Guillermo Machuca is a renowned theoretician, art critic, curator and academician in Chile, a man who in recent years has opted for some kind of silence or low profile. Far from leading major curatorship in or out of his country, attending huge conferences –as he did through most of the 1990s- his (public) interest has boiled down to publishing some books and writing an opinion column in The Clinic newspaper. From that tribune, he has looked askance at the local artistic realm, laying bare –always with acute irony- his suspicions on the critical effectiveness of contemporary practices and the rigor of the circuit that props it up.
In his latest issue he makes use of a language and a modus operandi more related to journalism. The Emperor’s Suit is an analysis on different moments of the local arts in terms of mass culture. And he does so by checking on the culture-oriented press and the art reviews of the times. Roberto Matta’s visit to Chile somewhere between the 1960s and the early 70s; the emergence of Escenas de Avanzada, the Chilean neo-vanguard during the dictatorship; Robert Rauschenberg’s exhibit in 1985 at the National Museum of Fine Arts or Chile Vive in 1987 in Madrid; as well as the controversial work of Juan Davila entitled El Libertador Simon Bolivar, unveiled in the early going of the democratic process in the 1990s; the curatorship of El Terremoto de Chile by Spain’s Fernando Castro Florez for the Visual Art Triennial in 2009; or the publication of Imaginarios Culturales in 2010, in which artists, left-wing intellectuals and citizen groups built on an ideology in the context of neoliberalism and the right-wing government of Sebastian Piñera. These and other stories are reviewed and intertwined with references to major national developments, like soccer matches, the Viña del Mar Festival or the Feb. 27 earthquake, among others.
The author carries out esthetic readouts of political, cultural and massive situations, such as political readings of the artistic realm. Though his comments sometimes verge on gossipy stuff, the interest is always a symbolic one. He ferrets out ties between art developments and social occurrences, even some more personal matters. In his effort to rewrite Chile’s recent art history, he doesn’t rely that much on the assessment of works or exhibitions, nor to a chronological description of events. He rather turns to a review of the imageries, the public narrations or the way the representation of our culture plays out in the historic context, something that could shape up amid heated social demonstrations, repression and torture, the implementation of free market economy, the dictatorship of neoliberalism and the tensions brought about by globalization.
In this huge panorama, the theoretician reemerges in intense episodes of Chile’s political and cultural scene. For instance, he gives us a way to look at Roberto Matta’s work and the artist’s relation with his son, Gordon Matta-Clark, that reveals more of an orphanage. Those were the days of the Unidad Popular and the Salvador Allende administration, yet suddenly we find ourselves in the early days of the dictatorship by the hand of Carlos Leppe’s work. Machuca comes back to his own artistic self amid other stories; he reviews fundamental performances and returns to his flirting with power. Next thing we know, we’re reliving the rifts that Escenas de Avanzada and the local neoexpressionist painting fell into in the course of the 1980s. He copes with conceptual emphases, a critical and resistance-hardened spirit, hedonism and the market butting in. a few pages later, we notice how the contribution to the neo-vanguard loses steam as it gets recycled into academic material and museum artifacts
Machuca establishes readings that sway from the unsaid to the said, from the local myths and the micro-narrations to the facts and the clues. The book is a grand tour in alleged chronological order in which every so often time breaks down into flashbacks and unsuspected occurrences. This kind of writing is no doubt a fluctuating collage, a fabric of woven data, impressions, descriptions and quotations in which –in the same breath- obsessive interpretations on the Chilean art are revealed. The theoretician usually sees things under culinary metaphors; corporal, digestive and scatological puns as he goes unveiling image after image of smoky dishes or vomits, virulence, secretions and dejections.
Machuca’s glance continues to be both bitter and suspicious in reference to Chilean culture. Thus, this country reveals itself with a hick, precarious and dependent look, enduring the endless ignorance of the political and entrepreneurial powers, not to mention a recent flare-up of the intelligentsia’s retreat. Far from economic flashes in the pan, it’s the country’s image what’s at stake here, an image that The Emperor’s New Suit –a classic penned by Hans Christian Andersen and quoted as the book’s title- leaves us with a feeling of useless and absurd ostentation. In the last chapter, the king walks naked in front of the people –allegedly showing off a new suit- and nobody has the nerve to call a spade a spade, neither artists nor art critics and the mass media. Machuca has no fears and he probably likes playing the game of amassing hatred. He tries to tell things the way they really are, and he does it pulling no punches. Some quotations are crystal clear: “Chile’s political and entrepreneurial powers only try to show some interest in the arts if they notice there’s some kind of immediate political gain in that.”
In the face of today’s artistic inefficiency, the author somehow puts his smart money on an encounter with cultural journalism. Despite that he constantly points fingers at the uninformed and snobbish people, this possibility has meant to be a serious chance to change the entangled theoretical tone of the past and replace it with a more resilient and plain language, even resorting to personal anecdotes. Paradoxical or consequent is the silence he keeps in the last paragraph to spell out how Calle 13 manages to be a mighty reflection of the ongoing political situation hitting Latin American countries, reaching out to massive publics. He only misses out on quoting the lyrics of El Residente, a song that resounds like the truth a child screams at the end of The Emperor’s New Suit: “But he’s naked.” The voice of the Puerto Rican band’s lead singer ends up saying what Machuca would have liked –in the current globalization context- the art to say with its symbolic power and the mass media to express with its power to pry into the mass culture.
GUILLERMO MACHUCA:The Emperor’s Suit. Art and Public Reception in Chile over the Past Four Decades. Metales Pesados Publisher, Santiago de Chile, 2011.
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