Systems Operator

Architectural drawings, by their very nature, call attention away from themselves. They make their viewers think of—and, in the best of cases, understand—something else, something realer. That is their responsibility; it is the role they fulfill in the production of buildings. An architectural drawing with no built correspondent tends to hang limply. It leaves its viewers alone to picture how the geometric configurations it suggests might have translated to three dimensions; it grants them the freedom to imagine but denies them the satisfaction of confirmation or the challenge of having been wrong. It is no longer a document of the bridging of the gap between desire and physical constraints, but one of fantasy unfulfilled. And, paradoxically, the external reference becomes more important, not less so, when it’s missing.

Likely thanks to Luis Fernando Benedit’s training as an architect—he graduated from the University of Buenos Aires’s program in 1963—Invisible Labyrinths is full of such objects: speculative, prototypical, referential. They are not all drawings, but also paintings and prototypes and an installation whose title lends the exhibition its name. The pieces are neatly divided up: Just over two dozen of Benedit’s paintings circle the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art’s (ISLAA) first gallery, while a smaller number of prototypes and drawings occupy the second, and the aforementioned installation the third. The effect of this neat grouping by type heightens the works’ allusive nature; we easily sense how they relate to prior moments in world history and art discourses, but less so how they relate to each other.

Silla presidencial con aparato eyector (Presidential Chair with Ejection Apparatus), from 1966, hangs near the entrance and depicts a blobby brown figure in a stiff seated position flying through an ochre expanse above a sort of primitive throne. The title is a cue to associate the work with the political discontent and turmoil that gripped Benedit’s Argentina for much of the second half of the twentieth century, and its ridiculous suggestion of a “solution” to this unrest combines with the wake of white and sky blue that extends out from the figure’s rear end to comic effect. He seems to have been hoist with his own patriotic petard.

It’s necessary to understand the political and cultural idiosyncrasies of life in Argentina, and specifically Buenos Aires, in order to appreciate the paintings that open Invisible Labyrinths—which only accentuates the sense that the thing that should really be the focus of our attention is not to be found here. Three works, their cartoonish style underlined by their arrangement in a triptych, depict mash-ups of shapes that suggest farming (title: La cocina del mundo, or The World’s Kitchen, a riff on Argentina’s nickname of “the World’s Silo”), ice cream (porteño treat par excellence), and open-air cooking (a common Pampean practice); they read as somewhat surreal but ultimately basic national emblems. Another would-be triptych is held together by a proclivity for grotesque depictions of animals: a parrot (an allusion to a folktale by Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga), pajaritos (little birds eaten with polenta, a cucina povera staple for Italian emigrants in the country’s capital), and rabbit cacciatore. Taken together, the colorful canvases in the initial gallery amount to a kind of national self-portrait through a kaleidoscope; they are visually and thematically amusing, but not likely to engender much in the way of feeling or reflection.

Works like these were, given their rather provincial references, also unlikely to attract attention outside of Argentina, which is at least partially why Benedit, in his work with the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC), changed tack. The CAYC was founded by Jorge Glusberg—a writer and curator, but above all a promoter—and brought together artists and architects to produce “systems art,” a term Glusberg coined to refer to art that engaged with processes larger than the ones required for its own production. The label was a marketing choice; it insinuated a relationship between CAYC’s artists and the international art world—American art theorist Jack Burnham had coined the term “systems esthetics” in a 1968 issue of Artforum—and allowed them to more easily insert themselves into it.

Benedit’s association with systems art was brief but impactful: It gave the artist a new formal language in which to work. In the second gallery at ISLAA, a series of notional habitats for ants, spiders, snails, and combinations thereof sit on white ledges cantilevered from the wall. Across the way, plans, sections, axons, and elevations depict how these would work were they to be actually constructed. Their classification as prototypes relieves the objects from the onus of actual function, and because they are shown without any critters in them, they have the same qualities as a child’s chemistry set: visually interesting and occasionally fascinating, but ultimately all for play.

Rather than rigorous laboratory analysis, Benedit seemed in this period to be interested in something approaching biological constructivism. The ’60s and ’70s were a time of political unrest in Argentina; a series of political dictatorships would, in 1976, give way to a military one. This, combined with the failures of developmentalist policies and the seemingly revolutionary advances in technology, made the present feel unbearable. It also made the future feel like something to embrace, even if it meant that, to paraphrase Benedit, nature would disappear and cities would take over. The habitat prototypes, and the actual habitats whose construction they suggest, were meant to make this embrace easier, to “facilitate evolution toward the artificial.”

