-reproductions held tautly in the air by metal wires and hooks, turn the question of identity into a life-and-death matter. Dr Adolfo Mena Gonzalez is a blowup of the passport photo that Che used to enter Bolivia; it shows him astonishingly transformed into a clean-shaven, balding man peering through horn-rimmed glasses. 12 Guerrilleros presents enlargements of admiring portrait drawings of Che's companions in Bolivia; these accomplished sketches, we learn, were made under duress by a colleague captured by the Bolivian military. Tania and Monika Ertl introduce two chameleonlike women who employed a variety of disguises in aiding the Bolivian guerrillas; like Che, both of them ultimately met violent deaths.

Fragments of the famous photograph of Che's cadaver being displayed by military officers appear in a series of Katz's collagelike color photographs, amid Dadaesque arrangements of colorful plastic letters in various sizes and hues. In this image--which, Katz points out, has repeatedly been compared to Mantegna's Dead Christ--Che assumes one final role: that of revolutionary martyr and icon.