- Artist
- Juan Downey 1940–1993
- Medium
- Video, 14 monitors, black and white and colour, and sound (mono)
- Dimensions
- Duration: 28min, 9sec
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Presented by Marilys Downey 2010, accessioned 2019
- Reference
- T15226
Summary
Moving is a single-channel black and white video, lasting twenty seven minutes, shown on a monitor. It is an early work from Downey’s Trans Americas series (1973–6) and is closely related to the installation Video Trans Americas 1976 (Tate L02998). Downey originally intended to show Moving on a monitor on a mobile platform within the installation; this however was never realised.
Moving is shot as a diaristic ‘road video’, documenting a personal journey through North and South America, much in the spirit of American artists and writers such as Jack Kerouac (1922–1969), the writer of the novel On the Road (1951), and the photographer Robert Frank (born 1924). Travelling from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the tip of Chile, Downey first drove across the United States to California with the artist and curator Willoughby Sharp (1936–2008) and the video artist Frank Gillette (born 1941), and then continued by train through the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes. In the voiceover for the video, Downey describes not only a physical, literal journey, but also a continual state of being. He revels in the unexpected details of the everyday; each moment has its life and beauty. From the American landscape of airports, motels and freeways to the imposing terrain of the Andes, Moving distils a sense of cultural context, time and place. Part of the soundtrack for the video is taken from The Book of Hopi, one of the creation myths of the Hopi, the Native American people of northeastern Arizona.
Downey’s framing of the work in the realm of anthropology and ethnography is important, since he was the first artist in Latin America to use the then very new and avant-garde technology and language of video to examine the notion of the ‘other’. Moreover, his work demonstrates an acute awareness of issues surrounding identity, a subject prevalent in Latin American art, and one that would be more fully explored and discussed in the 1980s.
Downey worked across a wide range of media, including drawing, installation and painting as well as video. In the 1960s, while living in Paris, he became interested in kinetic art and technology, producing a series of sculptures and installations that engaged the participation of the spectator through the use of electronic machines. At the time, video was a very new technology and Downey started experimenting with it early on. Having moved back to Latin America in 1973, he continued to work with video, using it to engage with the discourses around the diaspora and discussions surrounding identity.
Julieta González and Tanya Barson
May 2010
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