#dittborn

Fig. 1 Eugenio Dittborn, 1983. Sin rastros (Pintura aeropostale num. 13) [No Tracks (Airmail Painting No. 13)], photo screenprint, 175 x 145.5 cm. Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin.

Eugenio Dittborn Remembers the Forgotten, Part 2

Within the Blanton Museum of Art’s Latin American Collection there are two early Airmail paintings. Sin rastros (Pintura aeropostale num. 13) [No Tracks (Airmail Painting No. 13)] (1983) (Fig. 1) shows a series of women who escaped the grasps of the law and also depicts a hanged man originally created by José Guadalupe Posada, a Mexican printmaker, which dates back to the Mexican Revolution. The image of the hanged man is opposite the image of a disappeared person “in an equation between two fates in different historical moments.” (1) This juxtaposition has been interpreted as a “desire to ‘salvage memory’ ‘within a political climate that attempted to erase virtually all trace of it.’” (2) The title of this piece also alludes to the notion of disappearance and the idea of being gone without a trace.

In the bottom left-hand corner of this piece is written “Ninguna huella ha podido demostrar la supuesta eyaculación de los ahorcados” which translates loosely to “No trace has been shown of the alleged ejaculation of the hanged.” This seems to refer to the effects on the body when hung as this will sometimes cause an erection and ejaculation in males. But, this phrase suggests that we will never know if this myth is true because the bodies of the disappeared are not to be found. There is no way to find a clandestine camp or the site of a hanging without physical traces. This also springs to mind the myth of the mandragora or the mandrake since it is said that one will grow where ever human blood or semen contaminate the ground, including at the foot of gallows or hanged men. (3) A mandrake springing up would perhaps mark the spot of a hanged man, but perhaps there is a deeper connection. Because the mandrake springing up is a myth, and executions of the disappeared happened in clandestine camps and the grave sites were hidden and secret, there would be no trace of either one. So, it seems as though there could be the assumption that Dittborn equated the disappeared to myth, much like how many of the citizens denied what was happening all around them.

References:

1. Jacqueline Barnitz, Twentieth-century art of Latin America, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001),290-291.

2. Ibid.

This post is the first in a series of three. The next blog post, which will look at one object, will be posted within a week. The last blog will posted within a week of the second. I hope you find it interesting and I welcome any comments, insights, and suggestions (as this was part of my MA thesis, I'm putting out in the cyber world so others may be able to read it and engage with me, and others, about this artist and others in future series).

Eugenio Dittborn was born on January 31, 1943 in Santiago, Chile. At the age of 18 he began his study in the arts and in 1965 he was awarded a grant to travel to Europe and studied in Madrid and Paris. While he was in Europe, he was exposed to German contemporary art and was influenced by Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, eventually developing an interest in photography and silkscreening. (1) These influences show up in his early work in which photography became his “preferred means of addressing issues of identity, individuality, diversity, and historical memory...[using] irony and humor to challenge the distinction between high and low art...[and] there were other drawings...in which he focused on injustice and human misery.” (2) While this characterizes his early work, it is a foreshadowing of his later work and what I will now discuss.

Dittborn is best known for his Pinturas Aeropostales or Airmail Paintings that began in the early 1980s at the height of the dictatorship and it is these paintings that I will focus on. These works use a combination of painting (linked to wealth and prestige), photography (common and available to everyone), and text. They are also large in scale. Dittborn would “mine photography for its relationship to reality, memory, notions of identity, and mass culture. He would embrace it as a usurper of painting.” (3) From 1984 to 1988 Dittborn used a cheap, brown wrapping paper to support his work. His works after 1988 use a white non-woven fabric. Both of these materials are “lightweight and flimsy,” and Dittborn adds that they are also “Next to nothing. The strict minimum to cross the network, emerge at the far side and be shown there as an unfolding of different scarce resources...”(4)

These works often feature mug shots of criminals found in detective magazines from the 1930s and 1940s, often referring to the past and to the forgotten. In this way, his art works to “excavate, resurrect, and prolong memory.” (5) These mug shots were printed on perforated paper so as to be hung up in windows, thus indicating that these people had escaped. “As the net of the Law closed in, even to the point of pinning onto them an identity and a number, they slipped out, even further from the reaches of history.”(6) Not only do they have to do with memory, but they also circumvent the political censorship that is happening within Chile at this time. Under the dictatorship, photographic appropriation and deconstruction were an artistic strategy used by artists to undermine, contradict, and indict the regime’s discourses and oftentimes artists would take images published in the censored media and use it in their work. (7)

References:

1. Maria Jose Montalva, “The idea of the political artist in Chile under the dictatorship, 1973-1990, with a comparative study of Eugenio Dittborn and Arturo Duclos” (PhD dissertation, University of Essex, 2008), 91.

2. Ibid.

3. Gina McDaniel Tarver, “Eugenio Dittborn.” in Blanton Museum of Art: Latin American Collection, ed. Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro (Austin: Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin, 2006), 175.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6.Sean Cubitt, “Retrato Hablado: The Airmail Paintings of Eugenio Dittborn,” Third Text 5, no. 13 (Winter 1991): 18.

Julio Dittborn (ni que fuera chiste)

Julio Dittborn Decano Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales  Universidad Mayor