Roberto Jacoby
Reina Sofía, Madrid
Among the latest challenges posed by the RSNAM directors is “El deseo nace del derrumbe” (“Desire is born from collapse”), an interesting proposal which materializes the ambitious attempt of the Madrid museum, by way of a retrospective exhibition, to classify, agglutinate and interpret the work of multidisciplinary sociologist and artist Roberto Jacoby (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1944), while at the same time moving it away from the dispersion derived from the many formulas and formats of his artistic production. To this end, curator Ana Longoni has presented six projects which are interlinked, so as to show through nar- rations and assembling, and in the most critical way possible, the work of one of the pioneers of conceptual art and one of the most active avant-garde representatives of experimental art in Argentina. All of these exhibition tours share as starting points what the artist himself terms “fetish concepts”, which on the other hand are strongly rooted and recurrent ideas in his work.
The exhibition starts with Vivir aquí (Living here), the same installation presented in the Week of Happenings in Buenos Aires in 1965, and in which the artist’s room and the private moment of creation of an artistic production shared with his friends and family is shown to the public. This small room gives way to 1968 el culo te abrocho. This new installation is made up of 28 documents that attest to the hot moments of radicalization of the Argentine avant-garde movement. They include silkscreen texts that refer back to certain episodes in Jacoby ́s life and pretend to show new experiences, in a way demystifying a historical date which has ended up trivialized. On the other hand, the Bóvedas room hosts the video installations Darkroom and La castidad (Chastity). In the first, the film recorded with an infrared camera of the artist’s performance presented between the years 2002 and 2005, in which several actors wearing balloon-shaped masks moved blindly in a dark space is shown on eight TV screens. The other video installation shows the fictitious documentary on the platonic cohabi- tation pact between Jacoby and artist and sociologist Syd Krochmalny.
The third part of the show is conceived as an archive or docu- mentary space which shows us a great amount of material related to the Buenos Aires artist’s production, accessible from Archivo en uso (Archive in use). Along this same line of archive conception, Gabinete de curiosidades (Curiosity cabinet) is an attempt to take to an extreme the marked tendency of some museums to turn every document that explains conceptualism into an oeuvre , almost as if it were the only way for it to be exhibited. In this way, the nearly five decades of Roberto Jacoby’s action art, from his participation in “Tucumán arde” (“Tucumán burns”) or the itinerant feasts of Eros club, to his influencing trajectory as a collaborator of Argentine pop group Virus are documented and explained in this show.
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Scene from the Banquet for the materialization of a happening for a dead wild boar, 2010. Escena del Banquete de materialización del happening para un jabalí difunto, 2010.
