Temporal and Narrative (Dis)junctures: Guillermo Núñez’s Aesthetics of Memory and the Museum of Memory and Human Rights (Santiago, Chile)

Abstract

Focusing primarily on Guillermo Núñez’s work, this essay juxtaposes two almost-identical exhibits of his ‘exculturas’ (sic: xculptures/ex-cultures) – one at the Chilean-French Cultural Institute in 1975, which resulted in his detention and exile, the other in 2010 for the official inauguration of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights (MM) – to explore their relationships to memory production in Chile four decades after the military coup. In the first, Núñez offered a pointed critique of the repressive post-coup context through a series of caged and netted objects; the second reconstructed the first as a memory gesture, framed within the ultra-modern, state-sponsored MM, in its designated art space, at once included and physically separated from the historical narrative of the Museum. How do the politics, aesthetics and design of the MM work to complement, complicate, or contradict Núñez’s – and, perhaps, any – artistic proposal? What challenges might the aesthetic of memory in Núñez’s work pose to the Museum’s narrative frame? Examining Núñez’s ‘exculturas’ (and, briefly, Gonzalo Díaz’s reconstructed Lonquén) reveals several tensions – around politics of inclusion and exclusion, the state’s role in memorysites, and the relationships between human rights concerns and museological and artistic strategies – marking the social production of memory in Chile today.

Keywords:

• Latin American [Chilean] art
• Guillermo Núñez
• Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (Santiago Chile)
• politics and aesthetics of memory
• museology

Acknowledgements

I thank the Evergreen State College for Faculty Foundation Grant support, colleagues Catalina Ocampo, Diego de Acosta, Jean Mandeberg, Therese Saliba, Savvina Chowdhury, and two anonymous reviewers for their perceptive readings of this essay, and Soledad Bianchi and Guillermo Núñez for their essential insights, generous hospitality, and ongoing support, without which this piece could not have been written. Thanks, too, to Guillermo Núñez and Pablo Yáñez for permission to print their photographs in this essay.

Notes

1. In ‘Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos,’ María Luisa Sepúlveda clarifies that a private foundation directs the Museum, while state funds are allotted for it each year in the national budget and dispensed through the DIBAM (Dirección Nacional de Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos/National Directorate of Libraries, Archives, and Museums) (in Brodsky et al. 2011, 21). In a personal interview (2013), Museum Director Ricardo Brodsky explained that over 90% of the Museum’s funds per year are public, with less than 10% private/self-financed through donations. Cath Collins and Katherine Hite note that the only completely state-funded (as opposed to private or semi-private) memory site in Chile is the wall of names at the General Cemetery in Santiago. See their ‘Memorials, Silences, Awakenings’ (in Collins, Hite, and Alfredo Joignant, eds. 2013, 135 and 137).

2. The Museum proper is 5500 square meters (~60,000 square feet) according to its exhibition booklet, available 2012.

3. Nelly Richard points out that the choice to render this text in copper, Chile’s national product, serves to tie the universal declaration to the local context (2010: 265).

4. The Informe Rettig documented cases of disappearance and death, while the Informe Valech documented torture cases. A text above the display case housing those reports underscores their role as a framing referent for the Museum:

‘El Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos se sustenta en los informes de las Comisiones de Verdad. Éstos son referentes esenciales de su muestra permanente y su patrimonio. Estos informes fueron elaborados por la Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación [Rettig] en 1990, por la Corporación Nacional de Reparación y Reconciliación, entregado en 1996, y por la Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura [Valech] en 2004.’

(The Museum of Memory and Human Rights is based on the reports of the Truth Commissions. They are essential referents for the permanent collection and its patrimony. These reports were elaborated by the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission [Rettig Report] in 1990, the National Reparation and Reconciliation Commission, delivered in 1996, and by the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture [Valech Report] in 2004.

Museum Director Ricardo Brodsky links these texts to the Museum's role as ‘un acto de reparación moral a las víctimas’ (an act of moral reparation to the victims); see Brodsky (in Brodsky et al. 2011, 9).

5. Although some on the left have critiqued the Museum of Memory's silence about the Allende/Popular Unity period as suppressing a crucial legacy of social activism (e.g. Lazarra 2011), more frequently, vocal right-wing critics have sought to discredit the Museum for omitting the pre-coup context. In June 2012, shortly after a public homage to Pinochet in the Caupolicán Theatre, the conservative historian Sergio Villalobos kicked off a controversial exchange of letters in the conservative newspaper El Mercurio, lambasting the Museum for failing to contextualize – and in his view, justify – the military coup. One of his letters, titled ‘Museo del Fracaso’ (Museum of Failure) (El Mercurio, 22 June 2012), asserted that the Museum's narrative omitted ‘la destrucción de la ética pública, los abusos, engaños y desmanes del gobierno de la UP’ (the destruction of public ethics, the abuses, deceptions, and excesses of the PU government).

