Valeria de los Ríos - Marks of Travel: Strategies in Eugenio Dittborn's Airmail Paintings

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Issue 14. Painting / portrait

Marks of Travel: Strategies in Eugenio Dittborn’sAirmail Paintings

Author: Valeria de los Ríos

Published: July 2006

Abstract (E): The following essay is divided into three main parts. The titles of

each part are History/Stories, Strategies/Techniques and Airmail/Cartography.

The objective of this analysis is to explain different strategies used by the

Chilean artist Eugenio Dittborn in his Airmail Paintings project. The Airmail

Paintings are a series of paintings done with mixed media in a special format

that allows the artist to send them through the mail service. The first part of

this paper is a narration of the context in which the Airmail Paintings appear.

The second one, is a catalogue of the techniques used by the artist and a clue

to understanding them and their implications. The third part is an explanation

of the airmail system and a proposal to read the Airmail Paintings as maps.

Finally, I analyze the artist’s project from the unstable point of view of travel,

which is one of the pre-conditions of this artistic work.

Abstract (F): Cet article est divisé en trios parties, intitulées respectivement:

Histoire/Récits, Stratégies/Techniques et Poste aérienne/Cartographie. Son

objectif est de rendre compte des stratégies que suit l’artiste chilien Eugenio

Dittborn dans son projet des « peintures aériennes » (Airmail Paintings project).

Ces peintures exécutées dans une technique mixte ont un format particulier qui

leur permet d’être envoyées par la poste. On analyse d’abord la genèse

historique de ces peintures. Ensuite on décrit et interprète les diverses

techniques utilisées et on rattache les peintures au système postal pour

présenter les tableaux comme des cartes. Enfin, on analyse le projet du point

de vue du voyage, qui est une des conditions préalables du travail de Dittborn.

keywords: Dittborn, Airmail Painting, postal art, Latin American art,

cartography, museum.

History/Stories [1]

Eugenio Dittborn was born in Santiago de Chile in 1948. He studied at the Escuela

de Bellas Artes (School of Fine Arts) of the University of Chile, in Santiago, from

1962 to 1965. Then he studied graphic arts and painting in Paris, Madrid and West

Berlin (1965-1970). During the seventies and early eighties, Dittborn worked

simultaneously in a number of directions. He was highly involved in graphics and

video art, in a kind of “phobia of painting” that he seemed to suffer. Between 1977

and 1984, he experimented with different materials such as paint, cotton, photo

silkscreen, burnt motor oil and feathers, and with supports such as chipboard,

Perspex, cardboard and jute sacking (usually used in Chile to transport potatoes).

In 1981 for example, the artist poured 77 gallons of burnt motor oil over the



In 1981 for example, the artist poured 77 gallons of burnt motor oil over the

Tarapacá Desert, in the north of Chile. This gesture can be seen as foundational, a

kind of farewell to oil painting in the most traditional sense—as the work with

brushes, oil paint and canvas—and to the space of the Museum with a capital

“M,”—the institution of high art. The Chilean art critic Justo Pastor Mellado “reads”

in this display an amplification of Pollock's dripping and also a contradiction of

Dittborn's aversion to painting (motor oil as oil painting). Despite Dittborn's

decision not to work with oil painting anymore, his whole oeuvre makes constant

references to painting (as an institution). In this sense, his production can be seen

as self-reflexive, and as an avant-garde fashioned critique to the institution of art.

The Gloom In the Valley (The Painting Lesson I)

1989, airmail painting nº 74, paint, stitching and photosilkscreen on 2 sections of

non woven fabric, 210 x 280 cm.

Itinerary: Santiago de Chile 1989, Sydney 1989, Melbourne 1990, Canberra 1990,

Adelaide 1990, Buenos Aires 1991, London 1993, Southampton 1993, Rotterdam

1993-94, Santiago de Chile 1998.

His first Airmail Painting was created unofficially in 1982. It was sent to the art

critic (and now cultural critic) Nelly Richard, who was presenting the work of

Chilean photographers in the XII Paris Biennial. The work consisted of a piece of

wrapping paper with spots of different colored paint. The composition—now

disappeared—“traveled” from Santiago de Chile to Paris, as a kind of return to the

point of origin—Europe as the place where Western art begun—, with the most

basic resources for learning painting (paper with painted spots), the “homework”

made by an unknown Chilean artist, as Mellado affirms. This reference to the “point

of origin” is a link with the idea of culture and coloniality. Latin American thinking

and culture have been obliged, from colonial days, to reproduce those of Europe, to

develop as a periphery of that other “universe” which, by dint of consecutive

conquests, became one of the themes of its history. The allusion to “homework”



conquests, became one of the themes of its history. The allusion to “homework”

has to do with the notion of art education as a colonial model imposed upon Latin

American artists: inside the colonial context, artists had to “learn” the techniques

produced in Europe, as a kind of homework.

