Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Andrés Denegri, from distance to closeness

Generally speaking, Andrés Denegri's audiovisual realm is built on the meeting of two opposite elements: on the one hand, we have distant, strange, fleeting images, and on the other, we sense an intimate, personal closeness with those images. 

In each of Denegri's works, the tension that arises out of such opposition is resolved in a different way. At times, distance becomes voyeurism, and intimacy turns into confession. At other times, the strangeness leads to a sort of hermetic character, such as when the work approaches everyday life situations or autobiographical data. His taste for clippings and details-which escape the wholeness of the visual field-usually finds its counterpart in the personal nature of the audiovisual material, and in the author's translation of his own private life.

This method of composition has manifested itself ever since his early works. Yo estoy aquí, colgado de la ventana (1997), for instance, features images of a girl watched from afar without knowing-probably through a window, as the title suggests-, combined with a simple animated love poem. The images of the girl take up small parts of the screen, but the framing clearly shows a remarkable distance between the girl and the camera that records her. These images seem to be the result of espionage, an authentic act of voyeurism, with the spectator as an accomplice. On the other hand, the poem conveys a high degree of intimacy, not only due to its content, but especially because it is handwritten, and in the first person. Distance and closeness merge in this first work, and that is the key to Denegri's entire work. 

Once again, III Momentos (1998) is a voyeuristic exercise in patience. The video combines three recordings of anonymous persons, captured through the open windows of their homes. Here, the distance of the people being watched manifests itself in the enlargement of the electronic plot which all but dissolves the figures. The overuse of zoom turns image surfaces into flickering, bright reticules. The absence of sound concentrates attention, inducing a contemplative, meditative, and intense perception. The scarcity of data on what takes place draws interest, multiplying the possible situations. The interest is also attracted by the strangeness in trite everyday actions, which slowly reveal themselves, creating a suspense that is absent from reality. The framing pulls out a narrative that isn't there, creating a narrator/camera eye that is active and present, and which definitely prompts reflection on the act of looking. 

One of the great strengths of Andrés Denegri's work is his ability to create a story using minimal elements. Cuando vuelvas vamos a ir a comer a Cantón (2001) is perhaps the best example of this feature. The video revolves around a small set of pictures, obsessively reframed and revised but never fully shown. Thus, the static support becomes dynamic, and its laconic mimicry injects life into the narration. Sound is fundamental to this work: the author's voice whispers words to someone who is presumably in the pictures, even though one can't tell exactly where that person is. The oral account is deeply intimate and emotional; it's a love confession, it's about meetings and farewells. Even though it is never anchored in the images, the need to provide a meaning to the work generates a connection between sound and vision. The cinematic convention that holds image and sound together is the sole warranty of a possible relationship between the two. When said convention is denied, the work breaks down into irreconcilable fragments.

Denegri enjoys pushing the boundaries of the relationship between image and sound, especially when a narrative association between the two seems evident. By watching his videos closely, we will notice that they usually originate from a split, often undisguised, between sound and image. In most cases, the off-screen voices are located in the foreground, very close, contrasting with often distant, disguised, or out-of-focus images. Thus, a sort of Kuleshov effect is established between sound and image: the closeness produces a meaning that seemed absent from the isolated parts. Consequently, image and sound maintain a certain autonomy that allows them to have an unequivocal relationship.

The same procedure is found in Uyuni (2005). Here, the images show deserted streets in a small, unidentified town, supposedly the Bolivian city that lends its name to the video. The takes are distant, blurry, the camera trembles almost all the time, adding up to an equally continuous dephasing effect. As the images pass by, a nearby couple talks off-screen. They are travelers staying over at Uyuni, discussing their different perceptions of the place: he seems comfortable there; she seems bored. The couple's argument builds a story along with edited images (originally recorded in Super-8 format), albeit from a plastic vantage point. The established conventions immediately link the words of the travelers to the place they are in, but they speak of a hotel, of restaurants, and of military offices, all of which remain unseen. Although the connection between words and images does function from the narrative point of view, it is not strictly secured in the syntactic construction of the work.

Between the lines, this attitude hints at the video's presumed index-like nature. According to Rosalind Krauss, the video has a feature common to photography, the fact that it is an index; this means it depends on the reality to which it alludes, by proximity. Denegri questions this manifest dependence by postulating, in opposition, an uncertainty principle that obscures the connection between the electronic recording and the reality on which it operates.

This procedure repeats itself in a set of works of documentary character. Even when resorting to direct recordings, the artist manages to disarticulate the immediate relationship between what we see and the documented fact, usually by means of forced or unusual points of view. The Luján video (2004) is paradigmatic in that sense. Unusual framings and excessively long takes draw the attention away from the recorded event-a religious procession-, and into the video's occurrence in itself. A considerable share of important action takes place out of the reach of the camera; as viewers, all we see are clues that force us to complete that which the image cannot convey in its entirety. 

Another key element in the formal language of Andrés Denegri's videos manifests itself here: his constant return to metonymy, i.e., a predilection for building an audiovisual account using fragments that refer to an absent entirety, with gaps left to be filled in by the viewer. 

Denegri demands a lot from his audience. Not only does he ask them to fulfill the intentional gaps left in his work but sometimes he also pushes the level of information to the limit, requiring audience participation in order to organize the discourse. The key procedures here are accumulation and superimposition. By exploring the various information channels of video to the fullest (image, sound, text, visual composition, graphic intervention, editing effects, etc.), the author offers the viewer a complex audiovisual structure, one that is rich in multiple readings, and which just won't boil down to a single storyline. 

That is the approach Denegri took to his documentary film about artist Oscar Bony (Acerca de Bony, 2005), a key figure in 1960s Argentinian art, with whom Denegri had contact a few years before his death. In the style of Godard, in La Chinoise or in Histoire(s) du Cinéma, Denegri superimposed different recordings of images, sound, and text, promoting shock, redundance, and contradiction. The result is a palimpsest of sorts, combining biographical and autographical accounts, aesthetic and philosophical reflections, opinions and concepts, all transmitted in a collage of everyday life, urban, family, and work situations. The compositional complexity echoes the complexity of the life of Bony, who was a controversial artist, sometimes marginalized, but surely seminal.

In recent years, Andrés Denegri has set out to produce some fully autobiographical works. Using photographs and home videos, the artist took up the task of rebuilding his own life, marked by an ambiguous relationship with his father, and by growing up under the last military dictatorship in Argentina. The two works that he produced up to now (the El ahogo video and the Un martes installation, both from 2006) are a bit hermetic, but both manage to produce a disturbing effect. As in all of his work, the ultimate meaning is up to the viewer. Here, as ever, Denegri resorts to his own imagination, but also to his ability to provide a structure to data which at first may seem disconnected, or even irrelevant. 

Despite his young age, Andrés Denegri is one of the most relevant and original artists in Argentinian video art. His work easily switches between fiction and documentary, biographical account and experimentation. He shows deep knowledge of the audiovisual media, full command over his aesthetic abilities, and meaning-construction techniques. But most of all, Denegri found in video a means to approach people and the world, a bridge to inner life and affection that can turn the distancing of media into emotional closeness.