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[AUDIO LOGO] KATIE ADDLEMAN-FRANKEL: All right, thank you all so much for coming. I'm going to remember to introduce myself this time. My name is Katie Addleman-Frankel. I'm the Gary and Ellen Davis Curator of Photography here at the Johnson Museum. And I would like to start by thanking my colleagues in education, in particular Elizabeth Saggese and Saraphina Masters, for all of their help in organizing this event today.
We're delighted to be hosting this afternoon a presentations and discussions dedicated to the work of the artist Claudia Joskowicz. Our gathering is occasioned by the Johnson's exhibition of Claudia's brilliant 2011 video piece Every Building on Avenida Alfonso Ugarte-- After Ruscha and the publication of the bilingual Spanish-English monograph Claudia Joskowicz-- Quietud en movimiento/Stillness in Motion, which is forthcoming from Editorial Turner in Madrid that will be out this fall.
I begin by acknowledging that the Johnson Museum and Cornell University are located on the traditional homelands of the Gayogohó:no' The Gayogohó:no' are members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, an alliance of six sovereign nations with a historic and contemporary presence on this land. The confederacy precedes the establishment of Cornell University, New York State, and the United States of America. We acknowledge the painful history of Gayogohó:no' dispossession and honor the ongoing connection of Gayogohó:no' people, past and present, to these lands and waters.
So the order of events for this afternoon-- we will open with a talk by the artist herself, Claudia Joskowicz, which will be followed by a Q&A. After that, we'll have a short break of about 15 minutes. And if you haven't yet seen our exhibition of Claudia's Every Building, this would be a great chance to see at least part of it. It's in the gallery right at the end of this hall, just past the stairs up to the lobby.
We'll reconvene then at 3:15, around, for talks by our esteemed guests Saul Ostrow and Gabriela Rangel, who both contributed to the forthcoming Turner monograph on Claudia. And then Saul and Gabriela will be joined by Cornell faculty members Cecilia Lawless and [INAUDIBLE] a discussion of 30 minutes or so that will close out the afternoon. It's now my great pleasure to introduce Claudia Joskowicz.
Claudia is an artist who works primarily with film, video installation, and digital media. Her practice centers on history and its narrative, considering how popular media circulates and shapes collective memory, contemporary history, and social realities. Using long and slow video footage and oscillating between film and photography, she reproduces moments captured from global collective memories and personal stories that have a historical dimension and are anchored in her native Latin American landscape.
For most of her career, she has focused on this landscape, producing work in her home country of Bolivia, and in South America more broadly. Her earlier-- her early video work was staged as minimalist reenactments, with attention to the figure and the landscape and honing in on gesture and subtle movement, and has moved toward reimagined cinematic stagings of landscapes, urban and otherwise, where nuanced political drama unfolds in real time. The landscape and built environment are main characters throughout her work, as are the work's structural elements, which draw attention to the media's role in constructing historical events and our memories of them.
Joskowicz has exhibited widely in the United States and internationally. And her work is in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Kadist Foundation, San Francisco; the Cisneros Fontanals Foundation, Miami; and the Banco Central de la República, Bogotá. She holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Houston and an MFA from NYU. And she is currently an associate professor of art at Wellesley College. So please join me in welcoming Claudia Joskowicz.
[APPLAUSE]
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: Thanks. Hi, everybody. Thank you, Katie. It's truly an honor to be here and to have been invited to speak about my work and to show at this amazing museum.
I'm actually in love with this building. I had never been to Cornell before. And, yes, you're very lucky to work here.
And first and foremost, I want to thank Katie for her invitation and for installing such a beautiful version of Every Building, along with BJ and the installation crew. And I also want to thank Gemma and Saraphina for-- and the entire museum staff for putting together this symposium, and the panelists for being here, for agreeing to take the time to think about my work and to be part of this conversation.
So this is-- the previous slide was the cover of the monograph that Katie was talking about. And this is the opening page of the book that opens with a quote from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Calvino's book has been a reference for me for my entire career, since architecture school. The exploration of cities through memory, identity, and the connections between physical spaces and historical events are themes that have resonated in my own work since undergraduate school. This particular passage emphasizes that the real experience of a city comes from how its physical form interacts with its past, and that the understanding of a city requires looking beyond its physicality to the stories etched into its very structure.
And this is [SPANISH], the main square in [SPANISH] in Bolivia, where I was born and grew up. And it's also one of my earliest memories of an urban space, a public urban space. The plaza and the street name commemorate the founding date of the city.
In the middle stands a monument to Ignacio Warnes, who was a hero of the independence and who fought to liberate Santa Cruz from imperial rule in 1814 and died in the process. Legend has it that his head was displayed on a pike in the middle of the square. And legends like this abound all over the country and in Latin America at large.
So most of them are not true. But up until sometime in the 1980s, when they mysteriously disappeared, at the foot of the monument, there was an ossuary containing Warnes's remains. And as a child, I was totally fascinated with this box. It was like a tiny little six-inch box with a frosty cover, glass cover that you could see through, sort of.
It was humid. It was kind of disgusting. [CHUCKLES] But for me, that box and the-- was so small to contain this monument above it. And in sum, it represents the space between history and folklore, a visual representation of myth. And that's where I think I want my work to be understood from.
[CLEARS THROAT]
Excuse me. My approach to image-making links photography, memory, and collective history. I have been working with the moving image for over two decades. And for most of my career, I have focused on the Latin American landscape, especially Bolivia because that's the landscape I instinctively understand. I explore the intersection of landscape and specific historical events that have resonated in global or local history and examine how these intersections are mediated through some sort of technology, be it video, print, photography, or any other mechanical process, highlighting the malleability of the stories that they retell.
These landscapes transform, as do the stories, depending on the processes that are used to retell them. For example, the large distance between the Hollywood blockbuster film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid from 1969 to the real figures, who died in a shootout with the Bolivian police in a town-- in a mining town called San Vicente, where they had escaped to after robbing a mining company in the early 1900s, and my own version from 2009, which is a reenactment of the last scene of the film, this scene, where Butch and Sundance emerge from hiding with their guns drawn for a final stand against the Bolivian police. The scene freezes on them as they charge out, leaving the audience without a final resolution.
My reenactment of that one scene, or that-- basically, that one last frame uses a circular panoramic shot of eight minutes long that recreates everything around it, avoiding any action and focusing on the effect of the image on the landscape, thus distancing the actual event further from the location. The title is-- the title of my reenactment is a reference to Guy Debord's 1978 film-- and I'm going to butcher this, so excuse me, [? [LATIN], ?] which roughly translates to, we go round and round in the night and are consumed by fire. And like Calvino's book, that film has been cited in my work multiple times in different pieces.
This early work is from a trilogy entitled Reenactments. Each video focuses on a specific moment in Bolivian history that has been mythologized through mediated processes. The photo on the upper left is a diorama of the execution of Túpac Katari, an Indigenous leader of the Bolivian revolution, who led a major revolt against the Spanish colonial rule in the 18th century, and was also executed in public.
The photo in the bottom left is the display of Che Guevara's corpse for the press by the military, by the Bolivian military and the CIA in 1967 in the laundry room of a small hospital in Vallegrande, Bolivia, where he was killed nearby. And then his corpse was taken to the laundry room for the press. And the photo on the right is another still from the Butch Cassidy Hollywood film.
The three reenactments-- this is an installation photo of my three reenactments-- share three structural elements, the soundtrack, the tracking shot, and the length. The tracking shot is used differently in all three. And what I was looking for in using a single type of camera shot in each video was to explore how much the image could say with an economy of language. And I'll give you a little-- not the eight-minute, but a little preview of all three.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: And for time's sake, I'm going to speed it up a little bit. This video starts with a much longer shot of the landscape surrounding the little laundry house and ends with a very close-up shot of the-- of Che's body. But this is an excerpt of sort of in the middle. So I will fast forward a little bit. There you go.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: The end.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
And this is the reenactment of the Túpac Katari. And I'll also fast forward a little bit, too.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: I'm sorry. I forgot to give content warning-- nudity. [CHUCKLES]
[END PLAYBACK]
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: So basically, these are the original sources, and these are the reenactments. So those were pieces from 2007 to around 2009. And since then, my work has shifted towards a more-- towards more cinematic stagings of landscapes, both urban and otherwise. And the landscape itself and the built environment remain main characters in the work, as are-- as the structural elements.
But they are-- they remain there to draw attention to the media's role in constructing this event in our memories of them. And I'll speak briefly about two installations. One of them is the one that is here, Every Building on Avenida Alfonso Ugarte-- After Ruscha, from 2011. And the other one is Sympathy for the Devil.
And they were both made together in 2011. And they were made possible by a Guggenheim grant that I got that year, which facilitated the production of much larger-scale pieces than I had been able to produce before. This two-- they're companion pieces. In my mind, they act as companion pieces.
And they're very different in approaches and scale. But they both explore a significant city in Bolivia that I have known since childhood. It's the capital of La Paz, and it's a satellite city of El Alto.
But I've always felt very foreign there. Bolivia is a-- it's a large country. It has 34 official languages and more than 16 ethnicities. And I come from the Amazonian part, which is radically different than the Andean part. So even though the territory is very familiar to me, you-- it is possible to feel very uncomfortable in certain spaces.
These two projects act as bookends, encompassing several of the key issues tackled within my work. So every piece that I make is always triggered by something that already exists in the world. Every Building takes its inspiration-- Ed Ruscha's photo book Every Building on the Sunset Strip from 1966, in which he photographed four kilometers of the Sunset Strip in LA by putting a motorized camera in the back of his truck and recording every building on those-- in those four kilometers, and then placing them one side of the street on the top, the other side on the bottom. The book is also there with the installation, so you can see it in person. And it creates this amazing accordion book.
