“Small Talk” Eludes Legibility and Invites Infinite Encounters
Iván Navarro: Small Talk at Miriam Gallery. Installation view. Courtesy of the artist and Miriam Gallery.
I was once asked by a man I met at a protest with Bose headphones around his neck and a T-shirt with Karl Marx’s grainy, screen-printed face peeling off the front why I would bother going to graduate school for studio art if I had already gained a political consciousness (his words, trust me) in university. Soaking in Iván Navarro’s playful aggregations of media and materials at Miriam Gallery revived my reluctant faith in the convergence of ethics and aesthetics, which had evaporated in a cloud of Axe body spray and Parliament smoke at that moment.
Navarro’s strength lies in his ability to work in multiple conceptual and material directions at once without sacrificing aesthetics to politics, or allowing the political to be subsumed into a mere aesthetic device. Raised in Santiago, Chile, under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, he was nonetheless exposed to a breadth of artistic, musical, and political movements, as well as made painfully aware of their soft power. Navarro grew up listening to Chilean folk singers such as Quilapayün, Inti-Illimani, Violeta Parra, and Victor Jara, who continued the tradition of protest music, which had a large following in Chile among those who opposed the regime. One of Navarro’s earliest memories is the electrical blackouts in his neighborhood when police raided neighbors’ homes. His installations often utilize electricity, weaponized as a means of control, censorship, and execution under the Pinochet regime, as both medium and subject matter.
The late Okwui Enwezor, Nigerian curator and critic, identifies the crux of contemporary political art as an inversion of the maxim “all politics is local” to “all local politics is now global.” Navarro’s work epitomizes this sentiment. His cross-disciplinary, often collaborative practice spanning neon installation and collaborative sound-based performance speaks to a broad public—as Enwezor contends, the tactical public is always global—but remains steadfastly rooted in the personal and political history from which he emerges, and the specificities of the Chilean art world.
Small Talk presents Navarro’s audio-based publishing project, Hueso Records, as well as two edition-based works. To kick off the exhibition, the gallery held a conversation between Navarro, artist Courtney Smith, and Small Talk curator Dan Cameron, followed by a poetry reading by Cristalina Parra. The conversation centered on Cameron’s independent exhibition space La Capilla Azul in a rural corner of Chiloé Island in the south of Chile, which hosted Vid Vida Vidajena, a project that Konantü—a fluid collective conceived of by Smith in partnership with Navarro—produced with artist-musician Enrique Millán, which culminated in a record.
Past the bookstore that occupies the front half of the small, artist-run space not far from the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge, a gridlike arrangement of books, records featuring forgotten Pinochet-era recordings, ephemera, and two neon installations—titled Diccionario and La Ilustración Artística—lie on a sheet of plywood hovering a few inches from the floor. Documentation of a collectively enacted sound poem, Vid Vida Vidajena, plays on a loop on a screen mounted on the back wall with a pair of headphones hung alongside it. To the right, a record player in a black case is propped open to reveal a series of images depicting disembodied hands grinding chess pieces in a manual coffee grinder.
Iván Navarro: Small Talk at Miriam Gallery. Installation view. Courtesy of the artist and Miriam Gallery.
Books and records bearing both Navarro’s name and others’ line the left wall of the space. A label to the right of the shelves delineates the mission of Hueso Records: to find, restore, and share music that has never been released before; to work with artists who consider their audio practice an extension of main body of work, but do not consider themselves musicians; and to provide a platform for professional musicians. Visitors are permitted to select records via a record player by the front desk of the gallery, although this is not evident without instruction. The multimodal presentation of works is anything but “user friendly,” but perhaps that is the point—is it fair to consider reliance on human interaction a sign of failure within a curatorial context? Has the desire for easily consumable art displaced the practice of “slow looking”?
Iván Navarro: Small Talk at Miriam Gallery. Installation view. Courtesy of the artist and Miriam Gallery.
The exhibition eschews the commodity fetishism that fuels the circulation of contemporary art. However, in the void where hypervisibility and profit usually preside, nothing jumps forward to take their place. The exhibition hovers indeterminately between conceptual and documentary, past and indexical present, individual and collective. While the work of both the artist and the gallery is deeply collaborative, Small Talk keeps the public at a distance, squarely situated in the position of viewer or listener, but never participant. Although the use of headphones is perhaps necessary given the number of sound-based works packed into the small space, the transformation undergone to render collaborative works legible only to the individual is jarring.
While Navarro’s practice as a whole is marked by a painstaking awareness of the body’s entanglement with the material environment, Small Talk is strikingly ambivalent toward physical presence in the space. The neon-and-mirror installations for which Navarro is known are typically marked by a consciousness of their form and their status as an artistic intervention, disrupting architectural and psychological power plays. Armory Fence, for instance—an 82-foot neon installation at the 2011 Armory Show evoking the prototypical suburban white picket fence—barred entry into Paul Kasmin Gallery’s exhibition space, interrogating the intersection of surveillance, class, and property.
And yet the presentation of Diccionario, a book with a set of mirrors embedded in its pages superimposed with the words “open” and “closed,” and La Ilustración Artística, following the same format but with the word “end,” disallows corporeal engagement. The height and scale of the plywood plinth on which they rest precludes intimacy with the objects that it presents. The plinth itself places the work in dialogue with conceptual works destined for distribution—for example, Félix González-Torres’s “stacks” or Bruce Nauman’s Body Pressure—but the inclusion of the two mirror works which seem to belong to the realm of sculpture discourages handling of the objects. The intermixing of interactive and noninteractive elements without clear indicators leaves visitors in perpetual limbo.
Iván Navarro: Small Talk at Miriam Gallery. Installation view. Courtesy of the artist and Miriam Gallery.
In its plain refusal of market-oriented gallery conventions, Small Talk asks visitors to envision an art world that operates on a higher register than endless cycles of voyeurism and consumption. The exhibition raises questions regarding what that higher register may be: If the driving forces of the gallery apparatus are spectacle and profit, what is the intent of collaborative artist-run spaces? What is the role of visitors in such spaces? Are they participants? Collaborators? Or merely viewers or audience members? How can curators and art workers do justice to process-oriented, multisensorial artistic practices? Toward what audience(s) is that which is deemed “political art” oriented?
Traversing the fractured network of information, sound, video, image, and text that erratically unfolds across Miriam Gallery, I am left with more questions than answers—although perhaps that is the mark of an artistic and curatorial project that has successfully eluded the death of aesthetics for the sake of ethics.
Iván Navarro: Small Talk at Miriam Gallery. Installation view. Courtesy of the artist and Miriam Gallery.
Small Talk is on view at Miriam Gallery from November 14, 2024, until February 15, 2025.