The first “official” Airmail Painting was sent in 1984 to Melbourne, to the resident

Chilean artist Juan Dávila. The first exhibitions of these works were held

simultaneously in Cali (Colombia) and Sydney (Australia) this same year. The

“scene of writing” of the Airmail Paintings is the context of the military regime of

Augusto Pinochet (1973-1989). The system established by this regime was

characterized by the elimination of politics as a social practice. There was never an

official culture, but rather a reduction of cultural expressions, a phenomenon

known as “apagón cultural” (“cultural blackout “). There was not a systematic

exercise of censorship and the criterion applied by the government was not clear.

The consequence for artworks was the development of a strong self-censorship.

This is explained by the fact that, before the fear of being banned, the artist

becomes more acutely aware of the uses of language and he/she develops ways to

safeguard his or her right to expression, as Richard affirms.

The Airmail Paintings can be read both as an attempt to resist censorship and as a

peripheral effort to raise international circuits of art. The Airmail Paintings appear

as a strategy to escape a society where artistic production had diminished. In this

sense, it could be said that these artworks practiced a kind of self-exile, in a

moment in which exile (and self-exile) was imposed on a large number of

individuals. The idea of exile as an allegory of these works is related to the notion

of displacement, and in this sense one can make a connection with travel (although

exile is undoubtedly not a desired form of travel). One of the most important

features of this work—the essence of the Airmail Paintings—is to be sent. Transit

offers the only possibility for its preservation. The theorist Adriana Valdés affirms:

Las pinturas aeropostales se deben a una necesidad de jugar con la

problemática del viaje precario, del trabajo visual producido en un

lugar determinado, pero que tiene que ubicarse en un ámbito

distinto, internacional, donde llega como alguien peregrino, es decir,

como alguien extraño (76). [The Airmail Paintings respond to the

problematic of precarious travel, as a work that is produced in a

determined space, but that has to be presented in a different one,

an international one, where it arrives as a pilgrim, that is, as

someone strange.]

The artist designed the Airmail Paintings to be sent through the airmail to their

place of exhibition in stamped, franked and buffeted envelopes. The package

containing the works also carried a fresh envelope for the work's onward or return

journey. So, the Airmail Paintings are connected to the idea of boomerang: their

travel is a roundtrip.

Strategies/Techniques

In the series of the Airmail Paintings entitled Historia del rostro (History of the

Human Face), we can see a combination of two kinds of reproduced photographs:



Human Face), we can see a combination of two kinds of reproduced photographs:

thieves and aborigines. Also, it is possible to find a wide variety of drawings of

faces: faces drawn by Dittborn's seven years old daughter Margarita, faces drawn

by mental patients, police line-ups, faces cut out from art manuals, and so on.

At first glance, one notes that Dittborn employed three basic procedures:

photography, drawing and painting. At a second view, one has to admit that the

photography employed is not really photography, but rather a reproduction of a

photograph already mediated by its publication in a newspaper or a magazine, cut

out from its original context, and enlarged. In the support it is possible to

distinguish a few spots of paint, but painting is not used in a traditional way as in a

landscape or a portrait. There are only spots of pigment. The spot of paint can be

read as the repressed side of technology, as the unconscious side of the

reproductions practiced by the artist, as the spontaneous gesture that cannot be

controlled or regulated.

Dittborn uses basting and other non-permanent procedures as junctions. So it is

possible to think that there is an attempt to show the marks of production of the

work, to reveal the way in which it was done. At this moment, one realizes that the

Airmail Paintings project is a reflection on different technologies of production and

reproduction of the work of art, and the existing and possible mediations between

them. The diversified levels of production and reproduction are connected to the

idea of the coexistence of different stages of technology, which make a reference

to Latin American modernity. Néstor García Canclini has defined it as a “multi-

temporal heterogeneity,” a mixture of different stages of modernization,

fragmentary signs, disjointed languages, transcultural quotes, etc.

In this sense, it is meaningful to talk about the nature of the images used by

Dittborn in his paintings. First of all, one can say that either in the case of those of

the indigenous or those of delinquents, the photographic portrait works as an

identification device to create subjects under control. These images are predestined

to be classified and placed—as objects—into the files (archives) of science

(anthropology) or of the State (police).

