08 May 2010

On Documentation and Perversion. Topsy at Sala SAM Gallery in Santiago, Chile

Topsy is an exhibition curated by Jorge Cabieses Valdes for Sala SAM Gallery with the participation of chilean and international artists.

Topsy was a domesticated female elephant in Forepaugh Circus at Coney Island. The owners considered Topsy a hazard, so they decided to kill her. Thomas Edison, was at the time on a dispute with Nikola Tesla about the dangers of alternating current (AC) versus the advantages of direct current (DC). For the benefits of an experiment, Topsy was electrocuted with AC and the procedure was filmed as a proof of the dangers of such electricity.

The show is a reflection on the implications of the concept of snuff in contemporary art practice.

Snuff films are recordings of real murders (without the aid of special effects or any other trick). Their purpose is to record these acts using audiovisual support and then distribute them commercially for entertainment.

Topsy's approach does not necessarily bring down the explicitness of the concept of snuff to a sanguinary level (traditional pornography also exploits the explicit, but not the bloody or criminal). The vanguard of snuff and the main discourse of this project is the radicalization of perversion in the documentary.

The idea of the documentary as documentation conditions all the pieces of the exhibition. Each artist has used this representational mechanism to demonstrate under different perspectives, the thesis of perversion of the documentary. This perversion has been masked, since the very beginning of photography and then cinema, with the cynical illusion of the representation of reality. The documentary does not exist. Registration or representation are always fictional.

Similarly, this exhibition uses snuff as an aesthetic abstraction to relate the morbid with the representational, the commercial with the immoral, the visible with the black market, mimesis with counterfeiting and art with pornography.