Additionally, in 2010 at an art book fair in New York City I saw an original edition of the Ruscha book sitting right next to this book, which is a 1954 photo book by Yoshikazu Suzuki of Every Building on Ginza in Japan, which obviously has a very strong connection to the Ruscha book. And I've never found-- I've done a lot of research. I've never found a-- Ruscha's referencing this book. But it's obvious to me that he must have seen it. It's about 10 years earlier, very similar in approach and style.
But that wasn't really what interested me. What really interested me was that here we had two photographers, or, well, Ruscha's a painter, but two artists approaching the city, industrialized cities from the 20th century in a very, very similar way and recording it in a very similar way. And I wanted to take that same technique, so distance it from that 20th-century approach, and see what would happen if you took it to a developing city in the 21st century.
And El Alto is the fastest-growing city in South America, and economically and physically, of the 21st century. In my opinion, it is the city of the first-- of the 21st century. And so this is a Google map shot of El Alto in 2011.
It doesn't look like this anymore. But-- I mean, the landscape looks like this, but the city has grown exponentially. The yellow arrow is Avenida Alfonso Ugarte.
And the-- in addition to being one of the largest urban centers and fastest growing in Bolivia, El Alto is a-- is very strategically located politically. It's-- it sits on a mountain, where the capital, La Paz, is surrounded by the mountains. It's lower. So it's a strategic place to blockade. If you block these main arteries from El Alto to the city of La Paz, nothing gets in or out of the capital.
So this is the place where continuously, we get violence in one way or another. It's where demonstrations happen. It's where reaction to the demonstrations happen.
So what I wanted to do was record in the way-- in the manner of Ruscha, record as much as I could of a single strip of one of those main arteries and record a quotidian landscape of 2011 El Alto. But I also wanted to interrupt those 26 minutes with the two events that interrupt the city life constantly in cities like this, which are violence and celebration. So here we have-- so my only interventions into that landscape are at minute around 16 of the video, where you come across a stillness in confrontations, sort of like a photographic moment imbued into the video of a confrontation between the military and the protesters. And later in the video, you come across a party, a celebration, which happens weekly in places like this.
And I'm going to play a little excerpt from the video, even though you have it-- you can experience it in person here, just in case you can't visit the installation. Oh, hang on.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: I'll take you closer to the protest.
[BACKGROUND CHATTER]
[CAR HORNS AND TRAFFIC]
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: So while you're on one side of the street, you're coming across this interruption. On the other side of the street, life is going on, as usual. And the same thing happens later in the video in the other screen with [INAUDIBLE].
[VEHICLE TRAFFIC]
[BACKGROUND CHATTER]
[CAR HORN]
[CAR HORN]
[RUMBLING ENGINE]
[END PLAYBACK]
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: And this is Sympathy for the Devil, the companion piece that I spoke about earlier. It-- the title of the piece and the soundtrack reference a film entitled One Plus One, which is also called Sympathy for the Devil, by Jean-Luc Godard from 1968. And it begins as a documentary recording the Rolling Stones recording that song in 1968 in a London studio. But it quickly evolves into an essay film about violence, destruction, revolution, and sort of summarizes the end of that very historical era.
And it juxtaposes stories-- the shots of the Stones recording the song to this visual essay that is led by this character, named Eve Democracy, and-- who's trying to make sense of all this stuff. And in the film, or of the film, Godard said he wanted to, quote, "show that democracy was nowhere, not even construction"-- or "not even constructive," end of quote. This last frame of the film also shows Eve Democracy dead on the machinery used to create entertainment and distraction from all the things that are happening in the world.
And for Sympathy for the Devil, I took an anecdote in my personal family history from the 1970s about a daily encounter between a Polish-Jewish refugee in Bolivia and his upstairs neighbor, who was Klaus Barbie, who was a Nazi officer that had been exiled in Bolivia and living under an assumed name until 1983, when he was extradited to France. Both men met, lived parallel lives as neighbors, and as Europeans in exile in Bolivia, mutually aware of each other's presence, meeting daily in the elevator. And the backdrop is the city of La Paz that serves to highlight the contrast of these two men left-- the lives that these two men left behind, which were-- had opposing destinies in Europe, and this very cold, foreign landscape to both of them.
The single quotidian interaction, for me, serves to highlight the recurrent situation in Bolivia and most South American countries in the postwar period that offered asylum to persecuted Jews and Nazi Germans-- German Nazis aside, at the same time, which would later coexist for decades in South America. And this is a little preview of that film, which is also eight minutes long.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: Oops, sorry.
[ROLLING STONES, "SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL"]
Yeow, yeow, yeow
[INAUDIBLE]
(SINGING) Please allow me to introduce myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste
[END PLAYBACK]
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: I know you wanted to keep hearing the song, but have to move on. It basically acts in a circular motion to where at the end of the eight minutes, you're back in different screens to the same landscape from the window. I think, to me, hearing that anecdote as a child, the most striking thing was to associate these two men from about same age, same basic economic, socioeconomic status, that shared that same view from their window, and they probably approached the city-- they had more in common with each other as Europeans living in this very, very different city than the places that they came from, and yet had such opposing backgrounds as Europeans.
And to close up, these are two new pieces from a series called How to Read a Parentheses that are-- is ongoing. And it'll end up being nine different videos that go back to El Alto, a city that has changed drastically in the Morales era. Evo Morales is-- was president of Bolivia between 2006 and 2019.
And I wanted to return 10 years later, from 2011, to see-- to basically document that change. This is a production photograph from 2011 from Every Building. And a decade since making both those last pieces that you just saw, I wanted to record the-- how the urban fabric has changed radically.
And this is a production photo from Parallels from 2022. A combination of Morales's macroeconomic policies, white contraband, and different sources of underground flux of money to Bolivia into the Bolivian economy has made the city grow exponentially in that time. Economic wealth has also brought a new neo-Andean style of Architecture to the city, vernacularly referred to as Cholets. The Cholets have their origin in El Alto, but now you can find them in most other Andean cities.
Ironically, this economic progress and growth have also come with an increase in corruption, drug trafficking, and femicide. So these two new works, also conceived as an interior piece and an exterior piece, reflects the surface image of female empowerment that the Bolivian government has exported abroad and on the violence perpetuated on female bodies, historically and presently. So the first installation, [SPANISH], appropriates parts of a Bolivian folk novel of the same name from 1948 that formed a really important part of the [SPANISH] discourse in the period immediately preceding the 1952 revolution in Bolivia, which was-- brought about many social reforms to the country, including universal suffrage, that didn't exist before.
But the novel reflects the misogynistic lens that has been, and still is, used to impart apparently democratic projects in Bolivia. My video seeks to place the viewer between the true content of the new city almost a century apart against the language used in the novel, which still resonates in this new landscape. So things have changed radically, but things have not changed.
These are some stills. And I don't really think we have time for the previews. But if you're interested, there are little samples in my website.
And I'll just briefly talk about the companion piece, the interior piece, which is shot inside one of these new fantastic buildings. And it records an Indigenous women's wrestling show performed inside one of the Cholets. It's a very popular tourist event in the city of El Alto. And my video focuses on the audience and the building's interiors over the spectacle. Both of-- both the location and the event register the construction of identity.
And this is another nod to the Guy Debord film that I mentioned earlier. And these are stills of-- so there are two cameras circling around a complete 360 degree, one facing the audience, one facing the match. And it's about 23 minutes long. And I can show you a little preview of this.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- [SPEAKING SPANISH]
[CHEERS]
[BELL RINGING]
- [SPEAKING SPANISH]
[CROWD EXCLAIMS]
[CROWD CHATTER]
[SLAM]
[CROWD EXCLAIMS]
- [SPEAKING SPANISH]
[CROWD CHANTING]
[SLAM]
[CLAPPING]
- [SPEAKING SPANISH]
[CHEERS AND APPLAUSE]
- [SPEAKING SPANISH]
[SLAM]
- Ah!
[THUD]
- [SPEAKING SPANISH]
[SLAM]
[CROWD CHATTER]
- [SPEAKING SPANISH]
[BELL RINGS]
- [SPEAKING SPANISH]
[SPITS WATER]
[CROWD EXCLAIMS]
[CHEERING]
- [SPEAKING SPANISH]
[THWACK]
[END PLAYBACK]
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: To me, the spectacle really symbolizes the glossy, kind of shiny idea of female empowerment because domestic violence is very prevalent in the Indigenous community. And originally, the wrestling was a way for women to learn how to defend themselves. And it slowly became this very profitable business.
But if you look at the audience, it's mainly composed of white tourists and white Bolivians, who come from the city of La Paz to watch the spectacle. And both in the event itself, it's moderated by men, and it's narrated by men. So the violence that is prevalent there is disguised by the glossy interiors and the narration, basically. So I'll end up with that. And thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
KATIE ADDLEMAN-FRANKEL: Thank you so much, Claudia. That was a really wonderful overview of your work. It raised so many new ideas and interesting questions, I hope.
So I'd like to open it up. So stay up here. I'd like to open it up to the floor for some questions, if people have questions for Claudia.
I would also like to take the opportunity, since I'm standing here, to just make a couple of comments to things that I noticed. I have to say that one thing that strikes me when we're looking at all of these works that you have done over the past years is-- and what you opened with as well, the plaza and the ossified remains or the bones in this box, that violence is such an important feature of your work, talking about violence or referring to it in some way, making sure that it is known as an important everyday aspect of society.
But in your earlier works, it seems like you're leading up to these moments of violence in a more, I suppose we could say traditional line of narrative sense, with the reenactments, where we don't know where this is going. And we're leading up to this. And there's this real sense of tension when we get to this point, where we see the violence happening or the aftermath of violence, whereas in the-- in Every Building and in Sympathy for the Devil, which I have to say, I never put together in my mind before until you mentioned that, it's more of something that punctuates the everyday.
