Interview with José Alejandro Restrepo

by Carmen María Jaramillo

In order to develop his views of local surroundings, José Alejandro Restrepo interweaves tools and concepts from diverse disciplines. Anthropology, philosophy and history overlap with mythology as well as with drama, with music as well as with cinema. In his work Iconomía, the artist creates passages between them and generates perspectives in order to observe the manipulation that local media culture has over the singular imaginary of Colombians.

Turning to the war that originated during the Middle Ages — eighth century — due to the images, and that culminated in the division of the Christian Church, Restrepo establishes a link with the images, sacred and profane, of our contemporary context; the icon is transferred to the image created by the media, in a visually eminent era. To present Iconomía, José Alejandro Restrepo creates a connection between two rooms. The video Iconofilia is projected in one of the rooms, while in the other, Iconoclastia is shown. In the first, viewers may sit on a church-bench, in front of a television set, to view the nonlinear narrative Restrepo creates, parting from the edition of diverse accounts concerning the devotion for images by different sectors of the population: apparitions of the virgin, the consecration of the country to the Sacred Heart... among others. The space that houses Iconoclastia is organized in the way of a mirror with reference to the prior, but with a video that deploys a relation of destruction with the images: profaned religious statues, effigies of Child Jesus of Prague used to transport drugs, a guerilla leader reluctant to being filmed, or the troops of an army beating up a journalist and trying to confiscate images of infringements.

This work is evidence of how television values itself with the supposed objectivity that gives it the right to reproduce reality in 'identical' form in order to manipulate information. Restrepo points out, with irony and subtlety, the biased character and the keenness for rating — and therefore, for money and power — of the media, which slants its view from true happenings. Through the use of minimal alterations he does on videos he tapes from the news — variables in the music, adding animations or alterations in the original timing of the tapes — he shows the moral or political connotations that is granted to 'news' and history.

Furthermore, this work presents other possible lectures. One of them surfaces from the relation of the artist with memory, to the extent that it brings out to light that which had already been consigned to oblivion. This idea of the memory implicates an editing of the material that doesn't obey a chronological order, and in which neither of the characters that write the official local history appear. The protagonist of his work is perhaps the imaginary collective of issues involving war and politics, religion and daily life. The artist creates stories that try to find the way we represent ourselves, and how this representations are distorted, departing from his vision, as filled with brutality and humor.


Carmen María Jaramillo:   In your work, you have reflected upon the different perceptions under which art history is written. You observe how the images done by travelers of the nineteenth century were left out of the official and modernist narrative of present day aesthetics.

José Alejandro Restrepo:   I have also worked around the way in which history itself is written, because within it, within those narratives, and co-narratives, these images of the travelers don't have weight; and perhaps it is there where one finds clues that are much more interesting than the ones offered by conventional history. They have no weight, among other things, because supposedly these chronicles belong more to literature rather than to the history properly established, and the images appear as illustrations and not as a field of signs that need to be interpreted. I thought that if history is a written problem, a grammatical dilemma, then video art is directly involved when it comes to experimenting with other types of narratives. Who writes history? How is it written? Those are some of the questions that seized me since the beginning of my production. Traditional tales seemed suspicious to me. I believed in looking for other sources that were not as orthodox as other documents and other testimonies, sources that haven't been accounted for in those great exploits and heroic accomplishments.

Iconomía was a very interesting exercise for me, because after having finished it, I realized that there was a certain rewriting of Colombia's history during the last years, departing from the problem of the struggle with images. This revealed to me a fanatic country, iconophilic to the point of hysteria, at the same time having less evident iconoclastic features yet equally revealing, and it seems to me that it is in this crossing point where we may find something interesting history wise.



CMJ:   What was the process of recollection and interpretation of the sources like?

JAR:   I recollected material from TV news for seven or eight years, knowing there were very important things, and above all, of political relevance. It was all about seeing again, of rereading and thinking again; the work becomes a sort of counter-reading of issues that to me seemed transcendental, and that were shown as simple and insignificant news of thirty seconds, that were soon forgotten. Instead of telling completely fictitious stories, or heroic tales, I think history could be written like a Dziga Vertov movie, with such montage and editing, without having to turn to linear stories or fraudulent and sentimental narratives.

I also want to point out that there are other ways to see the context, because if private television channels send me an ideological image, I return it to them reinterpreted or questioning it. What's more, I am establishing a sort of answer to something of a utopia, facing the hegemonic and univocal power of the media.



