Artists

Since the mid-nineties Julio Grinblatt’s photographic work has been guided by the logic of conceptual seriation. The series Fotos de nada (1994) and Pasillos (1997) are operatively similar in
 that they are monotonous records of the same type
of visually uninteresting objects — wild plants,
 building corridors -, with the same type of 
composition, the same lighting, the same impeccable image quality. Through the closed shot 
in the first case, and the tiny print in the second case, real scale is dismantled in order to accentuate the purpose of these images: the depersonalization of authorship. In the second series, moreover, the
miniaturization enlarges the sensation of absence, of a place impossible to occupy. Grinblatt perceives 
photographic action as a slice of reality that violently
 excludes everything that is not contained in the
photo, including the photographer himself.
 Therefore, to photograph is to be absent from the 
scene, and in this sense, the situation works as a
 metaphor for social exclusion. In Fotos de otros 
(1999), this problem is made explicit, on the one
hand, by the inevitable contradiction between 
memory as duration and the specialized record of
 that duration through a snapshot and, on the other 
hand, in the doubly exterior position the recorded 
scene of the person activiating the recording device 
(for, in this case, Grinblatt’s photographic object is
 the object chosen by the photographer, plus the photographic act of that other photographer).

To make the search explicit, Grinblatt chooses 
situations that require using flash so that the photographer’s click is emblazoned on the 
photograph, and the shot made evident. The images 
thus question the distance between the attempt to 
capture experience, and the fact that the only thing 
that can live on is that which memory acquires as
consciousness of the present. This leads to the
 possibility that the photographic composition may
 become a spectacular illusion replacing memory. For
 El hombre frente a su torta de cumpleaños (1995-
2003), Grinblatt portrayed the moment in which a 
person is blowing out the candles on his birthday cake,
 and later, in the darkroom, he burned almost the
 entire photo except the image of the person
 celebrated, as a way of showing that condensed act
 from memory alone. In Cielito Lindo (2000-2005), 
this obsession with pointing out the functions of
 perception and composition in a still image of 
everyday reality, is transferred to the people in
 charge of printing photos in professional 
laboratories. The artist takes photos of clear skies,
 sends them to get them printed at different 
laboratories in different cities, and later, in the post-
production phase, contrasts the decisions of each 
lab technician for the purpose of, in the artist’s 
words, “mapping the variation of the idea of 
beauty.”

Text for 100 Latin American Artists, Exit, Madrid, Spain, 2007, pp 206-207

“…considero el ver como un proceso recíproco: si veo alguien o algo, soy visto por lo que veo y
 nuestras miradas se cruzan una con lo otra. Mi mirada encuentra su respuesta en la persona
 que veo, de tal modo que puedo ver su efecto en los ojos del otro/a. Si observo un objeto 
inanimado, éste tiene cierta presencia y también devuelve mi mirada en una suerte de eco.”

James Elkin refiriéndose a J. Lacan en The Object Stares Back Harvest Ed. P70

Para hacer estas fotos Julio Grinblatt ha comenzado realizando una serie de tomas
directas, en blanco y negro, tratando de no intervenir en lo que pasaba frente a su
lente. Ha buscado cuidadosamente la circunstancia más propicia para esconderse, 
para pasar desapercibido: en todo cumpleaños el fotógrafo es casi invisible porque 
se lo da por supuesto. Ayudado por la tenue luz de las velitas, se ha camuflado entre 
los invitados dispuesto a forzar los límites del retrato a partir de una instantánea.

Tuvo en cuenta que el/la cumpleañero/a exponía su intimidad al momento de
enfrentar su torta. Que tal vez pensaba un deseo o recordaba el transcurrir de la
vida. Eligió el uso de tecnología analógica, el tipo de cámara, la película, la luz, el 
proceso químico, en fin, tratándose de un fotógrafo ciertamente obsesivo es difícil 
calcular hasta qué punto se ajustaron concepto y técnica en la construcción de El 
hombre frente a su torta de cumpleaños.

En suma, Julio ha trabajado la toma haciéndo nos pensar que la realidad es más rica
 que la imaginación (como si fuera posible un mundo “objetivo” existente a priori de
 los sujetos que lo observan).