That’s how Benedit described the task of  Biotrón—on view at ISLAA only in photographs and video footage—a large (approximately six feet wide, fifteen feet long, and nine feet tall) Plexiglas box holding some four thousand live bees and twenty-five artificial flowers that gave off a sugary juice. The work was Argentina’s submission to the 1970 Venice Biennale. Benedit followed it up the next year with the interactive installation Invisible Labyrinth, which consisted of an arrangement of circular mirrors atop pyramidal bases that ricocheted invisible rays of light. Visitors were invited to try to make their way to the center of the arrangement; if they unwittingly crossed one of the light beams, a loud alarm went off. If the visitor succeeded in winding their way through the labyrinth, they were rewarded with a view of an axolotl in a small tank, invisible from anywhere else in the room. The choice was likely a reference to Argentine writer Julio Cortázar’s 1956 story “Axolotl,” in which the lonely male narrator finds peace in communing with the titular aquatic creatures at the Jardin des Plantes and eventually ends up inhabiting their consciousness. There was no such interspecies communion to be found in the installation of  Invisible Labyrinth at ISLAA, which contained no swimming salamander and landed like a leaden metaphor for state surveillance.

Some of the show’s most interesting moments are in the vitrines in the last gallery that hold the CAYC’s exhibition briefs, memoranda, and other assorted promotional material. There’s a 1971 press release from the CAYC’s first major show at the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires, which forcefully establishes the international significance of the collective’s forays into systems art, describing the term as including “the latest trends in art from the second half of this century.” There’s the brief for Benedit’s 1972 show at MoMA, which is full of phrases like “dialectics between physical being and reality” and claims that “[Invisible Labyrinth] thus fulfills all the formal conditions required for the structuring of a semiologic system,” though perhaps such pomposity was warranted, given that Benedit was the first Argentine artist to have a solo show at the New York museum. These items are a document of the things that haven’t changed—or only gotten worse—in the last fifty years: the power that institutions exert over an artist’s career and the semantic and promotional lengths to which artists will often go to show their work. Other reminders of the same? The fact that the CAYC remained open through the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional, the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983, while many artists went underground or into exile; or that in 2021 Benedit’s works were used to promote the NFT art platform Aura.

Why this artist? Why now?—I thought as I wove through the mirrors-on-stands, trying (and failing) to trip an alarm. I had recently asked myself a similar question while walking through the Whitney’s eighth-floor gallery, amid Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison’s Survival Piece #5: Portable Orchard (1972), an installation of eighteen citrus trees in individual planters under artificial lights, accompanied by architectural drawings, that modeled a way out of the looming environmental crisis. There is a desperation in both of these restagings, a wish to look to the ’70s as though the artists then knew something that we don’t now. But look at what Glusberg, Benedit, and the rest of the CAYC claimed in that 1971 press release:

One of the basic spiritual exercises of new communities is hardly what I would call art in the twenty-first century. Automation has decidedly not resulted in more leisure time, and one of the most appreciable “social changes” between then and now is that self-exploitation is more or less normalized. Benedit and his CAYC pals couldn’t have known this, just like they couldn’t have known any of the consequences of the polycrises with which we are now exceedingly familiar. The political critiques in his work were promotionally useful until they weren’t—the CAYC veered toward neoexpressionism in the late ’70s and throughout the ’80s—and their speculative solutions were nothing but imaginary flights. Benedit’s architectural training saddled his work with the burden of referring to something outside of itself and Benedit himself with a feeling of responsibility for solving the world’s ordeals, but it did not give him the requisite expertise to successfully “eject” a president or breed bees, just to take two examples. His paintings point toward issues—discontent with state leaders, agricultural exploitation, poverty—whose long-term consequences he did not think he would have to live with. His habitat prototypes look very different in the context of climate chaos. The works at ISLAA betray a naive belief in an expansive future, one not only wholly unlike the present, but also assuredly better. Invisible Labyrinths, at best, is an art-historical endeavor to preserve this illusion.