6. The day after the exhibit’s 18 March 1975 opening, agents of Pinochet’s secret police (DINA) burst into the exhibit space and ordered its closure. Hours later, Núñez was arrested and sent to the first of several concentration camps – Cuatro Álamos, Villa Grimaldi (twice), Tres Álamos, and, finally, Puchuncaví – for his alleged transgressions. On 30 July 1975, Núñez was declared ‘peligroso para la seguridad nacional’ (a threat to national security) and expelled from Chile; his passport was stamped ‘Válido sólo para salir del país’ (Valid only for leaving the country). The artist was only able to return in 1987, after 12 years of exile in France.

7. As I discuss below, a small museum store and café were later added to the third floor, and the arpilleras were then moved to an even more marginal space behind a wall facing the new café. They remain there today, although the store and café were subsequently moved to the ground floor entrance.

8. Bound in plastic netting, the ‘catalog’ formally echoed the exculturas themselves; inside, a paper envelope contained several loose paper items, offering images and words both whimsical and serious, related to the exhibit, including a (reproduced) handwritten list of objects and jottings from which I took the epigraph. The ‘catalog’ was distributed free of charge to visitors.

9. A small box of documents on Núñez at the Museo de la Memoria Centro de Documentación (CEDOC) contains the last 3 pages of a 5-page document on the exhibit, written by the artist shortly after his departure from Chile. Here, Núñez noted that: ‘La exposición la componían 25 [26] objetos reales, no pintados, tomados por aquí y por allá, jaulas compradas en la Vega (mercado de Santiago), todos objetos encontrables a la mano de cualquiera’ (The exhibit was composed of 25 [26] real objects, not painted, taken from here and there, cages bought at la Vega [market in Santiago], all objects at hand, that anyone could find). As I discuss, it is revealing that such handmade objects were much less commonplace by 2010.

10. As the 2010 ‘exculturas’ catalog indicates, Núñez ‘fue dejado en ‘libertad condicional,’ con la obligación de ‘concurrir a firmar el libro de reos encarcelados de la Fiscalía de Aviación, Ministerio de Defensa Nacional,’ una vez por semana’ (Núñez was conditionally released with the obligation to sign in once weekly in the imprisoned detainee book at the Air Force Prosecutor’s Office, Ministry of National Defense) (Núñez 2010a, 4).

11. The MIR (Movimiento de la Izquierda Revolucionaria/Movement of the Revolutionary Left) advocated direct action and armed struggle as tools for radical social change during the 1960s and 70s; MIRists were among those most fiercely persecuted by the dictatorship.

12. Núñez discusses his memories of the coup and its aftermath with the journalist Gilberto Villaroel (2009 DVD).

13. Needless to say, the other three exhibitions were not mounted in 1975. Núñez’s first exhibit of the democratic transition took place in 1990, and included paintings evoking fragmented bodies, pierced or broken joints, impeded vision, and violated landscapes. For discussion of fragmented bodies in his work, see Eltit (2008, 222–225) and Gómez-Barris (2009, 74–102). ‘El jardín de los jardineros’ was eventually shown at the Teatro Universidad de Chile in 2012; see ‘Obras de Guillermo Núñez abren’ La tercera (2012).

14. The necktie, which Núñez had bought years before in New York City, was red, white, and blue, colors not only of the Chilean flag, but also of the French, British, and US flags – countries all arguably associable with nooses (if presenting as formal wear) at distinct points in Chile’s history. Viewers are free to consider these multiple possibilities, to play with this ‘objuguete’ (objectoy). (If this were in the US, it might be labeled ‘do not try this at home.’)

15. Number 25, ‘Objulepe: Nature Morte’ darkly recasts quotidian objects – a pesticide sprayer (fumigador), a grater (rayador), a mousetrap – as arms or torture implements; its title, ‘Nature Morte’ (‘naturaleza muerta’ in Spanish, ‘still life’ in English), becomes an unsettling double entendre.

