By no means a mere retrospective, “Juan Downey: Una Utopia de la Comunicación” (Juan Downey: A Communications Utopia) was structured around a specific agenda: cybernetics. This well-researched and elegantly installed exhibition portrayed the Chilean-born, longtime New York–based artist as a video-art pioneer, conceptual architect, and gonzo anthropologist. Claiming cybernetics to be the theoretical hobbyhorse behind much of Downey’s production, curator Julieta González used it to trace a path through the various periods of the artist’s heterogeneous practice over the course of almost three decades, embodied in drawings, paintings, single-channel videos, video installations, and documentation. Citing specific examples from Downey’s oeuvre, such as a booklet of interviews randomly governed by a system of yes and no responses (A Novel, 1969), González emphasized the nontechnological applications of cybernetics, which aim toward the dissolution of the self in favor of larger, more participatory systems of collective undertaking. Anyone perplexed by the resurgent interest in this transdisciplinary crucible of social, mathematical, and scientific theory might recall the socializing structure of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s Documenta 13, which saw those involved, including not only artists but scientists, philosophers, and others, as nothing more than “participants,” variously and horizontally engaged in the allied pursuit of one of our moment’s shibboleths, “knowledge production.” It’s as if we were living a second, delayed wave of cybernetics—which arguably makes Downey’s work not just historically compelling but prophetic.

Driven by cybernetics’ preoccupation with the subject’s reciprocal relationship with his or her environment, Downey evangelically and artistically championed feedback as a way of instigating a more self-aware, and therefore modifiable, connection with the world. This was at first embodied in complex sculptural installations of a technological and interactive order, here represented primarily through drawings and video documentation, with the exception of one reconstruction, Against Shadows, 1969. This piece consists of two interconnected parts, in which the motion of a hand passed over a white, floor-bound box of holes registers in a corresponding grid of LED lights on the wall. Apparently, Downey’s purpose in such works was to literally pick up and feed back human “energy.”

Although this earnest embrace of technology was at the heart of more interactive video installations—seen in this exhibition mostly through documentation and involving, at times, the “invisible energies” of dancers and even live meditators—Downey’s faith in cybernetic feedback seems to take a hit in his best-known work, Video Trans Americas, 1973–76, and definitively falters in his subsequent video project with the Yanomami Indians in Venezuela in 1976 and 1977. Arrayed in a large fourteen-channel installation of monitors spread out across a floor map of Latin and North America, Video Trans Americas consists of footage from several roads trips south of the border, in which Downey sought to unite the peoples of the Americas through video while offering them the so-called emancipatory opportunity to experience feedback by witnessing themselves on video. Spurred in part by the inevitable quixotry of this epic undertaking and in part by a no less chimerical desire to return to his origins, Downey then went to live for a year among the Yanomami. While this people’s symbiotic relationship with nature exemplified an ecologically sustainable, and thus cybernetic, way of life—as seen in the video The Abandoned Shabono, 1977–78, which concentrates on a decomposable form of architecture—their elaborate and hallucinogenically fueled shamanic healing rituals, as shown in the video The Laughing Alligator, 1977–79, hardly seem adaptable by modern Western medicine. Perhaps this is why, in his final videos, which are characterized by postmodern montage, Downey (who died of cancer in 1993) traded in his cybernetic horse for a semiotic one. In any case, it is now clear that, with a radical utopian fervor so indicative of his era, he rode the former into the ground—which doesn’t necessarily mean that cybernetics has run its course.

—Chris Sharp