PUBLIC ART IN
THE AMERICAS

Introduction

Mirko Lauer:
Peru’s Fine Art
of Flag Washing

John Pitman Weber:
Out of the Studio,
Into the Streets

José Luis Soto and
Isa Campos Castañeda:
Mosaic Opening Night

Dora Andrade:
Brazilian Movement Gives Girls Dignity

María Galindo:
Bolivian Debtors
a Creative Force

Coco Fusco:
Now Playing:
Exotic People

Michael Schnorr:
Border Works
Tie Local to Global

María Esther Francia:
Uruguayan Youths
With Unruly Tastes

Slideshow:
Mosaic of the Americas

Books

Home: AMERICAS.ORG   September 2001

 Peru’s Fine Art of Flag Washing

Mirko Lauer is a political columnist for the Lima daily La República, a poet, a detective novelist, an editor of the Lima literary magazine Hueso Húmero, and the founder and co-editor of the Lima book publisher Mosca Azul. His latest poetry collection is Trópical cantante (El Virrey, 2000). Bruce Campbell translated his essay from Spanish.

Spontaneously and on their own initiative, no fewer than 20 Peruvian cities and 12 expatriate communities abroad participated in an artistic ritual that spanned seven months until last November, when dictator Alberto Fujimori fled the country. Called Wash the Flag, the ritual consisted of scrubbing the nation’s red and white emblem in a washtub (the recommended soap brand was Bolívar, named after one of the country’s 19th-century liberators) and then hanging it out to dry on a clothesline. Here in the capital, large crowds and opposition media converged every Friday in the Plaza Mayor fountain for the ceremony.

The cleansing began April 10, 2000, the day after a fraudulent first round of voting through which Fujimori attempted to install himself in an unconstitutional third presidential term. The Civil Society Collective (CSC), a group of visual artists and art critics, had called on regime opponents to gather around the fountain to return dignity to a flag symbolically stained by the dictatorship. This simple idea captured the citizenry’s imagination and revived in Peru a public-art genre known in both Spanish and English as the “happening,” a term coined by U.S. artist Allan Kaprow in 1959. The happening, unlike a painting on a wall, lacks a clearly defined object of consumption and is created in large part by its audience, often with unpredictable results.

The participants surrounding the CSC nucleus represented a wide spectrum of Fujimori opponents, from politicians desiring to bathe themselves in popular sentiment (Alejandro Toledo, who won the presidential election this June, had lined up and washed the flag, like everyone else) to students brought by their teachers. The washers included some who prayed or cursed like hardworking medicine men, giving the ceremony a liturgical air. But in the end, everyone would leave content, feeling they had fulfilled a civic duty.

The CSC, which defines itself as an artistic initiative in struggle for symbolic power, set its goal for those months as “the cultural overthrow of the dictatorship.” The group deliberately chose a humble daily task linked to the domestic sphere and women’s experience. The message was clear and replete with suggestive images: The water evoked Christian baptism; regular people were taking the nation’s primary symbol into their hands; authoritarianism constituted a civic stain that collective action could cleanse.

The flag-washing ritual culminated years of searching for that intersection between art and politics from which some of the 20th century’s most enduring cultural icons emerged. Despite obvious differences, this happening (the CSC prefers to speak of “artistic action”) followed the path of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937), Robert Motherwell’s Elegies to the Spanish Republic series (1949–1976) and other efforts to redeem through art a human dignity temporarily soiled by brute force.

A closer comparison is the famous Argentine silhouette display of 1983, when the Plaza de Mayo mothers called together 30,000 people in Buenos Aires to trace their own profiles on large paper surfaces. A name of one of those disappeared by the nation’s dictatorship was then placed on each silhouette, and the whole collection was put on public display.

In the 1970s, Venezuelan artist Carlos Zerpa used his country’s flag for a series of irreverent performances dealing with a variety of national icons, among them miracle doctor José Gregorio Hernández, earning him state prosecution. Similarly, Antonio Caro and Beatriz Gonzales have worked on the national flag of Colombia.

Peruvian artists had worked with their own patriotic symbols. Jorge Eduardo Eielson made a red and white quipu (collection of knotted cords that the pre-conquest Inca used for storytelling and mathematical calculations) in the late 1960s. Juan Javier Salazar started to critique patriotic icons in the late 1970s, followed by Eduardo Tokeshi and Moico Yaker in the 1980s, and Luis García Zapatero and Eduardo Llanos in the early 1990s.

Unlike a U.S. tradition in which artists ranging from Jasper Johns to Jimi Hendrix have manipulated the flag to test First Amendment rights, Wash the Flag sought to restore the social body’s dignity. The cleansing was patriotic.

The Plaza Mayor happening had its roots in Francisco Laso’s La lavandera (circa 1858), an oil painting that hangs in the Lima Art Museum. (The Afro-Peruvian woman in the picture isn’t washing the flag, just common clothing on a Lima balcony, but the piece is significant nonetheless, marking the appearance of popular life in local painting.) From La lavandera, CSC member Susana Torres derived La Vandera, her 1995 show in the Lima gallery Parafermalia. In the exhibit catalogue, critic Gustavo Buntinx noted that the flag is “a contentious space,” a field of struggle for symbolic power.

Just how contentious was evident in U.S. Rep. Newt Gingrich’s 1999 request that the Phoenix Art Museum close its exhibit Old Glory: The American Flag in Contemporary Art. (The Georgia Republican refused an invitation to see the show, and it remained open.)

In Peru, Fujimori’s regime had no reaction beyond the occasional threat by a guard in the plaza. More and more people dedicated themselves to washing flags. Ever more diverse crowds entered the washtub.

This year the CSC reports increased sightings of the multicolor flag of Tahuantinsuyo, the Inca empire. More and more Callao residents, meanwhile, are bringing the flag of that port city for a civic and democratic dunk. And Peruvians are beginning to wash the flag of their favorite soccer team when it has a rough spell.

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