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Issue 14. Painting / portrait

Marks of Travel: Strategies in Eugenio Dittborns

Airmail Paintings
Author: Valeria de los Ros
Published: July 2006
Abstract (E): The following essay is divided into three main parts. The titles of
each part are History/Stories, Strategies/Techniques and Airmail/Cartography.
The objective of this analysis is to explain different strategies used by the
Chilean artist Eugenio Dittborn in his Airmail Paintings project. The Airmail
Paintings are a series of paintings done with mixed media in a special format
that allows the artist to send them through the mail service. The first part of
this paper is a narration of the context in which the Airmail Paintings appear.
The second one, is a catalogue of the techniques used by the artist and a clue
to understanding them and their implications. The third part is an explanation
of the airmail system and a proposal to read the Airmail Paintings as maps.
Finally, I analyze the artists project from the unstable point of view of travel,
which is one of the pre-conditions of this artistic work.
Abstract (F): Cet article est divis en trios parties, intitules respectivement:
Histoire/Rcits, Stratgies/Techniques et Poste arienne/Cartographie. Son
objectif est de rendre compte des stratgies que suit lartiste chilien Eugenio
Dittborn dans son projet des peintures ariennes (Airmail Paintings project).
Ces peintures excutes dans une technique mixte ont un format particulier qui
leur permet dtre envoyes par la poste. On analyse dabord la gense
historique de ces peintures. Ensuite on dcrit et interprte les diverses
techniques utilises et on rattache les peintures au systme postal pour
prsenter les tableaux comme des cartes. Enfin, on analyse le projet du point
de vue du voyage, qui est une des conditions pralables du travail de Dittborn.
keywords: Dittborn, Airmail Painting, postal art, Latin American art,
cartography, museum.

History/Stories

[1]

Eugenio Dittborn was born in Santiago de Chile in 1948. He studied at the Escuela
de Bellas Artes (School of Fine Arts) of the University of Chile, in Santiago, from
1962 to 1965. Then he studied graphic arts and painting in Paris, Madrid and West
Berlin (1965-1970). During the seventies and early eighties, Dittborn worked
simultaneously in a number of directions. He was highly involved in graphics and
video art, in a kind of phobia of painting that he seemed to suffer. Between 1977
and 1984, he experimented with different materials such as paint, cotton, photo
silkscreen, burnt motor oil and feathers, and with supports such as chipboard,
Perspex, cardboard and jute sacking (usually used in Chile to transport potatoes).
In 1981 for example, the artist poured 77 gallons of burnt motor oil over the
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In 1981 for example, the artist poured 77 gallons of burnt motor oil over the
Tarapac Desert, in the north of Chile. This gesture can be seen as foundational, a
kind of farewell to oil painting in the most traditional senseas the work with
brushes, oil paint and canvasand to the space of the Museum with a capital
M,the institution of high art. The Chilean art critic Justo Pastor Mellado reads
in this display an amplification of Pollock's dripping and also a contradiction of
Dittborn's aversion to painting (motor oil as oil painting). Despite Dittborn's
decision not to work with oil painting anymore, his whole oeuvre makes constant
references to painting (as an institution). In this sense, his production can be seen
as self-reflexive, and as an avant-garde fashioned critique to the institution of art.

The Gloom In the Valley (The Painting Lesson I)

1989, airmail painting n 74, paint, stitching and photosilkscreen on 2 sections of
non woven fabric, 210 x 280 cm.
Itinerary: Santiago de Chile 1989, Sydney 1989, Melbourne 1990, Canberra 1990,
Adelaide 1990, Buenos Aires 1991, London 1993, Southampton 1993, Rotterdam
1993-94, Santiago de Chile 1998.

