It would be no exaggeration to say that Argentine Photography of the nineties began in 1993, when Marcos López completely revolutionised the use of colour and began a series that would come to be known as “Pop Latino”. This claim is based on the key role played by López’ work in a number of movements which are now considered definitive, and which we will focus on more closely later. But we shall begin by entering the inner space of his images.
LA CIUDAD DE LA ALEGRÍA (THE CITY OF HAPPINESS - the political context)
When interviewed, Marcos López has classed himself, half-jokingly, half-serious, as an underdeveloped Andy Warhol. In his images, the abundant commercial products and popular symbols, the insistence on a vivid, saturated palette, the public billboard dimensions and many other features could be ascribed to the North American pop aesthetic. However, the reference to a first world of contemporary art works less as a modernizer for his photography as the catalyst for a critical observation of his own political and cultural surroundings. López uses an imported model in order to “proclaim it bad”, to transgress it, to revert it to its original meaning. In his images, there is nothing of the optimistic, formal moderation of the sixities. The resources of pop art are submitted to a hyperbolic overload which turns them into elements of a theatrical parody, a masquerade. Make-up, masks, rubber gloves, condoms: together, a paraphernalia of elements which, in their ostentatious artifice, reveal the bitterness of the drama they are supposed to disguise. In the foreground, López accumulates characters disguised, covered with adornments and emblems shown off to the viewer with the kind of exaggerated gestures that serve as an ironic reminder of the forced, upfront style of TV commercials.
“La Ciudad de Alegría” (The City of Happiness, 1993) is the photograph that heralded “Pop Latino”. The multiplication of placards with Carlos Menem’s face at the beginning of his long term in office, give a decidedly political tone to these grotesque scenes. The abandonment of the intimate scale and the poetic distancing of his previous black and white portraits did not represent a simple stylistic evolution. The inflection of Marcos López’ work has been determined by the socio-cultural context of Menem’s Argentina. President Carlos Menem, rising from the Peronist party, was the first political leader who was able to dismantle the protectionist economic system and workers organisations set up by J. D. Perón decades earlier. This was the historical paradox which led to the complete subordination of Argentina within the transnational capitalist structure. Under the presidential promise of its direct insertion into the First World (a slogan which López would parody directly in “Carnaval Criollo” - Creole Carnival – in 1996), during the course of the nineties there was a gradual draining away of national capital, both economically and symbolically. In these first images, Marcos López transformed the triumphalist propaganda of the government into a theatrical joke and vacuous drinking binge. The multiplicity of imported trinkets alludes to the growing loss of cultural identity hidden behind the ideals of integration into the universe of consumerism. López would return to these themes with the monstrous promoter of “Todo para Don Pesos” (Everything for Don Pesos, 1995) and in the three images featuring the fictitious Señor Truch, a media version of the legendary sellers of coloured mirrors of colonised America (1997).
ATRAPADO POR LAS FUERZAS DEL MAL (TRAPPED BY THE FORCES OF EVIL, Latin-American as a stereotype).
The reference to pop art, then, does not allude so much to art history as to the process of degradation of local cultures at the margins of the so-called global world. In the Argentina of the nineties there was no longer room for the celebratory formalism of sixties Pop. If the art of those times had been overturned by the culture of the masses celebrating the colour and abundance of a new life, the photos of López allude to a periphery culture blown away by the homogenising torrent of late capitalism. The Pop model appears surpassed in his work, by the excesses of kitsch. This can be seen in the horror vacua of his scenes (the accumulation of poses and objects in the foreground) and in the touching-up, the extreme saturation of colour, the discordant tones. Nowadays, the artist claims, in the Latin American metropolis our daily experience has less to do with the heritage of indigenous folklore as the ubiquitous, gaudy colours of Made-in-Taiwan souvenirs.
In short, the most relevant aspects of “Pop Latino” can only be deduced from the specific differentiation that the introduction of the adjective “Latino” hopes to achieve. The “Latinity” of his proposal derives directly from his desire to put the aspirations of all regionalist aesthetics into perspective within the present panorama of the devaluation of periphery cultures. His work emerged from a deep questioning of what constitutes a correctly executed photograph, and the focus on the sentimental, iconographic and indigenous by international art systems which has typified the paradigm of Latin-American output.
