Uriburu’s Environmentalism
“With my art, I denounce the antagonism between nature and civilization,” reads Nicolás García Uriburu’s Portfolio (Manifesto), 1973, a grid of six silkscreens that report on his green “colorations” of bodies of water, found objects, maps, and body parts since 1968. Uriburu’s colorations have played on green’s double association as both natural and toxic by appearing, at first glance, to contaminate rivers, lakes, and public fountains: Venice’s Grand Canal (1968 and 1970), New York’s East River, the Seine, Buenos Aires’ Riachuelo (all 1970), and many others. Yet the fluorescein pigment that Uriburu used for these actions turns green only when it comes into contact with microorganisms in the water; it is literally catalyzed by living things. This is both dematerialized painting, freed of the canvas and set loose in the world, as well as a mode of marking—a way to draw attention to the natural, however compromised by its urban surroundings. The artist’s 1968 show at Iris Clert in Paris, Prototypes pour un jardin artificielle, which arrayed Pop-inspired Plexiglas representations of animals in a blantantly artificial “landscape,” marked a key transition from the artwork as “environment” to the artwork in the environment—that is, a much broader ecology connected to all other things. Yet Uriburu did not abandon the art object in the subsequent decade, nor did he take up the neutral, analytical position of many “systems artists.” Painting, sculpture and works on paper instead undergirded the Colorations, providing photographic documentation that expanded their audiences and pointed texts that clearly articulated the artist’s message. Indeed, more so than many of the other artists of the so-called Land Art movement, his work has operated in parallel to environmental activism and rhetoric, at times engaging in direct collaboration with organizations such as Greenpeace. He has also produced powerful paintings and sculptures dealing with the dictatorship, from his haunting visions of a depopulated Buenos Aires to the recent Víctimas y victimarios series. Across Uriburu’s work, green suffuses grim reminders of violence or catastrophe as the artist’s calling card, cry of protest, and emblem of a more hopeful future.
Daniel R. Quiles