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Juan Downey: Radiant Nature is a two-part exhibition on the early works of Chilean-born artist Juan Downey as part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative exploring the vast subject of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles.

From the late 1960s until the mid-1970s, Juan Downey (b. Chile, 1940; d. New York, 1993) pioneered interactive, participatory artworks that helped shape his better-known multichannel video installations such as Video Trans Americas (1973–76) and The Thinking Eye (1974–89). The works that make up Downey’s Electronic Sculptures (1967–71), Happenings and Performances (1968­–75), and Life Cycle Installations (1970­–73) take radically different forms, but they share similar strategies; conceived as vehicles for interactivity, they are intended to be played with or participated in rather than passively observed.

Downey was especially interested in the potential of technology to facilitate viewer participation, transform social relations, and forge new modes of communication between organic elements or environments and machines or machinic systems. Borrowing ideas from second-order cybernetics, he conceived the organic and technological aspects of his work as relational, operating in tandem and alterable by feedback. Viewer-participants interfacing with Electronic Sculptures, for example, may trigger an array of outcomes—sounds, colored lights, projections—depending on their actions. Similarly, Downey imagined participants in his Happenings and Performances as part of an unpredictable, amorphous system in which performers, video cameras, closed-circuit televisions, laser beams, and viewer-participants are working together. Life Cycle Installations create an interdependence between organic and machinic elements—plants, soil, and insects and electronic sensors, cameras, and television monitors—demonstrating Downey’s belief in the potential of cybernetics to solve large-scale environmental issues by rebalancing relationships between humans, technologies, and ecologies.

Juan Downey: Radiant Nature is part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, a far-reaching and ambitious exploration of Latin America and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles, taking place from September 2017 through January 2018 at more than 70 cultural institutions across Southern California.

Major support for Juan Downey: Radiant Nature provided through grants from the Getty Foundation.


 

Additional support is generously provided by Dirección de Asuntos Culturales, DIRAC, Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Embassy of Chile; Pasadena Art Alliance; Estrellita B. Brodsky; and Consulate of Chile in Los Angeles.
 

In-kind support is provided by Human Resources Los Angeles.

This exhibition is organized by ºÚÁÏÕýÄÜÁ¿ Art Galleries and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE).

About the Artist

Juan Downey (1940-1993) was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1940. He received a BA in architecture from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in 1961. Downy traveled in Europe from that year until 1965, first to Madrid and Barcelona to study painting, then to Paris, where he focused on printmaking. In Paris, he met Surrealist painter Matta and poet Pablo Neruda, fellow Chileans who influenced his commitment to a revolutionary art, and Kinetic artists such Julio Le Parc, who inspired his career-long exploration of the relationship between art and technology. Downey was one of the first artists to experiment with the new technology and the utopian potential of feedback, which many artists would eventually exploit in order to mine the possibilities of broadcast media, traditionally dominated by a unidirectional flow of information. In 1969 Downey moved permanently to New York, where his interest in communication technologies and information systems led him to exhibit with like-minded artists at the Howard Wise Gallery. 

Downey has had solo exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C. (1968 and 1969); Corcoran Art Gallery, Washington, D.C. (1969); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1976); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1985); International Center of Photography, New York (1990); and IVAM Centre Julio González, València (1997–98). In 2011, the MIT List Visual Art Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, organized the first U.S. retrospective of his work, which traveled to Arizona State University Museum, Tempe, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York. He has participated in group exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1990), and Museum of Modern Art, New York (1990, 1995, 1997, and 2010). Downey has also participated in Documenta, Kassel, Germany (1977); the Whitney Biennial, New York (1975, 1977, 1980, 1981, 1985, 1987, and 1991); and the Venice Biennale (1980 and 2001). In the last of these he was awarded an Honorable Mention for Excellence in Art, Science, and Technology for his installation About Cages. He has received two Guggenheim Fellowships, two from the Rockefeller Foundation, and nine from the National Endowment for the Arts. He was also an associate professor at Pratt Institute from 1970 to 1993. 
 

Related Events 

Symposium on Cybernetics
Saturday, November 18, 10 a.m.–3 p.m.
Benson Auditorium, ºÚÁÏÕýÄÜÁ¿

Exhibition Publication Launch
Sunday, December 3, 1–4 p.m.
Doing Things Together: Presentation by Grant Wahlquist 2–3 p.m.
LACE
6522 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles

More Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA exhibitions at the Claremont Colleges:

Pomona College
Pomona College Museum of Art presents Prometheus 2017: Four Artists from Mexico Revisit Orozco from August 29 to December 16, 2017.

Events on Saturday, September 9:
Opening reception: 5-7 p.m.
Gallery Talk with artist Rita Ponce de León and scholar and catalog essayist Daniel Garza Usabiaga: 4-5 p.m.
FMI:

Scripps College
Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery presents Revolution and Ritual: The Photographs of Sara Castrejón, Graciela Iturbide and Tatiana Parcero from August 26, 2017 to January 7, 2018.

Events on Saturday, September 9:
Opening reception: 7-9 p.m.
Panel Discussion with the Writers: 1-2 p.m.
Tea: 2-3 p.m.
Panel Discussion with the Artists: 3-4 p.m.

 

Image Captions

Installation view of Juan Downey: Radiant Nature at ºÚÁÏÕýÄÜÁ¿ Art Galleries, September 9–December 15, 2017. Photograph courtesy of Robert Wedemeyer.