Case study #7 Banal Biennale, you want Chile with that to spice it up?





 

Curated by Nelly Richards, one half of "Poetics of Dissent", representing Chile at the 2015 Venice Biennale, was a video work by Lotty Rosenfeld. No, No Fue Feliz (No, I Wasn't Happy) is a montage of 20C greatest protest hits adapted with millennial "Malestar" for and by the contemporary art world, its industries, venues, and subsidiaries. The Artist's signature is a single white line crossing the middle of the road broken white line. She juxtaposes her individual + and collective work in Chile as a founding member of CADA 1979-1984, NO + with: the Spanish Civil War, the Holocaust, Cuba, Chile 1973-1989, Berlin Wall, Gulf War, Arab Spring, Snowden, the 15 minutes of fame Occupy Movement, and from Warhol's same hometown, the New York Stock Exchange (and other mind control apparatus of neo-liberalism) before returning to Chile in 2014 with a student being arrested in Alameda by police (obvious torture) and a Mapuche demonstration in Santiago's streets in 2013. She doesn't include the assassination of the Luchsinger-Mackay couple, burnt alive in their family home in the name of the same cause the same year. How could she have known that this double murder would lead to the current terrorism in the same name in a soon-to-be Plurinational Republic of Chile? She jumps Nicaragua's first-time democracy of 1990 and Ortega's Dictatorship 2007-Present, and the Twin Towers, preferring the suppression of Snowden. Finally, Rosenfeld's selective-collective memory brings her + "sign" back to Chile's student cause with the learners homage to her art in NO + Lucros (no more profit) during the Chilean Winter 2011-2013 which was led by Chile's current President before he never graduated with his Law degree, and lived with one foot in the street and the other in parliament for his whole working life. NO, I Wasn't Happy is a visual-moral equivalence of Neo-Liberal economics with Fascism and the montage is only outdone by her 1979 intervention of + innocent victim/survivor by association, as a repeat performance. of Crossing the middle of a road in Cairo in 1998, her sign becomes internationally relevant in the middle of an exotic desert in the middle of nowhere. If No, I Wasn't Happy were submitted as a high school media project it would have failed for a lack of originality. In the global spectacle of the Banal Biennale, this self-re-appropriation ranks as Art. The Rank Catalogue of this middle of the road - read what you will - collective will of the Left is really quite a sad way to finish what looked like a brilliant career under the Dictatorship of General Pinochet 1973-1989.

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