Associação Cultural Videobrasil

About the Video Lo Sublime/Banal, by Graciela Taquini

"Being Argentine means being far away" - Julio Cortázar

With a wide-ranging, restless, and single sequence shot, Graciela Taquini is able to create a world within a Buenos Aires kitchen where two talkative ladies, one of whom is the author herself, recall their meeting with writer Julio Cortázar in Paris, 1971, as they whip creams and pick small fruit to decorate the dessert the tasting of which has brought them together as well. That sequence shot also serves to stitch it all together, containing and unifying the loud dispersion of the protagonists who are capable of going, in a single phrase, from the totemic and poetic remembrance, perhaps distorted or stylized by memory, to culinary details, domestic, evanescent, told and tasted with the same emphasis. 

From the very choice of the title for her video, Graciela Taquini makes explicit this game of opposites, counterpoints, and contradictions that permeate her work. From her self-portrait, Roles, in which she has herself called a “nun” and a “whore,” to her tribute to Hitchcock in Psycho, including scenes from the classic movie in which the shy Norman Bates cross-dressed himself as his murderous mother; in Jugetes, an institutional video for Museo de la Ciudad about old toys used by ghost children; and in her latest work, Granada, another ambivalent title that might refer to a song or an explosive (grenade), and which ends in a close-up shot of the face of an ex-convict of the military dictatorship, now submitted to the camera of the author, who dictates, in voice-over, parts of the statement to the protagonist.

All of these videos feature Taquini's thematic and aesthetic obsessions, the attractive or claustrophobic sequence shots, the invasive camera with its raw approximations, the use of space and the voice-overs giving new significance to the scenes, the invocation of episodes that happened in reality and were later sublimated by memory, art, or merely by their representation, the contradictions and contrasts that are resolved in circular or mirror-like solutions, the certainty of having lost a center and an order, maybe more mythic than real, the absence or rambling reminiscent of tango and of Cortazarian “Argentineness,” as the author of O jogo da amarelinha stated: “Being Argentine means being far away.”

The sophisticated mealtime companions of Lo Sublime/Banal, one of whom is the author herself, and the other, her friend Felicitas, managed to simultaneously transform the constant chaos of their universe of meetings and ingredients into a labyrinth with a direction or, as Borges would put it, an architecture, when they finally share, on the table, two communions: the two desserts, and the two postcards from Notre Dame in which Cortázar has left his play of speculation. To each woman he wrote something that can only be verified and reveal its meaning when confronted with what he wrote to the other woman. Taquini, as well as Cortázar, likes playing with opposites, and both know that every game needs rules, and every game needs chance. 

There also is, as in any self-respecting tango, the invocation of a past that makes itself present, the conjuring of ghosts that return, in an indecent combination of Tres Anclados en Paris* (Cortázar, Taquini, and her friend Felicitas) with the obtrusion of memory, in the likes of Naranjo en Flor** (“Si toda mi vida es el ayer que me detiene en el pasado” [If my entire life is yesterday, which holds me in the past]), as imprecise as it is mythic and sacred (frozen by photography in postcards from Paris, and made eternal by the wrist and handwriting of Cortázar, in his verses) which irrupts out or incarnates in a fleeting, ephemeral present time of domestic urgencies and instant pleasures.

As in Cortázar, the extraordinary and the fantastic take everyday life by storm; a bright, sensual cooking session turns into a séance, and the repetitions or mirrors redeem themselves in a perfect circle, thanks to which, as Borges would have put it, we live and die so that a scene can repeat itself. Symmetries, as well, are not strange to this work by Taquini, imprisoned in a circle inside a stained-glass window in Notre Dame. 

Perhaps those young language and art-history students met with Cortázar in a bar in Paris, circa 1971, so that this work could come into existence. Cortázar would also quote Mallarmé, claiming that every life should be able to become a novel, that we were predestined to be literature, and that that very literature justifies us. 