Y aquí surge la duda: ¿cómo pueden ir juntos el “objetivismo ingenuo” y estas fotos? Es evidente que al hacer las imágenes se actuó con plena conciencia de la más 
estricta interdependencia entre ambos conos —más allá y más acá del lente – en la
 posibilidad de la fotografía. Entonces, todo rastro de naturalismo se desvanece y nos 
preguntamos si Julio no habrá hecho una gambeta y, como cuando juega al fútbol o 
lo disfruta, su aparente subordinación a lo que está allí afuera no fue más que una 
estrategia para actuar sobre la fotografía de cumpleaños y descomponerla.

Quizá ese sea el motivo de su apego a lo analógico, y de allí provenga su
determinación cuando afirma que la puesta en escena debe ir al momento de la edición
 para añadir que en el laboratorio se produce un acto fotográfico equiparable a la toma. 
Lo seguro es que su actuación en el cuarto oscuro, aunque sólo sea accesible a través
del resultado, cambia fundamentalmente el carácter de la imagen. Al aislar a la
persona retratada, quemando hasta en negrecer completamente el resto de la foto,
 transforma“un cumpleaños en un retrato” y pone en evidencia la artificialidad de la
 representación.

Para los que hemos asimilado el metol y la hidroquinona a través de los poros es
interesante esta presión atenta y sutil sobre lo más firme de la tradición clásica de la 
fotografía. Tal vez porque abre una grieta que permite su desplazamiento y descubre un paisaje hasta entonces impensado, pero también porque insiste en la posibilidad 
de mirar el mundo desde la modernidad que, según parece, nunca fue algo del 
pasado.

Texto para el catálogo de Usos de la fotografía-II/El hombre frente a su torta de cumpleaños

Ruth Benzacar Galería de Arte, Buenos Aires, Argentina

The experience of meeting Julio Grinblatt at FotoFest stood apart from other encounters I had as a reviewer because of the depth and intensity of his engagement with the idea of photography.

Most photographers use the medium either for self-expression or as a tool of observation, but for Grinblatt it is his subject.

Grinblatt is possessed by photography, by its disciplines and its limitations — and by the alienation, both seductive and terrifying, of the photographic spectator. He is in the process of making a body of minimalist images, literally tiny in the case of the Corridors series which explores the specifics of photographic perception and the act of picture taking. They challenge our expectations of what a photograph should be and do.

This is a serious enquiry into the ontology of photography, and brave as well. Grinblatt transgresses the orthodoxies of ‘fine art photography’ because he is more interested in ideas than in producing a consumable aesthetic vision.

However, Grinblatt’s pictures are more than merely formal or theoretical. We can also read his work, as with any photographer’s work, as autobiography. When we do, we find it raw and discomfiting. The Corridors series describes the New York City that a young Argentine artist has chosen, at least temporarily, to be his home.  In this context, these images are exciting and disturbing in equal measure.

Wall Text from Discoveries of the Meeting Place, FotoFest, Houston, Texas, US, 2002

We, the Jews, are born old. You photograph things to chase them out of your mind. My stories are a kind of shutting of the eyes.

Conversation of Franz Kafka with Gustav Janouch

Franz Kafka “No soy una luz”, Buenos Aires, Ediciones Tiempo, 1977, pp 27

Unlike manual workers surrounded by their tools and industrial workers standing at their machines, photographers are inside their apparatus and bound up with it.  This is a new kind of function in which human beings are neither the constant nor the variable but in which human beings and apparatus merge into a unity. It is therefore appropriate to call photographers functionaries.

The program of the camera has to be rich, otherwise the game would soon be over. The possibilities contained within it have to transcend the ability of the functionary to exhaust them, i.e. the competence of the camera has to be greater than that of its functionaries. No photographer, not even the totality of all photographers, can entirely get to the bottom of what a correctly programmed camera is up to. It is a black box.

It is precisely the obscurity of the box which motivates photographers to take photographs. They lose themselves, it is true, inside the camera in search of possibilities, but they can nevertheless control the box. For they know how to feed the camera (they know the input of the box), and likewise they know how to get it to spit out photographs (they know the output of the box). Therefore the camera does what the photographer wants it to do, even though the photographer does not know what is going on inside the camera. This is precisely what is characteristic of the functioning of apparatuses: The functionary controls the apparatus thanks to the control of its exterior (the input and the output) and is controlled by it thanks to the impenetrability of its interior. To put it in another way:  Functionaries control a game over which they have no competence. The world of Kafka, in fact.

Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983). Reaktion Books, London, 2000, pp 27 – 28.

In Hitchcock’s classic “Rear Window” (1954), a photographer crippled by a broken leg defends himself from his neighbor, a serial killer slaughterer of young women, by blinding him with his flash bulb. The metaphor develops with clarity as the scene progresses: the beast, like darkness itself, freezes momentarily in each flash blaze and keeps moving forward. Flash photos are the most revealing. They stop time’s endless flow towards oblivion and record to memory poses and groups of people, events that took place in interiors or poorly lit exteriors. Night is suspended in the instant chosen for posterity. Flash photos always look slightly unreal: their inhabitants don’t have daytime attitudes, they aren’t legitimally luminous. They either pose or are caught as offenders.  Weegee, a famous New York nighttime photographer, tuned in to the police and fire-squad radio frequency to get to the crime scenes ahead of everyone and shoot his flash.

In his research, J discovered something essential: each flash charts a concern.  The reverse side of things worth preserving must be exposed. We have to forget in order to survive. Remembering moments selectively only exposes the banal and fatal sides of life. This map generated by flash-worthy events can be thought of as a fresco of social aspirations. But J does not want to say anything in particular about social topography. He is not interested in explicitly discursive viewpoints or commentary. He knows it’s a futile endeavor, that those beings whose photos he robs are merely executing a series of regulations in which the camera is a delimiting agent. J is simply present on the scene of the flash-crime to open his camera/black box.

“Photos of Others” stages a confluence of knowledge of different order: first up is the intersection of the industry that generates devices to satisfy basic mnemonic needs and the more or less professional uses of these devices: tourist and family snapshots, party photos, fashion and celebrity photos, etc. Here the intrinsically commodyfing relationship between spectacle, market and memory in industrial and post-industrial societies is exposed.  The second category is the one the “art” photographer, as opposed to the “documentary” photographer, should be concerned to develop: distinct point of view, skill at finding the “right moment,” the personal, in short, everything that goes with the subjective vision the artist offers as an individual. The two photos, J’s and the other person’s, coexist on light sensitive paper and prevailing darkness consolidates the two.  J quietly reveals something that is as obvious as it is unsettling: the “souvenir,” the “document” and the “work of art” have a common denominator. That revelation resonates in each value system according to context and distribution circuit.

The antropocentric and logocentric obsession of western culture is intrinsically intertwined with the model of representation defined by perspective, embodied in the lens. Let’s examine the camera obscura, which existed for several centuries without an attached lens. Isn’t it just a box with a little opening that allows an image to enter, a hole in which rays of light converge to transmit the image to a receiving plane? In other words, isn’t the camera already a lens?  Perspective’s regulating function in the face of unattainable reality and latent chaos is clear: It doesn’t really matter what’s out there, we know it recedes towards a vanishing point according to an established rule. We aren’t familiar with the topography before us, but we have a system to organize it. Ideally, perspective should eliminate anxiety in the face of the unknown. The lens is the bearer of an a priori truth whose application is demonstrated through use.  It’s an agent of knowledge.

A possible paradigm for perspective is a hallway interrupted at regular intervals, typically by doors. Mr. J’s hallways are photos of perspectives.

In other words, they are photos of lenses (and therefore of cameras). It’s not the absence of figures or the threatening potential of the doors or the ideological implications of the complexes to which the corridors seem to belong that is unsettling. What is unbearable is the smooth, straight presentation of the “camera” device as the mere bearer of a system of representations, with no conclusions. Once again, on the frontiers of the program we face both its paroxysm and its emptying.

“Corridors” and “Photos of Others” are part of a more ambitious project called “Uses of Photography”. It’s a catalog of catalogs. On the periphery of infinity, Mr. J seems to be snaring clusters of rules that are exceptions to everything.  At last: a passionate and enthralling bureaucracy.