So that's really just a-- something that I observed. And I was just wondering if you want to comment on that. Or did your thinking about how you wanted to portray violence change from one to the other?
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: Right, thank you. That's a great reading of the sort of-- I mean, what I've shown you starts in 2007 and ends in 2022. So it's 15 years of work.
So there's a large distance in, I think, my approach, my thinking to the work and also, yeah, what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. And as I mentioned, the structural elements remain very, very grounded in structuralist cinema. And the landscape is still very prevalent. But the way that you come to it as a viewer, I think, has changed, as you mentioned.
And, yes, I think-- I actually think the answer to that question is my own growth as an artist and how I, hopefully, I hope that the language becomes a little bit more sophisticated as-- and the length of the works, too, becomes-- I become less uncomfortable with letting things just run for 26 minutes. And so the violence can come in and punctuate the daily life, as it usually does and still does in countries like mine. But I'm OK with letting the viewer come in and out and experience different times of the works, without experiencing them in completion, where I think in the earlier works, I wanted you to-- eight minutes seemed like as long as-- the eight-minute Godard tracking shot is the longest that you had seen in cinema until then.
So eight minutes seemed like a good length. People can sit through eight minutes of nothing and still get something out of it. I don't know if that answers your question.
KATIE ADDLEMAN-FRANKEL: Do we have other questions from the audience for Claudia? Saraphina will come around with a microphone, so people in line can hear.
AUDIENCE: Hi, thank you for your talk and for showing us your wonderful work. I was struck by the music that you used early on in your work, especially with Butch and Sundance and Che Guevara. But then what happened to music for you?
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: I think that-- thank you for that question. Actually, that's a great question. I think that goes-- that ties right into the answer that I gave to Katie is that I felt OK not-- letting go of the music, too.
The trilogy, I worked with a sound designer. And I had a very specific soundtrack that I wanted to use. I wanted to use two instruments. I wanted it to mimic structurally what the visuals were doing.
I had very clear instructions of, you can use-- you have to use drums. And you have to use something else and at this time so that it could have silences. But still, you were guided by this kind of monotonous thing that was driving the lens.
And after that, I also felt comfortable with letting that go and just using diegetic sound. In-- especially in Every Building, if you spend enough time in the installation, you'll hear the trucks, the trucks and the horns because it's a very, very busy avenue. It's one of the main avenues in that city.
And we interrupted that landscape for filming, which we had to make traffic go in one lane while we were filming in the other lane. So the-- it becomes louder. And that is a little violent, too.
And I could have disguised it by either making it silent or putting music on it. But I was just OK letting it be what it was. So again, I think I hope it shows growth as an artist.
AUDIENCE: Thank you so much, Claudia, for the presentation. I'm very excited to see the other work that is coming up. My question had to do a bit with the different spectators that your work engages, depending on the format that you choose to display it because-- and this goes back to the questions we had with my students yesterday. But the installation itself, the way it's set, it requires a spectator audience to, in a way, participate and become a screen, even though you are never really reflected on what you see in the image. But the image actually runs through you if you take part of it and get yourself in the middle.
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: Right.
AUDIENCE: But then listening your presentation and seeing other examples of your work, as a video or sometimes as a shot, I think all of these are different dynamics and different mediations and relationships to the image. And I'm just wondering if you can maybe talk a bit more about what decisions go into the process of choosing how this is arranged, precisely considering that depending on that, there is a different agency and belonging or not belonging to the work of the people who are in it.
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: Yeah. That's a really interesting question because I don't know exactly how to answer because the control of the installations is not always up to me. It depends on the space. For example, here I had the privilege of having-- being able to tell the crew, oh, it needs to move a little bit further apart. And they actually moved walls for me.
There are other spaces that won't even paint the walls black. And so there are limitations put into the work that are beyond my control. And that's another aspect as an artist that you just have to let go.
So ideally, yes, the installation would be seen like this. But you as a viewer have a lot of agency with the work. You can stand in the middle and have the projection-- that's my preferred way of viewing it.
Other people get dizzy, as we were talking about yesterday, because the tightness of the streets and the movement. And so you might just step back and look at it from a distance. And you might just see it on monitors hanging on the wall because that was what the gallery or museum offered. And that's all they could do.
And I've told Katie this. At the beginning of-- when I first made this piece, I was very almost precious about it, like, oh, no, you can only install it this way and this way. And I lost a couple opportunities to show the work.
And once I let it go and I allowed it to be shown in monitors, and people came back to me and still had read things into it that were important to me, I just learned to let it go. So I think as an artist, even if you're a painter and are very precise about how the work is displayed, the engagement-- the audience has its own experience-- have their own experience with the work. And so you can never control it. Again, I don't know if that answers the question or not.
AUDIENCE: First, I just wanted to thank you for being here today. I wanted to ask about Every Building. You mentioned that the city in La Paz underwent a lot of changes under Morales. And I just wanted to ask, the one piece of intervention that you said you had was the still part of the protesters and the military. Was that referencing a specific event or just the overall violence in the area?
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: So, yes, thank you for your question. The reference in the installation in the video is a reference to recent Bolivian history. So Evo Morales came to power after 2003, very violent strikes and protests in El Alto, where the president at the time, Sánchez de Lozada, sent tanks to El Alto. And very-- many, many people died. That was a very particular event that led to a change in government, to the first Indigenous Bolivian president, and many, many social changes afterwards.
However, by the time I was making this piece six years later-- well, no, actually six years after Sánchez de Lozada left the country and Morales came to power in 2006, so five years, things were starting to fray. So that very hopeful, very idealistic moment in Bolivia that had led to this change, and all this violence that had led to this change was starting to unravel. And you were starting to see the same type of protests happening in the same place, the same blockades.
So it basically said, regardless of political change, regardless of who's in power, violence is still a prevalent part of the daily life of these cities. They were protesting the different things. But then things have changed significantly, and some things have stayed the same.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: Yes.
AUDIENCE: Well, obviously, thank you for being here and giving us the opportunity to watch your work. But something I noticed throughout was just the pace and the slowing down of time through a lot of your work. And obviously, you spoke about that a little bit. And that was with a purpose.
But my question is, Was there any everything-- anything that you learned about the work or what it was speaking to after the fact, maybe watching it? And I don't know what your role was in the editing or the production of it. But seeing it from a much slower perspective in a really zoomed-in perspective, was there anything that you maybe didn't intend to speak to or that you didn't really think about beforehand that became more apparent or just something that made you think about after?
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: Thank you. So I've learned a lot from the work by talking to people experiencing the installation. We were talking with [? Irina ?] yesterday in her class about a lot of the students were commenting how dizzy they get by standing in the middle.
And that was-- I got that same response the first time I installed the piece in my gallery in New York a long time ago. And that was not intended. But I liked that effect.
So after that, I started requiring that distance. It's the tightness of the two, of the space between the two screens that leads to this overwhelming motion sickness kind of effect. And I did it because it symbolically, to me, represented that chaos that you're living through in these cities every day.
So in that way, I think there are unintentional things that happen that you see the result of in post-production sometimes or in installation or many years later. And when someone comes back and has a reading of the piece that was completely unintended but that informs the piece to you back to you-- it's happened with all the essays that were written for the monograph. There are a lot of things that people read into your work that might be there but that weren't there intentionally. And it makes the work so much richer for me.
The-- to specifically address your question, the pacing has always been intentional. And it's about, again, going back to the structural film reference. And it's-- I'm a big fan of structuralist film from the 1970s. And it is about working with time.
So I want the viewer to be aware that this is time that has been stretched. So for example, in this piece, it's shot at one frame rate. And it's post-- in post-production, it's slowed down to a different frame rate.
So it's not really slow motion, but it is manipulating how many frames-- particular frames in time you're using to stretch back and forth the film. It's like what Tarkovsky talked about by Sculpting in Time. You're literally-- I want to make the viewer aware that you-- that my medium is time.
So again-- but that's-- so there's nothing about that that has been-- has come back to me after the work is done. That is really intentional. And it's there from the beginning.
KATIE ADDLEMAN-FRANKEL: Thank you so much, Claudia. I think we'll wrap there for the moment because we're amazingly almost exactly on time. We'll reconvene in-- around 3:15, so just over 10 minutes or so.
There's some coffee and water and sweets at the back. And then we'll come back with our other speakers, Saul and Gabriela, and our panelists Hanna and Cecilia. Thank you.
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: Thank you. Thank you so much.
KATIE ADDLEMAN-FRANKEL: [INAUDIBLE]
SARAPHINA MASTERS: Thank you, everybody, for gathering back together as we continue with our symposium. My name is Saraphina Masters. And I am the student engagement and public programs coordinator here at the Johnson Museum. And it's been a pleasure to be part of bringing this event together with Katie and everybody involved.
So I'm excited to introduce you to our next set of speakers. We'll have two presentations and then move right into our panel discussion. So I'll introduce everybody now.
First, we'll hear from Saul Ostrow, an independent curator and critic, and the art editor-at-large for Bomb magazine. He received his MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and himself has taught at the School of Visual Arts, Syracuse University, the Pratt Institute, and more. As a curator, he's organized over 70 exhibitions in the US and abroad. And his writings have appeared internationally in art magazines, journals, catalogs, and books.
Then we'll be joined by Gabriela Rangel via Zoom. Although currently in Bogotá opening an exhibition on the work of Tania Candiani at the National Museum of Colombia, Gabriela is based in New York. From 20-- from 2004 to 2019, she was visual arts director and chief curator of Americas Society and more recently was the artistic director of the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires. She holds an MA in curatorial studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, an MA in media and communication studies from the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello in Caracas, and a BA in film studies from the International Film School at San Antonio de Los Baños Cuba.