16. In the Villaroel interview, Núñez revisits the pastels, speaking at length of a violent world of voices heard in the dark, where ‘el grito’ (the cry), punctuated all prisoners’ existences. He stated that working on the pastel series during his exile involved feelings of indignation and horror, as well as survivor’s guilt. He also spoke to the fundamental paradox of communicating horror in artworks ‘que son horribles y encandilan,’ that are horrifying and beautiful: ‘ese horror se transforma en belleza; me duele, pero no tengo una respuesta’ (that horror is transformed into beauty; it’s painful to me, but I don’t have another answer). A small reproduction of the pastel series is included in the libro-objeto box titled El día que llovió en el diluvio (n.d.) along with Núñez’s two book-length testimonios.

17. He also produced two ‘libros-objetos’ (book-objects): a 2010 facsimile of the 1975 exhibit ‘catalog’ (see note 8) and a large-format art book combining images of the pieces and poetic narrative, ¿Y tú tan solo Ezra Pound? (2011).

18. In fact, Délano and Traslaviña contend that only under a regime as violent as Pinochet’s could such a radical version of Milton Friedman-inspired free-market economic experiments have taken place (1989, 47).

19. In addition to Délano and Traslaviña, key texts on neoliberalism’s impact on Chilean society and subjectivity include Moulián (1997), Richard (1998), Avelar (1999), and, more recently, Cárcamo-Huechante (2007), Pino-Ojeda (2011), Mayol (2012), Araujo and Martuccelli (2012), and Blanco (2015).

20. Londres 38, for example, has a meeting space that has been used for photographic exhibits; other spaces yet to be memorysites, like the old Clínia Santa Lucía, have large art collections to integrate into the eventual public space. Other sites, like Villa Grimaldi, integrate large sculptures as one of several aesthetic modes of presentation.

21. For further discussion, see my ‘Marketing Discontent: The Political Economy of Memory in Latin America’ (in Bilbija and Payne, eds. 2011, 339–364). Key referents for this discussion of memory, monuments, and memorials include Anderson (1991), Young (1993), Nora and Kritzman (1996), Loveland and Lira (2000), Agamben (2002), Jelín and Langland (2003), and Huyssen (2003), in addition to Richard’s aforementioned compilation.

22. Nelly Richard describes the dual legacy of collective reticence about the authoritarian past and what she calls the ‘tecnologías de la desmemoria’ (technologies of dis-remembering) that, in neoliberal Chile, ‘sumergen la conflictividad de lo social en la masa festiva de lo publicitario y lo mediático’ (submerge the conflictive nature of the social under the festive massivity of advertising and the media) (Richard, ed. 2000, 10). Núñez asserts that: ‘El artista ... acusa y devela aquello que los medios de comunicación masiva banalizan’ (The artist ... accuses and reveals all that the mass media banalize) (2008, n.p.).

23. The following excerpt gives an idea of the ‘catlog’s’ tone:

‘6.-Objetivo: --Tienes que estarlo--dijo el Gato (de Cheshire), --o no habrías venido aquí.’ (‘You have to be,’ said the [Cheshire] Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’ [The absent referent is ‘you have to be mad.’])

‘7.-Objetillo: Canten los futuros días, Louis Aragon, nous sommes neige d’or naissant, o poésie’ (Sing future days, Louis Aragon, we are born of golden snow, or poetry).

‘8.-Objesús: Homenaje a Eduardo Vilches’ (Homage to Eduardo Vilches).

‘9.-Objeriza: Homenaje al Santo Padre que vive en Roma’ (Homage to a Holy Father who lives in Rome).

‘10.-Objo: Aquí y en la quebrada del ají’ (Here and in Quebrada del ají [a remote rural Chilean town used in this popular phrase to imply something true everywhere, ‘here’ as well as in ‘the sticks’]).

24. Hands later became a trope at memorysites like Paine (mosaics) and, for example, in José Balmes’s paintings revisiting photographs of violence outside La Moneda on the day of the coup. See Guzmán (1999, DVD).

25. From the Diario de viaje (about his 1974 incarceration at the AGA):

‘Jueves 25. Recuerdo en 1961 o 1960 una tarde en París en una galería chiquita cerca de l’École des Beaux-Arts, entre mucho cachureo había algunas obras de Fontana, esas telas blancas o negras rasgadas a cuchillo. Reaccioné con indignación. Ahora al recordarlo, estoy llorando, no por el recuerdo, ni el día triste y lluvioso de ese día en París, ni una hermosa nostalgia, sino por la emoción del cuadro, esa herida, no el recuerdo, la obra misma. ¿Cómo explicarlo?’ (my emphasis).