Text for the catalog, Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2001-2

No puede saberse si hay algo más en las fotografías que exponen estos pasillos que ellos mismos: si hay algo que avance, se agite o permanezca inerte –una persona, una máquina, un espectro, una luz, una nada, una nube, una grieta– en estos interiores sin ventanas, algo que se fugue o se detenga, se desprenda de sí y avance hacia nosotros, en estos corredores que se abren con violencia, o que lo hacen apenas, o se repliegan sobre sí. No es posible saber si allí dentro, en las áreas densísimas de luces y sombras que un blanco interminable comprime (y que son, entre otras cosas, alucinaciones, cada vez diferentes, del interior mismo, y como de la entraña, de la cámara), hay  algo basculando hacia nosotros, o algo que ya se ha mostrado –en el flash, por ejemplo, de la primera visión– y que hemos perdido. En cada una de ellas, de modos diversos, con paciencia y ansiedad, se espera (y en cada una el tiempo persiste, todavía, meses, semanas, días, minutos después de la toma, acumulándose).

En el comienzo de Oppiano Licario, la novela de José Lezama Lima, un grupo de guardias espectrales, en pleno campo, disparan sobre un joven “que abría los ojos desmesuradamente y que aún después de muerto los abría más y más y que todavía en el recuerdo los abre más y más, como si el paisaje entero se hubiera detenido para ir entrando por sus ojos, en la eternidad de la mirada que rompió la cárcel de sus párpados”. Una mirada como esa, que se abre de ese modo aunque no sea sino por los fragmentos de segundo de una toma, hay en el trasfondo de esas imágenes. Por eso, las nervaduras de la sombra y la luz tienen, en la compresión de los rectángulos que pueblan, un carácter de cosa definitiva, final, y, al mismo tiempo, dan la impresión de estar tensándose, imposiblemente, hasta su límite. De ahí que parezca, a veces, enfrentándolas, que, en algún sitio –en ellas, en nosotros–, algo acaba de romperse o está a un paso de hacerlo (la cerradura, por ejemplo, de unos párpados). Por esa razón, o a pesar de eso, hay una exaltación secreta en sus calmas, turbulentas, extensiones.

Texto para catálogo, ICI, Centro Cultural de España, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Julio va en épocas estivales a su casa en Tigre. Cubierto el cuerpo de paños y ropa, semi-intoxicado por el repelente de insectos y cargando la parafernalia propia de su oficio, se dispone a la captura de nada.

Este ambicioso proyecto propone una anulación del sujeto en pos de la cámara, que hablaría así de sus límites y propiedades. Para que esto suceda debe entrar luz en su interior. La luz –quizás una frecuencia– tiene la insistente propiedad de delatar los objetos, lo que conspiraría contra la nada. Hay que adoptar entonces una estrategia constructiva: la pérdida inmediata de escala y referencias; la ausencia absoluta de narrativa. Circunscripto a este territorio peculiar al fotógrafo no le queda sino la intuición como recurso a sí mismo, reverso nuevamente sustantivo, foto a ambos lados del objetivo. El resultado guarda con la realidad la misma enrarecida relación que sueños y recuerdos.

Estas vegetalias pulsan la superficie del ojo desorganizando el cuerpo del espectador, forzándolo a una reformulación perceptiva. Al recorrer las penumbras voluptuosas la evidente realidad de las hojas colapsa, y en el escudriñar eternamente un momento del paisaje (existente pero construído) la fisura de sentido que esta contradicción propone se torna simple belleza.

Como la acción del clima, el viento, o la lluvia, el fotografiar un lugar significa erosionarlo, modificar sus formas, reduciéndolo.

Con los años, ciertos lugares irán desapareciendo por el simple hecho de ser fotografiados.

Cuando más fuerte se mire a través de una cámara, cuanto más intenso sea ese mirar, más rápido sucederá este fenómeno.

Los fotógrafos somos los verdaderos depredadores modernos: Es hora que se sepa.

Pronto, fotografías como las de Grinblatt serán el paisaje.

Poblarán salas de espera, galerías y museos.

Serán ventanas al pasado. Y servirán para que en un futuro, alguna madre las observe con su hijo.

Ella dirá –ésto era.

Y él, asintiendo, terminará su pepsi.