"En el Jardín Botánico" (In the Botanical Garden, 1993) and "Atrapado por las fuerzas del Mal" (Trapped by the Forces of Evil, 1993), featuring a bearded character which harkens back to images of guerrilla leaders, employ the fictional narrative of a comic in order to parody the talk of ideals and liberation of the Latin American peoples in the markets of tourist consumerism. Marcos López’ humour is full of silent irony.
Laughter is used to evoke just the opposite reaction. “Avoid crying for fear of crying forever more” – no better than the artist himself to express the unceasing anguish that would burst forth if for an instant one tore off the coloured layer of his scenes and masks.
CARNAVAL CRIOLLO (CREOLE CARNIVAL - Marcos López and Argentine art of the nineties)
Since the second half of the nineties in Argentina there have been a number of up and coming artists who have used “staged” photography in line with new aesthetic tendencies. While it’s true that the best of this work retained very peculiar, local characteristics, it would be a mistake not to recognise the significant influence of the international market, where new languages are associated with the drastic rise in relative terms of photography within its system of values. Any history of contemporary Argentine photography underlines the pioneering role played by Marcos López in this area, not only alluding to the chronological precedence of “Pop Latino”. The abrupt change in López’ work in 1993 emerges as a singular crossroads which has less to do with a knowledge of international contemporary art as with the slow accumulation of irreverent gestures within the traditional framework (both aesthetic and institutional) of local photography. The visual language that burst out of “Pop Latino” had actually crystallised gradually over the previous decade, in his black and white pieces, distilling into the sweet disobedience through which López took on board the classic portraiture model, traditional Latin American rhetoric and the discursive spaces of schools, societies, photo-galleries which had remained largely untouched by the young Argentine art scene. In 1995 and 1996, the “pop” work of Marcos López was included on the one hand in large retrospectives of Argentine photography, like the last link to a secular history of the medium, which would then be treated as an autonomous entity in itself. On the other hand, it was included as an example of a movement among contemporary Argentine artists who used photography as an element of the ready-made used in collage, montage and serial structures, conceived for the most part out of the tradition of conceptual art. His strident, parodic images strike a strange chord which doesn’t quite fit in either discursive context and which, with its exterior duality, symbolises the position that new photography found itself in during the nineties. In an important exhibition of contemporary art organised by the Generalitat de Catalunya in 1997, the great names surviving from the sixties and seventies were displayed alongside three very different artists representing Argentine art posterior to the 1976 dictatorship. Two of them were photographers. Adriana Lestido’s black and white shots of mothers and children in prisons echoed back to the long surviving tradition of the documentary aesthetic in third world photography. The colour photographs of “Pop Latino” not only pointed to a new photographic conception, it also represented the only reference in the exhibition to what had already become accepted historiographically as Argentine art of the nineties.
This chapter in the history of Argentine art established itself between 1989 and 1993 around the privileged aesthetic coming out of the Ricardo Rojas cultural centre. The work exhibited there displayed a movement away from the gestural painting of the eighties and a greater predilection towards the languages of mass consumerism and kitsch. Although some saw a reflection of the tacky “guaranga” culture of Menemism in this visual vocabulary, artists and critics generally agreed that it was fundamentally an apolitical movement. Within this setting, the work of Marcos López occupied a special position because its novel visual syntaxis retained a commitment to the Argentine social reality, a commitment which was largely absent from other artistic work considered representative of the decade. We could say that his documentary allegories achieved a unique synthesis between the “del Rojas” style and the documentary heritage of Latin American photography.
López participated personally in the multifarious activities throughout the two or three years during the formation of this new artistic movement. In 1996, the first important individual show of his work was held in Buenos Aires, to be precise, at the Ricardo Rojas cultural centre itself. There was an evident sense of family which united his colourful photographs in the bright ornamental style that had been used by artists since 1989 and was already considered as the seeds of a new tendency in local art. However, the humour in the work was acidic, its narratives clearly went beyond a personal testament, and his sense of kitsch pointed to an unequivocal social critique. This “Dual Discourse” already marked an irretrievable distance between López and the other artists of the nineties associated with the centre and its curatorial programme. If his work represented the aesthetic burden of Menemist culture, it also served as a reminder of the exceptional quality of the politically explicit discourse within this context.
