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20/3/2013

Juan Downey

Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City

Curator Julieta González

The work of Juan Downey (Santiago de Chile, 1940 – New York, 1993) covers a wide range of practices and mediums: drawing, installation, video, and painting. Likewise, it addresses a series of complex issues, very current at the time, about the use of new technologies in art and the implications this would have in terms of its reach and production of meaning in a context that went far beyond the museum and gallery exhibition space.

The exhibition Juan Downey. A Communications Utopia presented at the Museo Tamayo presents a significant selection from his major bodies of work, taking as a point of departure the notion of feedback as a constant and structural aspect of his work throughout his entire production.

Juan Downey was a pioneering figure of video art in a moment in which the medium was just beginning to be utilized by artists, who saw in it an enormous potential; the communicative power of the television medium, the immediacy of its transmission, its closed circuits and its manifold possibilities of edition and feedback, lent themselves to multiple experiments, not only in terms of image but also of perception and communication.

Trained as an architect, the topological experience of video feedback led Downey to conceive of dematerialized and ecological architectures through drawings of projects for buildings and cities that promoted the flow of energy between nature and the built environment.

One of Downey’s landmark works is the video-feedback-based installation Video Trans Americas. In 1973 he embarked on a journey that would take him from New York to Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile, where he recorded the autochthonous cultures of each place and then showing them to the inhabitants of these places and to others during the trip. Later, Downey decided to travel to the Venezuelan Amazonian basin and resided there, among the Yanomami, producing one of the most singular bodies of work in recent art history. With these fundamental works, Downey positions himself as a “cultural communicant, an activating aesthetic anthropologist with a visual means of expression: video tape.”

Upon his return to New York, at the end of the seventies and until his death in 1993, Downey continued to make videos that reflected on mass culture, the media, and representation, reaffirming his continued interest in communication structures.

Downey’s cybernetic utopia proposed a radical reformulation of the relations between man and technology, made manifest in the selection of works included in this exhibition, which presents Juan Downey as a thinker, of visionary and advanced ideas, aware of the complexities of his time.

Juan Downey (Santiago, Chile, 1940 - New York, 1993) He studied architecture at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. After college he moved to Paris where he lived for a period of three years. While in Europe he met artists such as Eugenio Tellez, Roberto Matta, Vassilakis Takis and Julio Le Parc. In 1965 he was invited by the Organization of American States to exhibit his work in Washington, a city where he lived for a couple of years. Finally, he would permanently move to New York where he lived until his death in 1993.

Image: Juan Downey and unidentified person in front of Information Center at the gallery Howard Wise, 1970. Photo: Harry Shunk / Cortesía Marilys Belt de Downey, N.Y.

Communications
Sofía Provencio - Beatriz Cortés T. (5255) 5286 6519 prensa@museotamayo.org

Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo
Paseo de la Reforma 51, Bosque de Chapultepec Del. Miguel Hidalgo C.P. 11580. México, D.F.
Hours:
Tuesday through Sunday, 10 am to 6 pm
Price: $19 / General public
Entrance is free to students, teachers, and senior citizens with valid identification
Sunday free to public

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