And then once we hear from Saul and Gabriela, they'll be joined in a panel by Cornell professors Cecilia Lawless and Hanna Tulis, who have terrific intersections of interests that will serve our discussion really well. Dr. Cecilia Lawless received her PhD in comparative literature from Cornell, where she is now the senior lecturer of Spanish language and literature in the Department of Romance Studies, a member of the steering committee for the Latin American Studies program, and a recipient of the Stephen H. Weiss Provost Teaching Award. In addition to her work in language and literature, sh has taught courses in urban studies and film at the Universidad de Los Andes in Venezuela.
Hanna Tulis is a lecturer in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning. And she holds a Master in Architecture from Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, as well as a BA from Barnard College, Columbia University. She's the founder of the Both-And collaborative, a multidisciplinary design practice here in Ithaca. Prior to becoming an architect-- or an educator, Hanna was an architect and worked at Preston Scott Cohen Inc., Beyer Blinder Belle, OMA, and most recently, Selldorf Architects.
So from the top of that lengthy order, I'll hand it over to Saul to start us off with presentations. And then we'll have a discussion to further our understanding of Claudia's work.
[APPLAUSE]
SAUL OSTROW: Given I had the maker on one side and a curator on the other, I decided what I would do for you is walk you through Claudia's work relative to what I am, which is a critic. So to start with, definitions. As a critic, I'm someone who professionally seeks to substantiate their point of view. Consequently, criticism, for me, is self-reflexive. To this end, this talk constitutes an introduction to my process, by which I constructed my subject, my subject being Claudia's strategies, as well as the understanding and the interpretation are derived from that understanding.
Secondly, a note. Each selection-- section of this talk is called an act, but not in the theatrical sense. In this case, the term refers to intentional mental activity or an experience of consciousness, rather than its content or its object. Therefore, this is a talk in 16 acts.
Act 1, Language. Definitions are analogous statements that are used to attach meaning to signs and symbols and words. All words are defined by other words.
As such, language, like mathematics, is a closed system. Therefore, it is important to keep in mind that definitions tend to be temporary. The meaning of words shift.
Some words are contextual. Others have vernacular meaning, based on general usage. These same words may have specialized meaning because they have become part of a meta language. Still other words represent abstract concepts that can only be pointed to. It is important to me to keep this in mind so that I might write what I intend to, or at least come close to-- as close as I can.
Given the vagaries of the relationship between language, words, appearances, experiences, perceptions, cognitions, and facts, I often find myself needing to assemble an inventory of examples and references. Again, some of these references are common, and others are specialized. I suspect Claudia does the same, not with words but with images and structures.
Act 2, Presumptions. Every expository text begins with an assumption about its purpose as well about its audience. My underlying assumption when I am writing, critically, that is, is that people are in the habit of wanting equivalences in the form of similes, anecdotes, and stories. They hope that these will fill the gap between what they know and what the thing before them is meant to signify or might be about.
Often, they consider aboutness as meaning the artist's intention. But even within this simple task, there is a spectrum, anchored at one pole by those who do not want to put in the effort to do their own analysis and at the other end by those of you who are more critical and seek from me to either-- seek from me either further insight or an affirmation of what you already know. All of this must be considered when one presents their views in public.
Act 3, Content. I do not believe that content is a thing that exists outside of our comprehension. We only arrive at the sender's message based on the extent of our ability or inability for understanding their codes and references. In other words, we each interpret our experiences based on what we already know.
This is, again, complex because our preconceived notions are affected by associations, emotions, and beliefs. As such, understanding is subjective. But this should not be confused with subjectivism, which claims that there is no objective reality beyond our beliefs.
Act 4, An Example. In my essay on Claudia's work, the "Long View," which will appear in her forthcoming monograph, I write about Alfred Hitchcock and the notion of the MacGuffin. Even though you may have-- you may know who Hitchcock is and you may have seen his films, this doesn't mean you're familiar with the MacGuffin and how it might be-- how it might apply to Claudia's videos.
As such, if I did not explain what it is in my text, the whole point of referring to it would be a loss. By the way, a MacGuffin are those plot devices used to misdirect the audience. It is a character that appears maybe only once or only in the background repeatedly, or a suspicious object that no one ever refers to.
Act 5, My Subject. As you can see, I have called-- I have asked for one of Claudia's videos to be played behind me for the duration of my talk. It will perhaps loop, which means you potentially will see it for more-- more than once, that is if you see it at all. This repetition is part of my subject, as it is part of Claudia's strategy.
Even though her subject and mine are not one in the same, we may use the same devices. This is important to note. Ergo, the video is not specifically the object of my talk. It is there as a reference for you, perhaps a distraction.
I could have chosen any of Claudia's videos. But this one seemed emblematic, sample of her general strategy. From this, you may conclude that I will-- what I will say in general-- I'm sorry. What I will say is generally applicable to all of her films, all of her videos.
I chose this one specifically because it references the film by Michael Snow, Wavelength, and because its historical art reference is that of Mantegna's Dead Christ, something that Claudia does in many of her videos. To be clear, my subject, Claudia strategy, is assembled from evidence, which I derived from her tactics, this being one of her tactics. This is another way to say, my concerns are with the maker's engagement with her medium, which I assert are formal, literal, and sefl-reflexive.
An aside. In the long run, a general consensus will be formed as to how Claudia's work is to be understood, how it is to be read. This symposia is part of that process.
Act 7, Indexes and Checklists. Given my medium is words, both written and spoken, this presentation features key words, such as "formal," "literal," and "self-reflective." These terms, among others, are part of both a checklist and an index. Such terms guide my understanding of what is present or absent in Claudia's works.
It is essential that we distinguish between an index and a checklist, which differs in purpose and in their relationship to their object. An index is a compilation of topics derived from a given source. A checklist's checklist terms may or may not be explicitly found in the subject object it is applied to. Consequently, one is derivative and the other comparative.
Act 8, An Exchange of Values. Moving along, let's now identify the economy you and I are engaged in and how it parallels that of my subject, Claudia's strategy. Firstly, we are all here for differing reasons. Our intentions, purposes, and aims differ.
You can only guess at the multitude of reasons that brought me here. None of them are worth going into at this time. Instead, let's turn to the matter at hand, this talk and Claudia's works. They are what brought us together.
You are hopefully here to consume content, interpret it, and perhaps even dispute it. If not, you are here for a multitude of other reasons, none of which are worth going into at this time. As I mentioned earlier, I'm concerned with what Claudia does as a maker and the content she attempts to convey via her chosen media. Some of you may not be interested in that subject, and I ask them to be tolerant me as I move things along.
So let's turn to what is meant by the term "media." Since conveying content requires a means, my use of the term "media" here refers to the channels of communication used to disseminate information, data, or entertainment. Speech, language, print, radio, television, digital media, such as the internet, are all different forms of conveyance.
The term "medium" refers to any singular form of media. Video is a medium. It is one amongst others. Yet it is unlike the others.
It is part of a suite of apps that are the product of the medium called the digital. Unlike earlier media, the digital has the capacity to be used as a medium of production, reproduction, and dissemination. Let us keep in mind that Claudia's videos are the product of digital technology's ability to mimic the appearance of all other media.
However, unlike film, the digital is a medium that is immaterial. It is continuous flow of data. And when it appears as a video image, that image is a simulacrum of a filmic one.
Photography and films' claim to realism is based on their indexical nature, the idea that what they portray is, in some part-- at some point took place in front of a camera. But digital media complicates this. Digital images can be manipulated and lack a direct connection to their referent.
With digital media, the indexical link between output and referent can be broken, manipulated, or obscured. This is because video is nothing more than a program generating a reading-- or-- generating or reading a binary code of zeros and ones. That same code is used to generate music, text, do mathematics, store data, produce searchable databases, et cetera.
At best, the digital as a medium is the representation of another means of representation. It is a mere re-presentation of the appropriate effects-- the appropriated effects of other media. Unlike film, video is seamless, a flow of data. And what we are watching may or may not have ever occurred outside of Claudia's computer. Likewise, the conditions under which we watch video are different than those that we watch film.
Act 10. Though seamless manipulation of real time, simulated and re-enacted events, Claudia creates an experiential engagement that blurs the boundaries between appearances and actualities. This creates an experiential engagement that is intended to challenge the viewers' conditioned responses. As such, she appears intent on prompting her audience to simultaneously suspend their disbelief and at the same time recognize the manipulative nature of what they are viewing.
This is the result-- this results in a cognitive discord between our presuppositions and our actualities. Here and there, with a wink and a nod, in a Jean-Luc Godardian fashion, she abruptly shifts genres, and in doing so acknowledges through an act of self-referentiality that there-- that what is before us in real time is a medium-induced delusion. And she takes advantage of that fact. Though we know cognitively these videos are not films, we relate to her work as if they were films, even when we're seeing them on a flat screen.
Here, I would like to reference Walter Benjamin, his concept of the optical unconscious; Theodore Adorno's critique of the culture industry; Laura Mulvey's analysis of the male gaze; and Slavoj Zizek's lacanian-inflected theories of ideology, all of which are highly critical of how film induces in the viewer a false sense of unmediated access to reality. For those who are interested, they can look up those references. Such references are relevant to understanding how Claudia subverts the varied modes of spectatorship, which elucidate the political and philosophical rather than the social stakes underlying her work.
