Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Sometimes I feel happy

“Sometimes I feel a pleasurable, macabre happiness, much like Glenn Close cooking the rabbit of Michael Douglas’ daughter.” Miss Tacuarembó, Dani Umpi

Montevideo, June 16, 2007, 3:00 a.m. I just arrived from the Central concert hall, where there has been a party-tribute to the Pachamama, one of the city’s emblematic nightclubs in the past. Dani Umpi appears onstage along with a particular group of people who push the boundaries between pop and kitsch.

Don’t You Want Me, Human League’s 1980s hit, is the song of choice of Dani Umpi, the performer, as the audience stands seduced and waiting. Shortly thereafter, the group Palangano takes the stage, perfect voices, carefully designed grotesque motions, and a state of emotiveness that is contagious, and which is not always present in the Montevidean scene, characterized by sobriety and circumspection, even when it comes to art and pleasure.

Dani stands out for a moment, his body outlined, naturally capricious, as he dedicates the song to his friends and to all those who participated in the Pachamama. Upon seeing him leave the stage, one might think of how improbable it would be to pigeonhole Dani Umpi into one single cliché, because he has the ability to put himself into as many as he wishes, or as many as viewers may fit him into.

The reason for that mobility is far from being the result of chance. It has to do with the fact that the pillar that holds his image and conceptual strategy is erected upon many different fields of production, linked together by zones of contact: melodrama, ambiguity, fiction, and everyday life make room for other possible territories.

These zones are interconnected in a precise manner, and they function as devices loaded up with affectivity and concepts that mobilize the passivity of viewers. 

Alter ego

The work of Daniel Umpiérrez is multinodal and rhizomatous. His positioning within the artistic field denotes different ways of operating within a conceptual strategy that consolidates itself as work in progress. A single reading cannot be made, without taking into account the vessel that connects with another point in the network. 

Nelson Daniel Umpiérrez Núñez was born in Tacuarembó in 1974, and has lived since 1993 in Montevideo, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in advertising and artistic and recreational communication. Parallel to that background, he developed his activity as a visual artist, originally as a member of an artistic action group entitled Movimiento Sexy, and later continuing with his career individually, both as curator (a good example is the Tics exhibition, held at the Cabildo de Montevideo, in 2004) and as art critic, by means of one of his alter egos, the architect Adriana Broadway.

Among the nodes that can be visited, writing is among the highlights. Of his narrative works, the three that were edited by now are: Aún soltera (2003, Ediciones de Eloisa Cartonera, Buenos Aires), Miss Tacuarembó (2004, Interzona, Buenos Aires), and Sólo te quiero como amigo (2006, Interzona, Buenos Aires).

His literature proposes to visit microworlds using a direct technique that reduces distance from the reader, in a style similar to that of television soap operas, which has led him to be compared to Manuel Puig, the renowned writer of Kiss of the Spider Woman, among other works. He also made his poetry known in editions published by the Buenos Aires gallery Belleza y Felicidad.

In his activity as a singer, he has been carving out the profile of a unique performer for himself. His mise en scène and choice of songs give rise, since the album Perfecto, to unusual, seductive atmospheres that run the gamut from lyrical singing to bossa nova, including international pop and folklore music.

Nelson Daniel Umpiérrez Nuñez has gradually created Dani Umpi: visual artist, singer, writer, and performer; the architect Adriana Broadway, art critic and curator; and Nelson Nilson, a politically correct architecture student. All are part of and interpreters in this machinery of creation that could be regarded as a big TV soap opera.

All of these aspects are featured in the videos selected for the FF>>Dossier—Ilarié, Compraré, Try to Remember, No hay cómplices, Zona urbana, and Wonderland—, as these works present the facet of the performer who selects music and atmosphere with sharpness, bringing us close to universes and situations that move to the rhythm of the stories escaping from a TV set.

Everyday

In Ilarié, Dani Umpi intervenes in the Juan Manuel Blanes Museum, a premise destined to the fine arts containing one of Uruguay’s most important collections. On the museum’s walls, modernity is a pathway to a not so distant past. The artist appropriates himself of the museum premises with a certain irreverence, perhaps disrupting the sacred silence that the museum proposes. This becomes evident not just from the music of Xuxa, but also from his own garments, a striking palette of strong orange that cuts the axes imposed by the premise.

The video proposes a double tour of a place that establishes, in a symbolic manner, a nonlinear relation between artist, viewer, and museum space. The camera creates continuity between artist (who intercepts the sight) and historic work. The mise en scène is anachronistic; the motions, the voice, and the appropriation of space, with a certain amount of caprice, reveal part of what the artist would develop in years to come.