His first Airmail Painting was created unofficially in 1982. It was sent to the art
critic (and now cultural critic) Nelly Richard, who was presenting the work of
Chilean photographers in the XII Paris Biennial. The work consisted of a piece of
wrapping paper with spots of different colored paint. The compositionnow
disappearedtraveled from Santiago de Chile to Paris, as a kind of return to the
point of originEurope as the place where Western art begun, with the most
basic resources for learning painting (paper with painted spots), the homework
made by an unknown Chilean artist, as Mellado affirms. This reference to the point
of origin is a link with the idea of culture and coloniality. Latin American thinking
and culture have been obliged, from colonial days, to reproduce those of Europe, to
develop as a periphery of that other universe which, by dint of consecutive
conquests, became one of the themes of its history. The allusion to homework
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conquests, became one of the themes of its history. The allusion to homework
has to do with the notion of art education as a colonial model imposed upon Latin
American artists: inside the colonial context, artists had to learn the techniques
produced in Europe, as a kind of homework.
The first official Airmail Painting was sent in 1984 to Melbourne, to the resident
Chilean artist Juan Dvila. The first exhibitions of these works were held
simultaneously in Cali (Colombia) and Sydney (Australia) this same year. The
scene of writing of the Airmail Paintings is the context of the military regime of
Augusto Pinochet (1973-1989). The system established by this regime was
characterized by the elimination of politics as a social practice. There was never an
official culture, but rather a reduction of cultural expressions, a phenomenon
known as apagn cultural (cultural blackout ). There was not a systematic
exercise of censorship and the criterion applied by the government was not clear.
The consequence for artworks was the development of a strong self-censorship.
This is explained by the fact that, before the fear of being banned, the artist
becomes more acutely aware of the uses of language and he/she develops ways to
safeguard his or her right to expression, as Richard affirms.
The Airmail Paintings can be read both as an attempt to resist censorship and as a
peripheral effort to raise international circuits of art. The Airmail Paintings appear
as a strategy to escape a society where artistic production had diminished. In this
sense, it could be said that these artworks practiced a kind of self-exile, in a
moment in which exile (and self-exile) was imposed on a large number of
individuals. The idea of exile as an allegory of these works is related to the notion
of displacement, and in this sense one can make a connection with travel (although
exile is undoubtedly not a desired form of travel). One of the most important
features of this workthe essence of the Airmail Paintingsis to be sent. Transit
offers the only possibility for its preservation. The theorist Adriana Valds affirms:
Las pinturas aeropostales se deben a una necesidad de jugar con la
problemtica del viaje precario, del trabajo visual producido en un
lugar determinado, pero que tiene que ubicarse en un mbito
distinto, internacional, donde llega como alguien peregrino, es decir,
como alguien extrao (76). [The Airmail Paintings respond to the
problematic of precarious travel, as a work that is produced in a
determined space, but that has to be presented in a different one,
an international one, where it arrives as a pilgrim, that is, as
someone strange.]
The artist designed the Airmail Paintings to be sent through the airmail to their
place of exhibition in stamped, franked and buffeted envelopes. The package
containing the works also carried a fresh envelope for the work's onward or return
journey. So, the Airmail Paintings are connected to the idea of boomerang: their
travel is a roundtrip.

Strategies/Techniques
In the series of the Airmail Paintings entitled Historia del rostro (History of the
Human Face), we can see a combination of two kinds of reproduced photographs:
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Human Face), we can see a combination of two kinds of reproduced photographs:

thieves and aborigines. Also, it is possible to find a wide variety of drawings of
faces: faces drawn by Dittborn's seven years old daughter Margarita, faces drawn
by mental patients, police line-ups, faces cut out from art manuals, and so on.
At first glance, one notes that Dittborn employed three basic procedures:
photography, drawing and painting. At a second view, one has to admit that the
photography employed is not really photography, but rather a reproduction of a
photograph already mediated by its publication in a newspaper or a magazine, cut
out from its original context, and enlarged. In the support it is possible to
distinguish a few spots of paint, but painting is not used in a traditional way as in a
landscape or a portrait. There are only spots of pigment. The spot of paint can be
read as the repressed side of technology, as the unconscious side of the
reproductions practiced by the artist, as the spontaneous gesture that cannot be
controlled or regulated.
Dittborn uses basting and other non-permanent procedures as junctions. So it is
possible to think that there is an attempt to show the marks of production of the
work, to reveal the way in which it was done. At this moment, one realizes that the
Airmail Paintings project is a reflection on different technologies of production and
reproduction of the work of art, and the existing and possible mediations between
them. The diversified levels of production and reproduction are connected to the
idea of the coexistence of different stages of technology, which make a reference
to Latin American modernity. Nstor Garca Canclini has defined it as a multitemporal heterogeneity, a mixture of different stages of modernization,
fragmentary signs, disjointed languages, transcultural quotes, etc.
In this sense, it is meaningful to talk about the nature of the images used by
Dittborn in his paintings. First of all, one can say that either in the case of those of
the indigenous or those of delinquents, the photographic portrait works as an
identification device to create subjects under control. These images are predestined
to be classified and placedas objectsinto the files (archives) of science
(anthropology) or of the State (police).
Since its ingress into the American space (around 1850), photography was used to
document Latin American reality. As Ronald Kay suggests, the shot of the camera
enacted the colonizing gesture of taking possession. The Indians were the
privileged objects of the ethnographic view, and were at the same time, created by
it for the western imaginary. But there was a gap between this evident sign of
modernizationphotographyand the subject constituted by the pose for these
representatives of modernity. Richard argues that the first violence carried out by
colonialism was the symbolic power controlling the relation ourselves-others in the
violence of representation. To represent implies the control of the gaze as viewpoint, which manipulates the setting for showing or recognizing. In Nosotros/the
Others she explains:
The inhabitants of the ends of the earth were subjected to the visual
extremes of the photographic process: portraits mass-produced by a
mechanical reproduction which made them collectors' items (objects)
for the European eye before they (as subjects) had achieved control
over the representation of their own image. (50)
Photographs as State's identification tools work in a similar way to ethnographic
photos: they capture and attach an image, a shape. The ID photography
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photos: they capture and attach an image, a shape. The ID photography

