Shoring up the Republic: Gonzalo Díaz’s Infrastructural Aesthetics

The museums keep the history of the Chilean Flag
dissolved anonymous concealed
the eye can apply its blindness by the book
unravelled
it is already dead history
the Chilean Flag rests in a glass case
(visits in office hours)
(cancel its value)⁰¹

—Elvira Hernández, La Bandera de Chile (The Chilean Flag)

Sometime in 1987, Elvira Hernández’s poem The Chilean Flag (1981) began circulating in the underground circuits of the Chilean cultural scene. While the end of the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet was nigh (it would arrive in 1990), censorship was still in operation. Finally published in 1991, at the beginning of Chile’s re-democratisation, Hernández’s poem offered ample grounds to reconsider the affective potential of national symbols, misused and abused during the military regime. The Chilean flag was bound up with the institutional network of the country, as much as it was bound to its citizens. Even in this short excerpt, the poem already conveys the disillusionment with symbols and institutions that the transition inherited. In 1997, it had been seven years since the end of the dictatorship and recent history still loomed heavily over society and politics. This was a period marked by disappointment with the legislative mechanisms of a democracy, which still relied to an extent on Pinochet’s 1980 Constitution. So when, in 1997, the Chilean National Museum of Fine Arts also inaugurated Gonzalo Díaz’s installation Unidos en la Gloria y en la Muerte  (United in Glory and in Death) (Fig.1), the public faced a work that did not offer many answers, but rather raised a number of questions. On what, if not language, were the national legislative and institutional infrastructures resting? Could this language be deconstructed? What was the museum’s relationship to Chile’s citizens? What does art have to do with power, and where does this relationship unfold? Who stands united in the historical present? Whose glory is at stake? As it happens, Hernández’s Chilean Flag kept blowing in the winds of the transition, signalling the urgency of targeted institutional critique. While the country was still battling the aftermath of the dictatorship, Díaz installation was a pertinent intervention into Chile’s historical past, reaching back to the early years of the Patria and the origins of the Chilean state.

Unidos en la Gloria y en la Muerte was a site-specific work – it cannot be reproduced anywhere but in the original space, and its embodied experience is lost to history. However, the work demands an intellectual and, firstly, an imaginative engagement – the installation’s afterlife, videos and photographs, inviting us to fill in the gaps. The work was introduced by a neon phrase (‘Unidos en la gloria y en la muerte’/’united in glory and in death) on the front façade of the museum, which was superimposed over the name of the institution (Fig.2). However, the core of the installation was in the Matta Hall – an underground space situated below the main museum hall. There, Díaz shored up the walls, literalising the physical foundations of the institution and buttressing the building (Fig.3). To complete the work, Díaz attached a neon text to the metal shoring – an excerpt from the 1850 presidential message to the Parliament, defending Chile’s new Civil Code, both written by the Venezuelan thinker Andrés Bello.

The material body of the installation is only seemingly humble, as its conceptual potential is inexhaustible. Addressing the nexus between institutions, power, legislation and the written word, the work interrogates state infrastructures and the discourse that sustains them. An infrastructural approach then, comes in handy. In this regard, anthropologist Brian Larkin’s formulation of ‘infrastructure’ offers a productive conceptual framework to read Díaz’s Unidos en la Gloria y en la Muerte. For Larkin, ‘infrastructures are built networks that facilitate the flow of goods, people, of ideas and allow for their exchange over space’.⁰²Not only are infrastructures ‘things’, but they are also ‘the relations between things’.⁰³There is always a  strong physical dimension to artworks dealing with infrastructures, as they often signify these systems either through building materials such as iron, pipes and concrete, or information technologies like wiring and satellites. This implied relationship to the world beyond the gallery is also at the core of Díaz’s work in the 1990s. His first experiment with the conceptual possibilities of joining shoring and neon was the work ¿Qué Hacer? – Chtó Dielat? (What is to be Done?) (1984), with which he moved away from painting; later on, Díaz created El Jardín del Artista (The Artist’s Garden) (1993) (Fig.4), where he placed neon text on the roof banister of the Juan Manuel Blanes museum in Montevideo, Uruguay. The emergent common threads of experimentation with the different significations of neon and shoring in site-specific interventions position Unidos en la Gloria y en la Muerte as a conceptual piece where the critical potential of these materials is at full force. Created towards the end of the decade, this is a liminal installation, produced at a liminal time. Rooted in Chilean sociopolitical history, its materials allude to a complex genealogy of Chilean institutionality. So first, a word on context.