Since its ingress into the American space (around 1850), photography was used to

document Latin American “reality.” As Ronald Kay suggests, the shot of the camera

enacted the colonizing gesture of “taking possession.” The Indians were the

privileged objects of the ethnographic view, and were at the same time, created by

it for the western imaginary. But there was a gap between this evident sign of

modernization—photography—and the subject constituted by the pose for these

representatives of modernity. Richard argues that the first violence carried out by

colonialism was the symbolic power controlling the relation ourselves-others in the

violence of representation. To represent implies the control of the gaze as “view-

point, ” which manipulates the setting for showing or recognizing. In “Nosotros/the

Others” she explains:

The inhabitants of the ends of the earth were subjected to the visual

extremes of the photographic process: portraits mass-produced by a

mechanical reproduction which made them collectors' items (objects)

for the European eye before they (as subjects) had achieved control

over the representation of their own image. (50)

Photographs as State's identification tools work in a similar way to ethnographic

photos: they capture and attach an image, a shape. The ID photography



photos: they capture and attach an image, a shape. The ID photography

immobilizes the photographed object, reducing it to an image that does not

identify, but rather homogenizes. It fixes the image as a static part of a system,

which in this case is the State apparatus. The face emerges as a social and public

construction, which configures a subject under control. Many of the delinquents

represented in the images used by Dittborn are peasants that came to the city

looking for better opportunities. In the pictures they appear dressed as gentleman,

in a very modern manner (the style is the one used during the thirties, forties and

fifties in Chile) and at the bottom of the page it is possible to read their names and

their alias. Valdés claims:

El nombre propio como el más arbitrario y más convencional de los

signos, puesto allí y tachado sólo para marcar su carácter sustituible,

y para dotar a los rostros presentes de un exceso de

“identificaciones” que da por resultado el anonimato. Como en la

multiplicación mecánica de las caras, la multiplicación de los nombres

en letra set condena definitivamente a la no identidad. (25-26) [The

proper name as the most arbitrary and conventional of all signs, put

there and crossed out only to point out its substitutive character, to

give to the actual faces an excess of identifications, whose final

result is the anonymous condition. Just like the mechanical

multiplication of the faces, the multiplication of the type set names,

condemn them definitively to no-identification.]

Secondly, in the drawings of faces it is possible to read the issue of control now in

relation to the institutional practice of drawing and its techniques. The illustrations

of art manuals represent the “correct” way to depict something (academic models),

while the pictures made by Margarita and the mental patients exemplify a drawing

free of technical conventions. But this freedom is only apparent, because although

there is a freedom to improvise technically, they—Margarita and the mentally

afflicted—were asked to do the drawings by Dittborn himself: he, the artist, is the

one applying the control over these uncommon draftsmen. The police line-ups are

an interesting combination of these ideas, as drawings made following the rules of

the oral description of the witnesses, used by the State apparatus to implement

control.



The 23rd History of The Human Face (Aljo Violet)

1999, airmail painting nº 128, tincture, non woven fabric, stitching and

photosilkscreen on 2 sections of duck fabric, 210 x 280 cm

Itinerary: Santiago de Chile 1999, Basel 2000

What is interesting here is how these subjects under control, and without proper

identification (they are perfectly anonymous for us) become the protagonists of

their own photographs, now outside the police files or the ethnographic records.

When the Airmail Paintings are exhibited, the gaze of these printed eyes connects

with the one of the spectator. As Roberto Merino puts it, this configures a

“suspended situation” (13), because the temporalities of both gazes differ. Dittborn

affirms:

An Airmail Painting is the space in which these times meet one

another, in this sense, the hybridization in my work is a temporal

hybridization. Signs that belong to different and distant temporal

strata finally meet there, and in meeting, make one another

reciprocally visible. (14)

This idea of the encounter of gazes in a way subverts the notion of the

ethnographic exhibition, where native people were put on display to provide

opportunities for aesthetic contemplation, scientific analysis and entertainment. The

depicted objects become subjects at the moment—displaced in time—in which their

look is received. So, at last, they become visible. The self-conscious movement of

the artist makes these images on exhibition be the ones who are looking at the

spectators.