immobilizes the photographed object, reducing it to an image that does not
identify, but rather homogenizes. It fixes the image as a static part of a system,
which in this case is the State apparatus. The face emerges as a social and public
construction, which configures a subject under control. Many of the delinquents
represented in the images used by Dittborn are peasants that came to the city
looking for better opportunities. In the pictures they appear dressed as gentleman,
in a very modern manner (the style is the one used during the thirties, forties and
fifties in Chile) and at the bottom of the page it is possible to read their names and
their alias. Valds claims:
El nombre propio como el ms arbitrario y ms convencional de los
signos, puesto all y tachado slo para marcar su carcter sustituible,
y para dotar a los rostros presentes de un exceso de
identificaciones que da por resultado el anonimato. Como en la
multiplicacin mecnica de las caras, la multiplicacin de los nombres
en letra set condena definitivamente a la no identidad. (25-26) [The
proper name as the most arbitrary and conventional of all signs, put
there and crossed out only to point out its substitutive character, to
give to the actual faces an excess of identifications, whose final
result is the anonymous condition. Just like the mechanical
multiplication of the faces, the multiplication of the type set names,
condemn them definitively to no-identification.]
Secondly, in the drawings of faces it is possible to read the issue of control now in
relation to the institutional practice of drawing and its techniques. The illustrations
of art manuals represent the correct way to depict something (academic models),
while the pictures made by Margarita and the mental patients exemplify a drawing
free of technical conventions. But this freedom is only apparent, because although
there is a freedom to improvise technically, theyMargarita and the mentally
afflictedwere asked to do the drawings by Dittborn himself: he, the artist, is the
one applying the control over these uncommon draftsmen. The police line-ups are
an interesting combination of these ideas, as drawings made following the rules of
the oral description of the witnesses, used by the State apparatus to implement
control.

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The 23rd History of The Human Face (Aljo Violet)

1999, airmail painting n 128, tincture, non woven fabric, stitching and
photosilkscreen on 2 sections of duck fabric, 210 x 280 cm
Itinerary: Santiago de Chile 1999, Basel 2000

What is interesting here is how these subjects under control, and without proper
identification (they are perfectly anonymous for us) become the protagonists of
their own photographs, now outside the police files or the ethnographic records.
When the Airmail Paintings are exhibited, the gaze of these printed eyes connects
with the one of the spectator. As Roberto Merino puts it, this configures a
suspended situation (13), because the temporalities of both gazes differ. Dittborn
affirms:
An Airmail Painting is the space in which these times meet one
another, in this sense, the hybridization in my work is a temporal
hybridization. Signs that belong to different and distant temporal
strata finally meet there, and in meeting, make one another
reciprocally visible. (14)
This idea of the encounter of gazes in a way subverts the notion of the
ethnographic exhibition, where native people were put on display to provide
opportunities for aesthetic contemplation, scientific analysis and entertainment. The
depicted objects become subjects at the momentdisplaced in timein which their
look is received. So, at last, they become visible. The self-conscious movement of
the artist makes these images on exhibition be the ones who are looking at the
spectators.
It is important to notice the subject matter of mediation. The images used by
Dittborn have been cut from old magazines such as the detective reviews Detective
and Vea, and from the sport magazines Estadio and Gol y Gol, found in second
hand bookstores in Santiago. The use of this kind of imagesof encountered
imagesis the product of the practice of collecting. Collecting, following the
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imagesis the product of the practice of collecting. Collecting, following the

