Persistent Observation (What I Learned Watching Francisco Masó’s Who Kills Ai Weiwei)
Browsing around the central gallery, the first element that stands out is the repetition of a similar motif, although the more precise term here would be pattern: horizontal stripes of varying width, in two, three, or four colors. All the paintings are different. The colors in the stripes, with the exception of white, differ. The simplest paintings usually combine two wide stripes—I see one painting that repeats bands of the same width in yellow and navy blue, another in black and light gray. There are also paintings that combine wider stripes—lime green and yellow, blue and red—with very thin white lines. Many paintings, however, reproduce more complex patterns: in one, what looks like a purple background is crossed by a pattern of thin white and pink stripes, these in turn separated by thinner lines of the same purple color. In another, a black and white pattern of four thin bands, each of different width, is followed by a thick olive-green stripe and then by a thinner gray line. The same pattern is repeated twice.
In a recent conversation, Cuban-born and Miami-based artist Francisco Masó, the author of these paintings—although he describes them as photographs, and I will come back to this later—told me about his creative and investigative process and also about his influences. He shared with me memories of his school days in Cuba and of his formation with artist Tania Bruguera—the last part of the show, where Masó surveys his viewers and asks them to answer Who Kills Ai Weiwei, evokes that more participatory mode of interaction that Bruguera also establishes with her audiences. He also told me about the artist and master of color, Josef Albers, and about Albers’ influential 1963 book, Interaction of Color. The reference to Albers’ work and color theory struck me as significant, because most of his commentators emphasize that Albers liked to describe color as ‘passive,’ ‘deceptive’ and ‘unstable;’ this is why he insisted that to understand how color behaves and to learn to use it effectively, it is necessary to observe it and study it in context.
Aesthetic Register of Covert Forces series in the exhibition Who Kills Ai Weiwei by Francisco Masó at Dimensions Variable (DV), Miami.
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Regarding both series, Aesthetic Register of Covert Forces (2017 – ongoing) and Time Specific Marked Paintings (2022), I would like to highlight what I perceive as an act of persistent observation. It may be that, at first glance, both series seem to just simply be repeating horizontal stripes of varied widths and colors. It may be that, at first glance, both series seem to evoke, both formally and conceptually, the geometric abstractions of Albers or the abstract expressionism of Mark Rothko (a category that Rothko rejected, so I mention it here with some apprehension). I insist that this only happens at first sight, because what the artist asks of me, the spectator, is that I stop to observe each of these paintings attentively, that I persist on this act.
Looking closely at these paintings, something becomes apparent, something that, at first glance, might go unnoticed: some paintings are accompanied by a small photograph, precariously attached to the frame at the bottom. These photos, records found on an array of websites, depict different scenes and situations: one focuses on a group of adult cis men, all standing side by side, smiling, looking at the camera; another focuses on two adult cis men who are greeting each other with a strong handshake, while a third cis man observes them; another focuses on a group of adult cis men walking while restraining one of them, the one who is handcuffed; another focuses on a group of people, most likely demonstrators, because it seems as if they are being repressed, but the circumstance is not evident. It seems as if they are being pushed or surrounded by forces or agents who remain mostly out of the frame. Some of the faces seem to express pain gestures, I see their mouths open, I think perhaps they are screaming. One of the bodies that appears in focus in the foreground has its back to the camera, so I can’t tell if he’s pushing against or trying to help to stand up some of the people in front of him.
What do all these photos have in common? What role do they play in this art show? The answer, again, emerges from persistent observation. In two photos I notice that almost everyone is wearing white t-shirts, although some are wearing blue t-shirts. But the key lies somewhere else in the frame. Here, in the photo of the protesters being oppressed, barely distinguishable in the background, almost out of frame, I find it in the upper left corner. There is a body standing there, of which I can only distinguish the extremities and part of the torso. This body wears a striped top. The t-shirt’s design—wide olive-green stripes combined with thinner white, navy, and gray stripes—is reproduced in the painting that accompanies the photo. The same goes for the rest of the photos: the shirts worn by the two cis men who greet each other with a handshake? Also striped shirts. The painting centers the white and blue stripes framed in black of the shirt worn by one of the photographed subjects.
