For nearly 30 years, they sat in storage in the dampness of Lima – a city where, as the artist who made them observed, it’s too humid for paint to dry. Prism-shaped objects, painted with garish imagery copied from advertising posters. Drawings on gridded paper, drafted with an architect’s precision, their margins noting the hours and minutes of the sessions in which they were made. Conceptual diagrams, with tree-like branches, words dangling off them. Dates, schedules, stamps, calendars, numbers and punch-cards: markers of time – and its displacement.
Until recently, it seemed likely that Teresa Burga’s principal legacy would consist not of art but of informatics and information systems. For three decades, she worked as an official in Lima’s customs office, where she programmed hierarchies for tagging information and legal taxonomies within an early computer database – devising the first such information resource in Peru. (The system, called sIgLa, or Customs’ Legal Management Information systems, was used until recently.) Then, in 2006, when Burga was 70 years old, two young curators knocked at her door wanting to speak to her about her role in developing pop and conceptual art in late 1960s Peru. ‘I simply didn’t believe you,’ she told one of them later.
Over the past decade, Burga – whose retrospective, ‘aleatory structures’, is currently touring Europe – has been recognized for a practice spanning drawing, painting, mechanically programmed works and conceptual structures for the visual display of information. At the core of her work is an interest in biopolitics and the cybernetic body. She has pictured with versatility the ways in which, through disembodied systems, we come into contact with means of regulation, standardization and profiling. Information, for Burga, is inherently political.
Burga was born in 1935 in the small port city of Iquitos: the epicentre of Peru’s rubber boom, which ushered in the European colonization of the western reaches of the amazon. As a child, she moved with her mother and father, a naval officer, to Lima. After training as an architect, Burga came into contact with the fractious cultural atmosphere of 1960s South America, where various restive artistic movements began to bristle against conservativism, colonialism and patriarchy. The influence of figures and movements such as artur Barrio and tropicália in Brazil, as well as Argentina’s Rosario Group, eventually spread to other parts of the continent. Uniting these artists was their critique of consumer society and the imperialist legacies of the US and Europe – forms of corporate colonization that persist to this day.
In 1966, six young Lima-based artists, including Burga, calling themselves the Grupo Arte Nuevo (New Art Group), began producing works spanning pop, happenings and ephemeral environments. A photograph from 1966 shows a series of their garishly coloured, painted sculptures leaning provocatively against the city museum’s Spanish baroque architecture. Newspaper reports attest to the rebelliousness they incited in Lima’s art scene, which, up to that point, had been in thrall to European academic painting.
Arte Nuevo were championed by the influential critic Juan Acha, who took note of the group’s ‘cultural activism’, as he called it. Acha, who was a Marxist, wrote in 1971 about the radicality of contemporary art in a rapidly changing Latin America: ‘Many argue that underdevelopment – a socio-economic characteristic of the Third World – is incompatible with the artistic avant-garde. It is, however, quite the contrary: underdevelopment requires the presence of the avant-garde.’ He would expand later, in 1975, that what was needed in Latin-American art was a ‘cultural and artistic self-decolonization’ and an evaluation of ‘our mestizaje’ (mixed heritage). Art, as Acha wrote in 1984, was a ‘matter of the sensorium of our Third World, so colonized by the dictates of the official forces of Western Culture’. something else was needed beyond the mere copying of Euro-American artistic imports.
Burga’s first works were paintings: figurative, brightly coloured works on sculptural panels, many of them derived from advertising or marketing imagery. Her series ‘Prismas’ (Prisms, 1968) contains tessellated, garish imagery and words printed on blocks of different geometrical shapes. Never interested in the expressivity of the author’s hand, Burga began outsourcing the painting of her works. The ‘human figure was losing its primary role’, she wrote in a 2006 text for Arte Nuevo’s 40th anniversary. The lynchpin of Burga’s project to date remains the deflection of subjective expression, in order to capture the ways in which the human body is suppressed, tessellated, translated or deferred more generally. In 1968, the left-leaning military officer general Juan Velasco overthrew the Peruvian president, Fernando Belaúnde Terry. Velasco’s regime lasted until 1980; it instituted vast governmental reforms and nationalized many industrial sectors, which caused political instability in the mid-1970s. The artistic and cultural sectors were centralized, too, and began supporting art that spoke directly to the country’s national identity. Acha, Arte Nuevo’s original supporter, was jailed briefly (on a technical mistake) and eventually went into self-imposed exile in Mexico. Arte Nuevo was no more.
The year Velasco came into power, Burga was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study at the Art Institute of Chicago. While there, she came under the influence of conceptual experiments in cybernetics, machines and actions, producing work on the basis of scripts and algorithm-like rules. She was also energized by an argumentative pedagogical atmosphere and the fact that she could speak relatively freely as a woman, in contrast to the deference to authority required in Catholic, patriarchal Peru. Burga’s Work That Disappears When the Spectator Tries to Approach It (1970) is a wall piece comprising layers of light bulbs, 100 in total, arranged in a square formation around a black box. As you approach, the bulbs gradually switch off, so that, when you reach the work, you are left in a dark, seemingly empty room.
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