El deseo demoledor de Roberto Jacoby

Foto: MUSEO REINA SOFÍA
MADRID, 25 Feb. (EUROPA PRESS)

SUS 'CONCEPTOS DE VIDA' EN EL REINA SOFÍA


Bajo premisas como 'tecnología de la amistad' o 'estrategia de la alegría', el artista y sociólogo Roberto Jacoby (Buenos Aires, 1944) nos propone un recorrido por sus experimentos, montajes y estrategias de exhibición, concebidas siempre entre la fiesta y la investigación social. 'El Deseo nace del derrumbe' es el título de esta muestra que podrá verse en el Museo Reina Sofía hasta el 30 de mayo.

Jacoby, figura "ineludible" en el arte argentino de las últimas décadas y poco dado a presentar su obra en museos y galerías, pero siempre bien ubicado en las "inmediaciones del arte", aceptó el reto de mostrar, por primera vez en un museo, su particular filosofía artística.

En este sentido, el director del Museo Reina Sofía, Manuel Borja-Villel describió a Jacoby como uno de los artistas "más interesantes e intensos" de su generación, quien desafiando a la obra tradicional, apuesta y le interesan las relaciones humanas.

Según ha explicado el propio Roberto Jacoby y la comisaria de la muestra, Ana Longoni, con el título, 'El deseo nace del derrumbre' se pretende "invocar al deseo" para que cambien las condiciones de vida que nos rodean.

El recorrido de la exposición comienza en la Sala de Protocolo donde se instalan los archivos del artista: un par de ordenadores permitirá acceder a gran cantidad de material documental sobre Jacoby -escritos, fotos, vídeos, canciones- a partir de una interfaz amable y lúdica, junto a la colección completa de la revista Ramona (2000-2010);

Sin olvidar el 'Gabinete de Curiosidades' (en la imagen), que, en palabras de la comisaria, Ana Longoni, "puede pensarse como una instalación" y muestra, a través de una vastísima documentación, la ineficacia e insuficiencia de exhibir las pocas ruinas que se conservan del arte de acción.

GALERÍA VIVIENDA

A continuación, Jacoby refleja en el 'Espacio Uno', una de sus instalaciones más conocidas titulada 'Vivir aquí' donde el artista trasladaba a la galería su vivienda-taller objetos cotidianos como la cama o el televisor, exponiendo públicamente el momento privado de creación de obra.

El concepto de este espacio, lo denomina como "tecnologías de la amistad", ya que surge de la colaboración entre artistas, que ha sido clave en todos los proyectos de Jacoby como Marina de Caro, Mariela Scafati, Daniel Joglar, Kiwi Sainz, Syd Krochmalny o Nacho Marciano, entre otros.

Asimismo, en la otra sala del 'Espacio Uno', se presenta la instalación '1968 el culo te abrocho', compuesta de 28 impresiones digitales de documentos que testimonian la radicalización política y artística de la vanguardia argentina en ese año.

Según explica la comisaria, sobre estos registros de este momento clave se inscriben -como capas geológicas- distintos modos de politicidad. "Los coloridos textos serigrafiados que flotan sobre los materiales de archivo convocan temporalidades azarosas en la vida del artista: desde sus canciones y poemas hasta citas de Karl Marx o los Evangelios Apócrifos".

Finalmente, en la zona de Bóvedas se exponen dos video-instalaciones: los registros de las experiencias Darkroom (2002-2005) y La Castidad (2007). Respecto al vídeo 'La Castidad', decir que es un documental de ficción que muestra una visión sobre el pacto de convivencia que mantuvo Jacoby durante un año con el joven artista Syd Krochmalny de mantenerse un año en "castidad" mientras trabajaban y producían su obra.

BIOGRAFÍA

Roberto Jacoby (Buenos Aires, 1944) empezó su trayectoria artística en 1964. Forma parte de la conocida como "generación Di Tella", en referencia al Instituto Di Tella, donde estudió.

Como miembro fundamental de la vanguardia argentina, en 1968 propició, junto con otros artistas, que el arte se trasladara hacia territorios aún más inciertos del conflicto social y político de su Argentina natal con obras como 'Tucumán Arde', en la que se propuso generar contrainformación y evidenciar la falsedad de la propaganda dictatorial.

