P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center: P.S.1 Newspaper 2009 Fall: Spotlight On Carlos Motta

2009 Fall

Spotlight On Carlos Motta

This article refers to the P.S.1 exhibition On-site 1: Carlos Motta

While the details of the torturous practices surrounding the Bush administration are only now slowly coming to light, Carlos Motta has spent more than five years investigating the history and effects of U.S. interventionist policies in Latin America. His installation in P.S.1’s lobby, Brief History (2005-09) is part of his SOA Cycle, a body of work that examines the School of the Americas, a Cold War institution set up by the U.S. government to train Latin American soldiers in counterinsurgency tactics and military strategy to help prevent the spread of communism in Latin America (infamous graduates of the school include dictators Manuel Antonio Noriega of Panama and Hugo Banzer of Bolivia). Motta says his strategy was to “set out to critically engage with official and public information available on the SOA’s website as well as with information disseminated by human rights organizations—such as the SOA Watch—that denounce the dubious pedagogical program of the school.” With this material, Motta has created audio pieces consisting of appropriated and altered speeches, chalkboard drawings based on official PowerPoint presentations, newsprint publications, and photo-based vinyl murals like the one in Brief History.

For Brief History, the New York-based artist lifted a newspaper image reporting on the war in his native Colombia and rendered it abstract. Color was evacuated and context stripped away so that it is unclear for which side the soldiers are fighting. Paired with two newsprint publications that respectively outline a brief history of leftist guerrillas in Latin America and a brief history of U.S. interventions in that region, the large vinyl image is representative of both agendas. As two elements of a whole, the newspapers act as running captions for the black-and-white image, and evoke the shifting contexts which continue to affect international relationships in the Americas today.

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