It is important to notice the subject matter of mediation. The images used by

Dittborn have been cut from old magazines such as the detective reviews Detective

and Vea, and from the sport magazines Estadio and Gol y Gol, found in second

hand bookstores in Santiago. The use of this kind of images—of encountered

images—is the product of the practice of collecting. Collecting, following the



images—is the product of the practice of collecting. Collecting, following the

anthropologist James Clifford, is related to identity. Children's collections, for

example, are an exercise in how to make the world one's own. Quoting Susan

Stewart, Clifford wrote:

She shows how collections, most notably museums—create the

illusion of adequate representation of a world by first cutting objects

out of specific contexts (whether cultural, historical, or

intersubjective) and making them “stand for” abstract wholes—(220).

Clifford assures that both the collector and the “savage ethnographer” could claim

to be the last to rescue “the real thing.” Authenticity—he wrote— “is produced by

removing objects and customs from their current historical situation—a present-

becoming-future” (228). So authenticity arises as an institutional effect. In the case

of Dittborn's work, where these photographs were rescued, more than a claim to

authenticity one could read a way to question precisely this kind of asseveration,

where authenticity and identity are presented precisely as the non-authentic and as

constructed elements. In his exercise, Dittborn recollects images and organizes

them articulating his particular idea of identity, which is not authenticity, but rather

—as in every collection—a specific kind of construction. The identification photos—

those of murderers and thieves—used in the Airmail Paintings are expressive in

relation to the issue of social control and the detective or anthropological

investigation. The subjects reproduced by Dittborn are marginal on the social map,

because they are supposed to be in jail, or they are rather exotic figures, destined

to be inside a museum.

Abelardo

(Juan Várez collection) 2003-2004, airmail painting nº 159, tincture, polygal,

sateen, stitching and photosilkscreen 2 sections of duck fabric, 210 x 280 cm

Itinerario: Santiago de Chile 2004, Miami 2004, Santiago de Chile 2005



The way in which these images are ordered alludes to the idea of palimpsest, or

rather to the notion of sediment, a visual image of how memory works. Collection

itself is associated with memory: “Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the

collector's passion borders the chaos of memories” (Benjamin 60). A collection is a

disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can

appear as order: “An excessive, sometimes even rapacious need to have is

transformed into rule-governed, meaningful desire. Thus the self that must possess

but cannot have it all learns to select, order, classify in hierarchies” (Clifford 218).

In this rescue of the forgotten images, Dittborn makes the gesture of taking out

rebel signs of the official catalogues. So he recuperates subaltern positions (of

class, gender and race) that represented the civil majority under military control.

Dittborn deconstruct metaphorically the political disappearance, which in Richard

terms is first of all a matter of “taking out of circulation.” While the Chilean State

tried to put out of circulation some determined subjects to condemn them to

oblivion, Dittborn's Airmail Paintings put back into circulation images of subjects

condemned to forgetfulness. The artist became a kind of “guardian of memory,” the

one which was suppressed by the official apparatus. In Margin and Institutions

Richard assures:

By transferring the photos from one referential field to another,

Dittborn makes the sources of these found images interconnected

and recombines their links with history: he disassembles and

reassembles the faulty archives until the effect of them becomes

legible. He reinterprets the national memory through photographic

omissions in popular portraits and everyday scenes until traumatic

repression is lifted (41).

The very use of photographs in Dittborn's work is associated with memory. Richard

affirms that in the context of the dictatorship, photography became a privileged

technique to present images as proof or evidence of reality. The photographic

image worked as a “substitution of the scene,” and in this sense, all photographic

symbolic interventions operated as rectification of reality itself. The photographic

images used by Dittborn in his paintings are in general images of faces: women

murderers of the thirties, thieves, aborigines of Patagonia, museum's mummies,

etc.

Memory works by actualizing (making present) signs—images—that remit to a

forgotten past in the context of a highly repressive present. The past is explored

not from the point of view of history as the capital narrative (monuments, famous

lives, and legendary dates), but rather from a minor perspective (residues, traces

of re-produced mass media images). As Benjamin noticed, the particular collector

(not the institutional collector or the museum) in his relationship to objects does

not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value, but rather their usefulness. While

rescuing images of magazines no longer distributed (old magazines), Dittborn

worked against fashion in an economic context where attempts were being made

to impose a neo-liberal system. Instead of using the new, Dittborn uses the old,

the already used, the second-hand thing, the quote.



