Nicolas Guagnini
A show at ISLAA presents the Argentine artist’s explorations of invisible structures and systems of control.
Luis Fernando Benedit: Invisible Labyrinths, installation view. Courtesy Institute for Studies on Latin American Art. Photo: Sebastian Bach.
Luis Fernando Benedit: Invisible Labyrinths, curated by Laura Hakel, Bernardo Moqueira, and Olivia Casa, Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, 142 Franklin Street, New York City,
through January 25, 2025
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Derived from the Latin habitare, the word “habitat” was first deployed in the 1790s as a technical term in texts on European flora and fauna. A habitat is literally the area or region where a plant or animal naturally grows or lives. In the parlance of the Enlightenment's “natural sciences,” “to inhabit” was expressed in the third-person-singular indicative of habitare, “to dwell,” frequentative of habere, “to have, to hold, to possess.” The vast, diverse oeuvre of Argentine artist Luis Fernando Benedit (1937–2011) enacts a recurring counter-etymological pursuit: to extricate the notion of habitation from that of possession. Toward that end, Benedit mobilized and subverted two conceptual devices that lie at the cornerstone of scientific certainty and epitomize the relationship between the hypothetical and the proven: the project and the experiment. Benedit’s central thesis is that the natural and the artificial, the human and the nonhuman, conform to and partake in an ever-changing yet unified interrelational system. No organism can possess its habitat.
Luis Fernando Benedit: Invisible Labyrinths, installation view. Courtesy Institute for Studies on Latin American Art. Photo: Sebastian Bach.
His current exhibition at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) comprises two bodies of work installed in two rooms, one displaying Benedit’s early pictorial output, the other populated with examples of the Habitats, the apex of his oeuvre, where the issues of control (a kind of possession) and the lack thereof prompted by his inquiry become clear. In the paintings, dated between 1966 and 1968, creatures resembling machines mark the first appearance of the labyrinth, a recurring motif in Benedit’s work, in the form of organs that contain white undigested, or perhaps indigestible, shapes at times reminiscent of eggs (themselves houses for gestating life). The insides of the creatures are visible, and their outside contours are nested in larger forms that resonate with the smallest ones found in the intestines. Figures can be interpreted as blowups of cells; but upon further examination, the schematic gives way to an anthropomorphic or zoomorphic body. Eyes often help situate heads and, by extension, bodies. While the flatness of the color areas, the emotionless acrylic paint application, and the cartoonish distortion of the renderings clearly connect with a prevalent idiom of the ’60s—that of Pop art—the overall biomorphic vocabulary references Jean Arp.
Luis Fernando Benedit: Invisible Labyrinths, installation view. Courtesy Institute for Studies on Latin American Art. Photo: Sebastian Bach. Pictured, left wall, left to right: Hormiguero (Anthill), 1968; Laberinto para hormigas (Labyrinth for Ants), 1970; Hábitat para caracoles (Habitat for Snails), 1970; Gota de agua (Drop of Water), ca. 1970.
Benedit spent 1967 in Rome on a fellowship to study landscape design. There, he met Greek artist Jannis Kounellis, who exhibited live horses in a gallery that year. Upon Benedit’s return to Buenos Aires in 1968, he presented his first “habitats,” which incorporate animals and plants. Insects, salamanders, fish, parrots, and other beings reside in tabletop structures made of Plexiglas, which facilitates our easy observation. Inside, partitions, also made of Plexi, direct the flow of life. Several of these projects are on display at ISLAA, complemented by exquisite, detailed, annotated architectural drawings of many other realized and unrealized habitats. Derived from and critical of the idea of the behavioral studies typical of ethology, their aim, in the artist’s own words, is “to part with natural life as best we can and make artificial nature. I am not nostalgic—I believe in evolution towards the artificial. . . . A balance between man and nature is possible. Man no longer stands before or against nature, but can optimize it.”
Luis Fernando Benedit: Invisible Labyrinths, installation view. Courtesy Institute for Studies on Latin American Art. Photo: Sebastian Bach.
For all the efforts to present a transparent observational environment—the use of Plexiglas in the habitats, the deployment of sections and plans as the preferred modes of visualization in the drawings, the representation of bodily interiors in the early paintings—Benedit appropriates the rituals and myths of science only to explicitly avoid providing repeatable conclusions, the hallmark of a scientific proof. His empiric experiments don’t try to prove anything. Causes and effects are rendered irrelevant. Instead, as one of the show’s curators, Laura Hakel, astutely suggests in the text for the exhibition booklet, they propose that we get acquainted with the undefinable poetics of “invisible structures.” Invisible and contingent.
Luis Fernando Benedit: Invisible Labyrinths, installation view. Courtesy Institute for Studies on Latin American Art. Photo: Sebastian Bach.
The experimental Centro de Arte y Comunicacion (CAYC), founded in Buenos Aires by Jorge Glusberg in 1968, provided Benedit with a theoretical and physical context for many of his crucial inquiries. A writer, curator, and cultural impresario, Glusberg framed the habitats (which he exhibited and promoted in his space, successfully helping to position them in MoMA and at the Venice Biennale) within Jack Burnham’s cybernetic-inflected “systems esthetics”—a term elaborated in his influential 1968 Artforum essay as focusing on “relations between people and the components of their environment.” In the largest and final work of the ISLAA exhibition, Invisible Labyrinth, it is a human—in the form of an art spectator—who must navigate a perplexing and pared-down environment, in this case to arrive at a primeval animal, an axolotl, placed in a transparent box at the center of a space roughly twenty-by-twenty feet. Motion-sensitive light beams bounce between eight small mirrors mounted on tripods at chest level. The beams are not visible, and the orientation of the mirrors is ambiguous enough to guarantee failure in the predetermined path. An alarm bell signals incorrect choices of direction when the invisible lines are crossed; right turns in quasi-empty space yield the privilege of observing the animal up close. Glusberg described the experience proposed by Benedit’s work as “a process of behavior adaptation as related to error (learning curve) that constitutes an obvious feedback mechanism that allows the participant to adapt to the mechanics of the system until he becomes part of it.” The invisible structures of life as a set of behaviors are thus always in a state of becoming, in a feedback loop that blurs the “scientific” distance between observer and system necessary to extract conclusions.
Luis Fernando Benedit: Invisible Labyrinths, installation view. Courtesy Institute for Studies on Latin American Art. Photo: Sebastian Bach. Pictured: Laberinto invisible (Invisible Labyrinth), 1971.
As I pondered my own discomfort with the labyrinth, a true counter-panopticon with an animal at the center and human punishment along the way, it dawned on me that the obvious vocabulary to describe and analyze this piece, dated 1971, was Foucault’s elaborations on surveillance and biopolitical subjects, published in 1975. In that forward genealogy, Deleuze’s Society of Control is from the early ’90s; Agamben’s What is an Apparatus from 2009. Invisible Labyrinth is not the first artwork from the period to be prescient, and it is only natural (in the man-as-nature Beneditian systemic sense, of course) that the best art is followed by pertinent theory. The opposite is invariably catastrophic. Historically: this piece was presented in Argentina in the turbulent democratic interlude between the Ongania military dictatorship (1966–70) and the much bloodier one inaugurated by General Videla (1976–83). Benedit did not position his work as explicitly political. Yet, in retrospect, the Invisible Labyrinth, while capping a utopian group of works oriented toward designing (again in Glusberg’s words) “the possibilities for the study of the new societies that we want to build,” can also be seen as a chilling allegory of the life-and-death perils of navigating the public sphere under repressive conditions.
Nicolas Guagnini is an artist and writer living in New York.