As far as the photography itself was concerned, the most relevant sociological work up until then had been executed without ever questioning the fundamental linguistic paradigms of traditional documentary photography. In order to achieve this synthesis, López also had to transgress the purism of photographic language. The chronicling of the real was no longer carried out through the shot, through a cut in the phenomenological reality, but by the construction of pictures or narratives according to the kindred processes behind fictional cinematographic production. At the same time as he revises the “realist” stereotype of local photography, López manages also to conserve his referential intention by injecting social comment into his living tableaux. Even when his images derive from a specific fact from the current political climate, as in “Cavallo en la Puna” (Cavallo in the Uplands, 1996), he never loses sight of symbolic abstraction. The portraits, undoubtedly the key genre in his work, do not refer to the individual himself but to allegorical characters: the identity of the actor who poses doesn’t matter, since they represent the incarnation of collective lifestyles or feelings.
“I never worried about what magic realism was,” writes Marcos López, but nevertheless he suggests a definition: “When all the parties of a situation are aware that they are taking part in an absurd act but don’t deign to betray it”. Serious caricature, forced happiness, obviousness of the mystery: all resources which Marcos López uses, leaving behind him the transparency of third world documentary photography, and in passing, alluding to the inevitable neutralisation that takes place when images of the poor and of catastrophes are set within the context of the museum and mass media.
LA ÚLTIMA CENA (THE LAST SUPPER, Marcos López and the dissolution of the cultural model of the nineties)
In several ways exceptional then, both in respect to the local photography that had nurtured him as well as in the context of the new art of the nineties of which he formed part, even before the momentous events of 2001, the images of López also showed, the “dirt” that had been hidden by the system. Photographs such as “Plaza de Mayo” from 1996 were like the rest of “Pop Latino”, allegorical and lacking in direct political intent. But in light of the popular outburst that followed, of the people crowding into the square shouting “Que se vayan todos” (Get them all out), that smiling, dark-haired cleaner, in her pristine overalls, brandishing cleaning products in front of the parliament building, has been given new meaning.
The events that took place on the 19 and 20 December 2001, marked a symbolic date in the explicit questioning of the neo-liberal policies by wide sectors of the local population. But the popular toppling of the acting president only marked the climax of a movement which had been felt for a long time. While the political act was unprecedented, it did not come about from political infighting but by resistance to the disastrous social and economic consequences of the policy of takeovers and privatisation. In other parts of the world the Argentine phenomenon was associated with the anti-globalisation movement. Work like that of Marcos López showed that the web of causes of this rowdy rebellion did not come about overnight.
Towards the end of the nineties the first world backdrop was beginning to collapse and the Argentine urban environment rapidly transformed: businesses closed, banks bricked up, the loud banging of street marches, political repression, growing poverty. Before 2001, Marcos López abruptly abandoned his vibrant “Pop Latino” palette and opened up his box of stylistic references both from photography itself and from the collective heritage offer by the history of art. Although he continued to work between reality and popular myth in set-up photographs, for the first time in his artistic career he took a significant number of direct shots of the suburban landscape. The poetry of bad taste and cheap resources is no longer produced through the setting up of cluttered scenes, but by the direct cataloguing of the city outskirts where outlandish radar stations and shopping centres sit beside adorned façades and re-sprayed automobiles. They could be described as decadent but it is not preposterous to suggest that nowadays the real ruins are to be found in the unpleasant aftertaste left by the imposing architecture of multinationals and commercial centres, the remains of a spent model from whose cracks a new trend of values and behaviour is emerging. Political and economic helplessness has led to death, but it is also a testament to the rise in new ways of living: self-sufficient neighbourhood associations, popular assemblies, bartering centres, community dining halls, recycling circuits and organisations. Life goes on, pigheadedly, and within the empty shells of institutional and legal architecture, people are building their own city.
After the end of “Pop Latino”, Marcos López photographed little, but from a powerful group of five pieces, all featuring male characters, an image has emerged that will for the moment, perhaps, be his masterpiece. We are referring here to “Asado Criollo” (Creole Roast) and the operation to adapt Christianity’s “The Last Supper” to the amicable Argentine Sunday ritual. The reference is clear and yet the original sense has been somehow inverted. At Christ’s table no one approaches the food. The group of apostles dressed in robes resemble a meeting of philosophers or a demonstration of the feelings and ideas that inspire divine revelation. In the crude Argentine reality, where death is a daily occurrence, where the uncertainty surrounding life after death seems trite when faced with the uncertainty of what will happen the next morning, the men surrender themselves to the ecstasy of the banquet which, for reasons far more earthbound, may well also be their last.