Act 11, An Appeal to the Senses. In keeping with Jacques Ranciére's views, aesthetics are the means of apprehending the world through sensory experience and plays a role in shaping what is perceivable, thinkable, and doable within a given social order. By emphasizing perception and viewpoint as embodied psychological experiences rather than purely cognitive ones, Claudia invites us to explore the role that aesthetics, sensory perception, and cultural cognition play in shaping the political landscape of our everyday lives.
Episode-- Act 12, Politics. Here, "political" refers to the economy of power and its influences. The economy-- and it is that economy that produces social issues. The social issues arise from the inequality of access to power. By taking control of the viewers' perception and leveraging it as a means to convey her message, Claudia privileges individual experience and sensory information over cognitive processes that depend on abstractions and standardizations.
A manipulation of the viewers' experience is a necessary part of her storyline. Though it is not necessarily acknowledged, it is something communicated experientially through shifts in viewpoint, points of view, and other contextual cues. The viewer may or may not even be aware that they are being transformed from a passive viewer into an active observer and then into a participant and finally a witness. Claudia's strategic use of the viewers' embodied psychological engagement invites the self-reflective viewer to critically examine the constructs, the constructed nature of their reality, and its political implications and the political implications of its aesthetic, not as a judgment of taste but as an organizational tool.
Episode-- Act 13, Six Theses. Reminder-- theses are propositions. Claudia's work may initially appear to be documentary-like conveyance of differing types of events, ranging from historical reenactments to references to popular culture. However, in actuality, they are more complex than that. They are, in the main, silent. There is no dialogue, no character development, and no plot lines, just a narrative of images.
If there is a commentary accompanying these videos, it is supplied by the viewers' recognition of an iconic moment, such as the one behind me, which culminates in Che Guevara's corpse being placed on display for the media after his assassination. And it is here that we have the reference to Mantegna's Dead Christ. Structurally, Claudia's strategy reflects the importance of the subjective factor embodied in the psychosocial dynamics of cultural politics.
Three, given the nature of the varied phenomena she both represents and presents, we can view Claudia's work as an event in itself. As an event, it is an observable change of status that signifies the transition from one condition or state to another.
Four, her videos are little more than fragments that exist between an unknown before and an undetermined after. Part of Claudia's strategy is to leave the event she references unidentified. As such, her works appear to come from nowhere and end in a climactic moment.
If we are familiar with the incidents her work references, it was because we brought-- we knew them before we saw her work. By extension, Claudia's works can be comprehended as intended to provoke her viewers into constructing larger patterns out of fragments. She-- the fragments she presents. This dynamic sets into motion a procedural one, which is the product of her overlapping objectives.
Five, rather than announcing her position or stance on the issues she builds her work upon, Claudia instead uses her visual and audio media to give expression to a narrative consistent with her aesthetics, social and political point of view, which is independent of the specific stories she uses to convey them. Here, content is to be found in the "how," not in the "what." Though her objectives are seamlessly knitted together, they resist synthesis. The resulting gaps, textual discontinuities, anachronisms, and inconsistencies of subject are essential to her implicit attempt to dissolve the presently congealed state of art, politics, and aesthetics, Walter Benjamin again.
Act 14, based on my experience of watching Claudia's videos, both installed in galleries and institutions as well as viewing them online, I would suggest that the core subject of her work resides in the difference between the temporal and spatial structures and its narrative subject. At this point, it would be useful to reference Walter Benjamin again and his concept of the dialectical image, a sign, depiction, or narrative that consists of conflicting terms, partial analogies, and associative connections. This is because Claudia's viewers, rather than their passive-- rather than passively consuming a linear narrative based on characters and plot development, must actively piece together the various elements presented to them and the associations these prompt. This, in my mind, brings her work into line with Benjamin's idea about the transformative potential of art and its ability to disrupt conventional modes of cognition and representation.
Only two more acts. Summation. Central to her strategy is how her work subtly challenges the dominant modes of spectatorship, which position the viewer as a bystander outside the political discourse, as the artwork seeks to enable. In this context, it appears as if Claudia's intention is to counter the self-alienation induced by social spectacles that leave us aesthetically craving the experience of our own self-destruction. In doing this, she constructs a perilous balance between the politics of engagement and the aesthetics of embodiment.
Claudia's work does not simply replicate the modus operandi of propaganda but seeks to point-- seeks a point of convergence between the impersonal modernist modes of expression she uses and the ethics demanded by her subjectivity. The outcome is an aesthetic where no spectacle is possible. The reenacted moments of conflict are presented in a matter-of-fact manner, leaving the viewer to contemplate what they have just experienced. And in so doing, she offers her audience, even if only momentarily, a sense of rational self-reflection.
16, Conclusions. By fostering a more dynamic and participatory viewing experience that counters the passivity, alienation, and distraction of the present political culture of everyday life, Claudia invites her audience to become an active collaborator in the construction of meaning. As a heterotop-- I'm sorry-- heterotrophic model, Claudia works rather than-- Claudia's works, rather than addressing social issues, wrongs, or telling us how we've been manipulated, instead addresses the semiotics of social and cultural practice. In doing so, she holds out the possibility that if we disengage from the social realist practices and means we have been taught will-- we have been taught are the means by which we will culturally redress the economy of power, we may just be able to reshape consciousness and open up new political and aesthetic possibilities.
Claudia's strategy is to disrupt the conventional modes of representation and spectatorship in which the viewer is either distracted from or disengaged from the social and political discourse of their daily lives. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
GABRIELA RANGEL: Well, thank you for the invitation to the Johnson Museum, and especially to Kate Addleman-Frankel, Claudia, of course, and all the people who put together this symposium, which I was waiting to happen for a long time, as I admire Claudia's work. And I was craving for-- to have a serious discussion about her work for-- as I said, for a long time.
I will read a text that I wrote for the monograph to be presented soon on her work, not completely. I'm going to omit some parts. And I'm also going to bring some discussions that were not included in the-- in that text.
I decided to talk about one work that reflects the latest iterations of Claudia's creative work. And that is Parallel, which is a video that was screened during Claudia's presentation. So I'm going to read. I hope I don't bore you with my far sound and all the technicalities of the situation.
"The plot is presented in two situations, on the one side, the combat between Indigenous women in a ring and on the other the reaction of the attending audience, witnessing the struggle. The decision to show the public separately from those engaged in the women's wrestling match is key to Parallels, 2022. Its brief title goes straight to the point by literally describing the operation executed by the artist. In other words, the work positions us in the space and time of a binary discourse unfolding before us.
Further, her choice to use two video channels might suggest the world is still divided in polarities of center, margin, right, left, modernity and demodernity, art and spectacle, Global South and the Global North, which we never hear about. But Joskowicz starts from these dialectical oppositions as a given, but with no intention to solve the dilemma."
I'm going to quote the artist. "My work"-- she said, "My work always looks to reflect and seal the precise moment, political and mundane, in which it takes place through the landscape."
"Urbanity and the Ordinary. We also know that all binary discourse leaves a gap between its constituting polarities. In this case, we divide-- the divide seems to be no other than the hybrid architecture known as Cholet, as we see it in the image, whose name combines the term [NON-ENGLISH] and "chalet," credited to the self-taught Aymara architect Freddy Mamani Silvestre, which is where the women's wrestling match takes place.
Joskowicz's visual imagery, political and mundane, usually moves on shifting grounds hard to simplify on a single storyline. And its multiple strands frequently seem a bit unorthodox in regards to the usual modes adopted by the Aristotelian narrative scheme we usually consume in the post-pandemic days and nights of movies and fictional series and documentaries offered by digital platforms. Nevertheless, Joskowicz' treatment of the moving image is simple, at times resembling an animated picture book or a segment of a cinema verité audiovisual essay, modifying its aesthetic conventions by using slow motion.
In Parallels, both channels are filmed frontally, using a long shot that is not too wide, like an intertext, voiceover, and other narrative resources. The sound comes directly from the source within the image. The lively public, the wrestling match, and their homogeneous treatment exacerbate the hypnotic sensation of the spectacle.
Joskowicz work contrasts specific-- especially with the documentary narrative, whose focus, either journalistic or essayistic, usually unravels themes, threads within a discursive unit within a progressive linear arrangement and standard duration. Joskowicz gambles on the opaque contemporary ethnographic gaze expressed in an in-camera edit but not scientific pedagogy. She favors the recording of the image, rather than the collage pieced together from the archives of footage, a common strategy used by contemporary artists.
In previous works, such as Every Building on Avenida Alfonso Ugarte-- After Ruscha, 2011-- is a work very much discussed here-- Joskowicz presented an installation also conceived in two channels, depicting the lengthy route of a high-traffic avenue of the city El Alto. I was very interested in what Claudia said in her presentation about El Alto as being the emblem for the 21st century, the city of the 21st century, which I think is very much what happens in that city, and the interest that the media has put on the-- on that urban environment.
I have seen El Alto represented in many fictions lately. If you can imagine that the city is even more important than Brasília nowadays. The site represents the role of a popular neighborhood in a city where important changes of Bolivian history has been triggered, including the 2003 gas war.
And I'm referring to politically significant incidents and events that took place in this city, stemming from the rise of the Indigenous social movements and the advent of the leader and former president Evo Morales, first Indigenous head of state and decisive actor of the contemporary transformation of Bolivia into a country that is more inclusive and which has integrated a new productive sector, the [SPANISH] or "urban mestizos." By contrast, Joskowicz states, "This work, as framed in conceptual strategies lifted from Ruscha's emblematic artist book Every Building on the Sunset Strip, where he photographs four kilometers of Sunset"-- I don't want to talk about Ruscha's strategy in the book because we all know the work. But I would rather introduce another reference, which for me is the urban cartography of the-- that brings Avenida Alfonso Ugarte in the 21st century.
[INAUDIBLE].