Air Mail/Cartography

If we accept that the Airmail Paintings' function as letters to be sent, then we have

to ask ourselves about the letters' condition of existence. The support of these

works was first wrapping paper—a datum that speaks to the economy of this

production—and then non-woven fabric, a white, lightweight and synthetic product,

a modern hybrid somewhere between paper and textile. This gives us a clue to

interpret these artworks as something in between writing and painting. The election

of materials has to do with the need for an easily moldable matter that could be

folded and put inside a mailer. The envelope allows the journey of the Airmail

Paintings through the mail service, as letters.

In the Airmail Paintings we can find a paradox between public and private spheres.

The painting as letter is thought to be private (the secrecy of the letter), but as a

painting it has to be exposed in public. The mediation established by the mailer is

a significant fact. The envelope is the limit, the frontier between public and private

spaces. It is a physical sign of this division, as the body is always something that is

in between the individual and the collective. The envelope is also a body in the

sense that it contains something inside it. As a container, the envelope works as a

metaphor of the notion of “home” that is a constant in the imaginary of the Airmail

Paintings. The exposure of the envelope is also a simile for the disclosure of

something that was thought to be confidential: the opening of the letter is a sort of

violation of privacy and by this gesture the spectators are transformed into

voyeurs.

At this point, one could pose the following questions: Why does Dittborn use an

envelope? Why does he not send the paintings as postcards, which means as

pictures without an envelope? Why fold the illustrations? The fold is the mark of

production and the mark of travel par excellance. It is the guarantee of the secrecy

of the letter. But, if there is any secret, what is it? Perhaps, it is the possibility for

the paintings to give up traveling, to remain in one determined place, in other

words, to become sedentary. In the specific case of Dittborn's painting, this idea

makes a reference to the possibility of being acquired by a collector or by a

museum (most likely in the metropolis).

We can ask ourselves if there is a “true” addressee for the paintings. Maybe there

is not such a thing. Perhaps the sender is also a false one. Jacques Derrida wrote

that the intrinsic structure of the letter comprises, always, the possibility that it

won't arrive at its destination. It is not that the letter wills never arrive at its

destination, but it is possible that it won't reach its intended destination. The

sender alone cannot assure the emission of the letter:

... Given that chance and that threat, that the notion of destination,

the certainty of arrival, cannot constitute the conception of the letter

unless it be accompanied by a system of control (a metaphysics of

presence, for instance) which assures delivery to the proper address.

Otherwise destination could only de defined by the event of arrival

itself, and not with any certainty by the event of dispatch (Willis,

22).

The letter is then an event that is actualized in the moment in which it is received.

An apparatus of control assures the run: in this case, the international mails



An apparatus of control assures the run: in this case, the international mails

system. Although it has strikes, is delayed, negligent and full of hazards, it can be

also expeditious, efficient and—as Dittborn indicates—humorous: “it always makes

the automatic joke of carrying the Airmail Paintings to their destination and then

the superior joke of returning them to the sender” (Merino 10).

Dittborn recognizes that the meaning of the Airmail Paintings depends on “the

circulation of the works through the international airmail network” (Cubitt 20).

There are many figures inside the paintings themselves that allude to travel, for

instance, the raft and the snail. The travel of the Airmail Paintings is one without

an end, because their essence is to be constantly traveling. When they are

presented in exhibitions, they are just in transit. This is precisely the subject of

these works. Dittborn explains:

The Airmail Paintings are not conceived for only one place that acts

as their support. They are conceived to be doubly supported: in the

first instance by the international airmail network through which they

circulate (the airplanes, custom checks and postmen serve as their

support producing their circulation). The Airmail Paintings are also

supported by the receiver or destination: the walls of the exhibition

space to which the works have been sent. … With regard to the

hypothesis that Airmail Paintings are conceived for only one place, I

want to say that the place would be—paradoxically speaking—the

traffic, the circulation, or, definitively, the circularity. (Cubitt 25)

It is precisely the condition of painting-inside-an-envelope that defines this project.

The airmail strategy is a material option and artistic cunning to disguise a painting

as a letter, to “infallibly reach places that are far away from the starting point, to

break through the isolation, separation and international confinement” (Cubitt 20).

These works operate under the idea of the Trojan horse: they come as letters and

then occupy a substantial amount of the space of the cultural metropolis. The

Airmail Paintings are paintings disguised as letters and therefore, they can infiltrate

into international circuits of art. Dittborn remarks:

I want to add that the Airmail Paintings, so small in their envelopes,

deceive the agents of the metropolis. They say: “Is it a letter? Yes,

that's what it is. It's a bit big, but go ahead, no problem” (Merino

14).

Yes, and then, when the Airmail Paintings come back, the agents of the metropolis

say “Aaggh, it's too late” (Merino 16).

