Iván Argote: The Burden of the Invisible

Entering Iván Argote’s The Burden of the Invisible at SCAD Museum of Art, museum goers trip. The floor is an uneven red, a pigment-dyed cement mimicking something like sand, something like sea. There are hard edges, small set-in-stone waves, and as viewers’ eyes sort through the monumental upside-down heads, the created wreckage of something just post, their steps are interrupted. They catch themselves.

Argote is interested in the tripping, the glitching, the break.

The exhibition, curated by Haley Clouser and Ben Tollefson as part of the Savannah College of Art and Design’s annual deFINE ART initiative, is full of toppled busts of unglazed ceramic, with branches sprouting from the hollow, exposed insides of their chests and shoulders. These militaristic fallen statues are placed throughout the installation, some singular, some in piles—none upright. The heads themselves evoke in no uncertain words the many-headed figure of colonialism, here punctured and overgrown with spanish moss, the same flowering plant that can be found crawling and floating across the city of Savannah. These are Argote’s “Señores,” purposefully unspecific, the everyman—monuments to men who killed and ruined to create the cities we build museums in are everywhere: here they are, toppled. This is the driving point of this work. The room is a reprieve from the white cube—the roughness of the floor against the feet, its redness, the park benches placed in the center of the room.

The benches surround the centerpiece of the exhibition: Levitate (2023), a nearly thirty-minute long, three-part, three-channel video created and voiced over by Argote. The video is sleek and meditative—drone footage that glides over the cities it depicts; a smooth voiceover spoken by the artist in French over ambient, droning audio; English subtitles floating on screen in a sans serif font. The artist presides over the room, enveloping the audience into the onscreen world with a direct address: “Hello, / it’s great to see you. / We are together here / to imagine days that have yet to happen.” Telling the story of the first time he visited Paris—the first time he left Colombia—Argote describes going to the museums, walking through the Tuileries to Place de la Concorde. On screen, an obelisk is held above ground by two cranes, out of place, hovering upright next to a villa. Argote’s narration continues. “In 10 BC, the first Egyptian obelisk was brought to Europe / by the Roman Emperor Augustus, / to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the conquest of Egypt.” The music trills ominously, somewhere between bug and machine. The camera veers drunkenly to the right. Wide again, the obelisk has been raised and is being pulled diagonally to a 45 degree angle by the bottom crane. “The history of obelisks reflects clearly how / public space has always been a tool for propaganda, / reproducing a narrative of strength and control.” Argote’s work is made of questions, not answers: “What is this obelisk doing here? / What if they become strange again? / What if these questions become public?” The levitating obelisk is briefly overlaid with a scrolling article on a Rome-based news site reporting on the very movement we are watching occur. “What if we contemplate mutation?” The obelisk, now having been carried into a main square, splits in the middle at the hands of the crane, revealing a thin facade and four wooden structural posts.

The film moves into part two, now in Madrid. A story, overlaid with gliding shots of a levitating monument—this time, Christopher Columbus—on October 12: the national holiday in Spain, the day Columbus “discovered” America in 1492. The same formula: steady shots, manipulation of a monument, overlaid news stories reacting to an assumed reality—in actuality, an imagined one. The false Columbus travels in a truck bed through the city. “Dreaming is key.” Part three, again: a story, a question, a manipulation, levitation. “What if … without permissions / we move the statue?” The artist is wearing a uniform, a reflective vest, a hard hat, tossing the cords of the crane around the monument. “What if … we become invisible?” Through the lens, it levitates. “Perhaps an imaginary day can push forward the present.”

Argote has created the imaginary day. He has conceptualized the protest and performed it on the screen, on the walls, on the rough red concrete. He has asked his questions. What questions are left?

Leaving the exhibition, I carry these with me over the red waves, through the white walls of the museum, out into the streets and city squares of Savannah: What about the realized protest? When does the true monument break? When do we stop catching ourselves? When do we levitate?