anthropologist James Clifford, is related to identity. Children's collections, for
example, are an exercise in how to make the world one's own. Quoting Susan
Stewart, Clifford wrote:
She shows how collections, most notably museumscreate the
illusion of adequate representation of a world by first cutting objects
out of specific contexts (whether cultural, historical, or
intersubjective) and making them stand for abstract wholes(220).
Clifford assures that both the collector and the savage ethnographer could claim
to be the last to rescue the real thing. Authenticityhe wrote is produced by
removing objects and customs from their current historical situationa presentbecoming-future (228). So authenticity arises as an institutional effect. In the case
of Dittborn's work, where these photographs were rescued, more than a claim to
authenticity one could read a way to question precisely this kind of asseveration,
where authenticity and identity are presented precisely as the non-authentic and as
constructed elements. In his exercise, Dittborn recollects images and organizes
them articulating his particular idea of identity, which is not authenticity, but rather
as in every collectiona specific kind of construction. The identification photos
those of murderers and thievesused in the Airmail Paintings are expressive in
relation to the issue of social control and the detective or anthropological
investigation. The subjects reproduced by Dittborn are marginal on the social map,
because they are supposed to be in jail, or they are rather exotic figures, destined
to be inside a museum.

Abelardo
(Juan Vrez collection) 2003-2004, airmail painting n 159, tincture, polygal,
sateen, stitching and photosilkscreen 2 sections of duck fabric, 210 x 280 cm
Itinerario: Santiago de Chile 2004, Miami 2004, Santiago de Chile 2005

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The way in which these images are ordered alludes to the idea of palimpsest, or
rather to the notion of sediment, a visual image of how memory works. Collection
itself is associated with memory: Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the
collector's passion borders the chaos of memories (Benjamin 60). A collection is a
disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can
appear as order: An excessive, sometimes even rapacious need to have is
transformed into rule-governed, meaningful desire. Thus the self that must possess
but cannot have it all learns to select, order, classify in hierarchies (Clifford 218).
In this rescue of the forgotten images, Dittborn makes the gesture of taking out
rebel signs of the official catalogues. So he recuperates subaltern positions (of
class, gender and race) that represented the civil majority under military control.
Dittborn deconstruct metaphorically the political disappearance, which in Richard
terms is first of all a matter of taking out of circulation. While the Chilean State
tried to put out of circulation some determined subjects to condemn them to
oblivion, Dittborn's Airmail Paintings put back into circulation images of subjects
condemned to forgetfulness. The artist became a kind of guardian of memory, the
one which was suppressed by the official apparatus. In Margin and Institutions
Richard assures:
By transferring the photos from one referential field to another,
Dittborn makes the sources of these found images interconnected
and recombines their links with history: he disassembles and
reassembles the faulty archives until the effect of them becomes
legible. He reinterprets the national memory through photographic
omissions in popular portraits and everyday scenes until traumatic
repression is lifted (41).
The very use of photographs in Dittborn's work is associated with memory. Richard
affirms that in the context of the dictatorship, photography became a privileged
technique to present images as proof or evidence of reality. The photographic
image worked as a substitution of the scene, and in this sense, all photographic
symbolic interventions operated as rectification of reality itself. The photographic
images used by Dittborn in his paintings are in general images of faces: women
murderers of the thirties, thieves, aborigines of Patagonia, museum's mummies,
etc.
Memory works by actualizing (making present) signsimagesthat remit to a
forgotten past in the context of a highly repressive present. The past is explored
not from the point of view of history as the capital narrative (monuments, famous
lives, and legendary dates), but rather from a minor perspective (residues, traces
of re-produced mass media images). As Benjamin noticed, the particular collector
(not the institutional collector or the museum) in his relationship to objects does
not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value, but rather their usefulness. While
rescuing images of magazines no longer distributed (old magazines), Dittborn
worked against fashion in an economic context where attempts were being made
to impose a neo-liberal system. Instead of using the new, Dittborn uses the old,
the already used, the second-hand thing, the quote.

