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Installation photo of Friends: Late Homage to Your Friends from Zipaquirá, Manaure y Galerazamba (Head of Lleras), 1970. Courtesy of the artist.

The following interview with the Colombian artist Antonio Caro combines two of our conversations, one from 2002, and a very recent one. During the last several years, Caro and I have been working on a collaborative project consisting of a series of public conversations. The talks focus on the reception of conceptualism in Latin America, Caro’s role as a critic of Latin American art institutions during the Cold War, and the relationship between his work and the construct of nationhood in Latin America. We attempted to create a dialogue merging artistic practices and cultural studies, and the politics engulfing both. These conversations have taken place in the Colombian cities of Bogotá, Cali, and Tunja, and the Ecuadorian cities of Quito and Guayaquil. Their publication is forthcoming.

The artist Luis Camnitzer has written that Caro’s strategies are those of a “visual guerrilla.” His work questions how Colombia’s cultural institutions attempted to expel internal difference from the narratives of Latin American nations during the Cold War. Caro’s first well-known work, Friends: Late Homage to Your Friends from Zipaquirá, Manaure and Galerazamba (Head of Lleras)* consisted of a head made of salt, outfitted with spectacles, bearing a strong resemblance to Carlos Lleras Restrepo, a former president of Colombia. The piece was first shown at the 1970 salon of the National Museum of Colombia, an iconic institution in the cultural construction of Colombia as a modern nation. It was placed inside a glass box where the salt slowly dissolved and salt water ran all over the museum’s floor. Some art critics—and the political left—interpreted the work as an amusing critique of how Colombia’s ruling class had caused our society’s deterioration. Head of Lleras received honors in the salon and, as Caro says, “catapulted” him to a position of prominence in Colombia.

At the time, the museum’s collection was organized and narrated as if Colombia’s indigenous people and African slaves had disappeared during the colonial period, making way for a comfortably modern state. Caro made Head of Lleras using ancient indigenous techniques to remind us that salt has been an important cultural and economic resource in the lives of the indigenous people from Colombia throughout history. The head of Lleras constitutes a metonymy for all the Colombian presidents who, according to the narrative told by the museum through an entire floor of presidential portraits, gave birth to the nation. The salt constitutes a metonymy of the indigenous population; Caro made the salt disappear and inverted the process of the nation’s formation.

However, Caro has said that perhaps his most important critique of the institution and the narration of the Colombian nation is Homage to Manuel Quintín Lame, a performance in which he retrieves the indigenous leader from oblivion and duplicates his signature. Quintín Lame spent his life defending indigenous peoples against the oppression of the Colombian state. Jailed on nearly 200 occasions, he became his own lawyer, successfully representing himself and the indigenous peoples. Quintín Lame performed a kind of mimicry by which he learned the rhetoric and legal skills of the modern state. He did not know how to write, and thus to sign was a theatrical act that should be understood as a cultural and collective vindication. Mimicking the governor’s style, Quintín Lame added baroque arabesques to his signature, using symbols of indigenous pictograms. Caro began the performance by burning native herbs. He then repeated Quintín Lame’s signature on a board, on paper, and on a wall. What Caro appropriated, however, was not the aesthetic of Quintín Lame’s calligraphy but rather the very strategy of mimicry and repetition with which Quintín Lame called into question the nation’s authority. Throughout his work, Caro appropriates multinational commercial typographies, national icons, and the signature of a non-national leader—as well as indigenous mediums and techniques—bringing to light the fragments, shards, and patches used to create a sense of national community.

*Hereafter referred to as Head of Lleras, as it is commonly known.

 

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Translated by Brandon Holmquest

Víctor Manuel Rodríguez Let’s begin by broaching a topic that might be of as much interest in the US as it is in Bogotá: the Andy Warhol exhibition that recently closed at the Art Museum of the Bank of the Republic in Bogotá, the first big Warhol exhibition in Colombia.

Antonio Caro The Warhol exhibition is a sufficiently universal topic, one that helps us avoid being too localist or parochial, something very common in Colombia. Although I see flaws in the exhibition, the media impact was an indisputable fact. But popularity is one thing and cultural affect is another. I wonder, for example, how I—at age 60—can compare this exhibit, which comes to my city with at least a 40-year delay, with the impressions I had at 20 when I vaguely heard there was a man named Andy Warhol.

VMR We have talked about the difficulty of exhibiting Warhol today, when much of the interest has shifted from a formalist reading of his work to a dialogue with its context. It’s difficult for us to access the debates and cultural struggles Warhol participated in. How would you curate an exhibit so that these aspects came to light? I’d like to hear more on your perception of the responses of both artists and public, then and now.

AC I’m thinking of a possible title for this interview: “The Light from the Stars.” Astronomers see a light that is supposedly a star and they analyze the phenomena this little light implies, but they also know that the mass that produced this light could have long since disappeared. I’m sure Warhol would have loved the comparison. It seems that we’re like astronomers when we talk about Warhol in Bogotá in 2009. His little light has reached us. But where’s his mass? The Warhol we see today no longer exists in the universe of art; he’s now in the universe of culture, with the added aggravation, for him, that this is the formal universe, the culture “establishment.”