Poco más tarde Jacoby abandonaba el arte en pos de la acción política directa, participando en la anti-revista Sobre e investigando la insurrección popular urbana, en 1969, conocida como el Cordobazo. También compuso decenas de canciones para el grupo rock Virus, uno de los más importantes de los últimos años de la dictadura militar y los primeros de la democracia en Argentina e impulsó numerosas fiestas y reuniones en espacios underground.

publicado en http://www.europapress.es/

Baño Revolution

In 2009 I tried to drive attention on some very common ways of discrimination in everyday life that remain invisible, even in institutions that are conscious and opposed to gender inequity. I worked specifically on the problem of public restrooms in the University of Buenos Aires. As everywhere, they are only two options: man and women. But, which one would be adequate for transgender or transvestite people? They remain with no place in binary gender classification.
With this idea in mind I produced an artistic operation called Baño Revolution (Toilet revolution) at the Department of Social Science at the University of Buenos Aires.
So I designed stickers with many gender options: women, men, lesbians, gay and transvestite persons. Then I stuck them in all the toilet doors of the Department turning them in genderless restrooms. As a way to make it work I invited some 50 people to use the restrooms independently of their gender option.
The event produced a wide and open discussions among students and professors. It was so polemic that the Department Director, the Academic Chair and professors wrote several articles which they published in a local newspaper. Aside from that, a research group on gender studies published a paper in the Social Sciences Review.
Later on, Argentina became the first country in Latin America and the second in the Americas to allow same-sex marriage nationwide.
My project is to turn the video recordings of Baño Revolution action into a mass media event through a video clip based on a song specially composed on the subject by a well known pop singer.
The video clip will play on Latin America music channels.

1. The Revolution Begins at Home

2. Girls, Boys and More

3. Thesis VIII

4. Multiple Love

5. Plan of Love and War

6. Open Restroom

7. Political Friendship

8. Social Conflict

9. Restroom Battle

10. Who are You?

11. Are the restrooms social facts?

12. Transvestite Origen of the World (Before Zeus's Maldition)

13. The Sacred Family

14. Social Theory DJ in the Bathroom

15. Genderless Restroom

16. Restroom Revolution

Apology of the Bathroom and the Revolution.

About a gender performance in the Social Science Faculty, University of Buenos Aires, April 2009

By Syd Krochmalny


Baño Revolution is an artistic project designed to change the sexual division of men and women’s restrooms into universal, genderless restrooms. The small yet ambitious objective was inserted into the course of daily life in the Marcelo T. de Alvear campus of UBA’s Social Science Faculty. This type of practice refers to the art-life relationship, and its references could be read from those experiences of Oscar Wilde from the end of the 19th century until the nowadays experiments of relational art. Baño Revolution could be thought of as a sociological experiment that uses the multimedia tools of contemporary art. Additionally, the event had its own political significance, in correlation with its function as an action that aims to transform daily life. It didn’t attempt to revindicate sexual liberties, nor to go along with them but to try to practice them in a natural way. In this sense, while well intended but conservative, the oppositions that could be read in the article published in Pagina/12 last Tuesday are worth some considerations. It is important to emphasize that the initiative was made with the aid of the sociological field, artists, professors and students. It was never opposed to further political articulations, in fact, by fueling the reconstitution of social ties within the university space, and, though it incorporated languages made possible by new technologies, the performance was “criticized” by its supposed “anchorage in the sixties”. The reaction against this intervention was reminiscent of a famous statement made by Professor Klimovsky in 1966 in regards to the experiences with mass communication media and contemporary forms called happenings. The claims were similar: elitism, exoticism, etc. But these actions, that were referred to as “trivial experiments,” culminated in Tucuman Arde, situated within the timeline of the politicization of arts that preceeded the Cordobazo. Perhaps, experiences like Baño Revolution, contextualized within a strategy of joy, contribute more to strengthen the repertoire of actions for the political-cultural fight to come, while a supposedly progressist rhetoric can not separate itself from a solemn, repressive and kind of nostalgic conception.

Baño Revolution is close to the relational art experiments that operate over social material with multimedia instruments, generating fruitful intersections between sociology and art. The idea is to try to question the uniformity of social sciences and to practice sociology with methods and tools that can can go past the always essential rational argumentation and the contrast of hypothesis and incorporate the performative, sonorous and visual dimensions of contemporary language

The critics to the experiment discursively opposed the experience against problems such as the redistribution of income, the reactionary offensive towards constitutional guarantees, the drugs, etc. This rhetorical strategy –to confront one small, external fact with the big problems that bleed our country day by day- is not only an crude result, but that it acts as a tranquilizing and exculpatory mechanism for those who refuge themselves in abstract declamations and the bureaucracy of knowledge like trenches for hiding their imposibility to propose new social forms capable of projecting a utopic dimension. These people, rooted in the bureaucracy and feuding amongst themselves about academic conduct, end up angering themselves over (almost) everything instead of imagining new links between sociologic knowledge and people.

There is not an inside (university/restroom) nor an outside (society), but creases, and the restroom is a nodal space in the house, like the fire, the bed, the library and the workshop, the sites of the origin of social transformations. If we believe that we have the posibility to elaborate discourses and practices that research and transform extended society, we should be apt to do it ourselves within our own space (Lenin dixit).

*Sociologist, visual artist, author of Baño Revolution