In this way, the paintings convert the metropolis into a place of transit, since from

there the works will be sent to another place of transit. The metropolis acquires a

status equivalent to the one of the place of origin, so the metropolis “is no longer

the place of arrival, the supreme summit of the artist's career” (Merino 14). The

very system of the Airmail Paintings calls into question the notion of the museum

as the institution of art: they arrive to the museum as letters and they do not stay

there, because their visits are ephemeral. This strategy reveals the artist's

shrewdness. He can put his works into the metropolis' museums thanks to an

inexpensive and easy envelope that appears as an irony compared to the

complexity of the museum's procedures. The art critic Guy Brett explains:



The travel of an expensive and famous work of art or artifact is like

a secret service operation. It must be accompanied by a fully

qualified curator-courier who must not let it out of their sight for a

moment, even if this means missing sleep. Its journey is

accompanied by great tension: that in its rigidity it may break, or in

its monetary value it might be stolen. It cannot be entrusted to a

system like the airmail, which, in the case of Dittborn's paintings,

works today almost as inevitably as the sea washing a message

across the ocean in a bottle. (73-74)

Brett argues that the Airmail Paintings aspires to be a new genre, [2] and that it's

disturbing and challenging effect occurs because it is not yet constituted as an

artistic genre. “Its legitimization is given by the cultural institution which in the

process removes it from the sphere of life to the museum and robs it of efficacy

(usually by re-interpreting it in terms of older genres)” (73).

December 1992

On a street in Santiago, Chile, 5 airmail paintings in envelopes, 3 months before

setting out for the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. They are: Liquid

Ashes, To Travel and 3 Histories of the Human Face (number 6, 11 and 13) which

arrived from Kassel, Rome, Boston, Seville and Antwerp between May and

November 1992.



In terms of the Airmail Paintings as a “new genre,” I will argue that besides the

paintings as letters, one could read the paintings as maps. The Airmail Paintings

are always exhibited with their trajectory traced in a map. At the same time, the

folds inside the paintings form a kind of grid, in which the images are inscribed.

The folds give the basic guide for the engraving of images into the work. Maps, like

Dittborn's works, are generally folded and in order to look at them, one has to un

fold them. The marks generated by the process of folding and unfolding create a

kind of parallel grid in which the depiction of the territory is inscribed.

The notion of picture as map is opposed to the idea of picture as window, which

was proposed by Alberti during the Renaissance. The aim of map painters was to

capture on a flat surface a great range of knowledge and information about the

world. In this sense, mapping is related to the idea of collection defined by Clifford,

as the way to make the world one's own, or in this case, to make the space one's

own. In her essay about Dutch art, Svetlana Alpers establishes a relationship

between mapping and describing. Maps give us the measure of a place and the

relationship between places, that is, quantifiable data. Maps were, since their

origin, a combination of art and science: “the map allowed one to see something

that was otherwise invisible,” and then she adds: “Like lenses, maps were referred

to as glasses to bring objects before the eye” (133). Following this idea, it is

possible to conceive of maps as a means of visualization, a technique that

permitted the extension of the gaze into territories that were too far to be seen

with only the help of the naked eye.

It is interesting to note that maps are one of the most usual cultural metaphors in

our conception of the world. The history of cartography is also the history of

rationalization, of how to articulate representation and signification in a visual

image. The models applied by mapmakers reflect particular structures of

knowledge. The illustrations of early maps, for example, were adapted to the

popular taste at the time in which they were depicted. Usually, eyewitnesses gave

the information for the design of those maps, and this data was never confirmed.

As a result, there was always a mixture of fact and fiction. Here it is possible to

see clearly the real distance established between territory and map. In other

words, it is possible to understand that the map is not the actual territory, but

rather a symbolic and ideologically constructed product.

Bonaventura de Souza Santos claims that each historical period or cultural tradition

selects a fixed point which functions as the center of its current maps, a position

from which all other spaces are distributed in an organized manner. So there is an

interesting bridge between the idea of mapping and the structure established by

the colonial system in America. The visualization of this new, recently discovered

space through maps, was one of the ways of appropriating the territory and

controlling it. In “Woodcutters and Cannibals,” Susi Colin re-affirms the well-known

idea that the work of the New World 's cartographers served political and at the

same time economic purposes. The colonial system established a division between

the colonial power as civilized centers from which technology was distributed, and