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Air Mail/Cartography
If we accept that the Airmail Paintings' function as letters to be sent, then we have
to ask ourselves about the letters' condition of existence. The support of these
works was first wrapping papera datum that speaks to the economy of this
productionand then non-woven fabric, a white, lightweight and synthetic product,
a modern hybrid somewhere between paper and textile. This gives us a clue to
interpret these artworks as something in between writing and painting. The election
of materials has to do with the need for an easily moldable matter that could be
folded and put inside a mailer. The envelope allows the journey of the Airmail
Paintings through the mail service, as letters.
In the Airmail Paintings we can find a paradox between public and private spheres.
The painting as letter is thought to be private (the secrecy of the letter), but as a
painting it has to be exposed in public. The mediation established by the mailer is
a significant fact. The envelope is the limit, the frontier between public and private
spaces. It is a physical sign of this division, as the body is always something that is
in between the individual and the collective. The envelope is also a body in the
sense that it contains something inside it. As a container, the envelope works as a
metaphor of the notion of home that is a constant in the imaginary of the Airmail
Paintings. The exposure of the envelope is also a simile for the disclosure of
something that was thought to be confidential: the opening of the letter is a sort of
violation of privacy and by this gesture the spectators are transformed into
voyeurs.
At this point, one could pose the following questions: Why does Dittborn use an
envelope? Why does he not send the paintings as postcards, which means as
pictures without an envelope? Why fold the illustrations? The fold is the mark of
production and the mark of travel par excellance. It is the guarantee of the secrecy
of the letter. But, if there is any secret, what is it? Perhaps, it is the possibility for
the paintings to give up traveling, to remain in one determined place, in other
words, to become sedentary. In the specific case of Dittborn's painting, this idea
makes a reference to the possibility of being acquired by a collector or by a
museum (most likely in the metropolis).
We can ask ourselves if there is a true addressee for the paintings. Maybe there
is not such a thing. Perhaps the sender is also a false one. Jacques Derrida wrote
that the intrinsic structure of the letter comprises, always, the possibility that it
won't arrive at its destination. It is not that the letter wills never arrive at its
destination, but it is possible that it won't reach its intended destination. The
sender alone cannot assure the emission of the letter:
... Given that chance and that threat, that the notion of destination,
the certainty of arrival, cannot constitute the conception of the letter
unless it be accompanied by a system of control (a metaphysics of
presence, for instance) which assures delivery to the proper address.
Otherwise destination could only de defined by the event of arrival
itself, and not with any certainty by the event of dispatch (Willis,
22).
The letter is then an event that is actualized in the moment in which it is received.
An apparatus of control assures the run: in this case, the international mails
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An apparatus of control assures the run: in this case, the international mails
system. Although it has strikes, is delayed, negligent and full of hazards, it can be
also expeditious, efficient andas Dittborn indicateshumorous: it always makes
the automatic joke of carrying the Airmail Paintings to their destination and then
the superior joke of returning them to the sender (Merino 10).
Dittborn recognizes that the meaning of the Airmail Paintings depends on the
circulation of the works through the international airmail network (Cubitt 20).
There are many figures inside the paintings themselves that allude to travel, for
instance, the raft and the snail. The travel of the Airmail Paintings is one without
an end, because their essence is to be constantly traveling. When they are
presented in exhibitions, they are just in transit. This is precisely the subject of
these works. Dittborn explains:
The Airmail Paintings are not conceived for only one place that acts
as their support. They are conceived to be doubly supported: in the
first instance by the international airmail network through which they
circulate (the airplanes, custom checks and postmen serve as their
support producing their circulation). The Airmail Paintings are also
supported by the receiver or destination: the walls of the exhibition
space to which the works have been sent. With regard to the
hypothesis that Airmail Paintings are conceived for only one place, I
want to say that the place would beparadoxically speakingthe
traffic, the circulation, or, definitively, the circularity. (Cubitt 25)
It is precisely the condition of painting-inside-an-envelope that defines this project.
The airmail strategy is a material option and artistic cunning to disguise a painting
as a letter, to infallibly reach places that are far away from the starting point, to
break through the isolation, separation and international confinement (Cubitt 20).
These works operate under the idea of the Trojan horse: they come as letters and
then occupy a substantial amount of the space of the cultural metropolis. The
Airmail Paintings are paintings disguised as letters and therefore, they can infiltrate
into international circuits of art. Dittborn remarks:
I want to add that the Airmail Paintings, so small in their envelopes,
deceive the agents of the metropolis. They say: Is it a letter? Yes,
that's what it is. It's a bit big, but go ahead, no problem (Merino
14).
Yes, and then, when the Airmail Paintings come back, the agents of the metropolis
say Aaggh, it's too late (Merino 16).
In this way, the paintings convert the metropolis into a place of transit, since from
there the works will be sent to another place of transit. The metropolis acquires a
status equivalent to the one of the place of origin, so the metropolis is no longer
the place of arrival, the supreme summit of the artist's career (Merino 14). The
very system of the Airmail Paintings calls into question the notion of the museum
as the institution of art: they arrive to the museum as letters and they do not stay
there, because their visits are ephemeral. This strategy reveals the artist's
shrewdness. He can put his works into the metropolis' museums thanks to an
inexpensive and easy envelope that appears as an irony compared to the
complexity of the museum's procedures. The art critic Guy Brett explains:
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The travel of an expensive and famous work of art or artifact is like

