essay about journal entries

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Meri Makhchanyan Art 80D

TA: Cebe Loomis

Journal Entry #4: Visiting Artist Lecture Rodrigo Valenzuela I found Rodrigo Valenzuela’s “Diamond Box” documentary film, which was the first thing he

showed to the class as an introduction to his work, to be the most inspirational in thinking about

voice and collaboration, as it seemed to embody these two concepts innately. The black and

white film featured several close-ups of people whose voice-over narration told the story of their

status as undocumented working-class Latinx immigrants and their stories of the hardships they

faced while trying to cross the border into America. The work defined collaboration in the sense

that it brought different people together within a space where they could share their stories. In

thinking about voice, I found the juxtaposition of the people’s silence on screen and their loud,

bold stories “off-screen” in the voice-over narration to be striking, almost as if it were a

commentary on POC voices being silenced versus voices being heard, and I thought the choice to

film it in black and white complimented this contrast. The film was evidently personal for

Rodrigo, as he himself came from a working-class immigrant background and was

undocumented, and this was his way of exploring others’ stories with similar experiences.

Another personal work for Rodrigo was “Maria TV,” which was also a documentary film, this

one more performative and experimental. Rodrigo described how he grew up in a home with his

mother and several (seven?) women, where his father was not around much. Thus, he spent a lot

of time with these women, who often enjoyed watching telenovellas, and therefore he watched a

lot of them too. I felt like “Maria TV” was a response to this experience, hence why it was

personal for Rodrigo, as it featured several hired Latinx women as maids (many of whom were

not actresses and were real immigrant workers) reenacting and ad-libbing scenes from such

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telenovellas. For me, the film was similar to “Diamond Box” in that it was another exploration of

voice and collaboration, and was an attempt to give voices back to those whose voices had been

lost, silenced, or ignored. While the women were reciting dramatic lines taken from and inspired

by telenovellas, Rodrigo re-contextualized them in this film so that these lines spoke to these

women’s experiences of hardships they have faced as Latinx immigrant workers.

In this way, Rodrigo instigates dialogue and encourages conversation about important issues

through his art, which contributes to the status of his work as “disruptive.” In a way, his work’s

goal seems to function as a call to action. Much of his work exemplifies this disruption, such as

“Diamond Box” and “Maria TV,” as well as the series of photographs of tossed wooden beams

he had taken to question what the minimum gesture was in building a home, and by doing so

questioning what defines “home” itself. When contextualizing this within themes of

undocumented migrant workers, “home” becomes a complicated notion that many of these

individuals would find hard to define, and therein lies another form of disruption. Thus,

Rodrigo’s work both reflects and initiates “disruption.”

Perhaps the work that mostly strongly suggests disruption was Rodrigo’s series of

photographs of memorials that he had created himself as a response to the ones he had seen

throughout the country. He believed many of these monuments honored the wrong people, such

as the ones in Texas that honored the Confederacy (one of his photographs depicted a figure

memorial graffitied with “slave owner”), and thus his work was disruptive in the sense that it

challenged how and why certain people were honored while others were pushed to the sidelines.

I found myself resonating most with these photographs, as I admired Rodrigo’s fearlessness in

simultaneously questioning the norm while challenging it with his own actualization of his

vision, which his photographs often did, as he continuously constructed and reconstructed sets

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within his studio. It made me think about the purpose of art, and thus if I could ask Rodrigo one

question, it would be whether or not he believes an artist holds a responsibility of causing

disruption - in one way or another, small scale or large - with their work, and why.