(Thursday the 25th. I remember that in 1961 or 1960, one afternoon in Paris in a small gallery near l’École des Beaux-Arts, among a lot of bric-a-brac there were some works by Fontana, those white or black canvasses slit by a knife. I reacted with indignation. Now as I remember it, I am crying, not because of the memory, nor that sad and rainy day in Paris, nor a beautiful nostalgia, but rather because of the emotion of the painting, that wound, not the memory, but the work itself. How to explain this? [my emphasis]).

As if to underscore its significance, Núñez repeats this passage in Retrato hablado (1993, 87) and on the page opposite a photo of the slit canvas/object 14 in the large-format book ¿Y tú tan solo Ezra Pound? (2011, n.p.).

26. Núñez writes in ¿Y tú tan solo Ezra Pound?: ‘¿Puede el arte, puede el artista, manipular impunemente los signos para decir el sufrimiento, la amenaza, el miedo? ¿Cuál es el límite?’ (Can art, can the artist, manipulate signs with impunity, to speak of suffering, threats, and fear?). After several pages that reproduce a serigraph image of an open mouth/tongue, a written question appears: ‘¿es posible transformar la ira, la soledad, el abandono, el dolor del otro, en arte?’ (Is it possible to transform ire, solitude, abandonment, the pain of the other, into art?), n.p.

27. Number 21, ‘Objeunesse: La primavera nace día a día’ (Spring is born from day to day), a butterfly trapped behind a strainer’s screen, echoes the symbolism of the captive rose: natural beauty and freedom artificially constrained.

28. From the artist’s 1975 notes at CEDOC: ‘los números estaban dibujados con tinta negra sobre cartulina naranja, igual que los que debíamos llevar prendido sobre nuestra ropa en la prisión’ (the numbers were drawn with black ink on orange cardboard, the same as those we had to wear on our clothes in prison).

29. Similar to the invitation to enter the cage discussed above, in other exhibits Núñez invited the public to wear a blindfold, thereby entering through subjective interiority into oblique connection with captivity. See also Gómez-Barris 2009, 96–98.

30. A sense of play with sinister undertones likewise derives from the artist’s multiple references to Alice in Wonderland (in the ‘exculturas,’ in the pastel series ‘El jardín de los jardineros,’ and in his Diario de viaje). In the CEDOC notes, Núñez writes, ‘éramos los jardineros numerados de la Reina de Corazones’ (we [prisoners] were the Queen of Hearts’ numbered gardeners). The Queen’s ruthless and absurd exercise of power in her garden/croquet-ground, together with the abundant imagination of those populating it, offer in each instance a generative metaphor of the post-coup context. As mentioned, Object 19, ‘Objardín: El campo de croquet de la Reina’ (Obgarden: The Queen’s Croquet-Ground), offers a potent representation of resilience and growth despite repression. Here, a trap (jaula trampera) with two doors conveys the process of transformation inside: two small, pale roses enter one end and three large, intensely red roses emerge out the other (see Figure 3). Object 6 also invoked the madness of detention, via its title’s allusion to an exchange between Alice and the Cheshire cat; see note 21 above and Carroll n.d., 65.

31. Later, the artist realized that the other dates (1814 and 1830) had personal echoes: 41 was his number as a prisoner and 1930 is his birth year. Personal interview with Núñez (2013).

32. Parra sang: ‘Miren cómo nos hablan/ de libertad/ cuando de ella nos privan/ en realidad.// Miren cómo pregonan/ tranquilidad/ cuando nos atormenta/ la autoridad.// ¿Qué dirá el Santo Padre/ que vive en Roma,/ que le están degollando/ a sus palomas? (Look at how they speak about liberty, while depriving us of it in reality// Look at how they proclaim tranquility, when authority torments us.//What would the Holy Father in Rome say, as they slit the throats of his doves?).

33. The playwright David Benavente describes the ways suspicion and self-censorship crept into everyday communication: ‘In [the post-coup] context, the suppression of language became the language of repression, which wasn’t limited to public spaces, but which penetrated the intimate realm, blocking and interfering with interpersonal relationships and private conversations’ (1989, 282).

34. Here again, I am building on the concept of ‘layers of memory’ from Jelín and Kaufman (2000, 89–110).

35. See Scarry’s The Body in Pain (1985).

36. But the artist's inaugural speech, never given, indicated a clear relationship between the two: ‘Los que contemplamos el Mal, cara a cara, en su profunda abyección y oprobio, nos preguntamos, hoy, cómo mirarán estas obras, esta memoria reconstruida, los que no conocieron el dolor y la violencia de nuestra historia’ (Those of us who contemplated Evil, face to face, in its profound abjection and opprobrium, ask ourselves, today, how will these works, this reconstructed memory, be viewed by those who didn’t know the pain and violence of our history) (Núñez 2011a, 36).