Just as dwarves from the past, from another time and space, make themselves present amidst the dishes and mixers of the inexorable here and now, the stagings in Graciela Taquini's videos are supported by a camera that cuts out, and thus imposes absences; one never sees the protagonists clearly, frontally, or completely. Something, a lot, remains scarce, so that it can be occupied by the invisible. She reminds us that seeing is not believing, as she makes what we don't see credible and, paradoxically, that which we do see becomes clouded with an unreal, hallucinatory, or absurd tone. Or else, the recording device becomes evident: if, in Granada, the protagonist speaks looking at the camera and staring at us, spectators, in Lo Sublime they show postcards to the camera, and both the audio and what they say run counter to what one sees, focusing more on the reality of image, than on the image of reality. Therefore, as in Velázquez, the screen is akin to a mirror, with its atrocious suggestion that we are, we and the world we assume as real, a mere reflection.

In this metamorphosis, intrinsic to the cutting and splicing of the audiovisual language and its space, light, color, and time values, the sublime becomes banal and vice versa, for everything that converges into the mirror, into the circularity of the tape or DVD, is subverted; what is above goes below and vice versa, depending on the spin point; banality finds its sublime reflection; darkness finds its light; the fleeting finds its eternity. 

The microworld traveled by Taquini, in this case a cozy, bourgeouis Buenos Aires kitchen, becomes rarified; after undergoing a process of estrangement, it unfolds itself, loses its certainty. As an Argentine in essence, she puts her existence as a defined unit in check and under tension. She feels and guesses that she is someone else, someone who has usurped her name and who can only be complete and recognize its own self when it accepts that it isn't indivisible. It needs distance and detachment in order to detect its true outline, or else it will use the superb and dangerous alibi of mixing with its own shadow. The postcards are as banal on their own as they are sublime when coupled. Only then do they become an indivisible phenomenon. 

Cortázar, Graciela, and Felicitas take Buenos Aires with them, like the shoes they wear, but this is better noticed in foreign territory; at home, details distract them, and the whole is not appreciated; however, as diagnosed by the author of Casa Tomada***, a gray sky pushes them into a private ceremony. And what else is sublime/banal, if not a private ceremony in which two friends ostentate frivolities and sensitiveness, daringness and prejudice, as each of them can be either fama or cronopio; together-like their postcards-, using video instead of chalk, they draw a hopscotch, this child's game in which you can go from hop to hop, from plane to plane, until you reach the sky. In the end, the Notre Dame stained-glass window shows me where does this video creation point to, and where does it hit the target. 

* Film by Argentine filmmaker Manuel Romero, 1938.
** Tango by Homero and Virgilio Expósito, 1944.
*** Tale by Julio Cortázar, 1946.

Why do you claim that electronic art lies at the “outer part of art”? In your opinion, where do the productions involving technology fit into the overall contemporary art scene?

Electronic art, or better put, video art, was an underground movement created by what I call “the videasta generation” [TN: the term videasta is a combination of the words video and cineasta, which means filmmaker in Portuguese]. Digital technology and access to very accurate software and hardware have brought into the electronic art field creators from other areas, such as the visual arts, drawing, architecture, music, etc., and helped them expand their artistic outlooks and practices.

You believe that access to technology has led to the “democratization and the broadening of individual discourses.” What's the importance of such an effect in a peripheral country?

There are different peripheries and different Latin Americas. There are examples of artists who are not peripheral at all. Southern Cone artists come from different social classes, with the exception, for instance, of Paraguay. I ran a video art workshop in Asunción, and the students had been to all of the Biennials, all of the museums, they had wide-ranging, up-to-date information. Argentines and Uruguayans don't have such possibilities. We've got the Internet, our deep curiosity, a certain degree of erudition, and an intellectual capacity for reflection, not just for information. We have our critical sense. 

You're acquainted with the international art scene; what are the particularities of the art produced in the geopolitical south of the world?

I'm not sure we have a big enough corpus for us to detect particularities. I see a certain power of discourse, humour (in the cases of Uruguay and Argentina), parody, irony. Poetics that is not purely based on visuality. I have just carried out a screening of videos from the Americas, and the work I chose from Brazil is not what one would typically expect in terms of color and rhythm. I selected A coleta da neblina (2001), by Brígida Baltar.

What do you consider to be the features of electronic media, as used these days?