What the paintings repeat, then, are textile patterns: the colorful stripes I see are the enlarged, expanded versions of the striped T-shirts worn by these individuals. But who are these subjects and why are their shirts so significant? This is where the strength and specificity of these geometric series reside, which seem to repeat the same thing, in a different way.
Time Specific Marked Paintings series in the exhibition Who Kills Ai Weiwei by Francisco Masó at Dimensions Variable (DV), Miami.
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In our conversation, the artist suggested that painting was, for him, a mechanism for understanding. Searching for information about protests against the Cuban government, in different dissenting venues (of course, this information scarcely circulates on the island), the artist found, and continues to find, photos in which different individuals dressed in striped shirts appear. Of course, the photos alone are not enough to understand who these subjects are, and what role they are playing in these situations. The artist began to create a database, his own record of these images of repression. Then, persistent observation gave him the key. The individuals in the striped T-shirts who appeared in the photos were undercover agents, members of the intelligence services in Cuba. (Masó told me that, in Cuba, where there is almost no textile industry, clothing is imported from countries like China, Ecuador and Mexico, and distributed by government institutions to their political officers as a work incentive).
Aesthetic Register of Covert Forces and Time Specific Marked Paintings explore and elucidate the forms, sometimes overt, sometimes deceitful, adopted by the intelligence and repressive apparatus in/of post-revolutionary Cuba, and they do so by appealing to aesthetics. I like to think of these series as variants, or more literal instances, of what Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman call investigative aesthetics. I say more literal instances because, Masó operates from and within the field of art—he uses art’s forms, adopts art’s tools and mobilizes art’s spaces and discourses, to elaborate a sensorial experience that also wants to function as evidence, as documentary record.
I return then to the gesture of persistent observation: in the same way that Albers observes and studies colors, placing them in certain contexts to study their variations and appreciations, Masó examines apparently simple photos—records of masculine camaraderie, of political protest, of different gatherings and meetings—and perceives something significant there. A certain repetition, a pattern that stands out, even if it is barely perceptible in the visible field. This repetitive element, this pattern, gives meaning and orientation to the database and re-signifies the entire archive. In Who Kills Ai Weiwei, the artist displays a tiny part of this archive, or counter-archive, that he has been building over the past few years.
Time Specific Marked Paintings series in the exhibition Who Kills Ai Weiwei by Francisco Masó at Dimensions Variable (DV), Miami.
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Masó talks about, and understands, these paintings as photographs. To me, who has written elsewhere about documentary practices of photography and about the expanding photographic field, the notion that these acrylic paintings are, can be, photos, does make total sense. I would even go further: these paintings are not only photographs, they are detail shots that, when assembled in series, reveal or show us even more, pointing to what a photographic record alone could never reveal. Because these textile patterns that the artist’s camera-eye amplifies are records of a different pattern, a pattern of oppressive behaviors—sometimes hidden or not quite evident, although we can also see in the selection openly vigilant, and repressive behaviors. Persistent observation allows the artist (and, consequently, those attending the exhibition) to appreciate and interpret the varying behavior of these secretive striped bodies in their specific contexts. In sum, Aesthetic Register of Covert Forces and Time Specific Marked Paintings insist on this: on the island of Cuba, a striped t-shirt is not just a striped t-shirt.