colonies as savage places, from which gold and raw materials were taken. Then,

after the independence of the countries of the New World and several attempts to

modernize Latin America, this model was replaced with the discourse of “cultural

dependency,” where the colonial power occupied the role of the center

(metropolitan power) and the ex-colonies took the place of the periphery. But this

model also underwent many transformations. Under the discursive dominance of



model also underwent many transformations. Under the discursive dominance of

postcoloniality and postmodernism, the center as a fixed and homogeneous polarity

began a process of semantic and territorial disintegration due to the proliferation of

margins (minorities) within itself. Moreover, the transnationalization of the cultural

and economic market dispersed the metropolitan power in numerous micro-

networks. Definitely, the colonial map changed, at least in appearance. In these

new circumstances, Dittborn's work plays with one of the most important

articulations of cultural power: distances.

The 24th History of Human Face (Cruza)

2002, airmail painting nº 141, paint, non woven, stitching and photosilkscreen on 2

sections of duck fabric, 210 x 280 cm.

Without itinerary

In Routes Clifford points out the importance of travel as a practice of crossing and

interaction, that troubled the localism of many common assumptions about culture.

Dwelling has been understood as the local ground of collective life and travel only

as a supplement. So he proposes to see these practices of displacement as

constitutive of cultural meanings rather than a simple transfer or extension. In this

context, museums arise as “contact zones,” sites of passage and encounter, with

hybrid possibilities and where political negotiation is possible. A contact perspective

views all culture-collecting tactics as responses to particular histories of dominance,

hierarchy, resistance and mobilization. If there is something to be negotiated, what

is it? Canclini suggests that in works such as Dittborn's what is negotiated is a new

kind of identity, now not only constituted in relation to unique territories, but also

generated in the intersection of objects, messages and people coming from divers

directions. He affirms that these works are polyglot and migrant, that they can

function in diverse and multiple contexts, and permit divergent readings from their

hybrid constitution. Inside them, every position is transitory.

The “Airmail Painting No. 49” is a good example. It uses as an emblem the image

of Jemmy Button, a native of Patagonia who was purchased by the captain of

Darwin's Beagle, FitzRoy, for a couple of buttons (thus his name). He was taken to

London in 1829 and there he learned to speak English. He came back to Tierra del

Fuego in 1833, dressed as an English man, but after being in contact with his



Fuego in 1833, dressed as an English man, but after being in contact with his

people, he forgot everything that he had learned. In 1984, his image came back to

London inside a Dittborn's Airmail Painting.

Brett argues that Dittborn “rescues a notion of the local only to show that the

local, like the global, is an abstraction, the conjunction of many planes of

experience and timescales” (76). For this reason, it is possible to think that what

Dittborn proposes is not an affirmative idea of identity (the local), but rather a

demonstration of identities as mobile configurations that are in a permanent

process of construction. At the same time, this proposal shows identities as

constructions and not as “real” entities. The airmail procedure reclaims and

exercises the painting's right to put into practice its own difference, so it is no

longer “spoken for” by others, its gaze no longer controlled by others. It organizes

its own policies of intervention.

Altura del Hueso

(courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York), 2004, airmail painting

nº 162, tincture, polygal, sateen, stitching and photosilkscreen on 2 sections of

duck fabric, 210 x 280 cm.

Itinerary: Santiago de Chile 2004, Miami 2004, Santiago de Chile 2005

Epilogue

This essay was divided strategically in three parts. But none of these parts are

sufficient by themselves to give a total explanation of Dittborn's Airmail Paintings.

His work must be read as a complex network of relations motivated by the

selection, manipulation and exhibition of some images disseminated through the

postal service.

Dittborn's work could be read in the interaction between three central poles:

technology, reproduction and the multiple systems. It is possible to analyze how



technology, reproduction and the multiple systems. It is possible to analyze how

these concepts work throughout different levels in the paintings. First of all, we

talked about the XIX Century technique of photography as a means of reproducing

images of suspicious subjects, which facilitates their introduction into the system of

the state or rather into the system of ethnography. The further reproductions of

these images in the Airmail Paintings reproduce the tactics of entering into a new

system, which in this case is the international system of art.