(extraído  de “Crónicas Marcianas segunda parte”)

La obra actual de Julio Grinblatt sobresale como uno de los enfoques más interesantes en la práctica fotográfica dentro del contexto del arte latinoamericano. Si bien sus series fotográficas parecen estar basadas en taxonomías pseudocientíficas, son el remanente de un enfoque experimental, planeado para desmantelar la posibilidad de la taxonomía misma.

En su serie de pasillos, Grinblatt crea un metalenguaje basado en la teoría del archivo fotográfico. Una serie de pasillos anónimos y modernos presentados en escala muy pequeña como si fueran especímenes “objetivos” científicos. Debido a la manera en que están fotografiadas, las imágenes están tan despojadas de cualquier estilo subjetivo, y el sujeto es tan genérico que el pasillo se interpreta como una metáfora de pasaje sin trascendencia o funciona como un placer formalista que conecta a la fotografía modernista con la abstracción geométrica. De cualquier manera, ya metáfora o estética formalista, los pasillos juntan el acto de la fotografía con el objeto fotografiado con una abarcadora lógica platónica: el rol ritual de la esterilidad, anonimidad, pureza y control como estándar estético de la sociedad moderna.

En su serie “Fotos de Otros” Grinblatt confronta la instantánea social (la forma más banal de fotografía popular) con la teoría del momento decisivo de Cartier-Bresson (el paradigma de la fotografía modernista).

Uno podría decir que Grinblatt se ubica fuera de la escena como un antropólogo documentando la “instantánea” de otro revelando el espacio y tiempo no-decisivo, irrelevante o indigno de ser fotografiado.

El congelamiento del tiempo garantizado por el uso del flash en la fotografía social instantánea, “el momento Kodak”, queda contenido dentro de una larga exposición en donde todo lo que lo rodea se convierte en un oscuro y caótico fondo de un teatro construido: un comentario sobre la artificialidad de la reclamación fotográfica sobre su capacidad de capturar la realidad. Esto resulta en una representación grotesca, un destello aislado de flash sobre las caras de las personas recortadas contra la oscuridad general, sus expresiones vistas de costado, congeladas en el tiempo, perteneciendo ya a la fotografía de otra persona. El momento decisivo de la fotografía modernista encuentra en el trabajo de Grinblatt un desvío a una tierra desconocida, privada del heroísmo de la autoría, insidiosamente revelando las cuerdas y andamios detrás de las escenas, ésos que son el soporte de la “magia” de la fotografía.

Julio Grinblatt’s series Pasillos (Corridors) seem like a Kafkian metaphor, or something out of a detective fiction film. The works create and destroy interpretations, increasing the tensions between
 consciousness and reality. These are alluring surfaces because they have an immense familiarity and 
are common to all our experience; at the same time they are surfaces of nothing that falter on the 
brink of utter insignificance. We cannot but project upon them so many awful significances—so
 many footsteps heard, places infused with voices and absence, arrivals and departures, alone and
accompanied.

These are, of course, cinematographic images. One thinks of Hitchcock, but they are also akin
to the film stills that Tessi has used, although they appear more distant and conceptually cooler.
 Grinblatt has frozen time—instead of being a constant forward movement, it has been turned into 
a question, numerous questions about its meaning and the potential of photography itself. Nicolas 
Guagnini writes perceptively of some of the questions raised by the series when he comments:

The anthropocentric and logocentric obsession of western culture is intrinsically intertwined with the reality
 of representation defined by perspective, embodied in the lens. . . Isn’t the camera already a lens? Perspective’s 
regulating fiction in the face of unattainable reality and latent chaos is clear: It doesn’t really matter what’s out
 there, we know it recedes towards a vanishing point according to an established rule. We aren’t familiar with the 
typography before us, but we have a system to organize it. Ideally perspective should eliminate anxiety in the face 
of the unknown. The lens is the bearer of an a priori truth whose application is demonstrated through use—It’s an 
agent of knowledge. A possible paradigm for perspective is a hallway interrupted by regular intervals, typically
 by doors. Mr J’s hallways are photos of perspectives. . . In other words they are photos of lenses (and therefore of
 cameras). Its not the absence of figures or the threatening potential of the doors or the ideological implications of
the complexes to which the corridor seem to belong that is unsettling. What is unbearable is the smooth, straight 
presentation of the “camera device” as the mere bearer of a system of representations, with no conclusion. Once
again, on the frontiers of the program we face both its paroxysm and its emptying.8