With socio-economic reforms underway, following the neoliberal politics of the dictatorship and the implementation of a democratic model of government, the arts in Chile were affected by a reconfiguration of cultural policies. While memory and social repair remained collective concerns, in economic terms, Chile’s democratic transition is still widely considered one of the most ‘successful’ ones.⁰⁴Yet, at the time, scepticism towards the current political mechanisms was palpable. As the cultural critic Nelly Richard recalls, ‘during the years of the transition we learned to mistrust democratic cultural officialism’.⁰⁵In his essay on the Chilean art scene of the 1990s, the Chilean art historian Justo Pastor Mellado defines the one thing that must be understood by the non-Chilean reader as follows: ‘the transition to democracy was born out of “pacts of forgetting”, which began long before the transition’.⁰⁶This addresses the long-awaited justice for the crimes of the dictatorship – from which, Mellado discerns, emerged 1990s’ artists’ profound cynicism towards the political class behind the transition.⁰⁷Mellado’s ‘pacts’ recall what the scholar Alexander Wilde refers to as the ‘conspiracy of consensus’, which began with the elites but which was eventually internalised by the rest of society.⁰⁸This resulted in the social mistrust and ‘aversion to open conflict’ that tend to develop when the elites are privileged over ‘direct interaction with the citizenry’.⁰⁹Unidos en la Gloria y en la Muerte, then, raised a highly pertinent question: to what extent is it possible for artistic structures to inflect the shortfalls of political systems and their institutions?

To try to answer, we would need to return to the early decades of the twentieth century. In front of the main entrance of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago stands an imposing bronze sculpture depicting Daedalus holding the body of Icarus after his fall; its Pieta-like fashion is impossible to overlook. The author of the work is Rebeca Matte (1875–1929), a first-generation Chilean sculptor, and its title is Unidos en la Gloria y en la Muerte (United in Glory and in Death, c.1930) (Fig.5). By appropriating the title, Díaz also appropriated Matte’s work as part of his installation. The sculpture drew in the viewer, welcomed them, leading them from the open public space into the enclosed space of the museum. In a way, it is the only figurative element in Díaz’s installation – one he didn’t even make himself. From then on, Unidos en la Gloria y en la Muerte (1997) invited the visitor to pause and carefully consider what was being shown.

Matte was trained in French Neoclassicism, which stylistically links her sculpture to the museum. Designed by the French architect Emile Jéquier (1866-1949), the building was inspired by the Petit Palais in Paris, combining Neoclassical, Art Nouveau and Beaux Arts elements. Its architecture brings it close to a number of institutional buildings designed by French architects and finished during the same period – such as the Mapocho and Providencia train stations, and the Palace of the Courts of Justice.¹⁰This penchant for French artistic models was adopted in the 1850s as a replacement of colonial society and tastes, and the museum itself, as part of a new civic project that would culturally define the nation, was built in a wasteland. Unsurprisingly, its splendour contrasted sharply with the illiteracy, high mortality and poor health, which were the other face of early twentieth-century Chilean society.¹¹

On the façade above the main entrance is Guillermo Cordova’s frontispiece Alegoria de las Bellas Artes (Allegory of the Fine Arts), 1910, depicting a Pegasus as a symbol of inspiration, surrounded by various figures personifying the arts (Fig.6). Beneath it, Díaz placed the text ‘Unidos en la Gloria y en la Muerte’, in neon letters. The juxtaposition of an academicist sculptural relief, dating from the beginning of the twentieth century, with a neon text evoking modernity, advertising and the entertainment industries may at first seem improbable. Yet, this incongruity is not at all obvious. As neon does not have much visual effect during the day, Díaz’s text would not have made a strong impression in daylight (Fig.7). Come night-time, however, the neon light would have drawn attention like a beacon, signposting the museum as an institution symbolic of the nation.

Inaugurated on the Centenary celebration in 1910, marking a hundred years since the Chilean fight for independence began, the building of the museum was the epitome of civic pride.¹²Of course, this aligns with the dominant role of the museum throughout modernity – as a ‘catalyst for the articulation of tradition, heritage and canon’, concerned with establishing cultural legitimacy through investing its collections with symbolic meaning, through which a community can culturally and historically validate and define itself.¹³Placing a neon text on the front façade thus functioned as an interventionist gesture that exposed the very fabric of the institution. However, a perhaps overlooked connection emerges: the first neon lights in modern form were shown at the Paris Motor Show in 1910, the same year as the museum’s inauguration. Modernity, as it turns out, came in different shapes and sizes.