37. As a suggestive counterpoint, in September 2013 I visited the former detention and torture center Nido 20, a small, humble, newly formed memory site in a house in Santiago’s La Cisterna neighborhood. Its rooms and patio had a decidedly unpolished feel, with informal guides attesting to past horrors within its walls, a modest display honoring two of its victims, and murals by the Ramona Parra Brigade coloring the patio space. Taped on one bedroom’s bare walls, I spotted a lone ‘decoration’: a mildly tattered mass-produced poster advertising the Día Nacional del Detenido-desaparecido (National Day of the Detained-Disappeared) on 30 August (2009?). The image: a painting-print by Guillermo Núñez. I wondered how many more people saw and were impacted by that image out in the world than the ‘exculturas’ exhibits. I wondered about its status as an ‘ad’ for human rights within neoliberal Chile. I wondered about its potential as a memory document in this off-the-grid, roughly staged commemorative site, so far removed from official circuits of power. And I wondered about all the other art in unofficial memorysites-in-potentia, such as the sizeable, ad hoc collection of artworks donated to the Comisión Chilena de los Derechos Humanos (Chilean Human Rights Commission) and precariously housed in the ex-Clínica Santa Lucía: what challenges beckon, or go unheeded, from all those marginal spaces?

38. In September-November of 2015, the Museum hosted a third reconstructed exhibit, Elías Freifeld’s Estrellato, first mounted in response to another pivotal episode exposing the dictatorship’s violence: the 1985 ‘caso degollados’ assassination of three professionals, José Manuel Parada, Manuel Guerrero, and Santiago Nattino, all members of the Communist Party. Freifeld rigorously deconstructed the Chilean flag, especially its stars, in his approach to this moment of the country’s history.

39. Oyarzún notes that the original phrase by Sigmund Freud, in his 12 June 1900 letter to Wilhelm Fliess, was: ‘En esta casa, el 24 de julio de1895, le fue revelado al doctor Sigmund Freud el secreto de los sueños’ (In this house, on 24 July 1895, was revealed to Doctor Sigmund Freud the secret of dreams) (2003, 89).

40. For Díaz, the piece joined together ‘Oscuridades fragmentadas que hilvanamos para iluminar un hecho, un lugar exacto, un episodio, una escena nocturna de puro horror’ (Fragments of darkness that we brought together to illuminate a fact, an exact place, an episode, a nocturnal scene of pure horror) (Oyarzún 2003, 91).

41. Alfredo Jaar’s intriguing installation piece, Geometría de la conciencia (2010), is housed in an underground room dedicated solely to its display, which may be accessed from the plaza esplanade outside the Museum’s entrance; the door to Jaar’s piece is habitually locked, though one may ask Museum staff at the main entrance to unlock it. Museum staff anecdotally told me that very few people ask to see Jaar’s piece.

42. See Hite and Huguet (2016), for this current monthly figure. In a personal interview (2012), María Luisa Ortiz, the Museum’s Head of Collection and Research, stated that 100,000 people had visited the Museum during its first six months, that the following year (2011) 160,000 had visited, and that the third year, then only half over, 70,000 had entered. An article on the Museum’s growth published in El Mercurio (‘Visitas’ 2013) stated that ‘Su balance de 2012 es positivo: contaron 202 mil visitas frente a las 129 mil de 2011. Es decir, crecieron en un 56,7%’ (Its 2012 balance is positive: they counted 202,000 visitors versus 129,000 in 2011. That is, they grew 56.7%).

43. Thanks to Silvia Tandeciarz and Pablo Yáñez (2013) for sharing these observations of events they witnessed after the Museum’s opening.

44. See Soledad Bianchi’s commentary on the scant reception of Núñez’s 2003 show at Matucana 100, ‘La quinta del sordo’ (2012, 153–167).

45. To the Museum’s credit, in 2015, it featured over 80 paintings and prints (plus one of the exculturas) in a beautifully displayed four-month exhibit outside the CEDOC, titled Núñez 85, in honor of the artist’s 85th year. The 2016 transnational Kickstarter campaign carried Núñez’s voice and art onto the World Wide Web, but also carried the artist into the streets of Santiago to interact with passersby, invite their interventions in reproduced artworks, and foster awareness of, and raise funds for, the archive project.