VMR I would like to point out, however, that the culture you speak of is not the context in which his project originated and which goes on redefining it, but rather the culture you call “establishment,” which is also media culture.

AC Yes. You can never see a cultural phenomenon separately from its social environment. Something the exhibition unfortunately didn’t tell us is that the environment in which Warhol lived has passed; it’s as if we were looking at photographs of Egyptian frescos. The Warhol exhibition in Bogotá in 2009 was as decontextualized as color plates of prehistoric caves.

VMR Yes. Contemporary readings of his artistic project in relation to the context of his era have revealed his links, for example, with the queer subcultures of New York. It’s been demonstrated that the omission of the firmament—that is, “other lights, black holes, and celestial bodies” in the reading of his work by “the establishment,” as you call it—is a political matter. The establishment can no longer ignore this context. However when it comes to introducing it within an exhibition, it is mostly used to produce a formalist reading and his queer ethic is converted into pathology. At the entrance of the second floor of the exhibition in Bogotá, where what the organizer understood as his “queer” works were shown, there was this statement: “Andy Warhol created an artistic empire. His pathology allowed him to understand how images give shape to desire, fantasies, identification, money, and power. He used cross-dressing as a way to explore sexuality and identity, as well as to comment and challenge the patterns of high art’s taste. America created an idealized image of its own hegemony. Could it be that the dream Warhol embodied through his life and work is actually the image of an empire in drag?”

AC I don’t know if this can be easily translated to English, but the saying in Spanish is: se ven las caras pero no se ve el corazón (we see people’s faces but not their hearts). I mean that there are very closed conditions for viewing art and we see only the surface. In Warhol’s case, we see faces but we don’t see hearts, which would be the social phenomena inherent to that moment.

VMR Still, in another sense faces were hearts for Warhol. You insist on the metaphor to call attention to the absence of context, but this absence doesn’t help us understand why he affirmed, “If you want to know about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”

AC I must insist. In Colombia, they teach us to see the surface. Art becomes an object that commands extremely high prices relative to the everyday economy. As a Buddhist would say, we see the illusion of a form, but never what’s there behind that form. Arthur Danto asked what the difference was between the Brillo box painted by Warhol and the one from the supermarket. I mention this to point out that in Colombia, viewers see the surface—the face, not the heart.

VMR That’s why the exhibition offers us surfaces to be formally analyzed, and not the political statements that Warhol made about the queer world he was attempting to create or about the modernist legacy of art and culture. Tell us about the perception of Warhol’s work 40 years ago.

AC I’m very interested in talking about this. Colombians of my generation know and can say very precise things about Warhol. They talk without knowing anything about the visual arts; they approach him as Pop. Initially, Colombian high culture did not accept him.

VMR Let’s talk a little more about your interest in Warhol’s engagement of mass culture.

AC Let’s put ourselves in that remote past: I was a young man without any of the sophistication of the high culture that came from Europe and was growing in the US. Although it’s maybe a reflection of what Warhol would later become, I felt it at that time. There are people who are paradigms, leaders of cultural changes, and a group or a generation submits to them almost automatically. I don’t think it comes from rational assimilation or a process of reflection. Seen from today, if Warhol was saying, “This is America,” this action unconsciously gave one the desire to say, “This is Colombia.” I believe in similarities and resonances. A few hours ago I was thinking—although he’s English—of a famous phrase of John Lennon’s which I’ll paraphrase: the problem with rock is that you feel it in your stomach. Warhol was an idol, and nobody questions an idol—people simply applaud and imitate. He was a star, hence my reference to light from the stars. Also, to flatter him further, since I always liked this about him, he recognized that an artist was no longer the 19th-century bohemian or a refined aristocrat, the European models.

 

Colombia Coca-Cola, 1976, enamel on tin. Courtesy of the artist.

VMR What about Warhol’s linking of his project to extra-artistic things? You have said that the importance of your work is that it resonates outside the art world.

AC I remember a Warhol Polaroid of Cassius Clay, who had recently won the gold medal at the Olympics. What’s interesting about Warhol is where he was: in the street, in the daily reality of the US. To come back to the 2009 exhibit in Bogotá, that is what we never saw: where Warhol was. I was talking with somebody today who said that my work was very objective. That there’s nothing invented. Warhol opened that door; he didn’t invent anything. All the characters and things were there and he simply painted them. Like Warhol, I also made a work on the topic of Mao. The important thing isn’t Warhol’s work about Mao or my work about Mao, the important thing is Mao! The day-to-day media reality is what’s important, as a reference.

VMR Could you tell us about your Mao work?

AC The piece was called Imperialism Is a Paper Tiger, paraphrasing Mao. It consisted of paper tiger silhouettes hanging from the ceiling of Bogotá’s planetarium, although some were glued to the wood-paneled wall that framed the entrance to the gallery. The silhouettes faced Mao’s famous phrase written on a banner and hanging on the opposite wall. The piece generated a debate amongst leftist artists, who thought I was mocking China’s cultural revolution.

VMR We’ve been speaking about the need to put Warhol’s work in dialogue with his social and political contexts to decode why he remains important. What do you see as the place of art today?

 

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