Jaime Davidovich, Covering
Tape is used to cover, and it is the iconic material that has characterized the work of Jaime Davidovich since the late 1960s. Tape appears in Davidovich’s paintings, site-specific installations and videos, not only as part of his formal experimentation with materials, but also as research about censorship and politics, a topic that deeply affected him as an Latin American immigrant in New York. These tensions between form and content and between the cultural traditions that inform his production demonstrate the richness and originality of the Tape Projects as an oeuvre.
Davidovich arrived at tape while experimenting with monochrome paintings and the pictorial surface, which he was trying to seamlessly integrate into the gallery space. He used tape to attach the paintings directly to the wall, avoiding the frame. In fact, the 1970 work Linoleum/Frame/Tape Project puts such a limit into play by making the tape the painting itself, one that is contained by a traditional and very ornate frame. Other early works such as Tape on Paper 4 and Collage Tape Painting 4, both from 1969, made similar inquiries. Soon thereafter, the artist would place tape directly in the wall, creating site specific environmental pieces which affected the spectator’s perception, such as Tape Project: Cincinnati, created for his 1974 show in that city’s avant-garde art space, Not in New York Gallery. In these works, tape covers the space at the same time as it reveals space, accentuating, but yet still distorting, the architectural surroundings.
This is the case of Adhesive Tape Project, made in 1973, where he planned to cover a whole room with tape, thus implicating the perceptual experience of color and space. The traditionally uniform aspect of the wall, invisible but omnipresent, is replaced by the monochrome but nonetheless fragmented aspect of the tapes. The adjacent lines of tape also turn the room into a textured space; invoking the tactile senses at the same time it embraces the visitor inside the room. Other pieces like Mirror Taped Project, from 1972, immersed the spectator visually by including a mirror into the installation. By involving him spatially or reflecting his image through the glass, these pieces invite the spectator to become part of the work.
It is not a coincidence that tape is also the material of video, the media Davidovich would adopt in the early 1970s and with which he created some of his well-known works. His 1975 videotape New York Project explores the covering effect by displaying the artist’s hands while covering a square drawn on paper. After completed, the montage of the video fades to reveal a street sign, a geometric shape one finds while wandering through the city. The film thus reveals the connection between the abstract and formal structure and the real experiencing of the urban landscape, superimposing the famous dichotomy of art and life.
Davidovich was always interested in breaking the frontiers in-between art and the vernacular, as seen by his commercial endeavor Wooster Enterprises and his iconic television project The Live! Show. The power of media images for the construction of national identity is the subject of La Patria Vacía (The Empty Homeland), the powerful video from 1975 where Davidovich most overtly discusses his identity as an Argentine immigrant. A poetic and painful exercise of memory and political reflection made a year after the death of Juan Domingo Perón, Argentine President and most controversial but important figure of Argentine modern history, the video is also one of Davidovich’s most openly political works. The video opens with a moving image of the flag of the United States, which Davidovich covers with tape to evoke the Argentine banner. The camera then takes us along 6th Avenue—also known as “Avenue of the Americas”— over the Queensboro Bridge and into the Argentine neighborhood in Jackson Heights. As a soundtrack we hear the voice of Carlos Gardel singing “Mi Buenos Aires Querido,” the most famous tango song of all time, whose lyrics are a hymn for nostalgic immigrants. The song is nonetheless interrupted by the voice of Davidovich, who throughout the duration of La Patria Vacía repeats insistently “Perón, Perón, Perón...,” invoking the name of the leader until exhaustion. Later in the video, the images of Perón’s funeral service are covered by Davidovich with black tape, in a double allusion to mourning and censorship. The enlightening ending of the video comes when he takes out the tape, revealing a map of Argentina with the inscription “La Patria Vacía” (The Empty Homeland). Even though he had left Argentina more than ten years before this video, Davidovich was able to synthesize in this piece the Oedipal tragedy of Argentina after the death of Perón, one that would expose the violent social fracture and take the most dramatic turn in 1976 with the coup d’etat and mass killing of tens of thousands of Argentines. The tool to express that was again the tape, the same one used in his abstract monochromes.
By definition, a covering is meant to protect or to conceal, and it is also a layer that coats something else. Davidovich’s tapes, through the formal exploration of abstraction and phenomenology and the political reference to censorship, reveal underneath the simultaneous estrangement and acuteness of being an emigrant artist in the 1970s New York, of being in-between identities and art histories. For this exhibition, Davidovich created a new tape project integrating all these concerns. The gallery’s marble fireplace is obscured with red tape in an architectural signaling that affects the room both in form and content. The intervention accentuates the architectural device by obstructing its view, and at the same time the chromatic choice reveals its function. Once again, Davidovich covers while at the same time reveals.
Aimé Iglesias Lukin
Jaime Davidovich (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1936) was educated at the National College in Buenos Aires, Argentina; the University of Uruguay; and the School of Visual Arts in New York. Under the auspices of EAT (Experiments in Art and Technology), he carried out a collection of works in which he replaced canvases with adhesive tapes. His experiments with tapes originated the project Tape as Art/Art on Tape, in which Davidovich proposed to confront the experiences produced by these two heterogenic mediums. His foray into video work enabled him not only to exhibit in some of the most important cultural spaces in the United States, but also to receive grants from The National Endowment for the Arts, The New York State Council on the Arts, the NEA Visual Arts Fellowship, the Creative Artists Public Service Program, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. In 1976, together with other artists, he founded Cable Soho and served as its first program director. One year later, he became a founding member of the Artists Television Network (ATN), an institution aimed at promoting television artists and their work, where he served as the director between 1977 and 1983. Davidovich has widely exhibited at museums and galleries in the US and internationally at institutions including the American Museum of the Moving Image, New York; MUMOK, Vienna; MOMA, New York; Artium, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires; the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; among others. Davidovich lives and works in New York City.