So, more than referencing Matte’s work, Díaz’s neon text also alluded to the very foundation of the art institution in Chile. The museum itself was targeted as a link in the infrastructural chain that enabled the production of art. In 1997, the Chilean art scene was undergoing complex processes of institutionalisation, and a growing interest in participating in global artistic discourses. During the dictatorship, the arts lacked institutional and official economic backing; in fact, for most of the twentieth century, artists were making a living largely through academic work. So when the military coup in 1973 led to the university shut down, many artists lost their primary source of earnings.¹⁴Artists resorted to alternative ways of circumventing the censorship of the regime, often working with cheap materials and in public spaces.¹⁵This was art that had to be ‘indigestible to the system’, often unreadable, self-censored. Writing, particularly criticism in catalogues distributed hand-to-hand, was an instrumental support for such artworks, as it complemented the meanings generated by art, and created a cultural sphere that was illegible to the regime.¹⁶

During the transition, the infrastructurally critical artwork could re-enter the museum space. In this context, text often remained intertwined with the artwork – however, it no longer needed to be opaque. In Unidos en la Gloria y en la Muerte, text lies at the work’s foundation, referring to the country’s legislative origins. The return of democracy naturally implied the return of the art institutions – primarily, universities, museums and galleries – which was followed by an academicisation of art, and a ‘growing lack of political topics’.¹⁷Díaz, one of Chile’s most accomplished artists, was ‘entrenched’ in the institution as an influential university professor, so he well understood art’s relationship with the state. Richard has defined his work as ‘severe’, ‘dense’ and ‘heavy’, both literally and metaphorically.¹⁸Díaz engaged in language games with institutional power, instead of succumbing to the ‘softening of the senses with which the art market gratifies itself’.¹⁹In Unidos en la Gloria y en la Muerte, the artist referenced the relation between state and art by dismantling it. This was done strategically, in order to draw attention to the institutions on which aesthetic production depends, and to the relationships between the material conditions of art making and the built environment in the outside world.²⁰

The minimal but effective introduction to the installation – the text on the façade – already hints at one of the main questions of the post-dictatorship period, as defined by the art historian Carolina Lara: in what ways can art recover its capacity to cause rupture? How can it remain ‘critical, emancipatory and generative of new realities and experience of language’?²¹ Díaz’s engagement with the institution begins precisely on the level of text. As Adriana Valdés has noted, the protagonist of Unidos en la Gloria y en la Muerte  is language itself.²²This already raises the issue of infrastructural critique, as Díaz brings forth the relation between the artwork and the framework that facilitates it. Matte’s work ultimately functions as ‘an allegory of ambition’ and a masculine ideal – Dedalus was a genius architect, competitive and ambitious inventor, a father.²³The statue was placed in front of the museum during the authoritarian regime of Carlos Ibáñez del Campo (1927–31), an army officer turned president. Notably, it is a copy of the original that Matte donated to Brazil on its own Centenary in 1923 – posthumously provided by the artist’s husband.²⁴By borrowing Matte’s title, Díaz borrowed the title of a copy, raising the issue of artistic value and highlighting the complex entanglement of the monument with its historical context. As a public artwork, Matte’s sculpture occupies the same space as the viewer, to the point where a regular passer-by would eventually stop noticing it. Díaz drew attention to Matte’s work obliquely, by reminding us that it is there. Similarly, his neon text on the façade asked the viewer to begin considering the link between institution, state, nation and cultural value before even crossing the museum’s threshold.

Upon entering the Matta Hall where the rest of the work was, the viewer was confronted with what is often considered Díaz’s most beautiful installation, due to the monumental harmony of the space.²⁵Along the museum walls, were three rows of metal shoring tubes normally used for providing temporary support to newly built constructions until the concrete sets. Díaz’s floor plan for the installation as well as the precise measurements of each neon letter (Fig.8) attest to the meticulousness with which the artist approached the relationship between his work and its spatial setting. The shoring signifies transition – it alludes to a state of fragility and stasis, used after the foundations have been laid but before the building can stand on its own. It was an apt metaphor for the current state of the country – a lot had been accomplished but the work of rebuilding was not complete. The use of infrastructural materials here functions as a cross-section of the functional chain of architecture-institution-nation, as it offers a look into ‘the state of things’.²⁶

On the second row of shoring, Díaz installed neon capital letters, forming a text that runs across the whole perimeter of the hall. The text is an excerpt from the message that President Manuel Montt (1851–61) addressed to the Parliament to get approval for the Civil Code project, written by Andrés Bello. The full text used by Díaz reads as follows:

More trust has been placed in the judgement of parents and intuitive feelings than in the law. When these are misguided or lacking, the voice of the law is powerless, its prescriptions easy to circumvent, and the sphere to which they can extend is extremely narrow. What could laws on the subject of wills and donations achieve against habitual dissipation, against the luxury of vain ostentation that endangers the future of families, against the hazards of gambling that secretly devours entire fortunes? The project has confined itself to curbing only the enormous excesses of indiscreet generosity – excesses which, if not truly the most to be feared in regard to the just expectations of legitimate heirs, are at least the only ones that civil law can properly address, without exceeding its rational limits, without intruding upon the sanctuary of domestic affections, without imposing inquisitorial measures that would be difficult to enforce and, in the end, ineffective.

Contrasting social vices with the obligations of civil authority, Montt’s words reflect the moderate and rational scope of the new Civil Code. Dating from the 1850s, it was fundamental for Chilean and Latin American legislation (influencing directly Ecuador, Colombia and Nicaragua, among others), Bello himself being a Venezuelan humanist, poet and ‘legislative genius’.²⁷Crucially, Bello’s text replaced the ‘bombastic moralising style of the old Spanish legislation’ and its conception of law as a ‘declaration of sovereign will’.²⁸It drew on Napoleonic, Spanish colonial and Roman law, as well as on Bello’s own legal thought. We see then, how the balanced tone of Montt’s address reflects that transition, while the ‘transitional’ effect of Díaz’s installation becomes double-layered.

Bello however, is not only the foundational architect of Chile’s legal system, but also, coincidentally, Rebeca Matte’s great-great-grandfather.²⁹The installation’s fragmentation of a paternal genealogy runs from Daedalus as the archetypal architect, to Bello to President Montt – who, as it happens, was the father of Pedro Montt – the president who inaugurated the museum.³⁰The intricate relationships between the parties involved is striking, and one wonders whether Díaz was fully aware of them. Perhaps critic Roberto Merino was right to describe Unidos en la Gloria y en la Muerte as a collective work – between Díaz, Matte, Bello and Jéquier (the architect of the museum).³¹The infrastructure of the work, however, begs us to recall the people who put it together – the firm that created the neon letters, the architect who helped Díaz and the workers who installed the shoring. The work exposes how contemporary art often necessitates a variety of social interactions between people, organisations and things.³²

The nexus of Unidos en la Gloria y en la Muerte lies in these relationships, as we mentally trace a history of institutional and legislative consolidation. These are infrastructural models, evoked explicitly through the use of shoring, as Díaz quite literally exposed the fragile foundations of the Republic and its institutions. Infrastructures exercise the rationalisation of society, and as such, they are at the intersection of politics, affect and civic relations.³³However, institutions often only appear monolithic.³⁴The period of the transition revealed the cracks in that appearance. Díaz evidenced the building blocks of the early Chilean state – law and civic architecture. The question was, how does the power of these structures, continue to influence the current political situation and people’s perception of their individual role in it?

Díaz identified in the installation a ‘historical urgency’, which ‘necessarily implies involvement in the civic obligation of a certain political production’.³⁵He signified this obligation by rendering the text of the presidential message luminous, slightly difficult to read and broken up by the shoring, asking the viewer to slow down and consider every word. Valdés considered his use of neon text, with its connotations of show business, spectacle and contemporaneity, a ‘plebeian gesture’ on the façade of the museum, signalling a shift in conceptions of the beautiful; philosopher Pablo Oyarzún read the presidential message reproduced in neon as a ‘parody’ born from the clash of art and spectacle.³⁶For Díaz, however, the purpose of an installation ‘justifies all types of language – cultured or popular, artistic or scientific, technological or artisanal – all materials, […] all models, be they one’s own or someone else’s’.³⁷The relational model that emerges enabled the viewer to participate in an affective exchange with the artwork, generating new potential meanings. The political agency of Díaz’s practice resides in its active reframing of history and of the museum as a place where culture is constructed rather than consumed. Yet, paradoxically, the lifespan of the work itself remained dependent on the functioning of the very institutional systems it exposed.³⁸

