Luis Camnitzer

Camnitzer, who is considered one of the most interesting Latin American artists, is often seen as related to tendencies such as conceptual art, minimalism and process art. However, the political nature and the interest in culture evidenced in his work attest to the fact that, as pointed out by the artist in Cronología of the Daros catalogue, his proposal is “much closer to anthropology tan to art”.
The repeated use of the text in some of the works lead the viewer to ask him/herself questions such as: Is the work the text itself? Is the text a guide to reach a mental image? Or must the text generate a reflection that ends in a concept? These questions are only answered through the experience of the viewer, who configures and performs the work. Just as in Esto es un espejo. Usted es una frase escrita (1966-1973), in which a phrase written back to front on an aluminum plate that can only be read on a mirror placed just behind it, implies the presence of the reflection of the viewer at the same time as he/she reads the phrase. An experience which produces something similar to a snapshot that is recorded in the public’s memory.
His political concern present in works such as Silence / Repression (1976), El viaje (1991) or Kings of hearts (2002) is reinforced by his own past, in which the territorial feeling of having been uprooted was the constant feature. He was born in Germany, and arrived in Uruguay when his Jewish parents emigrated, fleeing from the Nazi regime, and his own self-exile in the United States served him as an excuse to move away from a dictatorship that he never personally experienced and that probably drove him to declare himself Latin American, even though his career and formal influences were strongly marked by the North American culture. This interest is expressed most of all in his written production – the fact that Camnitzer has been a professor, art curator and art critic should not be forgotten –, the other place from which he has developed his ideas, where he formulates the importance of “performing an art that will affect politics”.
Another special place explored by Camnitzer is the paradox that exists between the work of art and its market. Signature by the slice (1971-2007), Pintura mural original (1972-2010) or Portrait of the artist (1991-2010) are clear examples of the perversion that the art market can generate in the creation itself, forcing it or subordinating it to a system in which artistic production is alien to itself, in what he himself poetically terms “ cinismo ético: acting to avoid producing harm, but keeping a cynical perspective of the market, to try and use it without being used.”