SIRI: (AUTOMATED VOICE) OK, I found this on the web for What important changes of Bolivia contemporary history has been triggered, including the 2003 gas war referring to political--
[CHUCKLING]
GABRIELA RANGEL: Hello? Hello?
SPEAKER 1: [INAUDIBLE]
SPEAKER 2: Hey. Yeah, we have you.
GABRIELA RANGEL: Oh, sorry. Something--
SPEAKER 2: The computer decided to talk back to you?
GABRIELA RANGEL: Yeah. Anyway, I was talking about another reference, which is the urban cartography of the Avenida Alfonso Ugarte in relation to the politics of the image recorded by Martha Rosler in The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems, where the photographic survey of New York's Bowery Avenue repudiated the excesses of subjectivism of feminist conceptual art, even while simultaneously processing the tensions arising in objectivist conventions of the documentary photographic records. And I want to go back to something that Claudia said about her work as a celebration of violence-- sorry, as a-- as dictated by violence and celebration, and a work intersected by photography, memory, and history, a social history. And I think the two descriptive systems here in place are precisely that phantasmatic history of El Alto and the street, as Claudia journeys us with the camera with how it is and how we can imagine all the history of Bolivia there in that street.
Both undercurrents of conceptual critique of the image, Ruscha and Rosler, [? artists ?] [? deal ?] in the resignifications and the new locus of enunciation, in this case, the Cholet architecture of El Alto and the role occupied by women in the construction of a new Bolivian social order. Claudia has chosen to display the symbolic economy of the Cholet architecture, deploying formal strategies similar to those she used in Every Building on Avenida Alfonso Ugarte-- After Ruscha, the technical device of frontal tracking and slow motion. The choice to film in El Alto, which sprang up as a satellite city to La Paz, was made due to its demographic explosion, currently equal to many other megalopolis in Latin America in the '50s and '60s.
Nonetheless, the Alto developed its own type of architecture, one close to the vision of Evo Morales government. But the Cholet buildings have flourished in a city where even though residential construction have reached massive proportions, no urban plans were ever made to build sidewalks. Or the public services and utilities of real estate development projects were never fully installed.
Nonetheless, this architecture is considered in the European and North American academies as an authentic expression of popular aesthetic, reflecting an Indigenous worldview. Mamani Silvestre, who is the architect, is credited for the indenization of the urban landscape. Though the Cholet architecture has been the object of consistent studies of urban planners, architectural historians, sociologists, cultural critics from all over the world, it is not always celebrated as an important decolonized contribution from Bolivia.
In order to unpack Claudia's work in Parallels, a useful digression allows identifying the contradictions of the space of visual production in which she states and voices her artistic discourse here. It is important to remember some of the premises of the foundational moment of develop-- this [INAUDIBLE] of developmentalism in Latin America, when the economic theory and its debates were a matter of public opinion as well as the national and regional collective interest.
Since the economic theory sponsored by CEPAL-- in English, Economic Commission for Latin America-- sought to create conditions to promote the improvement and equality of the region, widely concerted and discussed national development plans were drafted in this period of post-war capitalism. One of many promises of CEPAL's developmentalism was to create an economic projection system for a robust educated urban middle class in a region affected by social disparity and authoritarian cultures. It's been argued that Latin America's future in the period was conceived only from and for the city. And the development of its architecture was a result of and concomitant to the demographic explosions of the aforementioned megalopolises.
Nevertheless, countries such as Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, or Paraguay and the regions of Central America and the Caribbean were not part of the blessed geographic spots that profited from the glamour of developmentalism. And this was precisely the tone and direction of [? Marta ?] [INAUDIBLE] criticism to the notion of the avant-garde of the op and kinetic avant-gardes in Latin America. In this sense, the real estate boom of the city of El Alto was late to the rendezvous where architecture fused with ideology and form and currently arises as a sort of outstanding debt from the past inserted in the present. If modern rational discourse was only possible and applicable for a happy few in Brazil, Mexico, Caracas in Argentina, it currently appears in the Global South in spurious forms of architecture reflecting the plurinational definition of many of them, particularly that of Bolivia.
I want to stop here to comment about what Mário Pedrosa-- can you pass the next slide, please? Hello? Hello?
SPEAKER 1: [INAUDIBLE]
GABRIELA RANGEL: To the next one, sorry.
SPEAKER 2: Oh, OK, yeah, here's the next one.
GABRIELA RANGEL: Yeah. Particularly, I want to highlight the notion that Mário Pedrosa brought when he commented about Rubem Valentim, who is in the image that I'm showing now. This is an Afro-Brazilian artist who was born in Bahia and who took the iconographic and symbolic liturgy of Candomblé and brought that into kinetic art. I was wondering if the appropriation of Claudia, of El Alto-- and this is a question for the artist, and it's a question to think about-- this appropriation relates to what Pedrosa called the "cultural dilution" of these symbols and liturgic writing by Rubem Valentim with the tradition of abstract art and concrete art in Brazil and if this relates to the cultural dilution of [? [NON-ENGLISH], ?] and if Claudia's appropriation deals with this actualization of the discussion of modernism in a country in which modernism was not at all present, and it was not visible.
Claudia majored as an architect. And these questions have-- deal with the fact that she was trained as an architect. It has been recited between New York and Massachusetts for over 20 years. Claudia has visually educated herself in the logic of structural film that appeared in [INAUDIBLE], aimed at stripping conventional dramatic properties from image time to submit it to the rules for semiotic analysis and the poetics of nonlinear experimental cinematic language.
Though her camera records the vibrant chromatic palette of Cholet architecture that contrasts with the earthy monochrome and desert landscape of the Altiplano, the Andean highlight-- highland plateau, the characteristic style of its building, covered with colorful geometric forms-- and this is the parallel that I'm bringing-- is frequently compared to the [NON-ENGLISH], the skirts worn by Indigenous women in Bolivia, and why the-- and with the [? [NON-ENGLISH] ?] flag, which represents the Andean culture of the Altiplano itself. It is precisely towards this point of symbolic dress-crossing where Claudia's direct her gaze, the sovereigns of the self-taught mestizo architecture pretending to emulate female skirts at the violence of the spectacle of women's wrestling matches that turns Indigenous women into an object of Western entertainment. Both situations allowed visualizing the broken aspirations of a patriarchal society posing as inclusive, yet serving as a stage for a touristy spectacle, where the popular and vernacular culture are transformed into kitsch.
Add to these layers another more complicated question, which binds her work of visual observation to the feminist approach where racial discourse and dominant masculinity merge to create a construction of the feminine as a space strip of voice subjected of the opacity of violence. This is a ground of the work, my preferred ground of the work that Claudia Joskowicz archaeology of image reveals as an uncomfortable truth. Thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]
CECELIA LAWLESS: I've been waiting to ask this question. May I just start, yes? So I-- it's been so delightful to hear all about your work, see your work. We've had students come. I've had my own students come.
I'm teaching this course. Actually, we call it [INAUDIBLE] Cinematic Cities. So the work has really played into many of the questions that we've brought up.
And let me just preface it this way. So in the Western world, we read from left to right. Your filming, obviously, is going from left to right. It's a very horizontal, very linear expecting narration, as Saul has mentioned in his talk.
And one thinks that one is going to go from A to M, this whole desire for narration. And it's on a loop. And your talk also, you had it looping in the background. But if you spent more than eight minutes or more than 26 minutes, which many of us have, a lot of the surprise, a lot of the puncture that has been mentioned of the violence is, in fact, no longer a surprise, right? And so it becomes a journey without end.
And I was wondering, hence, if you could talk, address the horizontality, the reading of something that is, in the long run, an iteration and reiteration of the same but different, and if that is teaching us how to reread a city site.
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: Wow, OK.
CECELIA LAWLESS: So that's a lot there. But--
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: Yes.
CECELIA LAWLESS: --yeah, I've been so excited. I've been containing myself.
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: Well, thank you. Thank you all for all this. It's a little overwhelming. And, wow, that's a hard question to answer--
CECELIA LAWLESS: Yes.
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: --because it really depends on the context that you view the work. If you view the work once, then the surprise is there. If you view it online, like Saul said, you can-- the way that I did, skip through, get to the end.
And so I think that's what's interesting to me, that the digital platform and the different strategies of installing the work and viewing the work can lead to different readings of the work and of different meanings of the work. Hence, I think that's why the structural is there, to keep a constant, because the tracking shot is the constant. The horizontality is the constant. The implied narrative in the camera movement is the constant, even though you don't get a definition. But you get a narrative in the images.
So you do-- the way that we were viewing the video, the Vallegrande video, you may not notice the bee and the flower moving until the third time, the third viewing. And that becomes a MacGuffin, or it becomes a device that implies a narrative. But it's just a bee buzzing through.
Or the wind in the-- the wind in the shirt of-- which is in my version of Butch Cassidy, whereas if you don't notice that until the third or fourth, it could just be a still image that I just moved through the camera. In a lot of the-- in earlier works, before I started focusing on Bolivia solely, I had stitched still images to make spaces seem seamless. So there's, for example, an earlier work that is a 360. But it literally is left to right through three domestic spaces, and they're stitched together with these still frames that I photoshopped and did a lot of post-production editing, to where it seems that you're going directly from the bedroom to the living room and then from the living room to the studio or something like that.
But-- so there's no implied cuts. And then it fades to white. And then the white-- it goes into a white wall. And then the white wall goes back into the bedroom. So you have this endless seamless traveling through those three domestic spaces that have no beginning or no end.
Again, I think I'm addressing the question in a roundabout way because I-- it-- the horizon and the traveling through this very symmetrical space is intentional. But there is no conceptual reason for it. It's just an anesthetic device.