a secret service operation. It must be accompanied by a fully
qualified curator-courier who must not let it out of their sight for a
moment, even if this means missing sleep. Its journey is
accompanied by great tension: that in its rigidity it may break, or in
its monetary value it might be stolen. It cannot be entrusted to a
system like the airmail, which, in the case of Dittborn's paintings,
works today almost as inevitably as the sea washing a message
across the ocean in a bottle. (73-74)
Brett argues that the Airmail Paintings aspires to be a new genre, [2] and that it's
disturbing and challenging effect occurs because it is not yet constituted as an
artistic genre. Its legitimization is given by the cultural institution which in the
process removes it from the sphere of life to the museum and robs it of efficacy
(usually by re-interpreting it in terms of older genres) (73).

December 1992
On a street in Santiago, Chile, 5 airmail paintings in envelopes, 3 months before
setting out for the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. They are: Liquid
Ashes, To Travel and 3 Histories of the Human Face (number 6, 11 and 13) which
arrived from Kassel, Rome, Boston, Seville and Antwerp between May and
November 1992.

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In terms of the Airmail Paintings as a new genre, I will argue that besides the
paintings as letters, one could read the paintings as maps. The Airmail Paintings
are always exhibited with their trajectory traced in a map. At the same time, the
folds inside the paintings form a kind of grid, in which the images are inscribed.
The folds give the basic guide for the engraving of images into the work. Maps, like
Dittborn's works, are generally folded and in order to look at them, one has to un
fold them. The marks generated by the process of folding and unfolding create a
kind of parallel grid in which the depiction of the territory is inscribed.
The notion of picture as map is opposed to the idea of picture as window, which
was proposed by Alberti during the Renaissance. The aim of map painters was to
capture on a flat surface a great range of knowledge and information about the
world. In this sense, mapping is related to the idea of collection defined by Clifford,
as the way to make the world one's own, or in this case, to make the space one's
own. In her essay about Dutch art, Svetlana Alpers establishes a relationship
between mapping and describing. Maps give us the measure of a place and the
relationship between places, that is, quantifiable data. Maps were, since their
origin, a combination of art and science: the map allowed one to see something
that was otherwise invisible, and then she adds: Like lenses, maps were referred
to as glasses to bring objects before the eye (133). Following this idea, it is
possible to conceive of maps as a means of visualization, a technique that
permitted the extension of the gaze into territories that were too far to be seen
with only the help of the naked eye.
It is interesting to note that maps are one of the most usual cultural metaphors in
our conception of the world. The history of cartography is also the history of
rationalization, of how to articulate representation and signification in a visual
image. The models applied by mapmakers reflect particular structures of
knowledge. The illustrations of early maps, for example, were adapted to the
popular taste at the time in which they were depicted. Usually, eyewitnesses gave
the information for the design of those maps, and this data was never confirmed.
As a result, there was always a mixture of fact and fiction. Here it is possible to
see clearly the real distance established between territory and map. In other
words, it is possible to understand that the map is not the actual territory, but
rather a symbolic and ideologically constructed product.
Bonaventura de Souza Santos claims that each historical period or cultural tradition
selects a fixed point which functions as the center of its current maps, a position
from which all other spaces are distributed in an organized manner. So there is an
interesting bridge between the idea of mapping and the structure established by
the colonial system in America. The visualization of this new, recently discovered
space through maps, was one of the ways of appropriating the territory and
controlling it. In Woodcutters and Cannibals, Susi Colin re-affirms the well-known
idea that the work of the New World 's cartographers served political and at the
same time economic purposes. The colonial system established a division between
the colonial power as civilized centers from which technology was distributed, and
colonies as savage places, from which gold and raw materials were taken. Then,
after the independence of the countries of the New World and several attempts to
modernize Latin America, this model was replaced with the discourse of cultural
dependency, where the colonial power occupied the role of the center
(metropolitan power) and the ex-colonies took the place of the periphery. But this
model also underwent many transformations. Under the discursive dominance of
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model also underwent many transformations. Under the discursive dominance of