Díaz’s interrogation of power functions within ‘the expanded understanding of infrastructure’, the work pushes for a shift from ‘seeing people and things as situated in a context to seeing them as taking part of this context’.³⁹Conceiving the work as an installation was instrumental to emphasising the personal responsibility and agency of each member of society. To Gonzalo Díaz, the installation was a strategy, ‘a point of view’, a ‘meaning-making machine’.⁴⁰And, as a conceptual proposition, it embodies what Argentinian critic Mari Carmen Ramírez defines as the essence of Conceptualism – ‘a way of thinking’ about art in relation to society.⁴¹According to Valdés, in 1990s Chile the notion of ‘installation art’ was still indeterminate and while the general public still had little information about it, artists in the country had been making installations since the 1970s.⁴²In particular, the Museum of Fine Arts had been the site of numerous interventions, by artists such as Gordon Matta-Clark, Cecilia Vicuña and Lea Lublin during the directorial term of Nemesio Antúnez in the early 1970s.⁴³In a way, Unidos en la Gloria y en la Muerte responded to this earlier phase of Chilean installation art – a phase that carried international resonance. As Valdés notes, while in 1997 ‘a global perspective’ was still lacking in Chile, Unidos en la Gloria y en la Muerte asserted a global sensibility combined with local elements.⁴⁴

The relationship between global and local in particular was a hot topic in Latin American scholarship during the 1990s. The decade saw a boom of exhibitions dedicated to art from Latin America, and Chile was growingly concerned with establishing a global presence on the contemporary art scene. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York co-organised the landmark show ‘Latin American Artists of the Twentieth Century’ (1993) with the Seville Expo (1992) where Díaz was prominently featured alongside Juan Downey and Eugenio Dittborn. The Havana and São Paulo biennials were gaining further global prominence. And at the end of the century, Luis Camnitzer co-curated ‘Global Conceptualisms: Points of Origin’ (1999) at the Queens Museum, which had a large Latin American section, and due to its ambitious scale is still one of the more controversial formulations of conceptual practices. As part of the catalogue for the 1993 MoMA exhibition, Ramírez published her seminal essay ‘Blueprint Circuits: Conceptual Art and Politics in Latin America’, which proposed the influential idea of ‘ideological conceptualism’ to describe the political engagement of conceptual practices from the region. This text was the departure point for theorising such practices as culturally distinct, and Ramírez’s ideas have consequently been expanded on, reframed and contested.⁴⁵This was intertwined with contemporary debates on the centre-periphery relationship between Latin America and the hegemonic centres of artistic production – a definition of locality in relation to the global was a paramount concern in art theory at the time.⁴⁶Against this charged theoretical background, concerning the politics of the local in a period of rapid globalisation, Díaz’s distinctly Chilean ‘meaning-making machine’ was a sign of the times. His work interrogated the structures of the Chilean state, yet it did so in a way that links it to international artistic critiques of institutionality. Doris Salcedo, Tania Bruguera, Adrian Piper, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Subodh Gupta, and William Kentridge likewise made of use of infrastructural materials, such as concrete, steel, refuse or kitchenware, and could be inscribed within earlier discussions around infrastructural aesthetics.

In the 1990s, Chile lacked the functional structures to have a global art presence. The economic elite remained relatively indifferent to contemporary art, museums operated in ‘extreme poverty’, and only one long-standing gallery was commercial.⁴⁷Suffice it to say, the infrastructures of art circulation and financing were lacking.⁴⁸Stemming from years of academic debates concerning the indispensability of local context in Latin American art, Díaz’s work sits at the crux of the discussion. While Unidos en la Gloria y en la Muerte was deeply Chilean in its national symbolism, it also ‘thought’ about art in a material language that anyone could read, if given the context. While it may not have had the same historical resonance for a non-Chilean viewer, its minimalist language and elementary materials transformed it into a form of infrastructural inquiry that resonated internationally in the 1990s. If a work of art is an ‘infrastructure for gathering, for collective deliberation’, then Unidos en la Gloria y en la Muerte, retrieved a fragmented history, asking viewers to reconstruct it in the uncertainty of the present.

In 2025, it seems that some kind of institutional infrastructure is functioning well. While Unidos en la Gloria y en la Muerte is deconstructed for safekeeping and is removed from the only space where it can function, it remains well documented. Infrastructural critique demands that we continue activating such works through writing, display and discussion. In a way, Unidos en la Gloria y en la Muerte is ahistorical – it could be reassembled today, and it would illuminate the relations between the state-legislative apparatus and the institution in a similarly pertinent way. ‘The Chilean Flag’, wrote Elvira Hernández, ‘doesn’t belong to just one / it is given to anyone / who knows how to take it’.⁴⁹By endowing Unidos en la Gloria y en la Muerte with a solid infrastructural backbone and resounding legislative overtone, Gonzalo Díaz made sure that his ‘machine’ left meaning there for the taking – for those who are willing to make it.