Juan Downey | A Communication Utopía

Juan Downey (1940 – 1993), born in Chile and based mainly in New York, studied architecture at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. After his graduation he traveled to Paris and spent three years there. During his European sojourn he met artists like Eugenio Tellez, Roberto Matta, Vassilakis Takis and Julio Le Parc. In 1965, the Organization of American States invited him to show his work in Washington, where he resided for a couple of years, finally to settle permanently in New York.

His work comprises different disciplines such as drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and performance, and he is considered a pioneer of video art and the utilization of new technologies in the field of art. His artistic production is closely related to cybernetics and the concept of feedback. A large part of his works involved the active participation of the spectators and explored the conception of the universe as a system of invisible interconnected energies. It addresses a series of complex issues − particularly pertinent at the time when he explored them − regarding the use of new technologies in art and the implications this would have in terms of its scope and the production of meaning in a context that went beyond the museum space.

The exhibition “Juan Downey. | A Communication Utopía” gathers together a series of works that represent this artist’s major bodies of work, articulated under the notion of feedback as a constant and structural aspect throughout his artistic trajectory.

Juan Downey was a pioneering figure of video art at a time when this discipline was beginning to be used by artists, who saw in it an enormous potential; the immediacy of its transmission, its closed circuits and the diverse possibilities of edition and feedback were characteristics that lent themselves to multiple experiments, not only in terms of image but also of perception and communication.

Trained as an architect, the topological experience of video feedback led Downey to conceive dematerialized and ecological architectures through drawings of projects for buildings and cities that promoted the flow of energy between nature and the built environment.

One of Downey’s iconic works is the video installation Video Trans Americas, based on the concept of feedback. In 1973 he set out on a journey that would take him from New York to Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Bolivia and Chile, where he recorded in video the autochthonous cultures of each of these places and then showed the videos to the inhabitants of these places. As a result of this journey, the artist decided to live for some time in the Venezuelan Amazonian rainforest among the Yanomami, producing one of the most singular bodies of work of that time. With these fundamental works, Downey positioned himself as a “cultural communicant, an activation aesthetic anthropologist with a visual means of expression: video tape.”

Upon his return to New York, at the end of the 1970s and until his death in 1993, Downey continued to make videos that explored the territory of semiotics and reflected on the media, mass culture, and representation, reaffirming his interest in communication structures, which pervades his entire production.

Downey’s cybernetic utopia proposed a radical reformulation of the relations between man and technology, made manifest in the selection of works included in this exhibition, which presents Juan Downey as a thinker of visionary and advanced ideas, aware of the complexities of his time.