Masó also described Aesthetic Register of Covert Forces, an ongoing series, as a book that seeks to record the unofficial history of repression in Cuba—a history that, to be sure, few have dared to document and make visible. I find it interesting to imagine and propose this series as a book, and I wonder what other audiences could access this Aesthetic Register of Covert Forces if it existed, materially in book format (I’m thinking, for example, of audiences that do not usually visit art galleries). Regardless of whether this idea materializes or not, the allusion to the book and the description of the paintings as photographs led me to think of Masó’s investigative and creative process as a work of counterintelligence, and of the database that he has been developing over the years, as a counter-archive. An attentive and persistent archivist, Masó has spent years studying and exploring dissident and resistance sites, collecting records such as those I have been describing here. From these images, this archivist and documentary maker creates new photographs, records that operate at a different pace—not the fast pace that characterizes memes and blog posts shared on dissidence sites, news outlets, or social media. Here, the pace is determined by the time it takes to research, observe, recognize patterns, and then craft each piece. The latency of these photographs, eloquent examples of what I would dare to call documentary painting, is consistent with the work of memory, I mean the time it takes to create a memory in and of the present—in this case, the memory of political dissidence inside Cuba and abroad.
Aesthetic Register of Covert Forces series in the exhibition Who Kills Ai Weiwei by Francisco Masó at Dimensions Variable (DV), Miami.
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If this series of geometric abstractions forms an unofficial record of repression in Cuba, if each one of them can be perceived as a photo, it is because photography also works like color. I return here to Albers’s ideas. Like color, photography is also deceptive and unstable and its meanings inevitably contingent. As with color, what the viewer sees or does not see in a photo—the patent content, the visual information—will also be determined by the frames and contexts in which that photo appears, as well as by her own memories, experiences, and knowledges. Both Aesthetic Register of Covert Forces (2017 – ongoing) and Time Specific Marked Paintings (2022) operate, in this sense, as a school for the gaze, as a form of learning: the artist learns to observe and to read, patiently and persistently, countless records and then shares with his viewers this prolonged way of looking. Francisco Masó transforms these records into new photographs that reveal to us, through the repetition of the same pattern, what had remained hidden for years, even when it was already patent on those same photographic surfaces.
Ángeles Donoso Macaya
Ángeles Donoso Macaya is an immigrant educator, researcher and activist from Santiago, Chile, based in New York City. She is Professor of Latin American Cultures and Visual Studies in the Ph.D. Program in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures at The CUNY Graduate Center and Professor of Spanish at the Borough of Manhattan Community College/CUNY. Her research centers on Latin American photography theory and history, counter-archival production, human rights activism, documentary film, feminisms in the Southern Cone, and public humanities scholarship.
She is the author of La insubordinación de la fotografía (Metales Pesados 2021) / The Insubordination of Photography: Documentary Practices under Chile’s Dictatorship (2020), which received the Best Book Award in Latin American Visual Culture at LASA 2021 and Best Book Award in Recent History and Memory at LASA 2022, and co-editor of Latina/os of the East Coast: A Critical Reader (2015). Her most recent articles are forthcoming or have appeared in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, Cold War Camera (2023) and Photography and its Publics (2020), among others.
Since 2020, she has been Faculty Lead of Archives in Common: Migrant Practices/ Knowledges/Memory, part of the Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research at The Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Archives in Common is a public humanities project developed in collaboration with La Morada, an undocumented family-owned and operated Oaxacan restaurant in the South Bronx. Through the Public Seminar, Ángeles has organized conversations with activists, artists, and researchers on food justice, food sovereignty and community garden stewardship, mutual aid organizing and accountability, toxic clouds and state repression, immigration justice and immigration rights activism, and antiracist work.
As member of the activist research collective somoslacélula, she creates video-essays that respond to pressing matters, such as “Matar el ojo” (2020), formulated in collaboration with writer Lina Meruane. In 2020, Ángeles collaborated with Forensic Architecture, a multidisciplinary research group based at Goldsmiths, University of London, in the video-investigation Tear Gas in Plaza de la Dignidad.
Ángeles is also a 2021-2022 Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellow.
Photo credit © Paz Errázuriz