CECELIA LAWLESS: Well, there's a kind of-- you can see it as a kind of almost pedagogical way to read, right? Because of, as has been mentioned also already here, the slowing down of time. I mean, cinema is time and space, right? And that's very deliberate-- the early question from your talk.
You can see it in reactions to people's-- people's reactions. They-- maybe people aren't going to stand there for 20 minutes. Some of my students--
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: Most won't.
CECELIA LAWLESS: Definitely, yes, right?
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: I don't think I would.
CECELIA LAWLESS: Yeah. But it becomes a rumination. It becomes a meditation. You give yourself over. And I'm not sure that-- I'll stop talking because, yeah.
HANNA TULIS: I have a good dovetail because I had a different observation that is on the same line in your observation, Cecilia. If you watch it over and over, does it lose some of its magic? And when I watched the installation in the Johnson, I had the opposite panic, which is, Am I going to miss something because of how I positioned my body?
So I made sure I stayed for a few rounds of it so I could study it thoroughly. And actually, I was standing there so long that everyone thought I was a docent and asked me a lot of--
[LAUGHING]
--questions about the piece. So I became a de facto expert or somehow in 10 minutes. But that makes me-- leads me to a question a little bit on your-- maybe more on the methods.
CECELIA LAWLESS: Let me just interject. I never said "lose the magic." To the contrary, if anything, it would increase the magic because you no longer have surprises of this violence or whatever.
HANNA TULIS: Increase the discovery.
CECELIA LAWLESS: But it actually is changing, shifting the way you read, right? Because you know what's coming.
HANNA TULIS: Right.
CECELIA LAWLESS: But anyway, please.
HANNA TULIS: But it is possible in an installation view that you can fixate on one side of the street, for example in Every Building, and miss the theatrical moment, just miss it. And in some ways, I thought maybe that was part of it, that you could miss it, just like you could miss it.
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: And if I may interrupt, you most probably will miss it because who's going to stay? If you walk in at the beginning of the piece coincidentally, unlikely that many will stay for 15 minutes to get that moment of violence. So if you're interested enough in just this landscape, you can watch it for-- but I'm sorry, I interrupted you.
HANNA TULIS: Well, you could get a completely different reading, I think.
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: Exactly.
HANNA TULIS: I think you're saying could get an excerpt and come away with just the kind of documentary experience and miss the other layers, which I thought was really interesting. But I guess my question, thinking about your method, thinking about your formula in some ways-- and I hope-- and I don't mean formulaic, of course, just that you have a really, really beautiful recipe right now with the length, the shot, the speed, and what you described, Claudia, as being inspired by existing events, objects, artifacts that you're responding. And you're doing it in ways that keep evolving. And I think that's an incredible premise for an artist.
But one thing that Saul mentioned in his talk is this changing position of the viewer. Sometimes you're a witness. Sometimes you're a bystander. Sometimes you're a viewer.
And I wondered, because in all of the works we saw, you never really reveal the method, the fact that you're on a-- I don't know if you're on a dolly. I don't know if you're on a car. I don't know. It's so smooth. It never-- that is a wall that never breaks.
And I was reminded of certain other works from eras that you're interested in, in the '70s, that specifically reveal the embodied experience of the capture of the work. So a couple, just to throw out some references, that are more maybe in your architectural references, thinking of Kevin Lynch's view from the road of documenting the experience of the highway; or Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's documenting the Las Vegas Strip, which is in this [? riche ?] canon; or even maybe Michael Heizer's motorcycle in a circle of the Nevada desert, where the photographing of the circle he made, which was every 16 feet on a camera. And that labor becomes the piece. Is there a possible evolution or divergence in your work, where you break it?
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: Yes, absolutely.
HANNA TULIS: Finally.
[LAUGHING]
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: [INAUDIBLE]
HANNA TULIS: In 2022.
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: Yeah.
HANNA TULIS: Coincidentally, it was an accident actually, but in the-- in Parallels, the piece that Gabriela spoke about, there are mirrors in the building. And so at some point, the camera that is facing the-- not the audience but the camera that's facing the wrestling matches can be seen in the mirrors behind. So if you're focusing on the match in the foreground, you won't see it. But again, at maybe a third or fourth reading or viewing, you would see it. You would catch it.
And so there are a couple of seconds that-- where you actually see-- there are two cameras on a dolly around the stage. And the stage is higher. But there are mirrors all over the building.
The buildings are-- but they're-- that's also what's interesting about these buildings. They're so layered. And I thought Gabriela's reference to the Brazilian artist and the iconography is such a interesting and brilliant connection because I wouldn't have seen it. But it makes total sense. It's a cultural ethnographic connection to the physical building.
But, yeah, embedded in that-- in all that iconography are mirrors. So you were being reflected in the building itself. So, yeah, so the apparatus, the actual camera and the way of filming becomes part of it.
Also at the end of that video, the camera keeps going, even when the people have left. So you go through the whole thing where the match ends. People get up and leave. People get on stage and take photos with the wrestlers.
And then everybody dissipates. And you-- the camera just keeps going. And so the emptier the space gets, the more the reflection of the camera is there.
And then you have people turning off the lights. And it ends in just the empty chairs and darkness. So I think that also becomes part of-- just turning off the spectacle is part of the documentation, which makes the physical act of recording much more present than in other works.
But that's a-- that was-- so that part was intentional? The mirrors were just there as a gift.
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: Uh-huh.
CECELIA LAWLESS: I was wondering also-- I have so many questions.
[LAUGHING]
[INAUDIBLE]. I was wondering also if you could talk about what doesn't seem to have been mentioned up until now, with all the work. And now it's making me think when you were talking about the latest one, Parallels. But as-- I go back to the one here in the Johnson Museum, so that idea of an urban street scene that fascinates me so much in my own readings and work.
And so there's so much of a texture. Now I'm thinking of that haptic quality of film. So when you mentioned of stretching out time by having not even slow motion, but the way you explained it, slowing down the processing of the film, I'm wondering if that also adds to this stretching out of place, that this place, this urban place, they appear almost-- the people who are aware of being sometimes filmed, and sometimes not, so they appear almost ghost-like, like specters, sort of in themselves but simultaneously outside of themselves because they're almost stretched, your work, no?
And so what that does to this haptic quality of being in this growing city, El Alto, with all its class, social connotations and then these punctured violent movement moments, that end, which I don't think is the ending, of celebration, which is just another performance within a performance within a performance. So is that what the city street space is, just performativity of violence, et cetera? But if you could mention the texture and that haptic quality, that would be great to talk about.
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: So the texture is just there. I think these places, they're-- this city in particular is-- it's almost like a-- it's a ready-made, right? I'm not looking for it. It's just there. That's part of--
CECELIA LAWLESS: The clothes and [INAUDIBLE] signs.
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: The clothes. And if you look, there are many, many stores-- so the-- it's a very busy commercial street. So there are many, many stores that are selling the clothes. So the clothes and the clothes that Gabriela also speaks about in her paper that resonate in the construction of the buildings-- the buildings are processed in that same layered--
CECELIA LAWLESS: The vines on the wall, yeah.
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: They're very layered. The [SPANISH], the Indigenous women's skirts, are layered. They're multiple layers. They're huge.
They're-- but they're different in colors. They're made with very rich fabrics. And they're very expensive. It's a very luxurious, quality item. And it's also reflected in the-- they make up a lot of the texture.
You combine that with the electronic stores and the banks, lots of banks and lots of guarded--
CECELIA LAWLESS: Security guards.
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: --armed guards. It's like-- it's a little [SPANISH] of a visual [SPANISH].
CECELIA LAWLESS: It's a palimpsest, all those different layers.
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: Exactly.
CECELIA LAWLESS: Yeah, social, gender, material.
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: So it's not like I was looking for it. That is just that-- that's the quality of this. That haptic quality of film that you're talking about is just there.
It's there for the recording or the registering. It's not-- that's not intervened. That's just--
CECELIA LAWLESS: No, but by stretching out the time, I think it's maybe exaggerated, maybe exacerbated. It's definitely highlighted in a different way. And we've all been in cars going down streets, like that or similar or walking.
So this is-- there's a thoughtfulness that you demand of your audience on some level or not. I think you're very modest when you say, oh, yes, well, somebody stays three minutes, I feel happy. I mean, you pick up a novel, you're going to read the novel. I go into the exhibit, and most museum-goers will--
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: Stay.
CECELIA LAWLESS: --stay. Yeah, that's another whole area.
SAUL OSTROW: To a certain degree--
GABRIELA RANGEL: [INAUDIBLE]
SAUL OSTROW: --in my text, what I meant by you can consider Claudia's works events because that change in duration introduces these change states or conditions, where all of a sudden what wasn't observable--
[SCRAPING]
What wasn't observable becomes observable.
CECELIA LAWLESS: Right, on multiple viewings, too. Even maybe one viewing.
SAUL OSTROW: Yeah.
CECELIA LAWLESS: [INAUDIBLE]
HANNA TULIS: Yeah, and it--
SAUL OSTROW: But that slowing down, as opposed to the speeding car through the streets. [LAUGHS]
CECELIA LAWLESS: Yeah.
HANNA TULIS: And that-- the slowing down, and the one-point view. So it's interesting because it's a view we all have access to by looking out the window. So in some ways, it's a real view. It's a perspective.
But it's not because it's what we might say in the architecture world is like an unrolled elevation. It's an abstract view, where you see it completely frontal, which is never how you really see. But by stretching it out, you really do get to see a-- almost an analytical view of the street, which I thought was really interesting because that's also the portion that is the visual inventory.
And then I noticed how that flatness breaks at the intersection. And you get deep perspectival city space, which coincides in that piece with the protesters. Was there something going on there?