The technological artistic production is extremely fragile, and everything seems to indicate that it won't exceed the limits of this civilization. Technology seems global, nevertheless, only a small percentage of the world population has access to telephones. What appears to be a democracy is actually governed by market laws. An artwork that uses technology is no more contemporary than one that doesn't. Nevertheless, the use of technology is an increasingly frequent practice. Technology presents challenges and specificities that didn't exist before: new forms of interactivity, real-time, simultaneity, ubiquity, the development of hypertext, of nonlinear narratives, the unfinished work aesthetic, and unlimited possibility of creating artificial parallel worlds. 

You often joke about being an “old emerging artist.” Presently, what are the questionings that drive your personal work? 

In fact, my productive capacity in later years amazes me! My videos are the product of much planning, but they also have a random component. They are videos that I have found. I basically work with memory. I'm afraid to lose it. Currently, I'm working on a project along with two other artists, and it's about deep, dark secrets. I consider the electronic media as an honest media. But I'm not sure whether I have the time to experiment with all of the things I would like to do, such as breaking out of the screen and reaching out into space.

How did Lo Sublime/Banal come about? Did the success of the video, awarded at the Videobrasil, surprise you? 

The video arose out of a proposal made by the Zoom Buenos Aires TV show, of the Ciudad Abierta channel, which invited artists to create five-minute-long sequence shots. It was hard work, but in the end it all worked out. It's a real story, it happened with my friend Felicitas and myself. I found her to be a wonderful person to talk to, someone who helps me “see” the big picture. My idea was to be off-screen doing voice-over. I did another version in which only our hands appeared. When I won the Videobrasil award I almost had a heart attack. Afterwards, Carmen Garrido, from CaixaForum, told me it was the best video she had seen in the last three years, and she purchased it for their intranet. Jorge La Ferla considered it more banal than sublime, he likes Granada better; as does Rodrigo Alonso. Granada is usually more requested by festivals.

What's the nature of your contribution to the Ciudad Abierta public TV channel: is it the formatting, the subjects, or the language?

Television work is teamwork. But a good example of my concept is the El Cuerpo series: memory, dispersion, interviews, multiple simultaneous information channels. It's a more subjective take on television, one that is multifaceted, with different meanings.

A peculiar way of being on scene, questionings about memory, and an ease for switching to and fro between the realms of sensations and of facts; these are all features of the video work of Graciela Taquini (born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1941). From her early 1980s experiments until her burst of productivity in recent years, Taquini's artistic achievements have always been a branch apart in Graciela's close professional relationship with electronic art, especially Argentine electronic art. The holder of a degree in art history with specializations in Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Rome, and Washington, Taquini pioneered the promotion of Argentine electronic art, be it in the subject of books such as Buenos Aires Video X and Veinte Años de Video Arte en la Argentina or in her prestigious career as international curator. Her obsessions, namely fostering electronic art and the renewal of TV language through experimentation, have also driven her work in Argentine cultural government institutions, which she has been doing for twenty years now. 

Taquini showed creative power from the very start with her debut work, Roles (1988), in which she used recordings of passages or moments of her own life-at times as a dreamy adolescent, at others as a laureate intellectual-to discuss how socially imposed roles override the complexity of individuals. In the background, different voices recite academic titles and cursings in the same monotonous tone, as an old song, Only You, makes the idea of being unique sound old-fashionedly romantic.

A long time elapsed between her debut and her sophomore work, Psycho x Borges (1997). Built around a statement by Jorge Luis Borges in which he ironizes the dominating mother and submissive son portrayed in Hitchcock's movie, the film evokes the underground, experimental nature of Argentine video art. 

In the following years, working as General Manager of Buenos Aires museums, the artist applied her experimental principles to the institutional field, producing and writing scripts for videos such as Nueve Museos, Juguetes, and Primer retrato de Buenos Aires, Emeric Essex Vidal, which deals with the city's art collections, artworks, and museums. 

In 2000, working along with Carlos Trilnik for Buenos Aires' Channel 7, she created the Play Rec cycle, consisting of twenty-one special shows which presented an extensive map of Argentine contemporary art, grouping up artworks and artists' statements in sections dedicated to women, the role of landscapes in artwork, and other subjects. In the same period, working as a curator, Taquini participated in the Interferencias Biennial in Belfort, France; produced the Argentine video art exhibitions Trampas (en torno al simulacro) and the traveling Trampas 2; and created video selections that were screened in Germany and Spain. 