CMJ:   How did the process of editing the material take place?

JAR:   Even though it was very arduous to reorganize, I found I could arrange the material parting from an ancestral struggle: the friends of the images versus the enemies of these; the process occurred almost naturally. And this idea allowed me to make sense of the work in terms of a certain writing of history. Seeing the same images thousands of times is a methodology of infallible work. Paying attention to what the material is telling you. In many cases, it takes time to make such discoveries, it doesn't happen instantly; you have to be patient.

Regarding the systematization, this allows you to identify a very complex problem. Not that there is an iconophilic band and an iconoclastic one, but there exist tendencies that shift from one side to the other; in every radically iconophilic situation there is simultaneously another band that is iconoclastic.



CMJ:   In your work in general, and in this one in particular, one perceives the interest for a problem as well as the diverse views it has received, and that at the same time has been materialized, constructing realities. In Iconomía you seek to draw back the veils of these views...

JAR:   I begin to draw them or even to increase them, to contribute with the disorder; in order to point out that it is there that a potential turmoil or an eventual paradox exists. This paradox may be either strengthen or exacerbated and I believe that Iconomía is just that. Exacerbate limits and give evidence of the contradictions of this society, of these dreadful paradoxes, for they are mortal paradoxes. A lot of blood has been shed here, like in Byzantium during the eighth century...



CMJ:   Not in vain do the musings around the convergence of our time and that of the Middle Ages take place; anyhow it is not casual that you have taken a problem from the medieval to look to the confusion that surrounds our image of the media.

JAR:   Well, you see, something like what happened on September 11: a recognized group of people, like the Taliban appears. One finds an absolutely fascinating and anachronic iconoclastic radicalism, like prohibiting photography or television. How is it that a culture develops and defends its interests by using an attitude that is absolutely against images? A very interesting phenomenon appears there, which is how to conceive a world without images, how to picture the world without going through images. I think this is a captivating problem, not only in the intellectual field, but in the artistic practice as well. How not to contribute to filling this world with empty images, unnecessary, sumptuary, saturated to the maximum point, and how to be able to find a way, let's say, iconoclastic, without a need to refrain from images. How can we not become part of that capitalist saturation of the image, and of the consumption of images, which can sometimes become so exhausting.



CMJ:   What strategy do you use to give evidence of that which underlies the view of the media and at the same time differentiate from them? Because all the images you use come from television news...

JAR:   Well, ninety percent of the images are taken from the media and the other ten percent are mine. During the process, I thought of ways of making commentaries, of making emphasis on some aspects, and relating them to others. In particular that point: How to make them relate amongst themselves? Once you put forth that question, you start establishing discourses; you generate a sort of syntax that becomes very important and that is going to contribute in the creation of meaning. It's something that is made up of fragments, of pure montage, something like a collage, but not the surrealist collage, instead the one that works based on connections, common points, correspondents, but also including clashes and collisions.

The image is a very powerful weapon. Something that may be transmitted by a television set becomes legitimate only because of the fact of having been exposed there, and it is not taken into account that the information is subject to all kinds of manipulations and perversities; it becomes in the supreme instance of truth because "CNN said so", or "I saw it on the Discovery Channel". That absolute power is terrifying and that is why there exists a need for certain iconoclasm. Not only because there is a need to break false images or false idols, but also iconoclastic in the sense of a sobriety, of a moderation, of a distance in front of the images. Ask which are the strictly necessary images. And anyhow, it is a lost fight because the iconophilics swept everything away.

Now I remember that beautiful phrase by David Hockney in which he is asked, "What is your social responsibility as an artist?" And he answers "It consists in not leaving all the images to the television." And later, he says "I am responsible of my images because I sign them." Therefore, you also question "Who signs CNN?, Who signs Caracol? Who signs RCN?" It is really a matter of political interests. I find it interesting trying to dismantle the power of media... In particular, in a country like this one, where it results overwhelming; whether it is in terms of showing the ideological manipulations or the contradictions. Now, I know that this circulates in a very restricted media only and that it has no type of massive political repercussion.

CMJ:   Which could be those necessary images? What lies behind such images?

JAR:   Those images would consist, in the end, of good art, looking back to Hockney's phrase. What Hockney does is he takes what television has yet not acquired or what television has not yet taken by force. That is, among other things, what a good artist does.


All images are video stills from Iconomía, © José Alejandro Restrepo

© José Alejandro Restrepo and Carmen María Jaramillo 2004

Translated from Spanish by Carina Gallegos.