Liliana Porter and the Art of Simulation (review)

The current buzz around Latin American art has brought long overdue attention to these artists and their activities in the contemporary global art world. This is a good thing: it is only in recent years that Latin American artists have begun to be widely accepted as fully enfranchised citizens of the art world, not merely as exemplars of regional or national identities. Florencia Bazzano-Nelson's Liliana Porter and the Art of Simulation is a worthy entry to the reconfigured field of late twentieth century US/Latin American art history and criticism as it stretches to cast a wider net.

In this closely focused study of Argentine-born, New York resident Liliana Porter's art of the past 40 years, play's the thing. Bazzano-Nelson looks at multiple levels of play in Porter's work: play as in the toys, cartoons and other icons of popular culture Porter favours as subjects/objects in assemblage, drawing, graphics, photography and video, and play as in the play of these free-floating signifiers. She claims that Porter's art is dedicated to the 'playful but subversive dismantling of the limits that firmly separate everyday reality from the world of illusion and simulacra' (1).

The text is enriched by Bazzano-Nelson's personal acquaintance with the artist and the many interviews she conducted with Porter over the span of nearly twenty years. Liliana Porter and the Art of Simulation demonstrates a thorough familiarity with the trajectory of Porter's career, and in it Bazzano-Nelson maps out Porter's 'playing' with conceptual art, surrealism, postmodernism, art history and cultural studies. Porter's work spans the shift from modernism to postmodernism, and this is reflected in her choice of media as well as theme, moving from printmaking and paint to installation, photography and video. Leaving behind the play with 'serious' artists like René Magritte and Francisco Goya that she dedicated her early work to, she turned to toys and other small banal objects, reconfiguring them and forcing them to signify, playing with both their everydayness and the uncanny.

Liliana Porter and the Art of Simulation is structured around Porter's engagement with the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, the Belgian surrealist painter Magritte, and the French postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard. Magritte provides a point of departure and a tether for Porter's work of the 1970s and 1980s, as she explores the semiotics of this most semiotic of artists in prints and photographs; Bazzano-Nelson links her work of this era with the textual play of Borges, that most semiotic of writers. Like Borges, Porter was born in Buenos Aires; but unlike the great writer, she left Argentina at a young age, travelling first to Mexico City and finally settling in New York, where she has lived since the early 1960s. Her life and work exemplify the era of diaspora, mobility and globalism: urgent issues in contemporary life and art. While her career seems to move beyond a fixed, stable identity, in art history surveys she is categorized as an Argentine artist. Might it be productive to consider Porter's art as 'post-identity' art? This is one of a number of intriguing questions or approaches that remain to be addressed in relation to Porter.

Another aspect of Porter's story that needs to be more fully explored has to do with her sense of her own identity: after all, she lived through and made art in the era of political upheavals throughout Latin America, including the Cuban and Chilean revolutions, the dictatorship in Argentina and waves of repression in the region. Even if Porter made the existential choice to focus on personal, perceptual and conceptual concerns rather than explicitly political ones, she did not do so in a vacuum. Although Bazzano-Nelson mentions Porter's political activism, there is little visible evidence of social or political engagement either in Porter's work as presented here, or in Bazzano-Nelson's discussion of it.

In her installation, video, and...