postcoloniality and postmodernism, the center as a fixed and homogeneous polarity
began a process of semantic and territorial disintegration due to the proliferation of
margins (minorities) within itself. Moreover, the transnationalization of the cultural
and economic market dispersed the metropolitan power in numerous micronetworks. Definitely, the colonial map changed, at least in appearance. In these
new circumstances, Dittborn's work plays with one of the most important
articulations of cultural power: distances.

The 24th History of Human Face (Cruza)

2002, airmail painting n 141, paint, non woven, stitching and photosilkscreen on 2
sections of duck fabric, 210 x 280 cm.
Without itinerary
In Routes Clifford points out the importance of travel as a practice of crossing and
interaction, that troubled the localism of many common assumptions about culture.
Dwelling has been understood as the local ground of collective life and travel only
as a supplement. So he proposes to see these practices of displacement as
constitutive of cultural meanings rather than a simple transfer or extension. In this
context, museums arise as contact zones, sites of passage and encounter, with
hybrid possibilities and where political negotiation is possible. A contact perspective
views all culture-collecting tactics as responses to particular histories of dominance,
hierarchy, resistance and mobilization. If there is something to be negotiated, what
is it? Canclini suggests that in works such as Dittborn's what is negotiated is a new
kind of identity, now not only constituted in relation to unique territories, but also
generated in the intersection of objects, messages and people coming from divers
directions. He affirms that these works are polyglot and migrant, that they can
function in diverse and multiple contexts, and permit divergent readings from their
hybrid constitution. Inside them, every position is transitory.
The Airmail Painting No. 49 is a good example. It uses as an emblem the image
of Jemmy Button, a native of Patagonia who was purchased by the captain of
Darwin's Beagle, FitzRoy, for a couple of buttons (thus his name). He was taken to
London in 1829 and there he learned to speak English. He came back to Tierra del
Fuego in 1833, dressed as an English man, but after being in contact with his
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Fuego in 1833, dressed as an English man, but after being in contact with his
people, he forgot everything that he had learned. In 1984, his image came back to
London inside a Dittborn's Airmail Painting.
Brett argues that Dittborn rescues a notion of the local only to show that the
local, like the global, is an abstraction, the conjunction of many planes of
experience and timescales (76). For this reason, it is possible to think that what
Dittborn proposes is not an affirmative idea of identity (the local), but rather a
demonstration of identities as mobile configurations that are in a permanent
process of construction. At the same time, this proposal shows identities as
constructions and not as real entities. The airmail procedure reclaims and
exercises the painting's right to put into practice its own difference, so it is no
longer spoken for by others, its gaze no longer controlled by others. It organizes
its own policies of intervention.

Altura del Hueso

(courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York), 2004, airmail painting
n 162, tincture, polygal, sateen, stitching and photosilkscreen on 2 sections of
duck fabric, 210 x 280 cm.
Itinerary: Santiago de Chile 2004, Miami 2004, Santiago de Chile 2005

Epilogue
This essay was divided strategically in three parts. But none of these parts are
sufficient by themselves to give a total explanation of Dittborn's Airmail Paintings.
His work must be read as a complex network of relations motivated by the
selection, manipulation and exhibition of some images disseminated through the
postal service.
Dittborn's work could be read in the interaction between three central poles:
technology, reproduction and the multiple systems. It is possible to analyze how
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technology, reproduction and the multiple systems. It is possible to analyze how