Fictional

Compraré and Try to Remember are two works that share friction zones between them. In the first video, the scene takes place in the back of a car, as the singer and star system member rides around in a convertible, accompanied by two ladies as he sings José Luis Perales’ ballad song. The ride does not pass by a wide avenue of a big city, the song has no glamour, and the ladies do not fit into the expected prototype. Nevertheless, fiction unwinds in a full, credible way, as in a cult road movie. 

In the second video, the artist reiterates his arrival at a space in which the setting seems to contemplate the absurd. The reason is validated in waiting for friends at a surprise party, as they salute him with balloons, serpentines, and a birthday cake. The melody repeats itself with each scene, interpreted by a new artist. The recipient of the tribute changes his style and his surprise with each sequence. Spontaneity ends up being a stimulus for simulation. It no longer matters how many tributes may be paid, it all points to Deleuzian “difference and repetition,” to being able to indicate and think beyond that which is taken as predictable.

Ambiguous formats

No hay cómplices is almost a music hall work. Umpi moves within a strict register established by the choreography. Everything is symmetrically defined, each character is contained in its own function, and each piece falls into a precise location. The artist puts his body and voice, disclosing a mordacious, sensual personality, at the service of pleasure, or the insanity of love. In this quasi-hysterical game, the fact that the choreography attains formal perfection does not preclude the existence of freshness and seduction.

Zona urbana potentializes the ambiguity of its artistic proposal, since it is a recording of a homonymous show in free-to-air Uruguayan TV. In order to promote his spectacle, Dani Umpi presents, along with musician Adrián Soiza, a performance in which he sings as he slices vegetables. Unexpectedly, he starts to throw the food at the team of journalists at the show. The performance ends up in an all-out battle, until the journalists leave their presumed position of spectators. The video creates all types of questioning: What is the actual performance? What is the role of the artist? What is the role of mass communication media? Undoubtedly, the recording is eloquent, and Dani Umpi emerges as a superhero in a TV series who fights for his universe, using weapons as particular as they are precise.

Melodramatic

Wonderland. Each territory has its own wonders, each sector of intellectual or artistic production too. The rites, the parties, and the award ceremonies to a certain career are, no doubt, a screen on which to produce and in which to be seen. Dani Umpi was nominated to an award ceremony as the young revelation of the year. This leads him to participate in an event held annually in Uruguay.

With glamour on a Montevidean scale, i.e., with circumspection and discretion, the guests arrive at a party. Umpi greets, perambulates, and in his arm he wears Charly García’'s “Say no more” bracelet. He sits at the table, and from then on the border between simulation and truth becomes diluted. As he cheers up the party, with the complicity of many colleagues, the joy that stems from the award granted to the artist starts to get exaggerated. In between euphoria and confusion, the purpose is to celebrate Dani.

The party ends, the young man sits alone at the entranceway staircase of the party hall, without his prize. By recording his own event, the artist intervenes in the public place and in the means of communication. Without abandoning irony, he exposes himself, but most of all, he exposes this setting as a creation, and thus he fictionalizes the growing illusion and disappointment, as in a virtual soap opera.

Gentleman Umpi

Slavoj Zizek calls “virtual imagery” the phenomenological experience that structures our relation with other people and objects, based upon the representation of idealized images that erase elements that would make our experience unbearable or impossible. For example, he mentions that, when we interact with another person, we forget that the other transpires or feels hunger. Dani Umpi exacerbates the virtual imagery until he takes it to the limit. Solemnity gets subverted, drama is converted into spectacle, and happiness is merely another category within the virtual imagery. The freshness with which he escapes this labyrinth allows him to follow the thread of Ariadne while he entertains conversations with Dionysos.

In this scheduled metamorphosis, there are no forewarnings, and the unlikely conditions to which the artist submits us give rise to the creation of a universe that has an imagery of its own, which filters and deactivates the conventional devices for assimilating art. In this territory, Dani Umpi strolls around like a gentleman, distinguished by his particular elegance, between mass consumption culture and the huge capacity for pointing out that the truth (Zizek dixit) can only be arrived at by adopting a subjective, committed, partial stance with regard to artistic creation.

Art critic, curator, art journalist, and visual artist, Jacqueline Lacasa (Montevideo, 1970) assumed in 2007 the direction of the National Museum of Visual Arts of Uruguay. As head of the institution, she is implementing her Museo Líquido project, which includes the creation of a mediatheque, and focus on hosting international artists and exhibitions. In 2006, she coordinated the edition of Palimpsestos: escritos sobre arte contemporáneo uruguayo 1960-2006 - Cuadernos de arte contemporáneo, and attended the meeting of the International Association of Art Critics, in Paris. The holder of a degree in psychology, she is a member of the Uruguayan Association of Art Critics, and of the FAC –Contemporary Art Foundation of Uruguay. As an artist, she participated in the 9th Bienal de La Habana (2006) and in the Mercosur Biennial, in 2005, and she established the newspaper La hija natural de JTG (Joaquín Torres García).