Secondly, we discussed this airmail strategy, which is a means of communication, a

technique that permits entry into the international art circuits, and a method that

makes possible the dissemination of the works. Then we considered the paintings

as maps and maps as technologies through which the territories of the New World

entered into the colonial system. One of the characteristics of maps, as translations

from a sphere into a flat surface, is that the projection is viewed “from nowhere”

(Alpers). This means that in a map—unlike in traditional oil painting—there is

neither a single perspective, nor a vanishing point. As a result, the gaze is impelled

to become an active recourse rather than a contemplative one. This idea goes

against the notion of “world-as-exhibition” as defined by Timothy Mitchell, because

the view, in the case of the Airmail Paintings, is not organized. Moreover there is

no exhibition, but rather points of arrival and departure. The Airmail Paintings

make specific their point of origin and destination in time and space (these

indications are present in the envelope). But at the same time, they intimate that

there is no absolute point of origin or destination. Motion, traveling and

vagabondage are another state of being. Inside his paintings, the idea of travel is

present in the circulation of the images, the movement between the states of being

lost and then found, forgotten and remembered. Further, the images suffer the

“travel” of re-production: they pass form one state to another, for instance from

photography to serigraphy.

Here the notion of travel appears very related to technology. Historically,

technologies have been developed to facilitate travel and at the same time, travel

has generated new and sophisticated technologies. Maps and communication

means—such as the mail system—have been perfected thanks to new technologies

(for example, new modes of transportation). Some theoreticians (Paul Virilio, for

instance) have argued that the development of technology is connected to the war

industry. In this sense, it is pertinent to recall some declarations made by Dittborn

himself. For him, the idea of infiltration into the system of art (the airmail condition

as the technology to enter into it) has the character of a “viral” war, because it is

an anonymous war, a war that has not been declared.

The Airmail Paintings project onto the map some tensions in relation to technology

and its development. In this sense, the task of history appears. In Dittborn's work

technology is a reflection about Latin America and how the gaze has been

constructed in the continent. Dittborn describes the history of disjointed memories

and interrupted traditions that mix photographs, drawings, popular engravings,

offset reproductions, academic traditions and avant-garde movements. Usually he

uses second-hand images reproduced by modern techniques such as serigraphy.

This is an example of the presence of different stages of modernization and

precarious travels as representative of the Latin American condition. But at the

same time, the idea of representation or identity is questioned through constant

travel. There is not a fixed position from which to see. These works demonstrate

that the idea of identity and of the gaze as closed systems does not work, that one

cannot freeze them, because in this way they are transformed into masks. For this



cannot freeze them, because in this way they are transformed into masks. For this

reason, these paintings cannot give up traveling, because they enact the very idea

of mobile identities. [3]

Works Cited

Alpers, Svetlana. “The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art.” The Art of Describing.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. 119-169.

Benjamin, Walter. “Unpacking my Library”. Illuminations. New York: Schocken

Books. Random House, Inc, 1988.

Brett, Guy. “Dust Clouds.” Dittborn 71-87.

Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard

UP, 1988.

Colin, Susi. “Woodcutters and Cannibals.” America: Early Maps of the New World.

Munich: Prestel, 1992.

Cubitt, Sean. “An Airmail Interview.” Dittborn 20-26.

Dittborn, Eugenio. Mapa: The Airmail Paintings of Eugenio Dittborn 1984-1992.

Londres: IC A, 1993.

Kay, Ronald. Del espacio de acá. Señales para una mirada americana. Santiago:

Editores Asociados, 1980.

Merino, Roberto. “Signs of Travel.” Dittborn 7-18.

Richard, Nelly. Margins and Institutions. Melbourne: Art & Text, 1986.

---. “Dobleces y Plegaduras.” Pinturas Postales de Eugenio Dittborn. Santiago:

Francisco Zegers Editor, 1985. 15-16.

---. “Nosotros/The Others.” Dittborn 47-65.

Valdés, Adriana. Composición de Lugar. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1996.

Willis, David. “Post/Card/Match/Book/ Envois /Derrida.” Substance vol. XIII.-2

(1984): The University of Wisconsin Press.

Notes

[1] In Spanish, the word “historia” means both, “history” and “story.”

[2] Dittborn's painting might be said to belong to the sub-genre of Mail Art, which

since the sixties has been working sending pieces as letters for reasons of distance,

economics, politics, etc. But these productions “have usually been small, personal

and essentially inter-artist, whereas Dittborn explores the contradiction between

the private letter and the public painting.” (Brett 84)

[3] An iconic example of the risk of immobility, the following images are used by

Dittborn himself in the Airmail Paintings: the mummy of El Plomo hill and the body

of John Torrington, an English sailor who died in the failed expedition of Sir John

Franklin and remained frozen for 138 years.



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Valeria de los Ríos - Marks of Travel: Strategies in Eugenio Dittborn's Airmail Paintings