Juan Downey: Artistic Sparks From Culture Shock

Another in a series that profiles people in the arts who have migrated across cultural boundaries in the Pacific Rim.

Artist Juan Downey knows about culture shock. Born in Santiago, Chile, he left home at 21 for Barcelona, Spain. Uprooting again, he went to Paris a year later, then shortly thereafter settled in New York, where, after 24 years, he will soon become an American citizen.

Crossing time lines and language barriers, adapting to societies separated by thousands of miles and hundreds of years’ history, Downey’s art matured and expanded constantly, whether by exposure to Diego Velasquez’s classical 17th-Century paintings or to Andy Warhol’s Coca-Cola bottles.

“The culture shock became an aesthetic spark,” the 48-year-old conceptual artist said recently.

Yet, uniting the multiple facets of his background has proved impossible. In addition to the cultural chasm between his birthplace and his adopted homeland, there is the Irish heritage that gave the artist his surname, and French, Spanish and English ancestry too.

“I oscillate between these polarities . . . I am constantly trying to resolve the opposition with no success. It is a dilemma I have not solved and probably never will,” says the artist, who’s also a professor of architecture and video at New York’s Pratt Institute.

This torque and tension has influenced much of Downey’s work, two examples of which may be be seen in Southern California beginning this month.

“Latin American Spirit: Art and Artists in the United States, 1920-1970,” includes an electronic installation he made in 1969. KCET Channel 28 will air his recent video work “Return of the Motherland” on June 16 at 11 p.m. in its “New Television” series.

After studying architecture (his father’s profession) and printmaking in Santiago, Downey focused on painting, drawing and prints when he arrived in Paris in 1962. Intrigued by movement and energy, he created machine-like images, influenced by compatriot Roberto Matta, a Surrealist also living in Paris, Dadaist Marcel Duchamp and conceptualists who believed “that the ideas in art were more important than the object,” the artist said.

His work jumped off the page when he moved to New York in 1965 and started actually making machines, three-dimensional kinetic, electronic sculptural installations. These often required audience participation like “Against Shadows,” the piece in the San Diego show, in which viewers’ shadows determine patterns lit up on a bank of light bulbs.

Downey, whose works have been shown at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art, traces his interest in interactive artwork back to his studies of classical Spanish paintings in Barcelona.

“In this art, there is always room for the viewer. Specifically, Velasquez engages the viewer in a participatory act of seeing. In his work “Las Meninas,” the royal family looks directly at the viewer.

“So in my work of the ‘60s in New York (with further influence from such artists as Robert Rauschenberg who was experimenting with technology) it became audience participation by means of technology.”

And the use of technology then led to video, a medium he began to use in the early ‘70s when his work also became more political.

“Suddenly this perfect society of hippies collapsed. The bombing of Cambodia, the fact that Nixon was lying to Congress and the Kent State killings struck me very deeply.”

Among the works born out of this period were two series that combined video, installation and graphic works to address his own “transcultural” situation and the search for self. One, titled “Thinking Eye,” deals with his European roots; the other, “TransAmericas,” takes up his Latin American heritage.

“What’s beginning to happen lately is that the series has merged,” Downey said. “I often deal in one piece with both European roots and Latin American roots. For instance, I have a video installation entitled ‘About Cages,’ which deals both with fascism in Europe and fascism in Chile.”Downey’s worlds intermingle again in “Return of the Motherland,” the video to be televised next month. Here, the artist confines himself to his life in New York City and his ties to Santiago, expressing these two realities as suggestive “fictions,” woven together on the 27-minute tape that bespeaks his dilemma of “living in two cultures.”

“I feel very good in New York, I feel great response from the environment. I feel support, not only in the sense of grants or sales of my drawings, but in receiving feedback for my work and personal support and understanding.”

But, he said, “I cannot forget the elimination of the democracy under the (Augusto) Pinochet dictatorship, the missing people, the tortures. . . . Though I will soon be an American citizen and I’m active in the art world in New York, the Latin root is extremely powerful. My heart is in Chile.”