these concepts work throughout different levels in the paintings. First of all, we
talked about the XIX Century technique of photography as a means of reproducing
images of suspicious subjects, which facilitates their introduction into the system of
the state or rather into the system of ethnography. The further reproductions of
these images in the Airmail Paintings reproduce the tactics of entering into a new
system, which in this case is the international system of art.
Secondly, we discussed this airmail strategy, which is a means of communication, a
technique that permits entry into the international art circuits, and a method that
makes possible the dissemination of the works. Then we considered the paintings
as maps and maps as technologies through which the territories of the New World
entered into the colonial system. One of the characteristics of maps, as translations
from a sphere into a flat surface, is that the projection is viewed from nowhere
(Alpers). This means that in a mapunlike in traditional oil paintingthere is
neither a single perspective, nor a vanishing point. As a result, the gaze is impelled
to become an active recourse rather than a contemplative one. This idea goes
against the notion of world-as-exhibition as defined by Timothy Mitchell, because
the view, in the case of the Airmail Paintings, is not organized. Moreover there is
no exhibition, but rather points of arrival and departure. The Airmail Paintings
make specific their point of origin and destination in time and space (these
indications are present in the envelope). But at the same time, they intimate that
there is no absolute point of origin or destination. Motion, traveling and
vagabondage are another state of being. Inside his paintings, the idea of travel is
present in the circulation of the images, the movement between the states of being
lost and then found, forgotten and remembered. Further, the images suffer the
travel of re-production: they pass form one state to another, for instance from
photography to serigraphy.
Here the notion of travel appears very related to technology. Historically,
technologies have been developed to facilitate travel and at the same time, travel
has generated new and sophisticated technologies. Maps and communication
meanssuch as the mail systemhave been perfected thanks to new technologies
(for example, new modes of transportation). Some theoreticians (Paul Virilio, for
instance) have argued that the development of technology is connected to the war
industry. In this sense, it is pertinent to recall some declarations made by Dittborn
himself. For him, the idea of infiltration into the system of art (the airmail condition
as the technology to enter into it) has the character of a viral war, because it is
an anonymous war, a war that has not been declared.
The Airmail Paintings project onto the map some tensions in relation to technology
and its development. In this sense, the task of history appears. In Dittborn's work
technology is a reflection about Latin America and how the gaze has been
constructed in the continent. Dittborn describes the history of disjointed memories
and interrupted traditions that mix photographs, drawings, popular engravings,
offset reproductions, academic traditions and avant-garde movements. Usually he
uses second-hand images reproduced by modern techniques such as serigraphy.
This is an example of the presence of different stages of modernization and
precarious travels as representative of the Latin American condition. But at the
same time, the idea of representation or identity is questioned through constant
travel. There is not a fixed position from which to see. These works demonstrate
that the idea of identity and of the gaze as closed systems does not work, that one
cannot freeze them, because in this way they are transformed into masks. For this
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cannot freeze them, because in this way they are transformed into masks. For this
reason, these paintings cannot give up traveling, because they enact the very idea
of mobile identities. [3]

Works Cited
Alpers, Svetlana. The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art. The Art of Describing.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. 119-169.
Benjamin, Walter. Unpacking my Library. Illuminations. New York: Schocken
Books. Random House, Inc, 1988.
Brett, Guy. Dust Clouds. Dittborn 71-87.
Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
UP, 1988.
Colin, Susi. Woodcutters and Cannibals. America: Early Maps of the New World.
Munich: Prestel, 1992.
Cubitt, Sean. An Airmail Interview. Dittborn 20-26.
Dittborn, Eugenio. Mapa: The Airmail Paintings of Eugenio Dittborn 1984-1992.
Londres: IC A, 1993.
Kay, Ronald. Del espacio de ac. Seales para una mirada americana. Santiago:
Editores Asociados, 1980.
Merino, Roberto. Signs of Travel. Dittborn 7-18.
Richard, Nelly. Margins and Institutions. Melbourne: Art & Text, 1986.
---. Dobleces y Plegaduras. Pinturas Postales de Eugenio Dittborn. Santiago:
Francisco Zegers Editor, 1985. 15-16.
---. Nosotros/The Others. Dittborn 47-65.
Valds, Adriana. Composicin de Lugar. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 1996.
Willis, David. Post/Card/Match/Book/ Envois /Derrida. Substance vol. XIII.-2
(1984): The University of Wisconsin Press.

Notes
[1] In Spanish, the word historia means both, history and story.
[2] Dittborn's painting might be said to belong to the sub-genre of Mail Art, which
since the sixties has been working sending pieces as letters for reasons of distance,
economics, politics, etc. But these productions have usually been small, personal
and essentially inter-artist, whereas Dittborn explores the contradiction between
the private letter and the public painting. (Brett 84)
[3] An iconic example of the risk of immobility, the following images are used by
Dittborn himself in the Airmail Paintings: the mummy of El Plomo hill and the body
of John Torrington, an English sailor who died in the failed expedition of Sir John
Franklin and remained frozen for 138 years.
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