Lo Sublime/Banal (2003), a sequence shot that would win her the State of the Art Award at the 15th Videobrasil (2005), was her following work. The video depicts the author and her friend Felicitas in the intimacy of a Buenos Aires kitchen, preparing a delirious dessert as they reminisce on the long-gone day when they bumped into Argentine writer Julio Cortázar in an obscure Paris pizzeria. The work was commissioned by the Buenos Aires City TV channel Ciudad Abierta, for which Taquini worked as a consultant from 2003 onwards-the guidelines of which include receptiveness to independent productions, the new Argentine cinema, auteur documentaries, and experimentalism. 

In 2005, Taquini created the Resonancia installation and the Granada video, sibling works born of a single document: the video statement in which Andrea Fasani, artist and former militant of the Juventude Peronista [Peronist Youth] tells the Arquivo Argentino de Testemunhas [Argentina Witness Archive] how she was kidnapped, imprisoned, and tortured by the country's Army in the 1970s. Commissioned by the Museo de Arte y Memoria de La Plata, Resonancia features excerpts of the statement, which was re-recorded by the artists, along with images from inside a human body. The subject of Granada, the title of which alludes to a song Fasani heard during the bizarre celebration she was forced to witness in prison, is the very re-recording of the statement, as Taquini directs Fasani, repeating and making her repeat excerpts from a transcript of her original statement. That which the first work had only hinted at, became explicit in the second work; both are ruled by the difficulty (and by the inescapable need) of moving along memory's darkest labyrinths.

Magnetic resonance imaging, reminiscent of the uncomfortable physicality of the body, would later reappear in El Cuerpo, a series of four TV shows codirected by Taquini that same year. The series is perhaps the ultimate example of the genre she dubs “auteur documentary.” The author deals with issues such as the erotic body, the virtual body, and the excluded bodies by painting a fluid picture of superimposed information where images, stories, and questionings taken from her own personal history are as important as references to art history and birth statistics from Argentina. According to Taquini, the show is a defining example of her contribution to the TV channel.

Taquini's most recent work, the documentary film Tras Eduardo Kac (2006), stems from the exhibition of the Brazilian artist that she created for the Espacio Fundación Telefónica, in Buenos Aires. Eduardo Kac, Obras vivas y en red culled together the installations Génesis, Move 36, and Teleporting an Unknown State, plus photographs, objects, and the Rabbit Remix publications, featuring a transgenic rabbit supposedly created by Kac. It was one of Taquini's most celebrated curatorships since Vertigo-a collection of site specifics by artists Augusto Zanela, Martín Bonadeo, and Nushi Muntaabski for Malba (Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires), and Horizonte/Desierto-Argentine video selections exhibited at the Champ Libre Biennale in Montreal, Canada, both dated 2004.

During that same period, Taquini participated in exhibitions and festivals in Latin America, France, the United States, and in the 15th Videobrasil as artist, curator, and jury member, and won consecutive awards from the Argentine critics association and from her country's government for her cultural dissemination work. The curator of the Electronic Art section of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, in 2005 she received the title of Honorary Consultant Professor from the Escuela de Comunicación y Diseño Multimedial at Universidad Maimonides, a Buenos Aires-based institution that provides support for her production, academic, and curatorial activities in the field of electronic art.

Dossier on Argentine digital image 
This Web site gathers studies by Argentine theoreticians on art and new technologies, including essays and curatorial texts by Graciela Taquini. Featured subjects include electronic art production in Argentina, and the work of the Ar Detroy collective.

Transcuerpos
The Transcuerpos virtual exhibition, created by Graciela Taquini for the Cibertronic virtual electronic art magazine, of the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, gathers artists who use the body as an object, ranging from Mexican photographer Miguel Angel Sepulveda to Argentine performer Paula Gaetano.

Malba
The Web site of the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires features Vertigo, including site specifics by Martín Bonadeo, Nushi Muntaabski, and Augusto Zanela, among other exhibitions curated by Graciela Taquini that the museum has hosted.