I take Guagnini’s point, and feel drawn to the idea that perspective is a device to eliminate angoisse. I
 feel, however, that Grinblatt is talking of negativity and absence, that very same existential fear that
 perspective would wish to eliminate but can’t. Does the series’ repetition neutralize or emphasize 
the tremor of apprehension? Should we think about the way in which the lenses construct reality or
 should we deal with a disturbing minimal statement? The answer is, as usual, both: they are both intriguing concepts. These corridors are full of human whispering and of pregnant silence. They move
towards no climax. They will be walked, but they will return to begin again. Perhaps we need the 
recapitulation of the image to be sure of what is happening–but nothing happens. As in a Samuel 
Beckett novel, the waiting is endless: it is the very nature of things.

These corridors are starkly narrative and talk of our condition. This is a world, a mood, where man
is an irrelevance and where the universe, day after day, engages him in a game of chess. There is a
penetrating and prevailing mystery seeping through the walls and permeating the air in the corridors. The doors, I suspect, open onto an infinite series of doors that constitute yet another perspective. The mystery is irreducible and perhaps of two sorts: the first in the domain of existence that
 permeates these images, the implacable d’être là, and, secondly in the domain of will, the arbitrary
 decision, a sudden event that seems paradoxically imminent. These are images of our waiting for
something, perhaps for anything. The waiting period is tedious but tense. The images need us to
 complete themselves, yet there is no way that they can be completed and we are not there! They are, 
therefore, images of the human predicament.

This is a no-win situation. We can stare or pace up and down, but in the end silence returns. As
Beckett wrote:

It’s to go silent that you need courage, for youll’be punisbed for having gone silent, and yet you can’t do otherwise 
than go silent, then be punished for having gone silent.9

I have realized in the process of writing this essay that all of these works share a certain stance to 
reality: they create zones of narrative intention where the images have the power to claw. These
 artists have all pushed back inside themselves and found bittersweet, ironic echoes, from Prior’s
 assertive and expressive teddy bears to Grinblatt’s long corridors of tensioned emptiness (or passages between hells); from Mondongo’s pornographic fast food and perverse fairy story which, at 
a secondary level, read as metaphors for the corruption and double standards of Argentine society, 
to Tessi’s poetic bending of what he has downloaded from the Internet; and from Iuso’s vulnerably
affirmative “Iusonism” to an all-pervading silence.

These artists all work with a poetics of the everyday marked by irony a lightness of touch, intense 
perception, critical spirit, ambiguity, laughter, and superposed stories that never close on any final
 reading to create moving, telling, and often vulnerable images of the self.

1. I have taken this quote from Marcelo Pacheco and Jorge Gumier Maier, Artistas Argentinos de los 90, 
(Buenos Aires: Fondo Nacional de las Artes, I999). None of the artists I have chosen were given a
 place in this publication, but this should not be seen as a signal of different criteria because the two critics acknowledge in their introductory text that they have concentrated on artists from the first part of 
the 1990s, the artists discussed here— with the exception of Prior, who belongs to the eighties—have
 emerged in the late nineties.
2. Nathalie Sarraute, Tropisms (New York: George Braziller, I963), p. 6.
3. Franz Kaflta, Diaries 1914-23 (New York; Schocken, I965), p. I32.
4. Hector Libertella, La Librería Argentina – (Buenos Aires, Alción Editora, 2003), p. 60-61.
5. Alfredo Prior, Introduction to Juan Filloy, La Purga (Buenos Aires: El cuenco de plata, 2004), p. 22-23.
6. Francis Picabia in Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art (London: Thames and Hudson, I965), p. 76.
7. John Barth, Lost in the Fun Home (New York: Doubleday, I968), p. 106.
8. Nicolas Guagnini, Julio Grinblatt, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: 2001-2002).
9. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (New York: Grove Press, I958), p. 151 .

Excerpt from Catalogue text of : From B.A. to L.A. Track 16, Los Angeles, CA, US