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: Well, I think going back a little bit to your question, and to your previous question, that slowing down, that intentional stretching of time is sort of the answer to your previous question. It's like how does the-- how do you reveal the element of what is being used to record time is you stretch-- you abstract it to a certain extent, to where you're aware that this is a manipulated time. So the textural elements are there.
They're, to use your words, a depiction of a real thing. But they're manipulated through a digital process. So they are-- so that, I guess, answers in a way, in a roundabout way, both questions.
It's like-- it's instead of the mirrors literally reflecting the camera, it's stretching of time that reflects the process of it, not only the registering, the recording of the thing but the process of edit, post-production editing and finishing the thing because the original recording is we were in a van. The van is going different-- it had to slow down and speed up. And there were bumps on the road.
So you get that-- you get the feeling of being inside this van. But the time has been manipulated so much to get both streets positioned at the right place and then things to mimic a sort of reality or real-time movement.
CECELIA LAWLESS: But it is all one take or no?
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: Both-- one take on one side and then another taken on the other side. They're not at the same time. We couldn't block the entire avenue, unfortunately.
CECELIA LAWLESS: [INAUDIBLE] Why not?
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: Yeah, so we had to record the one side in the morning. And then-- because we had to deviate traffic, too. So one side is in the morning. One side is in the afternoon.
So you get the different types of lighting on both sides of the street. You also get different speeds at different moments. But the geography is literal. It is-- so the intersections match.
And so going back to the where the protest happens, there is a perspective view of these cross streets. The placement of that was mostly logistical. The streets widen at those points, so we had more-- I had more space to insert the military and the protests.
But it also mimics the real-life event of the blockage. You block-- you-- when you're blocking the streets, you want to block as many ways as possible. So those roundabout, the widened intersections, the bigger intersections, if you block one, you can block two at the same time. So there are--
CECELIA LAWLESS: Mathematics.
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: Yeah, so it's a-- it was a logistical decision but also mimicking real-life decisions that are taken by the way people use these streets.
KATIE ADDLEMAN-FRANKEL: I just want to interrupt for one second. Gabriela-- to turn it over to Gabriela, who I think has a question or comment.
GABRIELA RANGEL: Yes. Is it a question for me or--
KATIE ADDLEMAN-FRANKEL: No, I just saw that you wanted to say something earlier. And I wanted to make sure you got a chance.
GABRIELA RANGEL: Yeah, so I wanted to say something about the cliches that are represented by Claudia in many of her works, which are her way to operate as an anthropologist, as a contemporary anthropologist, meaning that her cultural devolution deals with the fact that we the viewers, we the public are here to see the otherness in terms of a touristy regard. But then Claudia unpacks that in a way that-- that's why I posited the association with Rubem Valentim in the 1960s with [INAUDIBLE], which by the way, he was an artist very much not well regarded, except for a few critics. And now, his moment is essential to read modernity in critical terms for Brasília and many other Latin American countries with an important population of Black people and minorities, which are-- were never part of the republics, of the foundational republics, as we speak.
So can you talk a little bit about that, Claudia? Because I really-- I'm really interested in the way that you keep self-representation. But you use the cliches in such a way that you can unpack all the preconceptions, to say the less, that we have.
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: Can you give me an example of one of those cliches, Gabriela? Can you, like--
GABRIELA RANGEL: The cliches are the architecture of Mamani, the Che Guevara as an ideological cliche and part of the histories of the Cold War in Latin America, and many other myths that you have explored--
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: The Rolling Stones song?
GABRIELA RANGEL: --in such a brilliant way, in my view.
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: Maybe I can answer that by talking about the Rolling Stones song because it's such an obvious cliche, especially if you listen to the lyrics, "Sympathy for the Devil." And it literally describes Second World War. And we're talking about a Jewish guy and a Nazi.
But it really-- I think it is maybe, in a way, a subconscious strategy to speak a language that is broadly understood. It seals a moment. It encapsulates a lot of information that would be really hard to unpack otherwise.
And in a way, the Che Guevara photograph, of course, although the further away we get from that moment, the less iconic it becomes and the less known it becomes. But at that moment I was making the piece, which is, what, like 15 years ago, it was still so recognizable that it eliminates a lot of the implied narrative. It's there. It's a given.
It's a-- so I don't think I can address that any further than it's like it is what it is. It's obvious. And it's easy. It's an easy device to use.
GABRIELA RANGEL: But I was trying to say that you-- that the obvious becomes strange. That's my point.
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: Oh.
GABRIELA RANGEL: That it's not obvious anymore.
CECELIA LAWLESS: Maybe there's a-- I don't want to speak [INAUDIBLE].
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: No, go ahead, please.
[LAUGHING]
CECELIA LAWLESS: Maybe there's a level-- I'm thinking specifically of this work that's here, which is the only thing that I've seen in person. But I think there is-- because of that stretching of time, because you're focusing on something that's universal in some ways but very particular in others, depending if you're insider, outsider, so that there's a level-- and if you're going to stand there for 28 minutes, physically, as well as emotionally, intellectually, a lot of uncomfortability that you are eliciting from what is very familiar. And for me, how that works is to arrive, because I'm immersed in urban cities, at a sense of the uncanny, in the eerie, in the urban that we all live in. So it's taken for granted, no?
So-- and of course, again, that provokes thought. Do you sit with that uncomfortability? Or then do you say, [SPANISH] and walk out, no?
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: But isn't it-- yes, thank you for that.
CECELIA LAWLESS: Maybe.
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: Yes. No, I think you said it much more eloquently than I could ever. But also, that, yeah, that moment of maybe taking the very, very known or the very, very familiar and manipulating it a bit, because the image is there still. The Che Guevara image is very almost faithful to the original photograph.
The song is the song. The song is still the song. The street is still the street, right?
But I think the way that you spoke about it as an abstraction, as an abstracted version of reality is really accurate in the sense of, yes, it becomes uncanny because-- and maybe the more you hear it, the more-- the weirder it becomes. Or the more you see the Che Guevara lying on the slab and the more-- the more weird it becomes.
CECELIA LAWLESS: Maybe because you shifted out of just life and death or the photograph and the film. And you're entering into multiple spaces that you're opening up. You're not only in the two channel. You're standing in the middle. Saul.
SAUL OSTROW: No, I was just going to say that I think what Gabriela's talking about is this sort of cognitive dissonance that it induces. There's an expectation, and there's a lack of fulfillment. We assume one thing, and we get something else.
And yet the image is still there. The song is still there, so on and so forth. But our association has been disrupted.
HANNA TULIS: And also, the recognizability of these moments but the backside of them or the fact that they don't appear as the central. They're the peripheries. I'm thinking of part of Saul's monograph article about the 16th-century Dutch paintings, where the fall of Icarus is kind of in the background there. But what's going on with those guys with the hay in the center? What's going on with the donkey?
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: The donkey.
CECELIA LAWLESS: Yeah.
HANNA TULIS: I really loved-- I think it's so brilliant to-- that one of the main focuses of let's say the Che Guevara piece is the outside of that abandoned building and the backsides of people. And that's the shot. And that's the dominant shot.
And it's-- it messes with you, I think, in such a kind of profound way, to see the backside of these stories or the imagined that is maybe between-- what you were saying, between history and folklore, this imagined space, almost surreal. Is that how you've imagined it?
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: Yeah, that's how I see it. So you're taking the real thing and taking the-- the Che piece is really easy to talk about in that-- in those terms because it's such a moment, where a photograph seals this myth, right? It's like Che Guevara was a man and a [SPANISH] and a flawed individual.
And he smelled bad because he had asthma and didn't bathe. And there are all these stories about the man, this guy that was in the jungle, trying to lead a very failed revolution. And at that moment where he's killed and-- but not the moment he's killed, but it's the moment that that photograph is taken that he becomes the guy on our shirts or the guy in the hats and the guy that-- some image, some symbol of a revolution that is embraced, or at least was embraced through the late 20th century as an icon of an ideal. It's like a myth, something that could never be realized.
CECELIA LAWLESS: Like Christ.
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: And he becomes this Christ, this [SPANISH] figure, right? And so, yeah, so that's-- it's very easy to talk about that. And that's the-- maybe the-- that's where that video operates. In the middle of that becoming from one thing to another, you just, you get stuck in that, those eight minutes of--
HANNA TULIS: [INAUDIBLE]
CECELIA LAWLESS: Yeah.
KATIE ADDLEMAN-FRANKEL: I'm so sorry to cut things off.
SAUL OSTROW: I think mortality is--
KATIE ADDLEMAN-FRANKEL: But this is such a good conversation.
SAUL OSTROW: --using Kawasaki motorcycles.
[LAUGHING]
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: Yeah. So we have to end here, I think.
KATIE ADDLEMAN-FRANKEL: Yes, and the museum has to close. But this is so generative.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Thank you so much.
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: And you and Gabriela. [SPEAKING SPANISH]
[APPLAUSE]
GABRIELA RANGEL: Thanks.
KATIE ADDLEMAN-FRANKEL: Thank you. Thank you all for this amazing event.
CLAUDIA JOSKOWICZ: And for your questions and your--
CECELIA LAWLESS: Oh, no.
Artist Claudia Joskowicz is joined by Saul Ostrow (independent curator/critic, Art Editor at Large for Bomb Magazine), Gabriela Rangel (independent curator/editor/writer), Hanna Tulis (Architecture), and Cecelia Lawless (Romance Studies) to discuss topics related to her video works of the past fifteen years.
This symposium was held in conjunction with the exhibition of “Every Building on Avenida Alfonso Ugarte—After Ruscha” at the Johnson Museum of Art (January 27–June 9, 2024) and with the publication of the 2024 monograph “Claudia Joskowicz: Quietud en movimiento/Stillness in Motion” (Editorial Turner).
Claudia Joskowicz’s visit was made possible in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
