Encounters in Video Art in Latin America

The comprehensive edited volume Encounters in Video Art in Latin America, edited by Elena Shtromberg and Glenn Phillips, unravels a complex history of making, exhibiting, storing, archiving, and preserving video art in Latin America. This decade-long undertaking dates back to a research project, Video Art in Latin America, initiated by the Getty Research Institute and led by the editors of this volume in 2012. Following the completion of their study in 2017, Shtromberg and Phillips, under the auspices of the Getty's citywide art initiative Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, curated an exhibition, Video Art in Latin America (September 7–December 17, 2017), surveying Latin American video art from the 1960s until today. This volume, however, is not an exhibition catalog. In fact, the 288-page book offers an extensive analysis of Latin American video art histories that the editors conducted by visiting twenty-one cities and 500 studios and surveying 3,300 artworks to assemble a "more global understanding of video art histories that puts the more dominant works in dialogue with lesser-known ones" (4). Before this volume, writing on video art in Latin America was sporadically published across exhibition catalogs, journal articles, and online resources, making Encounters in Video Art in Latin America the first English-language collection of essays and interviews illuminating the developments of video art in the region since the 1960s.As a new medium, video has been around since 1965, when the Sony Corporation began manufacturing the Portapak, the first portable half-inch black-and-white open-reel video recorder with a dedicated camera. Not only was the Portapak easy to operate, but it also did not require a technical crew to run the system, allowing Latin American artists to use video as a "decentralized media outlet for voicing opposition to State violence" (1). Although the machine that made video possible was manufactured in Japan, the history of video art is often told through the Western lens, focusing predominantly on video activity from the Global North. By referring to a project initiated by the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, Mapping Video Art—an interactive map visualizing the activity of video art as it crossed continents and decades—the editors stake a claim for their study. In the aforementioned map, the color-coded lines follow the movements of artists as they traveled across the world, making it seem as if the United States and Europe were the main hubs of video art activity while the entirety of Latin America has two spots marked on the map, located in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. It is vital to note that dots in Latin America indicate the activity of five US artists (Joan Jonas, Bill Viola, Beryl Korot, Peter Campus, and Bruce Nauman) who exhibited their work at the São Paulo Art Biennial and the Bank of Brazil Cultural Center (Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil), effectively erasing the video activity of Latin American artists. The lack of recognition for Latin American video art history demonstrates the relevance and urgency of this project.Across four sections, Shtromberg and Phillips take a thematic approach to their study of video art in Latin America. By employing thematic constellations across space and time as the methodological framework instead of tracing the development of video art in distinct national histories or time frames, the editors examine the earliest video experiments along with those more recent to unveil technological, political, and social developments across the region. In this way, Encounters in Video Art in Latin America explores the development of video art thematically through four sections: "Encounters," "Networks and Archives," "Memory and Crisis," and "Indigenous Perspectives." By featuring a collection of essays and interviews by scholars, artists, curators, and archivists working across Latin America, this volume employs a thematic model that moves between time periods while covering extensive and diverse geographical areas. Moving from Mexico, Brazil, Peru, and Chile to Argentina, among other nations, this collection uncovers a complex yet comprehensive history of video art activity in Latin America.The first section of Shtromberg's and Phillips's volume, "Encounters," focuses on the many encounters that the video artists, curators, archivists, editors of this volume, and their contributors had with video art histories in Latin America. In collaboration with Sophia Serrano, Phillips coauthored an in-depth study, "Encounters: CAYC and the International Encuentros," that traces the transnational movement of video art facilitated by the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (hereafter CAYC) and Jorge Glusberg, the central figure associated with CAYC. The ease of circulation that video as an art form carries enabled Glusberg to showcase video works by Latin American artists "both by fostering an international program at home and by sending CAYC shows abroad" (22). By organizing ten international open encounters on video (Encuentros Internacionales Abiertos de Video, hereafter Encounters) to exhibit the video work of Latin American artists, Glusberg circulated "new and dematerialized forms of art that could easily be mailed, wired, transmitted, reproduced, performed, or fabricated on site to allow art from Latin America to be cheaply exhibited throughout the world" (68). While this section is supposed to highlight video works by Latin American artists, it frequently spotlights work by well-known video artists who exhibited their work in Encounters such as Nam June Paik, Allan Kaprow, Toshio Matsumoto, and Wolf Vostell, among others, without making a connection to the Latin American video works. Thus, it would have been productive to compare how their work did or did not align with the videos of their international counterparts. The endnotes, however, are extensive and provide additional resources for readers to explore if interested in learning more about the works exhibited at Encounters.The second section of Shtromberg's and Phillips's study, "Networks and Archives," explores the transcontinental networks of video art archives in Latin America. Essays by José-Carlos Mariátegui and Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda and an interview by Ximena Cuevas trace the fragments of video art histories across institutional and home archives. In this section, three themes are predominant: issues and solutions to conserving video art, the accessibility of video technology and the emergence of women as central figures in a male-dominated industry, and the role of an artist as an archivist. All three connect to the larger theme of networks of curators, artists, and archivists working together to share resources to preserve video art histories in Latin America. In an interview with the editors, Cuevas expressed her admiration toward video as a "medium of freedom" (144) that opened new avenues for artists to explore and exchange different perspectives, all in the hope of creating an enduring "reference for life" (146).In the third section, "Memory and Crisis," Shtromberg and Phillips focus on the notion of memory and the role of video art as a medium capable of documenting alternative moments of political and social crisis during a period of heavy censorship and state control. The ease of production, circulation, and exhibition enabled artists and activists working in Latin America to document turbulent moments often censored by the strict government censorship boards. Essays by Shtromberg and Sebastián Vidal Valenzuela and an interview by Oscar Muñoz explore how video created alternative channels for political resistance during violent conflicts in Latin America. Through footage of political dissent, historical memories, self-representation, and organized video festivals, the essays and interviews of the third section present alternative avenues of preserving memories during a period of heavy censorship and control. In this way, "video functions to capture and express the complexity and ungraspable nature of deeply traumatic political pasts" (151) suppressed by government censorship.The final section of the book, "Indigenous Perspectives," focuses on the histories and memories seen through the lens of Indigenous communities and others. Essays by Francisco Huichaqueo and Benjamin O. Murphy and an interview with Vincent Carelli focus on Indigenous video art practices in Latin America. By expanding on the Indigenous perspectives of the Yanomami, Mapuche, and Gaviáo tribes, among others, section four examines how video technology enabled representation of and by Indigenous peoples. In his essay, Murphy examines work by the Chilean artist Juan Downey and the work of Vincent Carelli. Carelli brought video to the Indigenous communities instead of making them the subject of his work, as Downey did in his well-known works Video Trans Americas (1976) and The Laughing Alligator (1979). Carelli instead trained and handed the video cameras to the Indigenous tribes, which resulted in unique footage aesthetics "that people outside of these communities don't have access to" (239). This last section, which has a less obvious connection with the other three, stands out as a welcome addition to discussions regarding self-representation and decolonization, as it is the only discussion that considers Indigenous communities as a dominant cultural force in modern-day Latin America. Nevertheless, with its collectivity of voices, Encounters in Video Art in Latin America substantially enriches the conversation about video art activity in the region.The greatest contribution of this volume, however, is its challenge to the predominant narrative that video art did not circulate across Latin America during the early days of the field, which Encounters in Video Art in Latin America offsets as an in-depth study revealing the rich transnational networks of video artists working in the region. This book also provides excellent groundwork for future investigations of the impact of video art developments in Latin America.